Books I read in Oct. 2023
Nov. 1st, 2023 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amado1Total: 10 books
— The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami;
— On Tyranny: Graphic Edition. Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century by Timothy Snyder;
— Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück;
— The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai;
— The Pram by Joe Hill;
— Elder Sex by Marilyn Minter;
— Dear Congress: Voices of American Children Currently Being Abused by Conversion Therapy by Vellah Jones;
— Ankle Snatcher by Grady Hendrix;
— In Bloom by Paul Tremblay;
— Big Bad by Chandler Baker.
October was a month of starting a book, being satisfied with the incomplete version I'd read, and setting it down forever XD Really, I just spent a lot of time writing and obsessing over Con O'Neill, so the fact that I dropped off on reading can be forgiven.
Books I read significant amounts of, but did not finish:
— The Israel-Palestine Conflict, 4th Edition by James L. Gelvin;
— Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz;
— Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin;
— A Particular Friendship by Dirk Bogarde.
If I had to pick just one singular favorite from the first list, it would be "On Tyranny" -- apologies to Osamu Dazai! "Flowers of Buffoonery" was tailor-made for me, as ever, but "On Tyranny" is one I can whole-heartedly recommend to everyone I meet.
If I had to pick just one from the second list, it would be "Right-Wing Women" by Dworkin, which was insightful and addictive. The least rewarding of those four was "Extremely Online," which is ... really, more like a bland factual history of the Internet's most famous social media sites. Nothing new, insightful, or intriguing there. And the least rewarding of the first list is harder to choose. Obviously the "creature feature" novellas were all pretty bad, but I want to highlight "Dear Congress" -- this was only $2, so I guess it's worth the money, but its worth as a nonfiction resource is dubious. These letters are not really from children suffering from conversion therapy; they are cobbled together from dozens of individual stories and rewritten by an adult, so that nothing in them can be fact-checked or verified. And each short letter is introduced by an egregiously long, woefully bad poem, each one spanning 4-6 pages, while the letters themselves usually only last for 1-2. I'm not sure who wrote the poems but I suspect it's the same adult who rewrote the letters.
The book is also padded out with one-page quotes about child abuse in its different forms. At the same time, it's not NOT worth reading... it's a difficult book to rate.
— The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami;
— On Tyranny: Graphic Edition. Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century by Timothy Snyder;
— Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück;
— The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai;
— The Pram by Joe Hill;
— Elder Sex by Marilyn Minter;
— Dear Congress: Voices of American Children Currently Being Abused by Conversion Therapy by Vellah Jones;
— Ankle Snatcher by Grady Hendrix;
— In Bloom by Paul Tremblay;
— Big Bad by Chandler Baker.
October was a month of starting a book, being satisfied with the incomplete version I'd read, and setting it down forever XD Really, I just spent a lot of time writing and obsessing over Con O'Neill, so the fact that I dropped off on reading can be forgiven.
Books I read significant amounts of, but did not finish:
— The Israel-Palestine Conflict, 4th Edition by James L. Gelvin;
— Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz;
— Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin;
— A Particular Friendship by Dirk Bogarde.
If I had to pick just one singular favorite from the first list, it would be "On Tyranny" -- apologies to Osamu Dazai! "Flowers of Buffoonery" was tailor-made for me, as ever, but "On Tyranny" is one I can whole-heartedly recommend to everyone I meet.
If I had to pick just one from the second list, it would be "Right-Wing Women" by Dworkin, which was insightful and addictive. The least rewarding of those four was "Extremely Online," which is ... really, more like a bland factual history of the Internet's most famous social media sites. Nothing new, insightful, or intriguing there. And the least rewarding of the first list is harder to choose. Obviously the "creature feature" novellas were all pretty bad, but I want to highlight "Dear Congress" -- this was only $2, so I guess it's worth the money, but its worth as a nonfiction resource is dubious. These letters are not really from children suffering from conversion therapy; they are cobbled together from dozens of individual stories and rewritten by an adult, so that nothing in them can be fact-checked or verified. And each short letter is introduced by an egregiously long, woefully bad poem, each one spanning 4-6 pages, while the letters themselves usually only last for 1-2. I'm not sure who wrote the poems but I suspect it's the same adult who rewrote the letters.
The book is also padded out with one-page quotes about child abuse in its different forms. At the same time, it's not NOT worth reading... it's a difficult book to rate.
