en-US Tue, 15 Apr 2025 15:46:57 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 181109993 For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a taut and profoundly moving debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters during a heatwave in London as simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over one life-changing weekend.

London, 2019. It’s the hottest June on record, and a whale is stuck in the Thames River. In the streets of the city, four old acquaintances want more from life than they’ve been given. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, their paths will intersect at a party that will change their lives forever�

Maggie, a once-hopeful artist turned waitress, is pregnant and preparing to move back to her hometown with her boyfriend and father-to-be Ed, leaving the city she loves and the life she imagined for herself.

Ed, coasting through life as a barely competent bike courier, is ready for a new start with Maggie and their baby, if only to finally leave behind his secret past of hooking up with strange men in train station bathrooms—and his secret past with Maggie’s best friend, Phil.

Phil, who sleepwalks through his office job and lives for the weekends, is on the brink of achieving his first real relationship with his roommate Keith. The two live in an illegal warehouse commune with other quirky creatives and idealists—the site of the party to end all parties.

As the temperature continues to climb, Maggie, Ed, and Phil will have to confront their shared pasts, current desires, and limits of their future lives together before the weekend is over.

Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s addictive, page-turning debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a critical look at the political, emotional, and financial hurdles facing young adults trying to build lives there and often living for their evenings and weekends.]]> 352 Oisín McKenna 0063319977 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.77 2024
author: OisĂ­n McKenna
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 198563717
Come to Paris, August 2021, when the City of Lights was still empty of tourists, and a thirst for long overdue pleasure gripped those who wandered its streets.

After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, aged 46, unmarried with no children, spent 16 months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. The isolation was punishing. A year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness no one can prepare you for. When the opportunity to sublet a friend’s apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it. Leaving felt like less of a risk than a necessity.

What follows is a decadent, unexpected journey into one woman’s pursuit of radical enjoyment.

The weeks in Paris are filled with friendship and food and sex. There is dancing on the Seine; a plethora of gooey cheese; midnight bike rides through empty Paris; handsome men; afternoons wandering through the empty Louvre; nighttime swimming in the ocean off a French island. And yes, plenty of nudity.

In the spirit of Deborah Levy and Annie Ernaux, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is an intimate, insightful, powerful, and endlessly pleasurable memoir of an intensely lived experience whose meaning and insight expands far beyond the personal narrative. MacNicol is determined to document the beauty, excess, and triumph of a life that does not require permission.

The pursuit of enjoyment is a political act, both a right and a responsibility. Enjoying yourself—as you are—is not something the world tells you is possible, but it is.

Here’s the proof.]]> 288 Glynnis MacNicol 0593655753 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.39 2024
author: Glynnis MacNicol
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195790790
Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death.

Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city’s queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic , the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was “an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity.� Thom A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn , draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn’s poetry to create a portrait as vital as the man himself.

Nott writes with insight and intimacy about the great sweep of Gunn’s his traditional childhood in England; his mother’s suicide; the mind-opening education he received at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare and John Donne; his decades in San Francisco and with his life partner, Mike Kitay; and his visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Thom A Cool Queer Life is a long-awaited, landmark study of one of England and America’s most innovative poets.]]> 720 Michael Nott 0374279209 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.31
author: Michael Nott
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.31
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60387898 From the Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times reporter who has defined Donald J. Trump's presidency like no other journalist: a magnificent and disturbing reckoning that moves beyond simplistic caricature, chronicling his rise in New York City to his tortured post-presidency and his potential comeback.

Few journalists working today have covered Donald Trump more extensively than Maggie Haberman. And few understand him and his motivations better. Now, demonstrating her majestic command of this story, Haberman reveals in full the depth of her understanding of the 45th president himself, and of what the Trump phenomenon means.

Interviews with hundreds of sources and numerous interviews over the years with Trump himself portray a complicated and often contradictory historical figure. Capable of kindness but relying on casual cruelty as it suits his purposes. Pugnacious. Insecure. Lonely. Vindictive. Menacing. Smarter than his critics contend and colder and more calculating than his allies believe. A man who embedded himself in popular culture, galvanizing support for a run for high office that he began preliminary spadework for 30 years ago, to ultimately become a president who pushed American democracy to the brink.

The through-line of Trump’s life and his presidency is the enduring question of what is in it for him or what he needs to say to survive short increments of time in the pursuit of his own interests.

Confidence Man is also, inevitably, about the world that produced such a singular character, giving rise to his career and becoming his first stage. It is also about a series of relentlessly transactional relationships. The ones that shaped him most were with girlfriends and wives, with Roy Cohn, with George Steinbrenner, with Mike Tyson and Don King and Roger Stone, with city and state politicians like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani, with business partners, with prosecutors, with the media, and with the employees who toiled inside what they commonly called amongst themselves the “Trump Disorganization.�

That world informed the one that Trump tried to recreate while in the White House. All of Trump’s behavior as President had echoes in what came before. In this revelatory and newsmaking book, Haberman brings together the events of his life into a single mesmerizing work. It is the definitive account of one of the most norms-shattering and consequential eras in American political history.]]> 597 Maggie Haberman 0593297342 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.03 2022
author: Maggie Haberman
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213619983 With echoes of Shirley Hazzard and Virginia Woolf, a new novel of startling intelligence from prize–winning author Michelle de Kretser, following a woman looking back on her young adulthood, and grappling with the collision of her emotions and her values

In the late 1980s, the narrator of Theory & Practice—a first generation immigrant from Sri Lanka who moved to Sydney in her childhood—sets up a life in Melbourne for graduate school. Jilted by a lover who cheats on her with another self-described "feminist," she is thrown into deeper confusion about her identity and the people around her.Ěý

The narrator begins to fall for a man named Kit, who is in a “deconstructed relationship� with a woman named Olivia. She struggles to square her feminism against her jealousy toward Olivia—and her anti-colonialism against her feelings about Virginia Woolf, whose work she is called to despite her racism.

What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? In Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in this gap. Peopled with brilliantly drawn characters, the novel also stitches together fiction and essay, taking up Woolf’s quest for adventurous literary form.]]> 192 Michelle de Kretser 1646222873 Shadib Bin 3
Finally a decent book from 2025, as I have had a streak of books from 2024-2025 that I haven’t really enjoyed.

I was drawn to this books central premise - what we believe in versus what our true desires and actions are actually centered around. There has been disconnect at times in my life, so to read a book that could help unpack this dilemma really drew me in.

While the protagonist navigates her education life along with being in a relationship with Kit, who is in a “deconstructed relationship� with Olivia, the story permeates a lot of internal monologues that I really found searing, and cathartic. For example, there was a point at which she was being mean and difficult to her mother, and she knew it intellectually and morally, yet couldn’t stop herself from doing it. Or when she’d uncomfortably sit around with Olivia - noticing Olivia’s discomfort in not being able to ask point blank if the protagonist is sleeping with Kit - yet didn’t give her that aid that could have helped Olivia. These uncomfortable yet very real moments brighten this otherwise simple book.

Reason I am saying simple is because - I wish there was more of the former tone and voice and instead, a large chunk of the book can veer into safe spaces - which was tad bit frustrating.

Yet, given her age, and drawing parts of her own life in this book, I have to give credit - it was an absolute breath of fresh air. No moralism thrusted upon the readers, instead her inner voice as it would feel when she was younger. And where she is now.

The books ending encapsulated many years after, including demise of her mother and Olivia, is peppered with wisdom and care, that may at times feel cold, but feels real - you can’t always make meaning of things - even when they are difficult things. Best to just let it be. Which this book argues as the central principle- theory may veer off from practice- but the latter may sometimes benefit from being just that - practical.]]> 3.63 2024
author: Michelle de Kretser
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves:
review:
Review: Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser

Finally a decent book from 2025, as I have had a streak of books from 2024-2025 that I haven’t really enjoyed.

I was drawn to this books central premise - what we believe in versus what our true desires and actions are actually centered around. There has been disconnect at times in my life, so to read a book that could help unpack this dilemma really drew me in.

While the protagonist navigates her education life along with being in a relationship with Kit, who is in a “deconstructed relationship� with Olivia, the story permeates a lot of internal monologues that I really found searing, and cathartic. For example, there was a point at which she was being mean and difficult to her mother, and she knew it intellectually and morally, yet couldn’t stop herself from doing it. Or when she’d uncomfortably sit around with Olivia - noticing Olivia’s discomfort in not being able to ask point blank if the protagonist is sleeping with Kit - yet didn’t give her that aid that could have helped Olivia. These uncomfortable yet very real moments brighten this otherwise simple book.

Reason I am saying simple is because - I wish there was more of the former tone and voice and instead, a large chunk of the book can veer into safe spaces - which was tad bit frustrating.

Yet, given her age, and drawing parts of her own life in this book, I have to give credit - it was an absolute breath of fresh air. No moralism thrusted upon the readers, instead her inner voice as it would feel when she was younger. And where she is now.

The books ending encapsulated many years after, including demise of her mother and Olivia, is peppered with wisdom and care, that may at times feel cold, but feels real - you can’t always make meaning of things - even when they are difficult things. Best to just let it be. Which this book argues as the central principle- theory may veer off from practice- but the latter may sometimes benefit from being just that - practical.
]]> 380994 A Lover's Discourse, at its 1978 publication, was revolutionary: Roland Barthes made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe's Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover's Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.]]> 234 Roland Barthes 0374521611 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.43 1977
author: Roland Barthes
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 12292260
Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were isolated incidents in the Vietnam War, carried out by “a few bad apples.� But as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this groundbreaking investigation, violence against Vietnamese noncombatants was not at all exceptional during the conflict. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of orders to “kill anything that moves.�

Drawing on more than a decade of research in secret Pentagon files and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals for the first time how official policies resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded. In shocking detail, he lays out the workings of a military machine that made crimes in almost every major American unit all but inevitable. Kill Anything That Moves takes us from archives filled with Washington’s long-suppressed war crimes investigations to the rural Vietnamese hamlets that bore the brunt of the war; from boot camps where young American soldiers learned to hate all Vietnamese to bloodthirsty campaigns like Operation Speedy Express, in which a general obsessed with body counts led soldiers to commit what one participant called “a My Lai a month.�

Thousands of Vietnam books later, Kill Anything That Moves, devastating and definitive, finally brings us face-to-face with the truth of a war that haunts Americans to this day.]]> 370 Nick Turse 0805086919 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.22 2013
author: Nick Turse
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214152206 From rare book dealer and guest star of the hit show Pawn Stars, a page-turning literary adventure that introduces readers to the women writers who inspired Jane Austen—and investigates why their books have disappeared from our shelves.

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.

But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice� came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels.]]> 464 Rebecca Romney 1982190248 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.40 2025
author: Rebecca Romney
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 22929741
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.

Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.]]> 160 Maggie Nelson 1555977073 Shadib Bin 4




First Review:

—â¶Ä�

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

I wanted to read this book to celebrate Pride month, and it did not disappoint. It was a beautiful, cathartic memoir in a way I don’t think I know how to explain - this book is hard to categorize. It tells such personal considerations of Harry (Maggie’s partner) - his transition, Maggie’s own childbirth, reckoning what it means to be a mother and a daughter (extends some deep emotions and memories with her own mother that is at times devastating but loving, in the same paragraph).

I think the part that moved me so much is Maggie’s own understanding that Iggy, her child, may not really remember the care and tenderness brought forth, since children can often recall the tougher memories, the heartbreaking ones, more clearly. Yet, Maggie’s reckoning with it, that whatever Iggy remembers, cannot take away from her own devotion and care is stunning, and deeply human in the face of deep fears - what if my child grow to question my parenthood?

Aren’t those similar fears that I too feel / have? Am I a good son? A good leader? A good team player? A good partner? But this book turns these questions upside down. What if instead I choose to focus on what I think and understand is good? What if I adjust my thoughts if they aren’t grounded in being inclusive? What if we embrace the facets we bring and iterate and not just force ourselves to binaries of good and bad? What would happen then? The answer the book gives me - is the rare confidence to move forward - head and chin, held up.

“For this reason I am tempted to call it a lasting happiness, but I know I won’t take it with me when I go. At best, I hope to impart it to Iggy, to allow him to feel that he created it, which in many ways, he has.�

What a great book. Highly recommend.]]> 4.04 2015
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves:
review:
3rd time reading it / April 2025: I believe with age, I understand this book more easily, versus when I first came around it and I couldn’t stop raving about it. To be frank, it feels one of her weakest against On Freedom, or even Like Love, but still a very tender collection of her being so brutally honest about rendering a queer family, her becoming a mother, her worries, joys, etc. Maggie surely still remains an author I keep visiting, and it’s almost always a delight.





First Review:

—â¶Ä�

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

I wanted to read this book to celebrate Pride month, and it did not disappoint. It was a beautiful, cathartic memoir in a way I don’t think I know how to explain - this book is hard to categorize. It tells such personal considerations of Harry (Maggie’s partner) - his transition, Maggie’s own childbirth, reckoning what it means to be a mother and a daughter (extends some deep emotions and memories with her own mother that is at times devastating but loving, in the same paragraph).

I think the part that moved me so much is Maggie’s own understanding that Iggy, her child, may not really remember the care and tenderness brought forth, since children can often recall the tougher memories, the heartbreaking ones, more clearly. Yet, Maggie’s reckoning with it, that whatever Iggy remembers, cannot take away from her own devotion and care is stunning, and deeply human in the face of deep fears - what if my child grow to question my parenthood?

Aren’t those similar fears that I too feel / have? Am I a good son? A good leader? A good team player? A good partner? But this book turns these questions upside down. What if instead I choose to focus on what I think and understand is good? What if I adjust my thoughts if they aren’t grounded in being inclusive? What if we embrace the facets we bring and iterate and not just force ourselves to binaries of good and bad? What would happen then? The answer the book gives me - is the rare confidence to move forward - head and chin, held up.

“For this reason I am tempted to call it a lasting happiness, but I know I won’t take it with me when I go. At best, I hope to impart it to Iggy, to allow him to feel that he created it, which in many ways, he has.�

What a great book. Highly recommend.
]]> 216282964 It’s not the dream that matters, it’s the telling of the dream � the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mind

This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer.

Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator’s tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss � the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life.

With characteristic precision, humour and compassion, Nelson explores the limits of language to describe experience, while also offering a portrait of an unnerving and isolating time in our shared history. A stunning, original experiment in interiority by the adored author of Bluets and The Argonauts, Pathemata is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as an uncanny meditation on love, affliction and resilience.]]> 80 Maggie Nelson Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.37
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.37
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50403471 From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins



Adrian Daub's What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley's world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of "disruption," Daub locates the Valley's supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself.

FSG Originals � Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech's reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry's many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.]]> 160 Adrian Daub 0374538646 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.61 2020
author: Adrian Daub
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 436920 The Passion of Michel Foucault is a startling look at one of this century’s most influential philosophers. It chronicles every stage of Foucault’s personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.]]> 492 James Miller 0671695509 Shadib Bin 5
I have been a passive observer of Michel Foucault, primarily via the love that Maggie Nelson, whom I deeply love and revere, has for him throughout all her thoughts and books (especially most recently on her book “On Freedom�).

Over the years, I would visit bookstores, and think I’d get some of his work and finally start reading it - yet flipping through them, I got the sense they were deeply dense and challenging (which this book highlights as well). However, the tides have turned, and I was drawn to this book - which isn’t a biography, more explorations of Foucault’s work (and their inspirations), his peers, and the general landscape that all of it existed.

This book is a version from the year 1995, someone gifted it to a friend back then (with a handwritten note) - amazing to have it on my palms - in 2025. The book is endlessly readable - which is no small feat given how much James has to sift through to make sense of Michel Foucault and all his complexities- thoughts, what he read, etc. James can be at times tentative - especially around Foucault’s deep interest with death as an all encompassing goal of life - yet, for most of the other things - James is deeply curious and endlessly giving in this book to Foucault.

I’ll admit, I still don’t fully understand all that Foucault explored in his book, and unfortunately James doesn’t fully explain them as well as I’d like - I am assuming James hoped the readers already knew what he is talking about, but still, whatever I got - it was inspiring. Michel’s lifelong obsessions with wanting to understand struggles with deep want for power, body politics, queer fantasies and death drive, and many other issues that plagued him - not everything clicks or resonates but what a gift to have had in this world. To have someone like Foucault who wasn’t afraid to lay down his thoughts and inner most obsessions for us all to examine - and as Maggie Nelson said - take what helps, leave the rest.

I’ll definitely explore some of Michel Foucault’s actual work from here onwards. This was a fantastic introduction to Michel Foucault. Loved it. ]]> 4.18 1993
author: James Miller
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves:
review:
Book Review: The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller

I have been a passive observer of Michel Foucault, primarily via the love that Maggie Nelson, whom I deeply love and revere, has for him throughout all her thoughts and books (especially most recently on her book “On Freedom�).

Over the years, I would visit bookstores, and think I’d get some of his work and finally start reading it - yet flipping through them, I got the sense they were deeply dense and challenging (which this book highlights as well). However, the tides have turned, and I was drawn to this book - which isn’t a biography, more explorations of Foucault’s work (and their inspirations), his peers, and the general landscape that all of it existed.

This book is a version from the year 1995, someone gifted it to a friend back then (with a handwritten note) - amazing to have it on my palms - in 2025. The book is endlessly readable - which is no small feat given how much James has to sift through to make sense of Michel Foucault and all his complexities- thoughts, what he read, etc. James can be at times tentative - especially around Foucault’s deep interest with death as an all encompassing goal of life - yet, for most of the other things - James is deeply curious and endlessly giving in this book to Foucault.

I’ll admit, I still don’t fully understand all that Foucault explored in his book, and unfortunately James doesn’t fully explain them as well as I’d like - I am assuming James hoped the readers already knew what he is talking about, but still, whatever I got - it was inspiring. Michel’s lifelong obsessions with wanting to understand struggles with deep want for power, body politics, queer fantasies and death drive, and many other issues that plagued him - not everything clicks or resonates but what a gift to have had in this world. To have someone like Foucault who wasn’t afraid to lay down his thoughts and inner most obsessions for us all to examine - and as Maggie Nelson said - take what helps, leave the rest.

I’ll definitely explore some of Michel Foucault’s actual work from here onwards. This was a fantastic introduction to Michel Foucault. Loved it.
]]> 173404158
You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer,Ěý The Ěý Village Ěý Voice Ěýwas the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, theĚý Voice ’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention. It invented new forms of criticism and storytelling and revolutionized journalism, spawning hundreds of copycats.Ěý
Ěý
With more than 200 interviews, including two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Colson Whitehead, cultural critic Greg Tate, gossip columnist Michael Musto, and feminist writers Vivian Gornick and Susan Brownmiller,Ěýformer ĚýVoiceĚý writerĚýTricia RomanoĚýpays homage to the paper that saved NYC landmarks from destruction and exposed corrupt landlords and judges. With interviews featuring post-punk band, Blondie, sportscaster Bob Costas, and drummer Max Weinberg, of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, in this definitive oral history, RomanoĚýtells the story of journalism, New York City and American culture—and the most famous alt-weekly of all time.]]> 608 Tricia Romano 1541736397 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.24
author: Tricia Romano
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 34204370 Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism and an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history

The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time—Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.]]> 703 Hannah Arendt 0241316758 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.28 1951
author: Hannah Arendt
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1951
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205363938 A medical crisis brings one man close to death—and to love, art, and beauty—in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.

A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.

This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.]]> 306 Garth Greenwell 0374279543 Shadib Bin 2
I had hopes with this one but I just don’t think I am a Garth Greenwall fan. I tried another book years ago and similarly, found it painful to finish it. I don’t get his writing - it’s claustrophobic and frankly feels very surface level in terms of exploration of feelings and anxieties.

I appreciate the nuanced situation - facing life threatening issues and the thoughts that can swirl. I wish the writing was a bit more engaging.]]> 4.06 2024
author: Garth Greenwell
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves:
review:
DNF.

I had hopes with this one but I just don’t think I am a Garth Greenwall fan. I tried another book years ago and similarly, found it painful to finish it. I don’t get his writing - it’s claustrophobic and frankly feels very surface level in terms of exploration of feelings and anxieties.

I appreciate the nuanced situation - facing life threatening issues and the thoughts that can swirl. I wish the writing was a bit more engaging.
]]> 62217096 A radical new examination of the transition into motherhood and how it affects the mind, brain and body

During pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis. Other than during adolescence, there is no other time in a human's life with such dramatic change, yet science, medicine, and philosophy have neglected this life-altering transition. Its seismic effects go largely unrepresented across literature and the arts. Speaking about motherhood as anything other than a pastel-hued dream remains, for the most part, taboo.

In this ground-breaking, deeply personal investigation, acclaimed journalist and author Lucy Jones brings to light the emerging concept of 'matrescence'. Drawing on new research across various fields—neuroscience and evolutionary biology; psychoanalysis and existential therapy; sociology, economics and ecology—Jones shows how the changes in the maternal mind, brain, and body are far more profound, wild, and enduring than we have been led to believe. She reveals the dangerous consequences of our neglect of the maternal experience, and interrogates the patriarchal and capitalist systems that have created the untenable situation mothers face today.

Here is an urgent examination of the modern institution of motherhood that seeks to unshackle all parents from oppressive social norms. As it deepens our understanding of matrescence, it raises vital questions about motherhood and femininity; interdependence and individual identity; and our relationships with each other and the world.]]> 310 Lucy Jones 0241513480 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.45 2023
author: Lucy Jones
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 48721389 The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath.

*A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES*

Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark presents new materials about Plath's scientist father, her juvenile writings, and her psychiatric treatment, and evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Sylvia's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; and her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a true marriage of minds that would change the course of poetry in English.

Clark's clear-eyed sympathy for Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.]]> 1154 Heather Clark 1473579236 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.56 2020
author: Heather Clark
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 223436601 An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.�

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.]]> 400 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.30 2025
author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212976235 A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey toĚýpeace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofâ€�Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz � just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy � collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at Lambert’s Cove. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the varied waysĚýthose ofĚýother cultures grieve, such as the people of Australia's First Nations, the Balinese, and the Iranian Shiites, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between soulsĚýthat exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.]]> 224 Geraldine Brooks 0593653998 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.55 2025
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 223697041 A publishing event ten years in the making�a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists�the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until � betrayed and brokenhearted � she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America � but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 1039056253 Shadib Bin 2
Didn’t finish reading (read about 70%). Not a full book review but some interconnected thoughts about her and the book.

I was very excited to read this book, given Americanah was one of my favorite read years ago. Yet, from the beginning, this book reeks of someone whose writers block is clearly showing in the pages. It’s been a frustrating read and I don’t think I have the patience to finish it.

I actually went to an event where Chimamanda was talking about this book. Although the interviewer was awful, in simply talking more about her own self, versus try to unpack the book with the author - Chimamanda consciously or unconsciously opened up about the book in ways it explains the shortcomings. When asked if this book after 10 years since her last full length novel, was the book she has been waiting to write - her response was yes and no. There was hesitation. As if, she herself knew it didn’t match to her previous highs.

Chimamanda was also asked, rather indirectly, to talk about the political climate, and her thoughts. She said she has a lot of thoughts, yet, when probed, flat out refused to answer. Even when audiences would ask her questions, she wouldn’t answer directly, and deflect. All these deflections and not able to answer, shows up in the characters in the book. They feel like caricatures, imaginations that I am sure exist in real world, but in this book, it feels hollow and misplaced. Dare I say - the book lacks soul, even when it treks into murky or difficult territories.

Maybe it’s the burnout from the culture we are in, yet, someone so smart, incisive, choosing to be vague and generic, in her book and in her talk, feels disheartening.

I’ll leave with this - she opened up during the talk how she is reading 5 concurrent books at the same time. Her obsessions with world war 2. Her want to connect current times with the prior times. All these shows her deep intellectual curiosities. I wish she would tap into that energy, versus this book - which is frankly, so far removed from all these things that she thinks about or reads on a day to day basis.

Or maybe it’s grief and the rage she talked about after her parents passing away - that’s having a hold on her. I can only imagine the difficulty in such circumstances that take time, a long time.]]> 3.70 2025
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves:
review:
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Didn’t finish reading (read about 70%). Not a full book review but some interconnected thoughts about her and the book.

I was very excited to read this book, given Americanah was one of my favorite read years ago. Yet, from the beginning, this book reeks of someone whose writers block is clearly showing in the pages. It’s been a frustrating read and I don’t think I have the patience to finish it.

I actually went to an event where Chimamanda was talking about this book. Although the interviewer was awful, in simply talking more about her own self, versus try to unpack the book with the author - Chimamanda consciously or unconsciously opened up about the book in ways it explains the shortcomings. When asked if this book after 10 years since her last full length novel, was the book she has been waiting to write - her response was yes and no. There was hesitation. As if, she herself knew it didn’t match to her previous highs.

Chimamanda was also asked, rather indirectly, to talk about the political climate, and her thoughts. She said she has a lot of thoughts, yet, when probed, flat out refused to answer. Even when audiences would ask her questions, she wouldn’t answer directly, and deflect. All these deflections and not able to answer, shows up in the characters in the book. They feel like caricatures, imaginations that I am sure exist in real world, but in this book, it feels hollow and misplaced. Dare I say - the book lacks soul, even when it treks into murky or difficult territories.

Maybe it’s the burnout from the culture we are in, yet, someone so smart, incisive, choosing to be vague and generic, in her book and in her talk, feels disheartening.

I’ll leave with this - she opened up during the talk how she is reading 5 concurrent books at the same time. Her obsessions with world war 2. Her want to connect current times with the prior times. All these shows her deep intellectual curiosities. I wish she would tap into that energy, versus this book - which is frankly, so far removed from all these things that she thinks about or reads on a day to day basis.

Or maybe it’s grief and the rage she talked about after her parents passing away - that’s having a hold on her. I can only imagine the difficulty in such circumstances that take time, a long time.
]]> 214313749 From the distinguished art critic and historian, vital essays on key artists and critics, revealing how they redefined art and criticism over the last six decades.

“Serious art anticipates the future as much as it reflects the present,� Hal Foster remarked in a 2015 interview. “By the same token serious art history is driven by the present as much as it is informed by the past.� In Fail Better, Foster, an art critic and historian whose influential work spans disciplines and decades, brings this peripatetic perspective to contemporary art, art criticism, art history, and his own work over the past 50 years.

In these 40 texts—a few reprinted, most revised, some new—Foster reviews artists from Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns to Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha; considers contemporaries from Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman to Jeremy Deller and Adam Pendleton; and traces the development of criticism since the early 1960s, with essays on such influential figures as Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss and institutions like Artforum magazine and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Taking his title from Beckett—“try again, fail again, fail better”—Foster notes that, etymologically, an essay is always an attempt, more or less failed. Critics fail artworks, because there can never be a definitive reading. And art fails its historical moment, because it cannot resolve the contradictions that prompt it. But in these failures Foster finds historical consciousness, and with it the promise of future work, future illumination. In his “reckonings� he turns his own long history of criticism to account, to try again, fail again, fail better—and succeeds in conveying shifting concepts of art and criticism, the work of key artists and critics, and the relationships between criticism, theory, history, and politics over the last six decades.]]> 448 Hal Foster 0262552353 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 5.00 2025
author: Hal Foster
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 111928 The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said consider the full range of postmodern cultural production, from the writing of John Cage, to Cindy Sherman's film stills, to Barbara Kruger's collages. With a redesigned cover and a new afterword that situates the book in relation to contemporary criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic provides a strong introduction for newcomers and a point of reference for those already engaged in discussions of postmodern art, culture, and criticism. Includes a new afterword by Hal Foster and 12 black and white photographs.]]> 183 Hal Foster 1565847423 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.01 1983
author: Hal Foster
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214151178
Weaving between the historical, cultural and personal, award-winning author Philip Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the wild and revolutionary genius of William Blake.

In 1973, Derek Jarman set off from London to film the stones of Avebury. He was following in the footsteps of Paul Nash, who had photographed the ancient megaliths a generation before. Standing in that muddy field, by those stones, both artists had felt a direct connection to their hero � a man who had died a long, long time ago, yet who remained electrically alive to them.

In this alluring and poetic odyssey, Philip Hoare traces the enduring legacy of William Blake and how he came to inspire so many creative lives. Reaching out of his past and into our future, Blake draws together the natural world and metaphysical realms, merging the human and the animal and the spiritual, firing up 20th century artists, filmmakers, poets, writers and musicians with his radical promise of absolute freedom. This stirring, deeply-felt book brings us back to Blake and shows that art still has the power to create positive change.]]> 464 Philip Hoare 1639368477 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.14
author: Philip Hoare
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199798280
Raging ambition. Towering egos. Competition under a veneer of courtesy. Heroic effort combined with plagiarism, theft, exaggeration, and fraud. This was the state of bird study in eastern North America during the early 1800s, as a handful of intrepid men raced to find the last few birds that were still unknown to science.

The most famous name in the bird world was John James Audubon, who painted spectacular portraits of birds. But although his images were beautiful, creating great art was not his main goal. Instead, he aimed to illustrate (and write about) as many different species as possible, obsessed with trying to outdo his rival, Alexander Wilson. George Ord, a fan and protégé of Wilson, held a bitter grudge against Audubon for years, claiming he had faked much of his information and his scientific claims. A few of Audubon’s birds were pure fiction, and some of his writing was invented or plagiarized. Other naturalists of the era, including Charles Bonaparte (nephew of Napoleon), John Townsend, and Thomas Nuttall, also became entangled in the scientific derby, as they stumbled toward an understanding of the natural world—an endeavor that continues to this day.

Despite this intense competition, a few species—including some surprisingly common songbirds, hawks, sandpipers, and more—managed to evade discovery for years. Here, renowned bird expert and artist Kenn Kaufman explores this period in history from a new angle, by considering the birds these people discovered and, especially, the ones they missed. Kaufman has created portraits of the birds that Audubon never saw, attempting to paint them in that artist’s own stunning style, as a way of examining the history of natural sciences and nature art. He shows how our understanding of birds continues to gain clarity, even as some mysteries persist from Audubon’s time until ours.]]> 400 Kenn Kaufman 1668007592 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.11 2024
author: Kenn Kaufman
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61358639 How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the “attention economy� to spend time in quiet contemplation. But what if you don’t have time to spend?

In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism.

This dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book offers us different ways to experience time—inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales—that can bring within reach a more humane, responsive way of living. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire; the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory; the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.

Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it, imagining a world not centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. If we can “save� time by imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside these things, time might also save us.]]> 400 Jenny Odell 059324270X Shadib Bin 4
By Jenny Odell

Over the summer, I was walking in the heart of Madrid, looking for a new book to read. I found a store and the bookseller, whom I deeply revered and spent a considerable time talking about books, she recommended me How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. Although it was a good read, I knew, Jenny would be a person I would like to read more from.

Saving Time is a book that caters to some of my most abstract desires of life. Ever since as a child, I have had visions, imageries, hopes and expectations of world building, and inkling to the more devastating parts of life - and sometimes these abstractions just stay in my mind and think - is there anything that caters to these thoughts?

A book such as Saving Time, sees Jenny explore such myriad of possibilities - how she, as a young child, had asked her parents to grade her as she is (who were mortified, but that’s the world we live in - we grade each other and deem if one is worthy of a dignified life), to her journals on searching for this “it� feeling, to tackling how workers give so much of their life to work that keeps taking, climate change, evolution of earth itself and so much more. It’s breathtaking in its scope, to understand time as it is - but to see someone like her spiral to the depths of what she is trying to look for - it feels quite hopeful, to ride along this train that’s going to difficult territories. Maybe the light at the end of the tunnel is the not the miracle we crave, that’s what it feels like to read this book. Nonetheless- I couldn’t look away.

Even though the book often is hard to bear witness to, and although she never gives concrete answers, you feel someone instilling to not give up. To not just wanting more for own self against all others (human and non human) who are depraved. To instead approach from a communal way of living.

As I grow older, parts of my cynicism grows with it. Unchecked, it can drain. Yet, behind the cynicism, beneath it - are the wounds, the places in my body that itches, that I want to scratch till it bleeds and instead of taking them for surface level considerations, what happens when we flip the narratives around them? When we hold ourselves accountable and those around us? It feels a lot like a world I would love to learn from. This book, nudges towards that future. A time that’s ever more beyond the clock.]]> 3.60 2023
author: Jenny Odell
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves:
review:
Saving Time: Discovering A Life Beyond the Clock

By Jenny Odell

Over the summer, I was walking in the heart of Madrid, looking for a new book to read. I found a store and the bookseller, whom I deeply revered and spent a considerable time talking about books, she recommended me How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. Although it was a good read, I knew, Jenny would be a person I would like to read more from.

Saving Time is a book that caters to some of my most abstract desires of life. Ever since as a child, I have had visions, imageries, hopes and expectations of world building, and inkling to the more devastating parts of life - and sometimes these abstractions just stay in my mind and think - is there anything that caters to these thoughts?

A book such as Saving Time, sees Jenny explore such myriad of possibilities - how she, as a young child, had asked her parents to grade her as she is (who were mortified, but that’s the world we live in - we grade each other and deem if one is worthy of a dignified life), to her journals on searching for this “it� feeling, to tackling how workers give so much of their life to work that keeps taking, climate change, evolution of earth itself and so much more. It’s breathtaking in its scope, to understand time as it is - but to see someone like her spiral to the depths of what she is trying to look for - it feels quite hopeful, to ride along this train that’s going to difficult territories. Maybe the light at the end of the tunnel is the not the miracle we crave, that’s what it feels like to read this book. Nonetheless- I couldn’t look away.

Even though the book often is hard to bear witness to, and although she never gives concrete answers, you feel someone instilling to not give up. To not just wanting more for own self against all others (human and non human) who are depraved. To instead approach from a communal way of living.

As I grow older, parts of my cynicism grows with it. Unchecked, it can drain. Yet, behind the cynicism, beneath it - are the wounds, the places in my body that itches, that I want to scratch till it bleeds and instead of taking them for surface level considerations, what happens when we flip the narratives around them? When we hold ourselves accountable and those around us? It feels a lot like a world I would love to learn from. This book, nudges towards that future. A time that’s ever more beyond the clock.
]]> 202907135 Blood Loss explores survival after those we love have died.]]> 312 Keiko Lane 1478026553 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.50
author: Keiko Lane
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 34227516 Black and Blur--the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being--Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and Jos� Esteban Mu�oz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.]]> 360 Fred Moten 0822370166 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.37
author: Fred Moten
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.37
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56269292
So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom’s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four distinct art, sex, drugs, and climate.


Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing “practices of freedom� by which we negotiate our interrelation with―indeed, our inseparability from―others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.

For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture―from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis―is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.]]> 288 Maggie Nelson 1644450623 Shadib Bin 5
I don’t think I can really deep dive into each of them, since they each are so expansive, but I will try to explain some of the key things Maggie made me ask myself, and how I distilled it - as I think, great art does that for us - it unlocks questions for us, and then leaves us with frameworks / guidance to think. I didn’t enjoy the drug chapter as much, and for this review, I will leave that be, for now.

With art song, she challenged my thinking around what happens after we have distinguished something bad or good? We as a society, or individually, get hung up on the execution of the differentiation - us vs. them, but after that, what do we do? She asks me, to lean into the difficult terrain it takes me, and be ok to face the questions and assess, as there lies more deeper underpinnings worth exploring, even if that means, you, I, get the lashings, if we have trekked into difficulty / faulty terrains.

With the sexual optimism chapter, she married two key things - sexual proclivities between the heteronormative vs. queer world, and this is obviously a vast generalization, but at least, it gave me some great context and language to think about my own experiences in the broader context. This was perhaps, the only book, so far in my life, that takes some direct steps to discuss what it means to have desires, and how it’s on our prerogative, to explore them. And that even if the society we live in can restrict such desires and explorations (Maggie for example highlights how women are less sure about what they want). it’s even more devastating in never knowing what you want.

The climate chapter, was more feelings and thoughts then actual call to action, which again, was a very cathartic way to talk about a topic that distresses many of us. The concept on individual actions, vs. government/ corporate actions, and how we are already so deep into the devastation, that it’s no longer viable to just live behind curtains and not talk about it.

The essays, can trek into controversial spaces, not only because of how the times we live in (spotlighting anything that may be deemed deviating from the “cater to all, everything� approach, may be met with criticism of some kind), but also because, some of her stances and ideas can be hard to grapple with and can come off highly opinionated. I think there is deep power to that (the latter point), or maybe just where I am in my life. I love when people take clear, direct stance, or can formulate opinions and ideas, that can be hard to say out aloud or write about, but if we don’t have this kind of risk taking (full of heart and courage), art and life itself, becomes deeply stagnant.

]]> 4.02 2021
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:
One of the most thoughtful books I have read, that quite frankly demands repeated reads to ensure we can fully grapple with the questions and the follow-up presented within the book - about art, sexual liberation, drug use, climate crisis.

I don’t think I can really deep dive into each of them, since they each are so expansive, but I will try to explain some of the key things Maggie made me ask myself, and how I distilled it - as I think, great art does that for us - it unlocks questions for us, and then leaves us with frameworks / guidance to think. I didn’t enjoy the drug chapter as much, and for this review, I will leave that be, for now.

With art song, she challenged my thinking around what happens after we have distinguished something bad or good? We as a society, or individually, get hung up on the execution of the differentiation - us vs. them, but after that, what do we do? She asks me, to lean into the difficult terrain it takes me, and be ok to face the questions and assess, as there lies more deeper underpinnings worth exploring, even if that means, you, I, get the lashings, if we have trekked into difficulty / faulty terrains.

With the sexual optimism chapter, she married two key things - sexual proclivities between the heteronormative vs. queer world, and this is obviously a vast generalization, but at least, it gave me some great context and language to think about my own experiences in the broader context. This was perhaps, the only book, so far in my life, that takes some direct steps to discuss what it means to have desires, and how it’s on our prerogative, to explore them. And that even if the society we live in can restrict such desires and explorations (Maggie for example highlights how women are less sure about what they want). it’s even more devastating in never knowing what you want.

The climate chapter, was more feelings and thoughts then actual call to action, which again, was a very cathartic way to talk about a topic that distresses many of us. The concept on individual actions, vs. government/ corporate actions, and how we are already so deep into the devastation, that it’s no longer viable to just live behind curtains and not talk about it.

The essays, can trek into controversial spaces, not only because of how the times we live in (spotlighting anything that may be deemed deviating from the “cater to all, everything� approach, may be met with criticism of some kind), but also because, some of her stances and ideas can be hard to grapple with and can come off highly opinionated. I think there is deep power to that (the latter point), or maybe just where I am in my life. I love when people take clear, direct stance, or can formulate opinions and ideas, that can be hard to say out aloud or write about, but if we don’t have this kind of risk taking (full of heart and courage), art and life itself, becomes deeply stagnant.


]]> 279174 330 Douglas Crimp 0262532646 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.43 2002
author: Douglas Crimp
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58341029
The story of art collective Gran Fury—which fought back during the AIDS crisisĚýthrough direct action and community-made propaganda—offers lessons in love andĚýgrief.

In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury formed to campaign against corporate greed, government inaction, stigma, and public indifference to the epidemic.

Writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury’s art and activism from iconic images like the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill� poster to the act of dropping piles of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a collective and its members, who built essential solidarities with each other and whose lives evidenced the profound trauma of enduring the AIDS crisis.

Gran Fury and ACT UP’s strategies are still used frequently by the activists leading contemporary movements. In an era when structural violence and the devastation of COVID-19 continue to target the most vulnerable, this belief in the power of public art and action persists.]]> 432 Jack Lowery 1645036588 Shadib Bin 5 4.50 2022
author: Jack Lowery
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/30
date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> 58877223 379 Jenny Erpenbeck 332860085X Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.35 2021
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> 211953309 A dazzling debut novel set in 1980s New York, when cocaine is as easy to get as ice cream, about one young woman’s summer of infinite possibility—and looming danger.

It was the summer of 1986, when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum—half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed.

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that she’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents� medicine cabinet.

Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed, whom every girl wants to sleep with and every guy wants to be. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?

Freud called cocaine “a gorgeous excitement,� but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.]]> 368 Cynthia Weiner 0593798848 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.71
author: Cynthia Weiner
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.71
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> 127282418
Warhol superstar and transgender icon Candy Darling was glamour personified, but she was without a real place in the world.

Growing up on Long Island, lonely and quiet and queer, she was enchanted by Hollywood starlets like Kim Novak. She found her turn in New York’s early Off-Off-Broadway theater scene, in Warhol’s films Flesh and Women in Revolt, and at the famed nightclub Max's Kansas City. She inspired songs by Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones. She became friends with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, borrowed a dress from Lauren Hutton, posed for Richard Avedon, and performed alongside Tennessee Williams in his own play.

Yet Candy lived on the edge, relying on the kindness of strangers, friends, and her quietly devoted mother, sleeping on couches and in cheap hotel rooms, keeping a part of herself hidden. She wanted to be a star, but mostly she wanted to be loved. Her last diary entry “I shall try to be grateful for life . . . Cannot imagine who would want me." Candy died at twenty-nine in 1974, as conversations about gender and identity were really just starting. She never knew it, but she changed the world.

Packed with tales of luminaries and gossip and meticulous research, immersive and laced with Candy’s words and her friends' recollections, Cynthia Carr's Candy Darling is Candy's long-overdue return to the spotlight.

Includes 16 pages of color photographs]]> 432 Cynthia Carr 1250066352 Shadib Bin 5 4.18 2024
author: Cynthia Carr
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> 214151728 With unprecedented access and unsparing analysis, this is the definitive investigation into Spotify, weaving interviews with incisive cultural criticism, and illuminating how streaming has reshaped music for listeners and artists alike.

Flush with testimony from over a hundred industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us into the inner workings of the highly consolidated modern music business and how it has become personalized, playlisted, autoplayed, and algorithmic.

With an expert’s eye, music journalist Liz Pelly reveals how Spotify’s two-sided marketplace—the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all—has changed music media forever. She also explores how musicians and listeners are coming together to fight this era of musical individualism and advocate for artists� futures.

Amazon Unbound and Weapons of Math Destruction for the music industry, Mood Machine is a timely and unputdownable exploration of a company that has become synonymous with music.]]> 288 Liz Pelly 1668083507 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.95 2025
author: Liz Pelly
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 57404904
A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma―and disrupts the calm of her secluded household.

Second Place , Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift―and to destroy.]]> 192 Rachel Cusk 1250838681 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.70 2021
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 40163119
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.

Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.]]> 441 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385521316 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.47 2018
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 211003842
In this peerless memoir, the 85-year-old “paterfamilias of queer literature� (New York Times) recounts the sixty-plus years of sexual escapades that have inspired his many masterpieces. He explores the sex he had with other closeted boys in 50s Midwest, with women as a young man trying to be straight, the sex he's paid for and been paid for, sex during the Stonewall and HIV eras, and in the age of the apps. Through stories of transactional sex, mutual admiration, open relationships, domination, submission, love, and loss, he paints an indelible portrait of queer history in America and abroad in a way only someone who has lived through it can.

Written with White's signature honesty, irreverence, and wit, The Loves of My Life is the culmination of this legend's life and work, a delightful and moving tour of over seventy years of being unabashedly gay and in love with love in all its forms.]]> 256 Edmund White 1639733728 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.67 2025
author: Edmund White
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/07
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]]> 32791963
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys.

But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually “think for themselves�? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia?

By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind—and on our own.]]> 273 Peter Godfrey-Smith Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.00 2016
author: Peter Godfrey-Smith
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
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]]> 208840291 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.

Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”]]> 112 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1668072246 Shadib Bin 5 4.38 2024
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
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]]> 243991
Blurring the lines of fiction, essay and memoir, Chris Kraus's novel was a literary sensation when it was first published in 1997. Widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades, I Love Dick is still essential reading; as relevant, fierce and funny as ever.]]> 280 Chris Kraus 1584350342 Shadib Bin 4 3.53 1997
author: Chris Kraus
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
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]]> 14625430
"Waking up from the chilling high of a near-death sex game, Catt Dunlop travels to Albuquerque in 2005 to reinvest some windfall real-estate gains and reengage with something approximating "real life." Aware that the critical discourse she has used to build her career as a visiting professor and art critic is really a cipher for something else, she hopes that buying and fixing slum buildings will bring her more closely in touch with American life than the essays she writes.

In Albuquerque, she becomes romantically involved with Paul Garcia, a recently sober ex-con who has just served sixteen months in state prison for defrauding Halliburton Industries, his former employer, of $873. Almost forty years old, Paul is highly intelligent but has only been out of New Mexico twice. He has no information. With Catt's help, he makes plans to attend UCLA, only to be arrested on a ten-year-old bench warrant en route.

Caught in the nightmarish Byzantine world of the legal system, Catt and Paul's empathic attempts to save each other's lives seems doomed to dissolve. " Summer of Hate" is a novel about flawed reciprocity and American justice, recording recent events through the prism of a beleaguered romance. As lucid and trenchant as ever, Kraus in her newest novel reminds us that the writer can be a first responder of sorts when power becomes invisible, or merely banal.]]> 249 Chris Kraus 1584351136 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.88 2012
author: Chris Kraus
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/21
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]]> 846349 285 Chris Kraus 158435027X Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.08 2006
author: Chris Kraus
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> 188541701
“Luminous� (The Guardian) and “brilliantly odd� (The Irish Independent), Danielle Dutton's writing is as protean as it is beguiling. In the four eponymous sections of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. “Prairie� is a cycle of surreal stories set in the quickly disappearing prairieland of the American Midwest. “Dresses" offers a surprisingly moving portrait of literary fashions. “Art� turns to essay, examining how works of visual art and fiction might relate to one another, a question central to the book, while the final section, “Other,� includes pieces of irregular (“other�) forms, stories-as-essays or essays-as-stories that defy category and are hilarious or heartbreaking by turns. Out of these varied materials, Dutton builds a haunting landscape of wildflowers, megadams, black holes, violence, fear, virtual reality, abiding strangeness, and indefinable beauty.]]> 176 Danielle Dutton 1566897033 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.01 2024
author: Danielle Dutton
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/20
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]]> 56269264
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.]]> 692 David Graeber 0374157359 Shadib Bin 5 4.20 2021
author: David Graeber
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves:
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]]> 102864014
Roger Moorhouse is a Wall Street banker and Westchester family man with a preciously guarded secret. As the shouting begins and flashlights blaze in his face, the life he’s carefully curated over the years—a fancy new office overlooking lower Broadway, a house in Beechmont Woods, his wife and children—is about to come crashing down around him.

Columbia literature professor Julian Prince lives a comparatively uncloseted life when he finds his first committed relationship tested to its limits. How could he explain to Gus, a fearless young artist, that he couldn’t stay with him that weekend because the woman who was still technically Julian’s fiancée would be visiting? But when Gus is struck unconscious by a police baton, Julian comes out of hiding to protect him, even if exposure means losing everything.

For Danny Duffy, a carefree Irish kid from the Bronx with a sassy mouth and diverse group of friends, the raid is a galvanizing, Spartacus moment. Danny doesn’t have too much left to lose; his family has just disowned him. But once his name appears in the newspaper, he’ll be fired from his job at Sloan’s Supermarket, where he’s risen to assistant manager of produce, and begin a journey that veers between political enlightenment and violent revenge.

The three men find themselves in a police wagon together, their private lives threatened to be revealed to the world. Blackmail, a private investigator, Gus’s disappearance, and Danny’s quest for retribution propel Disorderly Men to its piercing conclusion, as each man meets the boundaries of his own fear, love, and shame. The stakes for each are different, but all of them confront a fundamental question: how much happiness is he allowed to have � and what share of it will he lay claim to?]]> 320 Edward Cahill 1531504442 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.19 2023
author: Edward Cahill
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 194803881
Tracking the natural beauty that surrounds us, The Backyard Bird Chronicles maps the passage of time through daily entries, thoughtful questions, and beautiful original sketches. With boundless charm and wit, author Amy Tan charts her foray into birding and the natural wonders of the world.

In 2016, Amy Tan grew overwhelmed by the state of the Hatred and misinformation became a daily presence on social media, and the country felt more divisive than ever. In search of peace, Tan turned toward the natural world just beyond her window and, specifically, the birds visiting her yard. But what began as an attempt to find solace turned into something far greater—an opportunity to savor quiet moments during a volatile time, connect to nature in a meaningful way, and imagine the intricate lives of the birds she admired.]]> 291 Amy Tan 0593536134 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.05 2024
author: Amy Tan
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.51 2024
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.11 2024
author: Alison Espach
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 54814834 The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it?

That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth� is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. She meets scientists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single, tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave. She visits a lava field in Iceland, where engineers are turning carbon emissions to stone; an aquarium in Australia, where researchers are trying to develop “super coral� that can survive on a hotter globe; and a lab at Harvard, where physicists are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere in order to reflect sunlight back to space and cool the earth.

One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.]]> 234 Elizabeth Kolbert 0593136276 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.07 2021
author: Elizabeth Kolbert
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/30
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review:

]]> 201826095 The story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart.

In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London. Hence, she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood…Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, unaware that they once inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we’ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.]]> 388 Lauren Elkin 1529926459 Shadib Bin 4 3.71 2024
author: Lauren Elkin
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves:
review:

]]> 123207191 An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: Thwaites Glacier. Their goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans, and believed to be both rapidly deteriorating and capable of making a catastrophic impact on global sea-level rise.

In The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush documents their voyage, offering the sublime—seeing an iceberg for the first time; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage; the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—alongside the workaday moments of this groundbreaking expedition. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for and protecting human life in a place that is inhospitable to it. Along the way, she takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to bring a child into the world at this time of radical change?

What emerges is a new kind of Antarctica story, one preoccupied not with flag planting but with the collective and challenging work of imagining a better future. With understanding the language of a continent where humans have only been present for two centuries. With the contributions and concerns of women, who were largely excluded from voyages until the last few decades, and of crew members of color, whose labor has often gone unrecognized. The Quickening teems with their voices—with the colorful stories and personalities of Rush’s shipmates—in a thrilling chorus.

Urgent and brave, absorbing and vulnerable, The Quickening is another essential book from Elizabeth Rush.]]> 424 Elizabeth Rush 1571313966 Shadib Bin 5
I first came across The Quickening in 2023 during a visit to Prince Edward County, at a bookshop I loved. At the time, I had no idea who Elizabeth Rush was, but the premise—Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood—immediately drew me in. I’m glad I remembered this book and finally gave it a read.

The premise is straightforward: Elizabeth joins an expedition to Thwaites Glacier to assess its condition and the growing risks it faces as warming water temperatures accelerate its decline. She explores this with meticulous detail, and while some of it might seem “boring� at first glance, there’s immense value in hearing about the intricate work happening in and around Antarctica. It’s a sobering, enlightening dive into a critical topic.

The narrative flows with the pace of the expedition, interspersed with time jumps that take us to Elizabeth’s life back home, where she’s preparing to welcome her child into the world. These shifts in time are handled so seamlessly that they feel natural, adding depth and texture to the story.

Now, let’s talk about the heart of the book. Elizabeth’s decision to have a child in a world facing profound climate turmoil is both unsettling and inspiring. Her argument is rooted in the belief that individuals shouldn’t have to sacrifice their existence to single-handedly save the planet when the true culprits are systemic failures. It’s unfair to place so much burden on individuals. Initially, I struggled with this perspective—I’m still working out where I stand—but it’s a deeply thought-provoking argument, especially for someone like me, who wants to have children and leave the world in a better place.

There’s a lot more I could say about this book, but what stands out most is its deep respect: for the Earth, for Antarctica, for the expedition team, for her son, for non-human beings, and for the interconnectedness of it all. That kind of reverence is rare, and it’s truly moving.

I’ll end with one of the book’s most poignant moments. Elizabeth makes a grave mistake, accidentally spoiling a glacier sample. Her mortification is palpable, and she doesn’t shy away from showing the raw reactions of the people around her or her own enduring shame. Here she is, confined on the Palmer research ship, with no choice but to face herself and those she’s let down. And she does—tentatively, but resolutely—by owning her mistakes and continuing to show up for the work.

This moment could have easily turned into a tale of self-pity, but instead, it becomes central to the book’s ethos: humans will make mistakes, but the only way forward is to look inward, own our failures, and return to the arena—even when it feels unbearable. In a culture that often rushes to punish and demonize, this approach is refreshing.

It’s a call to keep showing up: for the world, for those around us, for ourselves, and for future generations.
]]> 4.06 2023
author: Elizabeth Rush
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/22
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves:
review:
The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush | Book Review

I first came across The Quickening in 2023 during a visit to Prince Edward County, at a bookshop I loved. At the time, I had no idea who Elizabeth Rush was, but the premise—Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood—immediately drew me in. I’m glad I remembered this book and finally gave it a read.

The premise is straightforward: Elizabeth joins an expedition to Thwaites Glacier to assess its condition and the growing risks it faces as warming water temperatures accelerate its decline. She explores this with meticulous detail, and while some of it might seem “boring� at first glance, there’s immense value in hearing about the intricate work happening in and around Antarctica. It’s a sobering, enlightening dive into a critical topic.

The narrative flows with the pace of the expedition, interspersed with time jumps that take us to Elizabeth’s life back home, where she’s preparing to welcome her child into the world. These shifts in time are handled so seamlessly that they feel natural, adding depth and texture to the story.

Now, let’s talk about the heart of the book. Elizabeth’s decision to have a child in a world facing profound climate turmoil is both unsettling and inspiring. Her argument is rooted in the belief that individuals shouldn’t have to sacrifice their existence to single-handedly save the planet when the true culprits are systemic failures. It’s unfair to place so much burden on individuals. Initially, I struggled with this perspective—I’m still working out where I stand—but it’s a deeply thought-provoking argument, especially for someone like me, who wants to have children and leave the world in a better place.

There’s a lot more I could say about this book, but what stands out most is its deep respect: for the Earth, for Antarctica, for the expedition team, for her son, for non-human beings, and for the interconnectedness of it all. That kind of reverence is rare, and it’s truly moving.

I’ll end with one of the book’s most poignant moments. Elizabeth makes a grave mistake, accidentally spoiling a glacier sample. Her mortification is palpable, and she doesn’t shy away from showing the raw reactions of the people around her or her own enduring shame. Here she is, confined on the Palmer research ship, with no choice but to face herself and those she’s let down. And she does—tentatively, but resolutely—by owning her mistakes and continuing to show up for the work.

This moment could have easily turned into a tale of self-pity, but instead, it becomes central to the book’s ethos: humans will make mistakes, but the only way forward is to look inward, own our failures, and return to the arena—even when it feels unbearable. In a culture that often rushes to punish and demonize, this approach is refreshing.

It’s a call to keep showing up: for the world, for those around us, for ourselves, and for future generations.

]]> 220765
The novel follows several couples and solitary wanderers through the summer of 2001, as their internationally scattered vacations throw long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities and resentments into exotic and unbearable relief. Indiana shows his large and terrifyingly credible cast of America’s cultural elite exhibiting their worst behavior, while sympathizing with their underlying fears and frailties and thwarted good intentions.

Do Everything in the Dark is Indiana’s darkest and funniest novel, but also his deepest exploration of our least manageable, most uncomfortable emotions.]]> 274 Gary Indiana 0312312067 Shadib Bin 1
There are some excellent writings but the structure of the book and observations are so robotic and monotonous for most of it - it’s been absolutely dreadful to go through this book.

I still feel like he would be a great author / artist to explore - but as where I am right now, this book isn’t my cup of tea.

Rest in Peace, Gary. ]]> 3.93 2003
author: Gary Indiana
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2003
rating: 1
read at: 2024/11/06
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves:
review:
2/3 finished - couldn’t really finish.

There are some excellent writings but the structure of the book and observations are so robotic and monotonous for most of it - it’s been absolutely dreadful to go through this book.

I still feel like he would be a great author / artist to explore - but as where I am right now, this book isn’t my cup of tea.

Rest in Peace, Gary.
]]> 209810283 Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America’s feminist Gothic.

In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires, on the run from the Church. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, and, most importantly, be discreet.

In present-day Buenos Aires, a woman finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with her mother’s terminal illness and her own relationship with motherhood. When she first encounters the vampire in a cemetery, something ignites within the two women � and they cross a threshold from which there’s no turning back.

With echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.]]> 256 Marina Yuszczuk 1914484649 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.69 2020
author: Marina Yuszczuk
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 185127010 240 Khaled Alesmael 1642861480 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.00
author: Khaled Alesmael
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 204316857 The Nobelist's latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.

In September 1913, MieczysĹ‚aw, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz's Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort inĚýGörbersdorf, what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior?

Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.]]> 320 Olga Tokarczuk 0593712943 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.66 2022
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60907222 136 McKenzie Wark 1478016760 Shadib Bin 4 3.80 2023
author: McKenzie Wark
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Shadib Bin 5
I have grown from a tentative fan of Sally Rooney, to someone who looks forward to her writings and her growth. This new book makes total sense of where she is in her life, her philosophy and where these characters took her throughout Intermezzo.

The book definitely started out quite slow, but I remained patient, as I could sense she was building character arcs that would pay off in due time. And they did in plenty. It’s always her strength to touch on the unspoken aspects of life, between people, yet this book takes it to new heights that felt unnerving. There were scenes I felt I was within these characters and their head - when Peter would deeply feel the need to end his time in the world, or when Margaret would feel deep shame around what’s happening in her life, these are provocative sensations that never feel intrusive in the hands of Rooney. In her interview with NYT, she said how these characters guide her through the writing, and you can tell, she has great deal of respect for them - whatever they are going through.

The devastating fights between the brothers - worsened by the loss of their father, fractured relationship with their mother, and partners who have their own sorrows that they are dealing with - were pivotal in the book. Not for simply a showdown, but more so - the guilt that can stay with them after. After all, even though family is complicated, it is still family. Love still remains even when you think the other person deeply hates you and your existence. The book stays within these boundaries - pulses within it, and it can feel quite sad, quite hurtful - for everyone involved.

The final stretch of this book, broke me. In a good way. To have redemption for the characters, warts and all, with Peter quite literally choking when Ivan asks him to come for Christmas dinner - Rooney couldn’t have had a better conclusion.

The book was absent and devoid of any political commentary, something that was prevalent in her other books. Yet in the interview with NYT, you can tell, she is an aware person. And she self deprecatingly says how her book may never change the world or do any good at times like this that we are all in. And yet. In writing such vivid, humanistic stories- she is giving many of her readers solace, that seems to be so rare given the world we now live in.]]> 3.87 2024
author: Sally Rooney
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves:
review:
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

I have grown from a tentative fan of Sally Rooney, to someone who looks forward to her writings and her growth. This new book makes total sense of where she is in her life, her philosophy and where these characters took her throughout Intermezzo.

The book definitely started out quite slow, but I remained patient, as I could sense she was building character arcs that would pay off in due time. And they did in plenty. It’s always her strength to touch on the unspoken aspects of life, between people, yet this book takes it to new heights that felt unnerving. There were scenes I felt I was within these characters and their head - when Peter would deeply feel the need to end his time in the world, or when Margaret would feel deep shame around what’s happening in her life, these are provocative sensations that never feel intrusive in the hands of Rooney. In her interview with NYT, she said how these characters guide her through the writing, and you can tell, she has great deal of respect for them - whatever they are going through.

The devastating fights between the brothers - worsened by the loss of their father, fractured relationship with their mother, and partners who have their own sorrows that they are dealing with - were pivotal in the book. Not for simply a showdown, but more so - the guilt that can stay with them after. After all, even though family is complicated, it is still family. Love still remains even when you think the other person deeply hates you and your existence. The book stays within these boundaries - pulses within it, and it can feel quite sad, quite hurtful - for everyone involved.

The final stretch of this book, broke me. In a good way. To have redemption for the characters, warts and all, with Peter quite literally choking when Ivan asks him to come for Christmas dinner - Rooney couldn’t have had a better conclusion.

The book was absent and devoid of any political commentary, something that was prevalent in her other books. Yet in the interview with NYT, you can tell, she is an aware person. And she self deprecatingly says how her book may never change the world or do any good at times like this that we are all in. And yet. In writing such vivid, humanistic stories- she is giving many of her readers solace, that seems to be so rare given the world we now live in.
]]> 203956646 From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex (“introspective and breathtakingly honest”�New York Times Book Review,), a memoir about sex, drugs, and techno in a time of madness

In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.

In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City’s dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020.

Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one—least of all herself—Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.]]> 264 Emily Witt 0593317645 Shadib Bin 4 3.50 2024
author: Emily Witt
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 34497797 How did Nigeria create the second largest movie industry in the world?

Nollywood began in Nigeria in the 1990s and has grown into the second largest film industry in the world in the number of films produced annually, behind only Bollywood and ahead of Hollywood. Reporter Emily Witt travels to Nigeria to offer a vivid, rollicking tour of the industry today. She meets with young filmmakers and actors trying to break into the industry, covers start-ups trying to digitalize what has been largely an economy based on piracy, and documents the shooting of a historic epic in the northern city of Jos, which is emerging after years of civil conflict and a brutal attack by Boko Haram. The Nigerian movie industry, like Nigeria itself, is an organized chaos, but amid electricity cuts, fuel scarcity, and countless other obstacles its producers are pursuing the very real possibility that Nigerian movies could become a global brand as recognizable as the Bollywood musical, the Hong Kong kung fu flick, or the Hollywood blockbuster.]]> 128 Emily Witt 0997126485 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.46 2017
author: Emily Witt
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 270259
Then out of the rain walked Spanner, predator and thief, who took her in, cared for her wound, and taught her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped…but the cost of her newfound freedom was crime and deception, and she paid it over and over again, until she had become someone she loathed.

Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner…and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and creating a new future.

But to start again, Lore required Spanner’s talents–Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner’s game one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van Oesterling to be paid. Only by confronting her family, her past, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be…]]> 352 Nicola Griffith 0345395379 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.84 1995
author: Nicola Griffith
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195040 Book by Jarman, Derek 320 Derek Jarman 087951549X Shadib Bin 5 4.31 1991
author: Derek Jarman
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 31571759 What does it really mean to take a leadership role? In this book, learn how true leaders are made and how you can be one too

No one is born to lead. This is the idea at the heart of this thoughtful book on true leadership. While popular culture feeds us images of the stereotypical leader—charismatic, powerful, decisive—the truth is, with the right amount of self-knowledge and authenticity, anyone can be a good leader.

There are countless courses and books available on leadership technique, decision-making and public speaking, but How to Be a Leader by Martin Bjergegaard and Cosmina Popa aims to give you the tools to understand and bring out your own individual leadership style. With an in-depth look at what it really means to lead, and the differences between being a manager and being a leader, this book invites you to explore and learn about the unique leader in you.]]> 226 Martin Bjergegaard 1250078741 Shadib Bin 3 3.52 2016
author: Martin Bjergegaard
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2019/03/22
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 195845136 A garden contains secrets, we all know buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .�

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.

The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.]]> 336 Olivia Laing 1529066689 Shadib Bin 3 4.02 2024
author: Olivia Laing
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/15
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves:
review:

]]> 423279 428 Robert Katz 0871133547 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.21 1990
author: Robert Katz
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 36381091
One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, "None of what’s going to happen is your fault". Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: "Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world."]]> 272 Paul Tremblay 0062679104 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.31 2018
author: Paul Tremblay
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55959403
It wasn’t until a reporting trip took her to the Northern Irish countryside that Schaap found a partner to heal with: Glenarm, a quiet, seaside village in County Antrim. That first visit made such an impression that she returned to make a life. This unlikely place—in a small, tough country mainly associated with sectarian strife—gave her a measure of peace that had seemed impossible elsewhere.]]> 272 Rosie Schaap 0358097452 Shadib Bin 1
This was an unfortunately terrible read. I was hopeful - seeing some initial glowing reviews, regarding how the author navigates her grief through spending time in Ireland.

There are glimmers of good writing but overall, Rosie’s fragmented writing isn’t very convincing and feels hollow through and through. It’s definitely difficult to critique someone who is writing about grief, but the self-pity approach she takes on to put her late husband on the pedestal (and wiping away her own agency as a result) especially with regards to likes and dislikes about things such as music, art, etc., just didn’t feel very enjoyable to read and rather made me detach early on from the book.

Her jumping around different cities when she can’t navigate something in her real life in Brooklyn, and try and find paid travel trips to write about - frankly boring subjects, feels quite pedestrian and again, very little to engage with. I could just anticipate when she’d drop the explanations on how she is trying to spin a conversation / a new curiosity into perhaps something that can be a podcast, a write-up, which I understand is the job of a journalist but for a memoir that’s supposed to delve deeper into things - just feels highly commercializing every interactions and leaving no breathing space.

Perhaps my biggest critique is that - by nature of just jumping around and moving around, it’s permeating in the writing - and starts to make the book about grief and moving through it, very akin to self-help books without soul. It has all the ingredients - an inflection point, a beautiful new place, leaving old home, new acquaintances and what not - but if you can’t stay put with some threads of thought for a prolonged period of time - you end up with writings such as this - haphazard and “love, live, life� energy. It just annoyingly felt empty.

Disappointed to say the least. ]]> 3.71 2024
author: Rosie Schaap
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves:
review:
The Slow Road North by Rosie Schaap

This was an unfortunately terrible read. I was hopeful - seeing some initial glowing reviews, regarding how the author navigates her grief through spending time in Ireland.

There are glimmers of good writing but overall, Rosie’s fragmented writing isn’t very convincing and feels hollow through and through. It’s definitely difficult to critique someone who is writing about grief, but the self-pity approach she takes on to put her late husband on the pedestal (and wiping away her own agency as a result) especially with regards to likes and dislikes about things such as music, art, etc., just didn’t feel very enjoyable to read and rather made me detach early on from the book.

Her jumping around different cities when she can’t navigate something in her real life in Brooklyn, and try and find paid travel trips to write about - frankly boring subjects, feels quite pedestrian and again, very little to engage with. I could just anticipate when she’d drop the explanations on how she is trying to spin a conversation / a new curiosity into perhaps something that can be a podcast, a write-up, which I understand is the job of a journalist but for a memoir that’s supposed to delve deeper into things - just feels highly commercializing every interactions and leaving no breathing space.

Perhaps my biggest critique is that - by nature of just jumping around and moving around, it’s permeating in the writing - and starts to make the book about grief and moving through it, very akin to self-help books without soul. It has all the ingredients - an inflection point, a beautiful new place, leaving old home, new acquaintances and what not - but if you can’t stay put with some threads of thought for a prolonged period of time - you end up with writings such as this - haphazard and “love, live, life� energy. It just annoyingly felt empty.

Disappointed to say the least.
]]> 218173295 A debut linked story collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny fiction from Mexico.

Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.

In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.]]> 192 Dahlia de la Cerda 1761380419 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.07 2019
author: Dahlia de la Cerda
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 139401966 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 352 Kaveh Akbar 0593537629 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.15 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62092265
In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. At the group’s center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.� These three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of Iowa City, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.]]> 303 Brandon Taylor 0593332334 Shadib Bin 4
By Brandon Taylor

Years ago, I had randomly bought Real Life by Brandon Taylor and I remember finding it quite pleasurable to read. He did make a mark with his writing style - so when I saw a full length novel was out last year, I have been thinking about reading it. It’s been exactly 2 years since I read Real Life, and given where I am in my life right now, perhaps that is why I found this book equal parts exhausting and rewarding.

The book revolves around characters that aren’t the most easy to understand or enjoy. They come with a lot of baggage, and frankly, can be simply put - annoying. There was a point in time when I was reading the book - I thought to myself, “why stick around such god awful people?� That alone was telling me my own privilege to not deal with such people. And even if I do, that I can make my exit. My privilege aside, what do we do with difficult people and circumstances? The answer cannot be - to simply toss them aside. That’s the easy way out - but this book meanders and ponders around what happens when you can’t exit. When the bitterness, the anger that one keeps within themselves - starts to outwardly pour out without any sense of control - this book captures that. There are some very raw situations that made me perk up, and enjoy every bit of the drama, savour it really. The tossing of a glass and breaking into pieces. The laser sharp commentary on things that most people would let slide by - but these characters have vengeance brewing within them. The scene where there was vision of blood that simply is that - hallucinations. There’s palpable anger and sheer rage that Brandon wills into some of his writings - that made me kept reading, kept wondering where he is taking me.

The book has a roster of characters that Brandon delves into. It becomes the Achilles heel of this book. I wish he focused on fewer characters and let them breathe. Instead so many are at play - Seamus, Ivan, Fatima, Goran, Fyodor, Timo, and many more. I believe perhaps one or two of the characters were likeable on first introduction- but I think that was besides the point for Brandon. He wanted to see his way out of this book with as many vantage points as possible - and ponder - what then?

Which does make me come to the point that, Brandon’s setups can be really exhausting. It can be to a point that it starts to feel that he enjoys putting his characters through all these miseries and luxuriates within them. Leaving little to no redemptive arc. That they are at mercy of other people / conditions beyond them. And he does make that a thing with Olafur and Bert, the more “older� folks in this book - abusing to an extent their seniority in multiple situations that they are in and that they always simply wants to remind - how the younger generations won’t understand things (frustrating, since I have experienced this myself growing up - the not understanding part). If Brandon’s purpose with such setups is that, he wants to prove that people are indeed at mercy of things and don’t have a lot of their own agencies, and he is depicting some of the more bleakest situations and asking us readers to not look away- props to him. But it does feel empty. Why are people like Goran simply left to never understand how much generational wealth that his adoptive parents have - is influencing his behaviour? Why are people just so inclined to sleeping around without any sub-context (I say this, as a gay man, who knows a thing or two about sex as a coping mechanism)? Why are these characters simply existing in these stories without an interior world? This unfortunately highlights the limitations of fictional writings.

I believe Brandon is very smart. And I enjoy his writing, a lot. But I think I am struggling with his intentions that’s permeating from his writings. And I hope he makes some changes in his next book. ]]> 3.34 2023
author: Brandon Taylor
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/08/31
shelves:
review:
The Late Americans

By Brandon Taylor

Years ago, I had randomly bought Real Life by Brandon Taylor and I remember finding it quite pleasurable to read. He did make a mark with his writing style - so when I saw a full length novel was out last year, I have been thinking about reading it. It’s been exactly 2 years since I read Real Life, and given where I am in my life right now, perhaps that is why I found this book equal parts exhausting and rewarding.

The book revolves around characters that aren’t the most easy to understand or enjoy. They come with a lot of baggage, and frankly, can be simply put - annoying. There was a point in time when I was reading the book - I thought to myself, “why stick around such god awful people?� That alone was telling me my own privilege to not deal with such people. And even if I do, that I can make my exit. My privilege aside, what do we do with difficult people and circumstances? The answer cannot be - to simply toss them aside. That’s the easy way out - but this book meanders and ponders around what happens when you can’t exit. When the bitterness, the anger that one keeps within themselves - starts to outwardly pour out without any sense of control - this book captures that. There are some very raw situations that made me perk up, and enjoy every bit of the drama, savour it really. The tossing of a glass and breaking into pieces. The laser sharp commentary on things that most people would let slide by - but these characters have vengeance brewing within them. The scene where there was vision of blood that simply is that - hallucinations. There’s palpable anger and sheer rage that Brandon wills into some of his writings - that made me kept reading, kept wondering where he is taking me.

The book has a roster of characters that Brandon delves into. It becomes the Achilles heel of this book. I wish he focused on fewer characters and let them breathe. Instead so many are at play - Seamus, Ivan, Fatima, Goran, Fyodor, Timo, and many more. I believe perhaps one or two of the characters were likeable on first introduction- but I think that was besides the point for Brandon. He wanted to see his way out of this book with as many vantage points as possible - and ponder - what then?

Which does make me come to the point that, Brandon’s setups can be really exhausting. It can be to a point that it starts to feel that he enjoys putting his characters through all these miseries and luxuriates within them. Leaving little to no redemptive arc. That they are at mercy of other people / conditions beyond them. And he does make that a thing with Olafur and Bert, the more “older� folks in this book - abusing to an extent their seniority in multiple situations that they are in and that they always simply wants to remind - how the younger generations won’t understand things (frustrating, since I have experienced this myself growing up - the not understanding part). If Brandon’s purpose with such setups is that, he wants to prove that people are indeed at mercy of things and don’t have a lot of their own agencies, and he is depicting some of the more bleakest situations and asking us readers to not look away- props to him. But it does feel empty. Why are people like Goran simply left to never understand how much generational wealth that his adoptive parents have - is influencing his behaviour? Why are people just so inclined to sleeping around without any sub-context (I say this, as a gay man, who knows a thing or two about sex as a coping mechanism)? Why are these characters simply existing in these stories without an interior world? This unfortunately highlights the limitations of fictional writings.

I believe Brandon is very smart. And I enjoy his writing, a lot. But I think I am struggling with his intentions that’s permeating from his writings. And I hope he makes some changes in his next book.
]]> 58885965
In the last years of his life, the writer Amos Oz talked regularly with Shira Hadad, who worked closely with him as the editor of his final novel, Judas . These candid, uninhibited dialogues show a side of Oz that few ever saw. What Makes an Apple? presents the most revealing of these conversations in English for the first time, painting an illuminating and disarmingly intimate portrait of a towering literary figure.

In frank and open exchanges that are by turns buoyant, introspective, and argumentative, Oz explains what impels him to begin a story and shares his routines, habits, and challenges as a writer. He discusses the tectonic changes he experienced in his lifetime in relationships between women and men, and describes how his erotic coming of age shaped him not only as a man but also as an author. Oz reflects on his parents, his formative years on a kibbutz, and how he dealt with and learned from his critics, his students, and his fame. He talks about why there is more humor in his later books and gives his exceptional take on fear of death.

Resonating with Oz’s clear, honest, and humorous voice, What Makes an Apple? offers unique insights about Oz’s artistic and personal evolution, and enables readers to explore his work in new ways.]]> 152 Amos Oz 0691219907 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.20 2018
author: Amos Oz
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,� chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.� Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]> 192 AysegĂĽl Savas 163973306X Shadib Bin 4 3.88 2024
author: AysegĂĽl Savas
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 777062 Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the title phrase “Where is Ana Mendieta?� evokes not only the suspicious and tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta’s earth-and-body art to alter, unsettle, and broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta’s use of mythology and anthropology, the ephemeral nature of her media, and the debates over her ethnic, gender, and national identities.
As the first major critical examination of this enigmatic artist’s work, Where Is Ana Mendieta? will interest a broad audience, particularly those involved with the production, criticism, theory, and history of contemporary art.]]> 184 Jane Blocker 0822323249 Shadib Bin 3 4.21 1999
author: Jane Blocker
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 123856312
In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada. As the final arrivals, their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the PM shaking Y-Dang's father's hand, reaching out to pat baby Y-Dang's head. Forty years later, in her brilliant, astonishing book, Y-Dang returns to this moment, and to many others before and after, to explore the tension between that public narrative of happy “arrival,� and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to the people in her family.
ĚýĚýĚý In precise, beautiful prose accompanied by moving black-and-white visuals, Y-Dang weaves back and forth in time to tell stories about her parents and two brothers who lived through the Cambodian genocide, about the lives of her grandparents and extended family, about her own childhood in the refugee camps and in rural Ontario, and eventually about her young son’s illness and her own diagnosis with a terminal disease. Through it all, Y-Dang looks with bracing clarity at refugee existence, refusal of gratitude, becoming a scholar, and love.]]> 312 Y-Dang Troeung 1039008763 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.53
author: Y-Dang Troeung
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.53
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199798868 New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work, twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis� life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.]]> 294 Colm Tóibín 1476785112 Shadib Bin 4 3.68 2024
author: Colm TĂłibĂ­n
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/06
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 200634908 A novel of family, secrets, ghosts, and homecoming set on the seaside cliffs of Maine, by the New York Times best-selling author of Friends and Strangers.

On a secluded bluff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house, lavender with gingerbread trim, a home that contains a century’s worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane. There are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards, even though no one has set foot there in decades. The house becomes a hideaway for Jane, a place to escape her volatile mother.

Twenty years later, now a Harvard archivist, she returns home to Maine following a terrible mistake that threatens both her career and her marriage. Jane is horrified to find the Victorian is now barely recognizable. The new owner, Genevieve, a summer person from Beacon Hill, has gutted it, transforming the house into a glossy white monstrosity straight out of a shelter magazine. Strangely, Genevieve is convinced that the house is haunted—perhaps the product of something troubling Genevieve herself has done. She hires Jane to research the history of the place and the women who lived there. The story Jane uncovers—of lovers lost at sea, romantic longing, shattering loss, artistic awakening, historical artifacts stolen and sold, and the long shadow of colonialism—is even older than Maine itself.

Enthralling, richly imagined, filled with psychic mediums and charlatans, spirits and past lives, mothers, marriage, and the legacy of alcoholism, this is a deeply moving novel about the land we inhabit, the women who came before us, and the ways in which none of us will ever truly leave this earth.]]> 384 J. Courtney Sullivan 059331915X Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.51 2024
author: J. Courtney Sullivan
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195036 This book is Derek Jarman's own record of how this garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to the last year of his life. More than 150 photographs taken since 1991 by his friend and photographer Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages and at every season of the year. Photographs from all angles reveal the garden's complex geometric plan, its magical stone circles, and its beautiful and bizarre sculptures. We also catch glimpses of Jarman's life in walking, weeding, watering, or just enjoying life.
Derek Jarman's Garden is the last book Jarman wrote. Like the garden itself, it remains as a fitting memorial to a brilliant and greatly loved artist who, against all odds, made a breathtakingly beautiful garden in the most inhospitable of places. It will appeal to all those who are themselves practicing gardeners, as well as to the legions of admirers of an extraordinary man.]]> 144 Derek Jarman 0879516410 Shadib Bin 5
Yesterday, I was wandering around my apartment, and finally picked up this book and couldn't stop reading. I have heard about Dungeness, and I have seen pictures of it - his beautiful garden, yet this book gave me insights into it unlike anything else before - driven by Howard Sooley's pictures.

Yet, the writings that go with it - are extremely generous, compassionate, and just flowing with love that heals. It's especially vital to highlight that, given he was suffering from AIDs at that point, and soon after passed away on February 19, 1994, when I wasn't even 2 years old.

As a queer man, I have always felt this generational loss and trauma within me, from those ravaged by the AIDs epidemic. Derek at one point in a poem writes how he would be forgotten - like clouds dispersing in the sky. And yet.

Derek - your generosity, your tenderness to your writings, to your garden, across time and space, 30+ years later - they mean a lot to me. And for that, I am thankful. ]]> 4.48 1995
author: Derek Jarman
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.48
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/29
date added: 2024/07/29
shelves:
review:
I first came across Derek Jarman, from Olivia Laing, and I tried to read his Modern Nature book - a journal really, which I unfortunately have not been able to finish. Partly because I suspect I need to be in a state of mind that I simply wasn't when reading the book.

Yesterday, I was wandering around my apartment, and finally picked up this book and couldn't stop reading. I have heard about Dungeness, and I have seen pictures of it - his beautiful garden, yet this book gave me insights into it unlike anything else before - driven by Howard Sooley's pictures.

Yet, the writings that go with it - are extremely generous, compassionate, and just flowing with love that heals. It's especially vital to highlight that, given he was suffering from AIDs at that point, and soon after passed away on February 19, 1994, when I wasn't even 2 years old.

As a queer man, I have always felt this generational loss and trauma within me, from those ravaged by the AIDs epidemic. Derek at one point in a poem writes how he would be forgotten - like clouds dispersing in the sky. And yet.

Derek - your generosity, your tenderness to your writings, to your garden, across time and space, 30+ years later - they mean a lot to me. And for that, I am thankful.
]]> 587275 240 Derek Jarman 0879516798 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.32 1994
author: Derek Jarman
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1141368
- Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.]]> 144 Derek Jarman 0879515384 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.36 1992
author: Derek Jarman
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55777544 “Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?�

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives� successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives� tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.]]> 464 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0593133498 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.72 2024
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56918103 A fresh and unique debut novel by the bestselling young star of Korean queer fiction.

Love in the Big City is an energetic, joyful, and moving novel that depicts both the glittering nighttime world of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning-after.

Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they suppress their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and freezer-chilled Marlboro Reds. Yet in time even Jaehee settles down, leaving Young alone to care for his ailing mother and find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life.]]> 217 Sang Young Park 1911284657 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.77 2019
author: Sang Young Park
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 200101541 A chilling twist on the “cursed filmâ€� genre from the bestselling author ofĚýThe Pallbearers Club andĚýThe Cabin at the End of the World.

In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.

The weird part?ĚýOnly three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.

The man who played “The Thin Kid� is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he’s going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions � demons of the past be damned.

But at what cost?Ěý

Horror Movie is an obsessive, psychologically chilling, and suspenseful twist on the “cursed film� that breathlessly builds to an unforgettable, mind-bending conclusion.]]> 277 Paul Tremblay 0063070014 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.31 2024
author: Paul Tremblay
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209527753 228 Anna Bogutskaya 0571385788 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.99 2024
author: Anna Bogutskaya
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 434903 The Rings of Saturn � with its curious archive of photographs � records a walking tour along the east coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich.]]> 296 W.G. Sebald 0811214133 Shadib Bin 3
]]> 4.26 1995
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves:
review:
I have heard of this book many times from a lot of my favorite authors, so finally coming around reading it. I do not think I got it much, really. Sebald goes through this meandering physical travel and along the way, makes a lot of observations - feverish and dream like. Although I wanted to give up on it - somehow his smooth writing just pulls you in. Perhaps in another time in future - I’d appreciate it - but for now, I am satisfied for what I have taken out of this book. It’s unlike anything out there - perhaps Olivia Laing’s To the River comes to mind, but you can clearly see Sebald is a reason why he is a legend and deep inspiration for people like Olivia.


]]> 161868 396 Alexander Theroux 0805044604 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.83 1987
author: Alexander Theroux
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195790675
Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

When a mother dies, her children confront her the stories she told; the roles she assigned to them; the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they’ve inherited different things.

Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a true story—about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.]]> 198 Rachel Cusk 0374610045 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.55 2024
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57847000 Winner of the 2022 Nib Literary Awards.

Chosen as a 2021 �Book of the Year� in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Book Review.

The celebrated, Walkley Award-winning author on how global warming is changing not only our climate but our culture. Beautifully observed, brilliantly argued and deeply felt, these essays show that our emotions, our art, our relationships with the generations around us � all the delicate networks that make us who we are � have already been transformed.

In Signs and Wonders, Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer, a lover of nature and a mother of small children in an era of profound ecological change.

Building on Falconer’s two acclaimed essays, �Signs and Wonders� and the Walkley Award-winning �The Opposite of Glamour�, Signs and Wonders is a pioneering examination of how we are changing our culture, language and imaginations along with our climate. Is a mammoth emerging from the permafrost beautiful or terrifying? How is our imagination affected when something that used to be ordinary � like a car windscreen smeared with insects � becomes unimaginable? What can the disappearance of the paragraph from much contemporary writing tell us about what’s happening in the modern mind?

Scientists write about a 'great acceleration' in human impact on the natural world. Signs and Wonders shows that we are also in a period of profound cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme and, sometimes, beautiful. Ranging from an �unnatural� history of coal to the effect of a large fur seal turning up in the park below her apartment, this book is a searching and poetic examination of the ways we are thinking about how, and why, to live now.

â€�Only theĚýfinestĚýofĚýwriters can hope to convey the mercurialĚýnature ofĚýtheĚýtimes we are living though: the sense of slippage; ofĚýterror andĚýbeauty. Falconer isĚýsuchĚýa writer. Signs and Wonders is an essential collection.â€� Sophie Cunningham, author of City of Trees

�Delia Falconer is one of the best writers working today, and in Signs and Wonders she demonstrates everything that makes her writing so necessary. Brave, beautiful, and breathtaking in its elegance and intelligence, it is, quite simply, a marvel.’�James Bradley

â€�Scintillating. Delia Falconer is at the peak of her powersĚýas a critic, and as an observer of the natural world. Signs and Wonders looks outward from Sydney, and from literature, to trace the contours of our environmental moment.’Ě�Rebecca Giggs, author of Fathoms

â€�Exquisite â€� From reflections on feeding birds, analyses of literary trends, to Falconer’s Covid and fire diaries, the essays are complex, ambitious, rewarding â€� Delia Falconer’s mesmerisingĚýSigns and WondersĚýhelps us to process the disorienting complexity of living in this time of great beauty and loss.â€� Jonica Newby, Australian Book Review
Ěý]]> Delia Falconer 176085784X Shadib Bin 4
During my trip in Bangkok, I went to this bookstore, completely by chance - I was contemplating on not going since was about to run late to meet some friends. Yet I ended up there and finding this book on the second floor. I was immediately drawn to it - perhaps because of my own bias of enjoying terms such as signs, wonders, dispatches (sub-heading: “dispatches from a time of beauty and loss�).

Generally with new authors, I tend to be more on guard - having not been exposed at all, I subconsciously start to compare them to the very best, which I know isn’t fair and I do my best to see the book in its own terms, but still, it’s a difficult act. But right from the get go, Delia’s writing put me at ease. She writes beautifully, no doubt. Yet, the central voice in the whole book remains this acute sense of beauty and urgency, while holding onto deep depression / sense of devastation within herself. That alone, feels quite generous because she could just as easily slip into murky “woe is me� territory, yet not once does she slip in that, instead, it’s a constant deep exploration of anxieties, curiosities, and perhaps these open fields of not knowing what’s really coming our way. Our way - as in everyone in this planet (obviously the extent varies) by way of the raging capitalism’s impact on climate itself. That’s the central theme of this book and all its essays.

Delia meanders around human impact on burning fossil fuels (and the history of coals - which I found quite fascinating), about feeding birds with her dying mother, around understanding signals across 1992 to 2021, about what COVID isolations really meant for her, the Australian bushfires and more.

I wanted to highlight two in particular which that I loved and why:

A. Hyper Realism: this pokes around a critic who was dismissive of Zadie Smith around the late 90s, as her book looked into terrorist attacks, among myriad of dystopian considerations that prior to that moment was missing from books. The critic was dismissive on the hyper realism and pondered on the past glories when people focused more on abstract and the quite literal approach to fiction that’s more relaxing and not so much grounded in reality. What Delia considers against this - is what ended up happening after 9/11, significant shift in the world’s view on Islam, on raging subsequent wars, the general climate and more. The essay, at least to me asks - at what costs do we try to be dismissive of things that are out of the ordinary? What would it take to open up to new paradigms? She further asks how a lot of authors tend to circumvent around climate issues, because people want easy reprieve. Again, at what costs?

A parallel example (albeit more superficial example), is when Charli xcx released Vroom Vroom back in 2016, which had a polarizing opinion, Pitchfork giving it 4.5/10 or 45% (Pitchfork since then has revised the score to 7.8/10 or 78%) yet Tiny Mix Tapes gave it 4.5/5 or 90% and went as far as saying “Vroom Vroom offers a brief, appealing glimpse of a world manifest with characters, ideas, and feelings, all presented with a novel exposition. This could be pop’s near-future: It’s just a hundred miles down theĚýroad.â€�

Why am I highlighting this now in 2024? It’s because Charli xcx released brat to universal acclaim at 95/100 on metacritic (PF gave it a career high 8.6/10) as the album is quintessential record of what she has been pioneering since 2016. It has only (sarcasm) taken 8 years for people to come around to what she was pushing for back then. Again, at what costs does these shunning work? What if people shy away from transgressive considerations in favor of what’s easier to consume? That’s the culture I fear we are in. I don’t know what that means - but I sense a dread.

B. Although the thread running across the essays are climate dread, Delia doesn’t shy away from showing her love and compassion for non-humans suffering because of our Anthropocene impact. Be it birds, be it seals, be it water habitants. You can tell her heart breaks, so does the readers, in what our human actions are doing to these animals. I think I personally crumbled when she wrote about a Koala giving up to the bushfires and surrendering to the fire. That’s what we are driving these animals towards.

I was speaking to my mother, as she reckons with some of the pigeons our family has, and how some of them have suffered due to the unruly heat (that seems to be the topic of discussions with every country it seems). And how she explained that these creatures cannot even talk to explain what’s happening, and simply waiting for recovery and if not, their demise. It’s paralyzing to think what that means. This silent pain. This silent devastation.

�

All in all, I am grateful I went to that store, and picked up this book. She wrote at a point in one of the essay - that authors should stop patting each other on their back and accept that writing doesn’t do much / bring about change. And yet, her words, her thinking - it changed me. It changed me to realize I need to drop my own greed to get ahead (because it’s my anxieties of getting left behind - a deep feeling that’s left at the wake of capitalism) and instead bring along people and animals - forward in this world (a world that’s beyond “being saved� but can still be looked after even with all the wreckage’s around us).]]> 3.84 2021
author: Delia Falconer
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/11
date added: 2024/06/11
shelves:
review:
Book Review: Signs & Wonders by Delia Falconer

During my trip in Bangkok, I went to this bookstore, completely by chance - I was contemplating on not going since was about to run late to meet some friends. Yet I ended up there and finding this book on the second floor. I was immediately drawn to it - perhaps because of my own bias of enjoying terms such as signs, wonders, dispatches (sub-heading: “dispatches from a time of beauty and loss�).

Generally with new authors, I tend to be more on guard - having not been exposed at all, I subconsciously start to compare them to the very best, which I know isn’t fair and I do my best to see the book in its own terms, but still, it’s a difficult act. But right from the get go, Delia’s writing put me at ease. She writes beautifully, no doubt. Yet, the central voice in the whole book remains this acute sense of beauty and urgency, while holding onto deep depression / sense of devastation within herself. That alone, feels quite generous because she could just as easily slip into murky “woe is me� territory, yet not once does she slip in that, instead, it’s a constant deep exploration of anxieties, curiosities, and perhaps these open fields of not knowing what’s really coming our way. Our way - as in everyone in this planet (obviously the extent varies) by way of the raging capitalism’s impact on climate itself. That’s the central theme of this book and all its essays.

Delia meanders around human impact on burning fossil fuels (and the history of coals - which I found quite fascinating), about feeding birds with her dying mother, around understanding signals across 1992 to 2021, about what COVID isolations really meant for her, the Australian bushfires and more.

I wanted to highlight two in particular which that I loved and why:

A. Hyper Realism: this pokes around a critic who was dismissive of Zadie Smith around the late 90s, as her book looked into terrorist attacks, among myriad of dystopian considerations that prior to that moment was missing from books. The critic was dismissive on the hyper realism and pondered on the past glories when people focused more on abstract and the quite literal approach to fiction that’s more relaxing and not so much grounded in reality. What Delia considers against this - is what ended up happening after 9/11, significant shift in the world’s view on Islam, on raging subsequent wars, the general climate and more. The essay, at least to me asks - at what costs do we try to be dismissive of things that are out of the ordinary? What would it take to open up to new paradigms? She further asks how a lot of authors tend to circumvent around climate issues, because people want easy reprieve. Again, at what costs?

A parallel example (albeit more superficial example), is when Charli xcx released Vroom Vroom back in 2016, which had a polarizing opinion, Pitchfork giving it 4.5/10 or 45% (Pitchfork since then has revised the score to 7.8/10 or 78%) yet Tiny Mix Tapes gave it 4.5/5 or 90% and went as far as saying “Vroom Vroom offers a brief, appealing glimpse of a world manifest with characters, ideas, and feelings, all presented with a novel exposition. This could be pop’s near-future: It’s just a hundred miles down theĚýroad.â€�

Why am I highlighting this now in 2024? It’s because Charli xcx released brat to universal acclaim at 95/100 on metacritic (PF gave it a career high 8.6/10) as the album is quintessential record of what she has been pioneering since 2016. It has only (sarcasm) taken 8 years for people to come around to what she was pushing for back then. Again, at what costs does these shunning work? What if people shy away from transgressive considerations in favor of what’s easier to consume? That’s the culture I fear we are in. I don’t know what that means - but I sense a dread.

B. Although the thread running across the essays are climate dread, Delia doesn’t shy away from showing her love and compassion for non-humans suffering because of our Anthropocene impact. Be it birds, be it seals, be it water habitants. You can tell her heart breaks, so does the readers, in what our human actions are doing to these animals. I think I personally crumbled when she wrote about a Koala giving up to the bushfires and surrendering to the fire. That’s what we are driving these animals towards.

I was speaking to my mother, as she reckons with some of the pigeons our family has, and how some of them have suffered due to the unruly heat (that seems to be the topic of discussions with every country it seems). And how she explained that these creatures cannot even talk to explain what’s happening, and simply waiting for recovery and if not, their demise. It’s paralyzing to think what that means. This silent pain. This silent devastation.

�

All in all, I am grateful I went to that store, and picked up this book. She wrote at a point in one of the essay - that authors should stop patting each other on their back and accept that writing doesn’t do much / bring about change. And yet, her words, her thinking - it changed me. It changed me to realize I need to drop my own greed to get ahead (because it’s my anxieties of getting left behind - a deep feeling that’s left at the wake of capitalism) and instead bring along people and animals - forward in this world (a world that’s beyond “being saved� but can still be looked after even with all the wreckage’s around us).
]]> 10342445
In Where Art Belongs, Chris Kraus examines artistic enterprises of the past decade that reclaim the use of lived time as a material in the creation of visual art. In four interlinked essays, Kraus expands the argument begun in her earlier book Video Green that “the art world is interesting only insofar as it reflects the larger world outside it.� Moving from New York to Berlin to Los Angeles to the Pueblo Nuevo barrio of Mexicali, Kraus addresses such subjects as the ubiquity of video, the legacy of the 1960s Amsterdam underground newspaper Suck, and the activities of the New York art collective Bernadette Corporation. She examines the uses of boredom, poetry, privatized prisons, community art, corporate philanthropy, vertically integrated manufacturing, and discarded utopias, revealing the surprising persistence of microcultures within the matrix. Chronicling the sometimes doomed but persistently heroic efforts of small groups of artists to reclaim public space and time, Where Art Belongs describes the trend towards collectivity manifested in the visual art world during the past decade, and the small forms of resistance to digital disembodiment and the hegemony of the entertainment/media/culture industry. For all its faults, Kraus argues, the art world remains the last frontier for the desire to live differently.]]> 176 Chris Kraus 1584350989 Shadib Bin 3
By Chris Kraus

I have enjoyed Chris Kraus� writing for some time, particularly her biography of Kathy Acker titled After Acker, and thus was excited to jump into this book. I've been interested in reading Where Art Belongs because I appreciate art, and I know Kraus offers insightful commentary and critique as one of her many jobs (alongside being an author of many books). It was particularly exciting to dive into this book and explore spaces and thoughts I usually don't have access to even though I love Art. Almost think about what happens to before the Art is accessible to general public - that’s what the book hones in on.

The book is brief but highly readable and enjoyable. When you hear the title Where Art Belongs, it can seem quite literal, but luckily - Kraus delves deeper into both literal and metaphorical interpretations of this title, which I loved. The book spans a range of considerations, such as the rise and fall of American Apparel, among other stories, along with Moyra Davey’s writing and art, Tiny Creatures and many more. She also focuses on visionary artists but is not interested in presenting them as if they were products of a capitalist system (instead actively / subtlety working against it seems to be the primary drive with these people).

Overall, the book leans more towards Kraus's personal thoughts on these topics, which can sometimes feel dense and less accessible. However, that's part of the charm—reading someone's deep exploration of their interests.

Kraus� writing along with some of the artists being profiled - acknowledges that staying in this industry often doesn't bring a lot of financial rewards, but she and the artists emphasizes the joy and fulfillment it provides - which is in itself the antidote against the raging capitalism space we all operate under. ]]> 3.91 2011
author: Chris Kraus
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/05
date added: 2024/06/05
shelves:
review:
Book Review: Where Art Belongs

By Chris Kraus

I have enjoyed Chris Kraus� writing for some time, particularly her biography of Kathy Acker titled After Acker, and thus was excited to jump into this book. I've been interested in reading Where Art Belongs because I appreciate art, and I know Kraus offers insightful commentary and critique as one of her many jobs (alongside being an author of many books). It was particularly exciting to dive into this book and explore spaces and thoughts I usually don't have access to even though I love Art. Almost think about what happens to before the Art is accessible to general public - that’s what the book hones in on.

The book is brief but highly readable and enjoyable. When you hear the title Where Art Belongs, it can seem quite literal, but luckily - Kraus delves deeper into both literal and metaphorical interpretations of this title, which I loved. The book spans a range of considerations, such as the rise and fall of American Apparel, among other stories, along with Moyra Davey’s writing and art, Tiny Creatures and many more. She also focuses on visionary artists but is not interested in presenting them as if they were products of a capitalist system (instead actively / subtlety working against it seems to be the primary drive with these people).

Overall, the book leans more towards Kraus's personal thoughts on these topics, which can sometimes feel dense and less accessible. However, that's part of the charm—reading someone's deep exploration of their interests.

Kraus� writing along with some of the artists being profiled - acknowledges that staying in this industry often doesn't bring a lot of financial rewards, but she and the artists emphasizes the joy and fulfillment it provides - which is in itself the antidote against the raging capitalism space we all operate under.
]]> 127282370
Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide―from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker―but certain themes intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.

Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking, and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.]]> 336 Maggie Nelson 1644452812 Shadib Bin 5
I’ve been planning to read Maggie Nelson’s Like Love during my current sabbatical. I have deeply loved her previous works, such as On Freedom, The Argonauts, and Bluets. Generally, I find her books to be quiet, deeply felt, and complex, requiring multiple readings to fully grasp their depth.

Like Love is a collection of essays, thoughts, and conversations spanning from 2006 to 2023. This book showcases Nelson's maturity over the years, highlighting how her initial anxieties and thinking have evolved. It’s fascinating to see how her life experiences and interactions have shaped her current perspectives.

Here are a few key observations from the book:

1. Exploration of Shame: Nelson tackles the concept of shame head-on. Her writing addresses personal and societal stigmas without fear of judgment. She discusses deeply personal topics, such as alcoholism, with refreshing honesty. This approach helps to demystify and reduce the stigma around such issues, encouraging readers to reflect on their own lives in a similar framework.

2. Personal Revelations: Unlike her previous works, this book contains more personal insights. Nelson opens up about her depressive thoughts and the struggle to feel the magic in everyday life. Her honesty and willingness to share these thoughts without excessive explanation are both refreshing and relatable.

3. Conversations with Friends: The book features rich and lively conversations with friends like Jacqueline Rose, Eileen Myles, and Wayne Koestenbaum. These dialogues are generous, full of life, and deeply cathartic, providing insight into Nelson's thought processes and the mutual exchange of ideas.

4. Critique of Other Authors and Artists: One aspect I didn’t enjoy as much was Nelson’s admiration for other authors and artists. While her support for others is evident, these sections felt less critical and more like positive affirmations, lacking the depth and critical thinking I’ve come to expect from her.

In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed Like Love. It came at a time when I was navigating complex feelings, and Nelson’s generous and insightful writing provided much-needed clarity and comfort.]]> 3.70 2024
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/30
date added: 2024/05/30
shelves:
review:
Book Review for Maggie Nelson’s Like Love

I’ve been planning to read Maggie Nelson’s Like Love during my current sabbatical. I have deeply loved her previous works, such as On Freedom, The Argonauts, and Bluets. Generally, I find her books to be quiet, deeply felt, and complex, requiring multiple readings to fully grasp their depth.

Like Love is a collection of essays, thoughts, and conversations spanning from 2006 to 2023. This book showcases Nelson's maturity over the years, highlighting how her initial anxieties and thinking have evolved. It’s fascinating to see how her life experiences and interactions have shaped her current perspectives.

Here are a few key observations from the book:

1. Exploration of Shame: Nelson tackles the concept of shame head-on. Her writing addresses personal and societal stigmas without fear of judgment. She discusses deeply personal topics, such as alcoholism, with refreshing honesty. This approach helps to demystify and reduce the stigma around such issues, encouraging readers to reflect on their own lives in a similar framework.

2. Personal Revelations: Unlike her previous works, this book contains more personal insights. Nelson opens up about her depressive thoughts and the struggle to feel the magic in everyday life. Her honesty and willingness to share these thoughts without excessive explanation are both refreshing and relatable.

3. Conversations with Friends: The book features rich and lively conversations with friends like Jacqueline Rose, Eileen Myles, and Wayne Koestenbaum. These dialogues are generous, full of life, and deeply cathartic, providing insight into Nelson's thought processes and the mutual exchange of ideas.

4. Critique of Other Authors and Artists: One aspect I didn’t enjoy as much was Nelson’s admiration for other authors and artists. While her support for others is evident, these sections felt less critical and more like positive affirmations, lacking the depth and critical thinking I’ve come to expect from her.

In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed Like Love. It came at a time when I was navigating complex feelings, and Nelson’s generous and insightful writing provided much-needed clarity and comfort.
]]> 43482860
In Cruising the Dead River, Fiona Anderson draws on Wojnarowicz’s work to explore the key role the abandoned landscape played in this explosion of queer culture. Anderson examines how the riverfront’s ruined buildings assumed a powerful erotic role and gave the area a distinct identity. By telling the story of the piers as gentrification swept New York and before the AIDS crisis, Anderson unearths the buried histories of violence, regeneration, and LGBTQ activism that developed in and around the cruising scene.]]> 240 Fiona Anderson 022660375X Shadib Bin 3
I have been meaning to read this book for a couple of years now. Last year, I was walking around one of my local bookstores, and found this book - which was very exciting given how niche the book is. Finally getting around to reading it.

I have been deeply drawn to the 1970-1980s era, perhaps the most due to the art that came out during this time, but also the sheer devastations that happened due to the AIDS/HIV crisis. I have also been drawn to David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar, two landmarks artists in my opinion from that era, along with the cruising culture for sometime in my life as well - so this book fit a lot of the niche inclinations and likes I have been drawn to - and the book (mostly) delivers.

Fiona’s research is meticulous - she has touched Sarah Schulman, Samuel Delaney, Cynthia Carr, and many others to explore this book - pioneers in my mind from that point of time - still alive and those who capture the raw sentiments (rage) given how systematically they were failed during that time by the government. I have found other artists that I didn’t know anything about - Peter Thak, Alvin Baltrop. The book is also full of fantastic art reviews by Fiona, and glossary of images that are timeless. You can tell these topics really drew Fiona a lot - but unfortunately I found that the thread slackened across the multiverse that she explored. Fwiw - I appreciated her curiosities but when she was toying around the cruising culture anchored by David Wojnarowicz’s writings from last 1970s to 1980s, it started to feel far too stretched by also invoking the 1971 queer liberations / stone wall riots led by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Given how slim the book already is, I wish she stayed with some of the topics she explored - such as Peter Hujar’s photography about the Piers, or police brutality monitoring queer lives after the AIDS / HIV crisis. The disparate topics are indeed connected, I am wholly aligned with that, but Fiona’s bridging them together felt unfinished and rather haphazard.

However, I really enjoyed her spending time around gentrifications and how they are all interrelated. For example, when the AIDS / HIV crisis was taking a hold of the queer community - the first inclinations by authorities was to shut down bathhouses or places where anonymous encounters happen - not once taking a pause to consider these places could be safe haven for people to share notes, safe practices (even if feels counter intuitive - to whom really? The book argues those who have no idea about these spaces other than their ignorant viewpoints, were the staunchest supporters of policing these spaces) and help each other, at a time when these communities needed it the most. As Sarah S. explored in Gentrification of the Mind, gentrifications has always been about smashing / annihilating complexities in favor of homogeneity and simplifications, which robs things so much of their original essence (of what is being removed). This book does a great job of reminding us just that. That cruising in the ruins, the art it evokes, the emotion it fills the person cruising, the curious observant - is worth understanding and protecting.

I’ll close with this - I have done cruising myself, and continue to do it, and hope to going forward. It’s been something complex over the decade that I have engaged in, but with each passing year, it has made me realize the vitality for it, at times when queerness at its core is under fire. To explore this space - which suspends class, and a lot of other barriers, and bring myriad of people in closeness, with the hope of exploring sense of belonging and sexuality, it’s worth shining a light and not let it be burned to ground. This book does just that, for which, I am grateful for Fiona. ]]> 4.22 2019
author: Fiona Anderson
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/14
date added: 2024/05/14
shelves:
review:
Cruising the Dead River by Fiona Anderson

I have been meaning to read this book for a couple of years now. Last year, I was walking around one of my local bookstores, and found this book - which was very exciting given how niche the book is. Finally getting around to reading it.

I have been deeply drawn to the 1970-1980s era, perhaps the most due to the art that came out during this time, but also the sheer devastations that happened due to the AIDS/HIV crisis. I have also been drawn to David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar, two landmarks artists in my opinion from that era, along with the cruising culture for sometime in my life as well - so this book fit a lot of the niche inclinations and likes I have been drawn to - and the book (mostly) delivers.

Fiona’s research is meticulous - she has touched Sarah Schulman, Samuel Delaney, Cynthia Carr, and many others to explore this book - pioneers in my mind from that point of time - still alive and those who capture the raw sentiments (rage) given how systematically they were failed during that time by the government. I have found other artists that I didn’t know anything about - Peter Thak, Alvin Baltrop. The book is also full of fantastic art reviews by Fiona, and glossary of images that are timeless. You can tell these topics really drew Fiona a lot - but unfortunately I found that the thread slackened across the multiverse that she explored. Fwiw - I appreciated her curiosities but when she was toying around the cruising culture anchored by David Wojnarowicz’s writings from last 1970s to 1980s, it started to feel far too stretched by also invoking the 1971 queer liberations / stone wall riots led by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Given how slim the book already is, I wish she stayed with some of the topics she explored - such as Peter Hujar’s photography about the Piers, or police brutality monitoring queer lives after the AIDS / HIV crisis. The disparate topics are indeed connected, I am wholly aligned with that, but Fiona’s bridging them together felt unfinished and rather haphazard.

However, I really enjoyed her spending time around gentrifications and how they are all interrelated. For example, when the AIDS / HIV crisis was taking a hold of the queer community - the first inclinations by authorities was to shut down bathhouses or places where anonymous encounters happen - not once taking a pause to consider these places could be safe haven for people to share notes, safe practices (even if feels counter intuitive - to whom really? The book argues those who have no idea about these spaces other than their ignorant viewpoints, were the staunchest supporters of policing these spaces) and help each other, at a time when these communities needed it the most. As Sarah S. explored in Gentrification of the Mind, gentrifications has always been about smashing / annihilating complexities in favor of homogeneity and simplifications, which robs things so much of their original essence (of what is being removed). This book does a great job of reminding us just that. That cruising in the ruins, the art it evokes, the emotion it fills the person cruising, the curious observant - is worth understanding and protecting.

I’ll close with this - I have done cruising myself, and continue to do it, and hope to going forward. It’s been something complex over the decade that I have engaged in, but with each passing year, it has made me realize the vitality for it, at times when queerness at its core is under fire. To explore this space - which suspends class, and a lot of other barriers, and bring myriad of people in closeness, with the hope of exploring sense of belonging and sexuality, it’s worth shining a light and not let it be burned to ground. This book does just that, for which, I am grateful for Fiona.
]]> 6664343
Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.

In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.]]> 244 José Esteban Muñoz 0814757286 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.30 2009
author: José Esteban Muñoz
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 10863827 Now a major motion picture starring Mia Wasikowska, Paul Giamatti, Laura Carmichael, Ezra Miller, and Rhys Ifans, and directed by Sophie Barthes
Ěý
Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, Emma takes drastic action with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter.

When published in 1857,ĚýMadame BovaryĚýwas deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for its heroine. Today the novel is considered the first masterpiece of realist fiction. In this landmark translation, Lydia Davis honors the nuances and particulars of a style that has long beguiled readers of French, giving new life in English to the book that redefined the novel as an art form.




From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 14 Gustave Flaubert 1101195886 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.59 1856
author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1856
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61615226 Reading for the Plot, his important contribution to what came to be known as the “narrative turn� in contemporary criticism and philosophy, Brooks returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as an excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from The Girl on the Train to legal argument, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive.]]> 176 Peter Brooks 1681376636 Shadib Bin 3
Still a great exploration - wish it was more accessible. ]]> 3.42 2022
author: Peter Brooks
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/28
date added: 2024/04/28
shelves:
review:
One of those unreadable books - he writes very, very eloquently but I don’t think Peter understands that some people (myself included) quite simply won’t get his steady stream of thoughts without a bit more pausing, structure, clarifications and humility. I don’t know who it’s catered towards - especially if the mantra is to allow story telling to happen with critical analysis by the listener. Especially if from what I understand - he wants the listener to be more thoughtful on their own especially in this age where everyone is wanting to tell their story and slip into harmful territories (I.e. positioning the story telling to benefit one own self). By being this inaccessible - it just feels a bit pandering to himself and those who truly get it - the very select few.

Still a great exploration - wish it was more accessible.
]]> 302243 151 Cookie Mueller 0936756616 Shadib Bin 2 4.47 1990
author: Cookie Mueller
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1990
rating: 2
read at: 2024/04/26
date added: 2024/04/26
shelves:
review:
I was really looking forward to it but I found the book quite cold and perhaps too factual and little to no emotions. I enamoured her spirit to live a life on the edge but time and time again, it started to feel like a nightmare and mechanical.
]]> 11702606 L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn's first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering "new information for me." Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy. Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted's star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay-porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989. In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted—to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time—and what it looked like when it collapsed.]]> 216 William E. Jones 1584351071 Shadib Bin 3 4.13 2011
author: William E. Jones
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/20
date added: 2024/04/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 34511852
The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, many of them created by her. Twenty years after her untimely death at age 50, Acker's legend has faded, but her writing has become clearer.

A few years ago, the writer Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, found that her own experiences were becoming more and more like Kathy's. She began writing about Acker 'through the distance, but with this incredible frisson of feeling that often I could write "I" instead of "she."'

This is 'literary friction': The first fully authorised biography of the avant-garde writer Kathy Acker, by the woman who arrived on the scene straight after her, who shared some of her boyfriends and friends, and her artistic ambitions

Using exhaustive archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and friends, Kraus traces the woman behind the notorious novels, and places her at the centre of a kaleidoscopic artistic world.]]> 352 Chris Kraus 024131805X Shadib Bin 4
I do not yet know if Acker would be someone / a writer I’d enjoy. I have briefly skimmed through things and it didn’t speak to me enough to warrant interest to sit and read. Yet, this book painted, quite clearly, someone who consistently tried. Tried to paint picture of what it means to be enveloped by sex, and letting the unconscious take over - this persistence always resonate to me. An artist putting their heart out for examination. I have read some of Chris� work, so to see her be enveloped in this biography writing mode was also very exciting. It’s a tough balance since her partner, Sylvère Lotringer, dated Kathy Acker as well back in a days and Chris has been compared to Kathy herself. But you can tell - Chris has deep respect for Acker - enough to keep all these personal imbalance aside and see Kathy on her terms (with facts). I just wish Chris let loose a little to truly tell us about what she thought about Kathy.

I could tell that the end was rushed, perhaps it’s ok to not fester in what are clearly painful parts of Kathy’s brief life - who was extremely sick, and couldn’t quite understand the reality of the matter and succumbed to dark sides of alternative medicine, and eventual demise.

I also wish we understood the parallels of why Kathy was obsessed with sex, with men who were committed, her obsession with fame and more. We get glimpses on the why - her mother floundering her wealth and eventual suicide, her fathers absence in her life, but never truly being addressed head on and left for interpretation.

I loved this book. It took me to times when Kathy was alive - roaming between North America and Europe - to sell and publish her work, and boy did she do it valiantly. On retrospect - she is admired for charting new waters with her writing and her feminism - yet - one would wonder what would happen if she got her flowers while alive. While asking for “the list� on her deathbed.]]> 3.93 2017
author: Chris Kraus
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/19
date added: 2024/04/20
shelves:
review:
I haven’t read much of Kathy Acker, but I have heard a lot about this biography and so finally getting around to read it. I never thought I’d love biographies in my life - but here I am - already thinking about the next one.

I do not yet know if Acker would be someone / a writer I’d enjoy. I have briefly skimmed through things and it didn’t speak to me enough to warrant interest to sit and read. Yet, this book painted, quite clearly, someone who consistently tried. Tried to paint picture of what it means to be enveloped by sex, and letting the unconscious take over - this persistence always resonate to me. An artist putting their heart out for examination. I have read some of Chris� work, so to see her be enveloped in this biography writing mode was also very exciting. It’s a tough balance since her partner, Sylvère Lotringer, dated Kathy Acker as well back in a days and Chris has been compared to Kathy herself. But you can tell - Chris has deep respect for Acker - enough to keep all these personal imbalance aside and see Kathy on her terms (with facts). I just wish Chris let loose a little to truly tell us about what she thought about Kathy.

I could tell that the end was rushed, perhaps it’s ok to not fester in what are clearly painful parts of Kathy’s brief life - who was extremely sick, and couldn’t quite understand the reality of the matter and succumbed to dark sides of alternative medicine, and eventual demise.

I also wish we understood the parallels of why Kathy was obsessed with sex, with men who were committed, her obsession with fame and more. We get glimpses on the why - her mother floundering her wealth and eventual suicide, her fathers absence in her life, but never truly being addressed head on and left for interpretation.

I loved this book. It took me to times when Kathy was alive - roaming between North America and Europe - to sell and publish her work, and boy did she do it valiantly. On retrospect - she is admired for charting new waters with her writing and her feminism - yet - one would wonder what would happen if she got her flowers while alive. While asking for “the list� on her deathbed.
]]> 150778642 An astonishing debut from the beloved NPR science correspondent: intimate essays about the intersection of science and everyday life.

Inspired by Walt Whitman’s invocation to the “transient and strange,� longtime NPR science reporter Nell Greenfieldboyce brings what best-selling essayist Tim Kreider calls her “bright inquiring mind and lively, drily funny voice� to the largest matters of life―birth and death, constancy and impermanence, love and aging. In personal essays both curious and wise, she describes the wildest workings of the natural world, from the echoing truth of a fetal heartbeat and the incredible leap of the humble flea to the eerie power of tornadoes and the otherworldly glint of micrometeorites. Beautifully blending explanatory science, original reporting, and personal experience, she captures the ache of ordinary comforting a frightened child, wrestling with potential genetic defects, confronting mortality through a parent’s illness. Transient and Strange delves into the places where science touches our lives most intimately, offering resonant insights into both the world around us and the worlds within us.]]> 224 Nell Greenfieldboyce 0393882349 Shadib Bin 5 3.82
author: Nell Greenfieldboyce
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/31
date added: 2024/03/31
shelves:
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]]> 63934607
Humans are unique in our ability to understand time, able to comprehend the past and future like no other species. Yet modern-day technology and capitalism have supercharged our short-termist tendencies and trapped us in the present, at the mercy of reactive politics, quarterly business targets and 24-hour news cycles.

It wasn't always so. In medieval times, craftsmen worked on cathedrals that would be unfinished in their lifetime. Indigenous leaders fostered intergenerational reciprocity. And in the early twentieth century, writers dreamed of worlds thousands of years hence. Now, as we face long-term challenges on an unprecedented scale, how do we recapture that far-sighted vision?

Richard Fisher takes us from the boardrooms of Japan - home to some of the world's oldest businesses - to an Australian laboratory where an experiment started a century ago is still going strong. He examines the psychological biases that discourage the long view, and talks to the growing number of people from the worlds of philosophy, technology, science and the arts who are exploring smart ways to overcome them. How can we learn to widen our perception of time and honour our obligations to the lives of those not yet born?


Praise for The Long View:

'A wise, humane book laced with curiosity and hope. It will open your mind and horizons - and leave you giddy at the prospect of all that we may yet become.' Tom Chatfield, author of How to Think

'Hope-filled and revelatory ... Beautifully readable and scholarly, rich and personal, this book shows how, to leave a robust legacy for the future, we need to overcome our bias for the present.' Rowan Hooper, author of How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

'A soaring hymn to all that might lie in the future; alongside the diverse and beautiful ways to think about it. Overflowing with wisdom and insight.' Thomas Moynihan, author of X-Risk

'Few books can claim to shake your perspective on life, but The Long View does exactly that ... a landmark book that could help to build a much brighter future for many generations to come.' David Robson, author of The Expectation Effect

'The Long View is a manifesto calling for a radical reconception of our relationship with time. Richard Fisher documents the social, psychological, and economic reasons we have become stranded on the Island of Now - and charts routes for us to get back to the mainland.' Marcia Bjornerud, the author of Timefulness...]]> 352 Richard Fisher 1472285212 Shadib Bin 2 3.89
author: Richard Fisher
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.89
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/30
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves:
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]]> 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.ĚýYet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 Shadib Bin 1
Perhaps one of the worst books I have ever read, full of manipulation of the human experiences to paint a picture that’s just so awfully depressing and frankly, annoying, this book and the author puts a bad taste in my mouth.

There were some moments of great writings but as a whole, it falls flat. A big no.]]> 4.28 2015
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 1
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/03/22
shelves:
review:
To be fair, I couldn’t finish it and I just haven’t been able to go to this book over the past 3 months.

Perhaps one of the worst books I have ever read, full of manipulation of the human experiences to paint a picture that’s just so awfully depressing and frankly, annoying, this book and the author puts a bad taste in my mouth.

There were some moments of great writings but as a whole, it falls flat. A big no.
]]> 6557780 304 Arundhati Roy 0241144620 Shadib Bin 0 to-read 3.98 2009
author: Arundhati Roy
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 40230535 To answer this question I will need to follow two paths. I will have to understand the politics of Varg Vikernes and where they come from in the perspective of his art form, which is extreme metal music. Next to that it has to be clear what Europe is and where it is at now.]]> 301 Gordon Segers Shadib Bin 0 to-read 4.50
author: Gordon Segers
name: Shadib Bin
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>