The void is my friend.
This category contains all my book reviews.
What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms pull me back into my senses, not just–like flowers–through their riotous colors and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.
page 1, Prologue Autumn Aroma, The Mushroom at the End of the World
Continue reading “Review: Filterworld by Kyle Chayka”Attention becomes the only metric by which culture is judged, and what gets attention is dictated by equations developed by Silicon Valley engineers.
page 9, Filterworld
Continue reading “Review: The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff”Wasn’t sanity like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?
Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens
Continue reading “Review: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna”A middle-aged white woman smiled warmly at them from behind the till. “Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?” she said, abiding by that ancient and most sacred British law of only ever starting a conversation with a comment on the weather.
Chapter 12 of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna
Continue reading “Review: Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris”Starving the peasants into the factories is the classic narrative of proletarianization, the creation story of the industrial working class. California didn’t have the factories of a Manchester, UK; a Lyon, France; or a Lowell, Massachusetts, but the state took on a factory orientation towards what it did have, which was gold and land. Unlike so much of the world, California did not see capitalist economics evolve step-by-step out of feudal property relations. Capital hit California like a meteor, alien tendrils surging from the crash site.
Page 20 of Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris