5am impulse buy on the Kobo store… I‘m not into esoteric stuff on a serious level but love tarot artwork and archetypes and how that connects with storytelling. This has some psychology mixed into it and I thought it would be my bag after reading a Guardian interview with the author. I‘ve only read a few chapters but think it‘s filled with vague and deep-sounding psychobabble and not really up my alley but not gonna pan it just yet. Scuse the dirt

This was a good and fairly easy read, more of an argumentative piece than a deep-dive into what degrowth would look like, with animism and reciprocity as its themes. Some academics struggle with writing for a general audience, but Jason Hickel (who is an economic anthropologist) is not one of them. I was upset by the story of enclosure and rise of dualism and really loved the last chapter‘s foray into how trees improve humans.

Prior to this, animism - viewing the world as alive and fragile, not something that you could exploit - was the widespread philosophical belief at the time. Basically the enlightenment philosophers transformed the living, fragile mother earth to a dead harlot so as to get to commodify and plunder it. I‘ve heard of primitive accumulation before but never saw it put it like this!

Basically - Hickel argues that philosophers created a new view of the world during the enlightenment - they started arguing that the animal world was basically dead and filled with non-thinking automatons - and that this was a way to philosophically justify exploiting the earths “resources” after feudalism. In fact, thinking of the earth as “resources” and not an ecosystem was a product of this.

I started reading this maybe 6 months ago so as to use as a source on an assignment on degrowth. I only skimmed the introduction and conclusion then and I‘m now reading it from chapter one, which is on the origins of capitalism. It‘s so interesting and I‘m having a bit of a mind blown moment about it (tho maybe it‘s anthropology 101 for others)...

Made a non-serious attempt at reading this 2 years ago but it was a little bit too difficult and dense for me then. Have the audiobook to help me along this time, which is a medium I‘m new to. Although it‘s really helping me with her prose I feel like text processed this way has a shorter half-life. It gives a strong impression but details of it leaves sooner. For that reason I vary reading with listening.

Freud getting psychoanalysed. This is a biography on Freud written by a psychoanalyst and which I came across today browsing my city‘s (virtual) library. Might be, might not be a good starting off place to start reading about some psychoanalytic concepts. The twittering machine really peaked my interest on that front. And you also have to tackle this at some point if you want to ~read theory~

Reading this on yet another Twitter hiatus. I‘ve made so many highlights in this one... Really essential for understanding yourself and other bird app users. This first peaked my interest because it doesn‘t really seem to do the whole pop neuroscience-ish analysis of social media but looks at what we‘re *doing* there, which is writing and wanting.

have officially finished a whole book in a foreign language :) i‘m proud of myself. this was a bit of a difficult and claustrophobic read, but enjoyed the language and challenge of it. i probably should have chosen something easier for first read in french.

not sure what i‘m going to read next, probably a novella by annie ernaux or something short by maupassant.

a bit of a bummer that e-reader pics are so boring to look at.

reading my first book of the year which is also the first whole book i‘m reading in french! called lullaby / the perfect nanny in english. was first surprised by how uncatchy the title is in the original compared to lullaby (which may be one of the loveliest english words out there). but chanson douce has grown on me because of how evocative it is of the kind of life the nanny wants to live, which is that of her bosses, a much softer song.

just learning french and making flashcards 💅

i was supposed to read this, but now that i‘ve obtained it i don‘t want to anymore

this is probably the last good reading memory i have … and i may have cheap tastes, but this is such a good cover. so symmetrical and YUMMY.

i have a moratorium on reading geoff dyer for now because i had that reaction i have to writers i‘ve over-read when i tried reading another book of his. you don‘t want to risk becoming allergic to a writer‘s voice so it‘s safer to just not read his book on writing and not writing about DH lawrence, for now.

this book is a marvel

picked this up today and excited to read A Doll‘s House because Hedda Gabler fucking slapped and I wanted more of it. can u believe Strindberg was so offended by A Doll‘s House he literally *wrote his own version of it and titled it A Doll‘s House*.

🥰 could not have bought this any faster. hardback from 1938.

excerpt from Anne Boyer‘s book “The Undying” published in the New Yorker (the piece is called “What cancer takes away”). i hadn‘t heard of her before, but now i want to read everything she‘s written. it‘s so true about fiction being about not being ill, without knowing it. if i wasn‘t broke i‘d run out and buy this.

misogyny play. yes - i know this is to be expected with him - it is literally his brand - i just didn‘t expect it to depress me. it‘s one thing to hate women in a base way, and it‘s another to have the Strindbergian unquenchable need to ridicule women, these half-men half-animals going against their nature. in story after story! this extreme diligence - not only the works themselves but paired with the long polemical forewords - is what gets me.

terrific book on Rosa Luxemburg. a bit of a palate cleanser.

i am loving this.

I literally let out an "really?" over this, it's just so close to self-parody. All adults look like weirdly aged babies, except for the few who look like they were born old. Very sad that it takes me a fortnight nowadays to read a short novel. Longing for a proper sized book but pain and anguish stands in the way of that. It's just impossible to imagine being in a different place & inhibiting a different body at this level of, well, suffering :/

this has happened to me too. a sudden funhouse mirror effect takes hold of reality and permanently disrupts your perception of it. this is one of many reasons i don't do any drugs (anymore). no hairdresser ever speaks this much to me though. they read my face and don't even bother trying.

i think i have book synaesthesia or something. the first cover i see just clings to my mental image of it forever, like it does an imprint, a sort of mood that i start associating with it... forever. this american cover on the left is as painfully on the nose as the last one, but with a pretty colour theme. the right one is my aesthetic and my sole reason for reading these hah. ok the writing is fine too

Enjoying this book a lot but damn if American book design isn‘t 10-15 years behind. it makes me sad to see good writing get the personality-less airy-but-r e s p e c t a b l e treatment, with that noughties-feeling paper gradient. Topped off with the NYT seal of approval. It‘s so depressingly conformist and lifeless, the type of design that keeps me from getting interested at all. the cover on the right (British cover I think) is so much better.

I never ever would have guessed Harold Bloom had a daringly original theory of anything.

Orwell on Yeats: “To begin with, in a single phrase, ‘great wealth in a few mens‘ hands‘, Yeats lays bare the central reality of Fascism, which the whole of its propaganda is designed to cover up.”

was delighted to find out that George Orwell wrote an essay on Henry Miller. I read Down & Out last year and it reminded me a great deal of Tropic of Cancer (which was published a year later, actually). this is how you do a scathing semicolon: “But he himself seems to me a man of one book. Sooner or later I should expect him to descend into unintelligibility, or into charlatanism; there are signs of both in his later work.”

yates has the best eye for (& probably experience of) this type of scene - it just flies off the page.

Happiness is indeed not a potato. Charlotte gets it!

Hag reason 😭

It doesn‘t look it but one of the funniest books I‘ve read

love this cover

‘You‘re not going to believe this‘