2017: mixed media

I can't believe the last thing I posted on this blog was about Ezra Koenig! (Maybe some of you have forgotten who he is, given that he hardly tweets at all anymore. I don't blame you.)

Last year, I said I'd do away with reading challenges, and so I have. I've also done away with Goodreads ratings, for the most part: there's something absurd, isn't there, in asking the present-day reading population to rate Common Sense — for instance — on a scale of one to five. (It's currently at 3.97, for those wondering. One one-star review by a "Parentheses Enthusiast" remarks that the pamphlet is "DRY. DRIER THAN AN ANCIENT RAISIN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ATACAMA DESERT.") But here are five books I read in the past year that I would have rated four or five stars, I suppose, and that you might feel similarly about:

5. THE SHEPHERD'S LIFE (James Rebanks)
One of the first things I saw when I arrived in England last May, apart from the inside of the Manchester airport, was a group of sheep grazing on a highway median. That set the tone for the next few months, during which I developed a surprising affinity for sheep of all stripes; I picked this book up in the same airport on my way home. Rebanks writes of his childhood (and adulthood) spent as a shepherd in the Lake District, so there are no highway medians here, but it's no less interesting for it. The Shepherd's Life is at once memoir and cultural history (its subtitle, in some editions, is A People's History of the Lake District). It is better as the latter than as the former, although Rebanks's account of his journey from his sheep to Oxford to London and (finally) back to his sheep is necessary — it shows us that he's the best-placed person to do what he does in this book, which is to advance a critique of capitalist society from the point of view of a pre-industrial profession. I don't know if that's what Rebanks intended, exactly, but I do think that's what makes this book so valuable.

#4 through #1, under the cut.

2016: six books you'll like and several you might

[An aside: 2017, for me, is the year I do away with reading challenges -- because a) certain things took precedence, rightly, over my book-a-week goal this year and will continue to do so in coming years, b) if I'm ever going to finish The Making of the Atomic Bomb once and for all, I'll have to spend a solid summer on it, and c) in times like these -- not the times that try men's souls, but the ones leading up to them, if we're lucky -- I'd like to reread the complete works of Laura Ingalls Wilder.]

6. ON WOMEN AND REVOLUTION (Crystal Eastman) if you can find it.
Crystal Eastman (1881-1928; prolific writer, co-founder of the ACLU) was an extraordinary woman, but the titular and is an extraordinarily misleading and. I picked up this long out-of-print book (here!) in the hope that each essay inside addressed women and revolution together, but On Women and Revolution is in fact divided into two parts: Crystal Eastman on Women and (surprise) Crystal Eastman on Revolution. The former section is, I think, of more interest to the casual feminist than the latter is to the casual leftist; Eastman's writings on feminism are at once mordant (Winston Churchill is "full of beans" to her) and moving, and it's worth noting just how many of her concerns remain our concerns -- a full century later.

(Almost) as before: #5 through #1 + extras, under the cut.

ten books i can in good conscience recommend to almost every single one of you (+ some i can't)

[out of all the ones I read in 2015, the full list of which you can find here.]

10. A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES (Janna Levin) if you like the idea of logic more than you like logic itself.
A brilliant little book that's highly speculative in its detailing of the lives and loves and genius and internal suffering of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing: but Levin doesn't seek to depict these men with total accuracy (this is a work of fiction, after all) so much as she wants to make us feel the beauty and revolutionary nature of their ideas, contrasted with the ultimately tragic lives they led -- wracked as both were with loneliness, illness and the myriad punishments of nonconformity. Their ideas intersect as their lives parallel each other (resulting in a few genius storytelling moments) and (bonus!) the book's held together by the ever-present Wittgenstein. (I maintain that he's haunting me.)

#9 through #1 + extras, under the cut.

2015 in film, with blinders on

Yours truly was truly bad at watching Great Films outside of my preferred genres this year. That aside, these are the five films of 2015 which I enjoyed the most and which I am very invested in all of you watching and talking about with me. (I guarantee you I did watch more than five -- more than ten -- films that came out this year, and that not all of them prominently featured the letter 'M' in the title. I'm not scrounging for films to fill up this list. These are the cream of the crop, y'all.)