#and i was like ‘you don’t understand. i wrote a think piece about jungian theory and sleep token. i am insane’

[excelsior9173]

god. vessel talking about jaws (kerrang interview)

and saying “you don’t know someone until you have seen them destroy something”

I AM CHEWING THE BARS OF MY ENCLOSURE I AM SO ABNORMAL ABOUT THIS

[rotworld]

some asks

some of these are a little old, sorry about that! 

an anon asked:

I imagine you get asked this a lot because your writing is amazing - but are you ever available for writer circle sort of stuff? Like, swapping pieces for feedback, etc? If not, totally understandable! We are all busy people living in a weird weird world!

i actually haven’t done much, at least not online. time is definitely an issue right now lol but more than that, i don’t think i’d be very helpful for something like this. the one time i took a creative writing course, i was that kid who always wrote something like “this is very good :)” for feedback lol i have a lot of trouble giving meaningful feedback or concrit to people i don’t know very well. it’s partially a shyness thing, and partially working through some stuff. the last time i did extensive collaborative work with somebody, it was a very bad experience. i’m just not ready to open up like that yet, even with something as impartial as feedback. hopefully someday in the future!

an anon asked:

Hiii have you ever seen American Horror Story? The show really reminds me of your page!

very, very little. maybe an episode and a half lol i had a few seasons recommended to me before but i bounced off of the one i tried. 

an anon asked:

Does the spider from Needs of the Many have a name?

he will!! ;v; i haven’t named him yet, but i will by the time he shows up again. i feel terrible, he’s so popular and yet he’s appeared so briefly lmao he’ll make a comeback someday!

an anon asked:

I found your ao3 and fell in love with your fic Fabula though it seems to be dead ;_; I was wondering if there was anything about that story you would be willing to reveal I'm kind of obsessed and want to know more!

this might be the one fic that actually is abandoned, and i’m really sorry about that. i don’t like leaving things like that with no intention of finishing them, but it’s a fandom i don’t have any connection to anymore, so it’s hard for me to imagine returning. there are a few things i can say about it.

first, about the title. the fic was called fabula after a concept from russian literary criticism. there are a pair of terms you can use to describe what happens in a story, “fabula” and “sjuzhet.” the sjuzhet is the way the story is told to you, or the order in which things are revealed. it starts with the reader waking up in the hospital, missing time and crucial memories, and trying to piece things together. the fabula is the actual chronological order in which the events occurred. it seems a little heavy-handed in hindsight lol but i wanted to explicitly bring this up in the fic. the reader is living the sjuzhet of their own story but they’re seeking the fabula, the actual start of it all and the missing pieces leading to where they are in the first chapter. and that sjuzhet was going to become increasingly difficult to pinpoint because time travel was involved lmfao.

second, the coded messages. i got some very telling comments that lead me to believe at least one reader went out of their way to solve those ciphers which blew me away lmfao they weren’t terribly complicated and there were some pretty unsubtle directions on how to solve them in the story, but i was so startled someone had actually taken the time to figure it out! if you ever wanted to know what these codes said, here are the translations by chapter:

chapter 1: “do you recall when we spoke of jungian theories of dream interpretation what do you think i am trying to tell you”

chapter 2: “let me show you”

“i need you to see it see everything and see nothing”

“i need you to understand please my dear”

“i need you to accept what has happened to me”

“your answers are in hotland”

“you are all i think of now”

“in eternity and oblivion you dwell in my thoughts and you are all i have”

“my light in this deep darkness my accomplice and my victim my own alice”

[randomnumbers751650]

Long, unedited text in which I rant about comparative mythology, Joseph Campbell and his monomyth,

Back in 2012 I wanted to improve my fiction writing (and writing in general, because in spite of nuances, themes and audience, writing a fiction and a nonfiction piece shouldn’t be that different) and thus I picked a few writing manuals. Many of them cited the Hero’s Journey, and how important it became for writers – after all Star Wars used and it worked. I believe most of the people reading this like Star Wars, or at least has neutral feelings about it, but one thing that cannot be denied is that became a juggernaut of popular culture.

So I bought a copy of the Portuguese translation of The Hero of a Thousand Faces and I fell in love with the style. Campbell had a great way with words and the translation was top notch. For those unaware, The Hero of a Thousand Faces proposes that there is a universal pattern in humanity’s mythologies that involves a person (usually a man) that went out into a journey far away from his home, faced many obstacles, both external and internal, and returned triumphant with a prize, the Grail or the Elixir of Life, back to his home. Campbell’s strength is that he managed to systematize so many different sources into a single cohesive narrative.

At the time I was impressed and decided to study more and write in an interdisciplinary research with economics – by writing an article on how the entrepreneur replaces the mythical hero in today’s capitalism. I had to stop the project in order to focus on more urgent matters (my thesis), but now that I finished I can finally return to this pet project of mine.

If you might have seen previous posts, I ended up having a dismal view of economics. It’s a morally and spiritually failed “science” (I have in my drafts a post on arts and I’m going to rant another day about it). Reading all these books on comparative mythology is so fun because it allows me for a moment to forget I have a degree in economics.

Until I started to realize there was something wrong.

My research had indicated that Campbell and others (such as Mircea Eliade and Carl Gust Jung, who had been on of Campbell’s main influences) weren’t very well respected in academia. At first I thought “fine”, because I’m used to interact with economists who can be considered “heterodox” and I have academic literature that I could use to make my point, besides the fact my colleagues were interested in what I was doing.

The problem is that this massive narrative of the Hero’s Journey/monomyth is an attempt to generalize pretty wide categories, like mythology, into one single model of explanation, it worked because it became a prescription, giving the writer a tool to create a story in a factory-like pace. It has checkboxes that can be filled, professional writers have made it widely available.

But I started to realize his entire understanding of mythology is problematic. First the basics: Campbell ignores when myths don’t fit his scheme. This is fruit of his Jungian influences, who claim that humanity has a collective unconsciousness, that manifest through masks and archetypes. This is the essence of the Persona games (and to a smaller extent of the Fate games) – “I am the Shadow the true self”. So any deviation from the monomyth can be justified by being a faulty translation of the collective unconsciousness.

This is the kind of thing that Karl Popper warned about, when he proposed the “falseability” hypothesis, to demarcate scientific knowledge. The collective unconsciousness isn’t a scientific proposition because it can be falsified. It cannot be observed and it cannot be refuted, because someone who subscribe to this doctrine will always have an explanation to explain why it wasn’t observed. In spite of falseability isn’t favored by philosophers of science anymore, it remains an important piece of the history of philosophy and he aimed his attack on psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung – and, while they helped psychology in the beginning, they’re like what Pythagoras is to math. They were both surpassed by modern science and they are studied more as pieces of history than serious theorists.

But this isn’t the worst. All the three main authors on myths were quite conservatives in the sense of almost being fascists – sometimes dropping the ‘almost’. Some members of the alt-right even look up to them as some sort of “academic’ justification. Not to mention anti-Semitic. Jung had disagreement with Freud and Freud noticed his anti-Semitism. Eliade was a proud supporter of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist organization that organized pogroms and wanted to topple the Romanian government. Later Eliade became an ambassador at Salazar’s Fascist Portugal, writing it was a government guided by the love of God. Campbell, with his hero worship, was dangerously close to the ur-fascism described by Umberto Eco (please read here, you won’t regret https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf).

“If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge – that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.”

Campbell did that a lot. He considered the Bible gospels and Gnostic gospels to be on the same level. Any serious student, that is not operating under New Age beliefs and other frivolous theories like the one that says Jesus went to India, will know there’s a difference between them (even Eliade was sure to stress the difference).

But Campbell cared nothing for it. He disliked the “semitic” religions for corrupting the mythic imagination (which is the source of his anti-Semitism), especially Judaism. When I showed him describing the Japanese tea ceremony to a friend who’s minoring in Japanese studies, she wrote “I’m impressed, he’s somehow managed to out-purple prose the original Japanese”. So, it’s also full of orientalism, treating the East as the mystical Other, something for “daring” Westerners to discover and distillate.

What disturbed…no, “disturbed” isn’t the word that I need in the moment, but what made me feel uncomfortable is that, in spite of all his talk of spirituality, the impression I had of Power of Myth is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more materialist than him. Not even Karl Marx, founder of the Historical Materialism, was as materialist as Campbell.

At one point in the book, he was asked if he believed in anything and he gave a dismissive reply and said “I want to get experiences.” A man who studied all the myths of the world available, apparently didn’t believe in anything. Is that what spiritual maturity is? A continuous flux of experiences? Being taken by some sort of shamanistic wind like a floating plastic bag?

In nowhere in the interview he talked about virtues. In rebellion with his Catholic childhood, he said that we should go to the confessionary and say “God, I’ve been such a good boy”. Any cursory reading of the Gospel would say otherwise. Wasn’t this exactly Pharisee’s prayer in Luke 18:9-14? While the wasn’t the publican, who went with humility and asked for forgiveness, the one who walked out with an experience? And not only in Christianity, since in Tibetan Buddhism, a tulpa is something you have to kill, not foster like an imaginary friend like in some internet circles, contamined with this obsession with experiences.

The way I came to see Joseph Campbell as a man who was so stuck in his own world that nothing could move him out of it. All he wanted to do was this big experience, but in the end it’s as wide as the ocean, but shallow as a puddle. Even when Campbell speaks about having a “cosmic consciousness”, all that New Age jargon, claiming it’s about people discovering they’re not the center of the universe, it’s still so…self-servicing. It addresses a crowd so obsessed with experiences, but wants nothing to do with anything that requires compromise. He quotes the Hindu concept of maya, that life is an illusion, but I wonder how right he is about it.

I want to share this critique, by a researcher in comic studies: “We do not remember The Night Gwen Stacy Died because Gwen’s death reminds us of our own mortality, ‘the destiny of Everyman’, but because the story exposes the fragility of Spider-Man reader’s fantasies. Even icons can die.”

The exposition of the fragility of myths, especially the Hero’s Journey, never happens in Campbell’s work. It never talks about the potential of myths hindering entire societies, causing strife and causing people who can’t fit to become outcasts. Not even the cruel ones, like the Aztec death cult is treated as sublime, ignoring the fact that the Aztec neighbors helped to Spanish because they had enough of the Aztec myth.

I have changed my article. While I will still write on the hero entrepreneur, I’ll take a more critical view. The focus of the entrepreneur as an individual has many issues, because it ignores the role of public investment (necessary for high risk enterprises, like going to the moon or creating touch screens) and it treats with contempt the worked wage. Cambpell also treated with contempt the “masses”, who cannot be “heroes”. The theory on the entrepreneur is the same, treating the entrepreneur as a hero and the waged workers as lowlifes who have nothing to do, but to work, obey and be paid – to the point it feels like some economists treat strikes as crimes worse than murder. Not only that, but they can exploit the worker (see a book named “Do what you love and other lies about success and happiness”, it could be replaced with “Follow your bliss…”).

Campbell wrote in a time that there was no Wikipedia. So his book was the introduction of myths to a lot of people. It helped it was well-written. He considering his approach apolitical, but it’s clear that’s it’s not exactly like that (though this is a reason why Jordan Peterson failed to become the next Campbell, since he’s also a Jungian scholar, but he tried to become a conservative guru and this was his downfall). And, nowadays, Campbell is still inevitable in the circles that his themes matter, unlike Freud and Jung. Read it, but be aware of its problems, because it has already influenced what you consume.

[hadit93]

Grimoire Purism and Modern misconceptions.

One of the arguments within the magical community concerning grimoires is the methodology used to work the rites contained within them, especially when those rites are evocationary in nature. People tend to fall into two camps- those who believe the grimoire rites should be adapted and updated to conform to modern theories about magick and those who are grimoire purists and believe the operations should be followed to the letter. I fall into neither camp and believe both have valid argument, it is about using your own common sense.

1.Context matters.

When exploring the grimoire one should really take into account the period in which it was written, who the likely author was, what their beliefs were, and what possible sources their work could be based upon. For example it is clear the Solomonic texts were written by Christians who were literate and intimately familiar with scripture. They believed in God, in demons, in heaven, in hell- these were realities to the author. It is likely they were some how connected to the church and had a role within the church and thus likely to be devout. It has also been established that earlier sources for the Solomonic tradition can be found within the Greek magical papyrus and the Hygromanteia. The Picatrix also seems to be a possible precursor from my research, but I haven’t read it and so cannot confirm it.

It matters to know all this because it highlights the reasons why things were done and things were avoided. It shows the development of magic and how it has changed over time and thus gives insight into why certain rules within grimoires are important. It provides understanding.

What one shouldn’t do is approach the grimoires and immediately state that angels, demons, spirits etc are all portions of the human brain and rewrite everything the authors wrote in a Jungian fashion and then rewrite the procedure to conform to your theories, or simply state the procedure does not matter at all. If you cannot suspend your belief for an hour and work the grimoire as written you are a poor magician. If you do not believe in energy, spirits, or anything beyond the five senses drop magic altogether and pursue a masters degree in Jungian studies. It will save you time and money.

2. The Instructions Matter.

If it seems like a great effort to perform the rite and you believe it could be done much simpler, do you really believe these works would have survived as long as they did? The reason the procedures can be tough is because they are necessarily so. The lazy magician out there would love just to open up their 777 set up a temple and look at which goetic spirit fits into that framework. But miss out the purification, the prayers, and everything else and you are not getting the change in consciousness required to even enter the temple. Good results require hard work and there I no getting around that, there is no room for laziness.

Whenever you work with a new grimoire you should work it as close to the letter as humanly possible for a good handful of times before you can consider yourself knowledgeable enough to make individual changes and substitutions. Your requirements and needs will not be the same as a medieval practitioner of magic and adjustments may be have to be made but you won’t know where to sensibly make these adjustments without working the grimoire as written first.

3.Spirits know the names of their superiors.

A common error modern practitioners make is perceiving the entire universe through the lens of their own dogma. Thelemites are the worst for this- you will find Thelemites summoning goetic spirits whilst standing in a circle protected by the names Babalon, Therion, Chaos, Nuit, Hadit etc. I understand why, I understand that in your eyes Nuit is just as powerful if not more so than YHVH, but the spirits might not know that! It might work, the power might be enough, but why take that risk simply because you have a negative experience of Christianity? This is the equivalent of taking someone below you at work into the office and saying that a manager at another office in another continent is going to punish them and ensure they are doing their job properly. They are not going to care because the other manager has nothing to do with them! Use the names from the system they come from just to be safe.

I am not saying the Thelemic Gods are any less powerful or offer less protection, but use the tried and tested means first and experiment later. You may get good results, you may get bad ones. It’s okay saying that you believe that Hadit is the same as AHIH, but they are from different mythos’, different names, and serve different purposes in their original context. Trying to organise everything onto the tree of life is useful, but if you are working with an Abrahamic spirit, use an abrahamic system- or a system which calls upon Abrahamic forces. You can’t pick and choose as you please it doesn’t work like that, the ritual has to be cohesive. If anyone has done it well enough for me to believe I could give it a go it is Jake Stratton-Kent and his Goetic Liturgy. But again, I personally would stick with the Abrahamic version for spirits you have not summoned before and already have a relationship with when it comes to goetic and angelic workings.

4. The Tools Matter, but....

The grimoires list tools because they are deemed necessary, they are called tools because they are used. They are not jut fancy ornaments to sit on the altar collecting dust. If you can afford to make, buy, or otherwise acquire the tools as written then you should do so. Now some of them are harder to come by and require a small fortune. This is where common sense comes in- if you can’t get the actual tool, get the closest possible thing you can. If it is truly irreplaceable and you are just being lazy- stop being lazy! For example, if the grimoire calls for a hazel wand cut at 3AM on a Wednesday you will have to step outside and look for a hazel tree in an area which is accessible to you at 3AM on a Wednesday. If the time is truly impossible, venture further out until you find one! Honestly, it is laziness to assume it impossible and just log on to eBay and buy one.

Now if you are truly having an issue acquiring an item due to funding or lack of materials anywhere you will have to make substitutions, but these substitutions should be logical. For example, anything large made out of gold may be out of your price range. You can always apply gold leaf to the item thus giving it a piece of gold and allowing the same value and powers inherent within gold to be added to it, or you could paint the item gold- however it depends on what the item is for, this is the common sense part. If you are charging an item it would be better to have the properties of Gold on the item as it has a resonance with certain types of energy. If it is not being charged and is simply decoration or for show or is symbolic then it is probably less necessary, emphasis on probably and less.

Why does this all matter? Because this type of magic is NOT ALL ABOUT INTENT! The tools matter because they have a use, a physical and symbolic use within the ritual. People used to rituals such as the Lesser Pentagram Ritual will argue that that ritual calls for a dagger or wand but can be done effectively without the tool. Yes, you are correct, but that ritual is working upon the lower astral plane and is not really seeking to create physical results-thus the working on the physical plane with physical tools matters less. And I don’t care what you say, if you actually had something to banish other than your own bad juju the dagger would be more effective. In evocation rites you are trying to manifest the spirit on the physical and often gain physical results from doing so. The physical plane matters, the tools matter, the robes matter, the temple matters. The circle definitely matters! You are not working on the astral plane in these rituals, you are working on all planes and all planes matter.

Again once you have been around the block you will be able to see what tools are absolutely necessary and which ones are only necessary in certain situations. You can omit as you want once you have the experience, but don’t assume you can right at the beginning.

5. Sometimes alternative is better.

I can think of one time when it is probably acceptable to evoke a spirit from a grimoire utilising a procedure which is simpler and different to the grimoire in question. This one instance is when you have previously used the grimoire procedure and are well versed in it and have evoked the same spirit before and formed a good- emphasis on good- relationship with the spirit. You may call upon it again and ask if there is an easier way o communicate with them and get them to work with you in alternative ways, if there is, I will tell you. Here is the catch, you must be able to trust this spirit and ensure the methods it give still assure your protection. You must be able to get rid of the spirit if it turns out is is lying to you and becomes unruly.

Once some experience is gained I am all for experimenting, but you should do so cautiously at first and know that mixing pantheons, tradition, and customs can get messy. The more cohesive and logical a ritual is, the better. If you have evoked say Agares 8 times and he is always nice to you and you believe there is a simpler way which is more cohesive your working every day system and have asked him if it is alright, then go ahead and try it. If you are confident with banishing go ahead and try another spirit- but at the very least know the names it answers to within it’s traditions and make sure you have implements which serve the same use as tools mentioned within the grimoire text.

But- don’t be scared to work with a Christian framework because you are not a Christian. If someone assaults you and you say you are phoning the police they are going to be a little scared and more willing to calm down etc. It doesn’t mean you have actually called them or even have any love for the police you simply understand the authority they have over the criminal.

[litbits]

2018 Reading Round-up!

In 2018, I read 21 fiction and non-fiction books. (Poetry to be dealt with separately.) I probably spent the equivalent of 10 books’ worth of time on stupid Twitter, though. I don’t know what the sum of these tweets have contributed to my life or understanding of the world yet. I can’t even remember the funny memes at the moment. OH WELL. I also tried to keep up with a New Yorker subscription, which cut into book-reading time. I’m discontinuing this in 2019 and have subscribed to Granta, which is quarterly, instead. I’m also engaging in periodic social media fasts to break addictive patterns. We’ll see how that goes!

Reading trends in 2018: more European fiction, more novels and fewer short story collections than I usually read. Each year, there’s been a single author I become obsessed with and seek out (Anais Nin, Deborah Levy, Elena Ferrante, Joan Didion), but that didn’t really happen in 2018.  The list is rather eclectic and there was nothing that made me rave and buy multiple copies and press into friends’ hands, which is my favorite thing that happens. I do want to read more by Elizabeth Strout, Rebecca Solnit and Virginie Despentes, but the desire isn’t at obsession level.

Some stats:

•  52% fiction (mostly novels), 48% non-fiction (interviews, memoir, politics, feminist theory, art theory)

• 64% by women, 36% by men (out of 22 total writers)

• Authors were from the U.S.A. (11), United Kingdom (3), France (2), Italy (2), Canada, Colombia, Germany, and Greece (1 each). I read 19 books in English, 5 of these were in translation, and 1 book in Spanish and 1 in French.

• Original dates of publication span 1946-2018. About half of what I read was published within the past ten years. 

The list, ranked in order of how much I enjoyed the book, its scope of impact on the life of the mind and imagination, and how likely I am to re-read and recommend it. 

1. The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton, 2018)

This is the second volume in what Levy herself has termed a “working autobiography”. The first volume, Things I Don’t Want to Know, was probably one of my favorite books I’ve read, ever, so I was excited for this one. The second volume doesn’t dive as deep as the first, but that deep dive is also something that can’t be done twice. (The first book contended with her childhood in South Africa and her first graspings of injustice as a fact of life). In this volume, she recounts starting over at age 50, post-divorce, making a new life with her daughters, losing her mother, writing through it. She does it her way, which is in a Modernist spirit, understatedly, through metaphor, and weaving in objects (a bird clock,  a necklace, a heavy e-bike), recurring phrases, and other pieces of writing (in this one, Beauvoir’s, Duras’) as way of coming at the narrative elliptically and lyrically. Her piercing analysis and sense of humor make her writing about anything a pleasure.

Provenance: Van Stockum bookstore in Leiden (RIP) Fate: On the keeper shelf

2. My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout (Viking, 2016)

A slim, absorbing, funny, affecting novel. Lucy Barton starts by remembering a period she spent hospitalized in New York and her mother came to visit. Her mother, who had never been on a plane before, who she hadn’t seen in years. The story weaves around like memory itself, making lateral, associative leaps between different episodes about growing up in poverty and becoming a writer. The narrative also mimics the writing process itself, now that I think of it. My only quibble is that this is a piece of fiction where the narrator is a writer, writing about writing, writing about writing workshops and writing about another writer. It all gets too much into itself – the premise would somehow be more acceptable to me if it were a piece of non-fiction.

Provenance: Gift from my sweet mother-in-law Fate: Passed on to a friend

3. Fellini on Fellini, various translators (1976)

This was a re-read. Essays by and interviews with Federico Fellini. Things I take away from Fellini: his (Jungian) trust in dreams, the image as a source of creation; appreciation of artifice (the film set above reality, hyper-real characters); improvisation and a sense of humor as requisite for survival; not doing it for the money. There’s a beautiful essay about Rimini, the place he grew up, in the 1930s (essentially an essay version of Amarcord). There’s an interesting coda, when he goes back to the town in the late 60s and barely recognizes the place. He is older than the revolutionary youth, but he admires their ideas and bravery, recognizes the limitations religion and fascism placed on his own youth and how their freedom from those strictures will take them into new, unknown discoveries. Curiously, he view his own time as producing outsized artists, and the post-60s times as producing more, but smaller figures, a society of small artists. Is this true?

Provenance: a used bookstore in New York Fate: On the keeper shelf

4. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantis (1946), translated by Carl Wildman

If you can set aside a feminist perspective and pretend you’re a pre-1970s dude while reading this, then it’s a classic. I don’t mean that facetiously – the character of Zorba is a useful point of reference in life. I think about him a lot, and the wimpy narrator, too. We all have a bit of both in us. (I am OK with reading like a pre-1970s dude at the moment, maybe because there are so many interesting women’s voices out there, it’s almost like assumed patriarchal views are historical, like feudalism, and not annoyingly ubiquitous. Almost. I also have times of only wanting to read women, insisting on our personhood, etc. With Zorba, beyond even issues with the female characters and what happens to them, there’s the basic world view it departs from, that women are like nature, religion, war, learning: one of those things in life men must contend with, rather than heroes of their own stories, too.) 

So, Zorba versus the narrator: eating up life all has to offer vs. ascetic withdrawal; a life of experiences over a life of contemplation; choosing experience over morality. The spiritual life? Monks reveal themselves to be as depraved and greedy as anyone else. The simple country life? Apparently innocent villagers can transform into a killer, misogynist mob. Zen withdrawal? When a beautiful woman offers herself to you, you take her! You might as well be honest and not buy into any of those rigid life paths. But then there are the sacrifices you make if you choose to be a Zorba, too, going all the way, doing it all, leaving everyone behind at some point or another...

5. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff (Henry Holt, 2018)

I couldn’t put this book down. I’ve figured out why it was comforting: It was a confirmation of reality, of a timeline of events in objective reality, in this awful moment when we’re spun in circles by media, social media, fake news, real news, bad news, until we’re dizzy, can’t see straight, think straight. Particularly notable was Wolff’s account of election night and the weeks that followed. I wanted it to go on and on, up through the present day. Wolff writes vividly and entertainingly. He also has a nuanced grasp of the media landscape, which shaped Trump and the people around him more than politics did, and isn’t afraid to be critical of Democrats and figures on the left, either. I wrote more about this book here. (God, it seems like this was published years ago, the scandal it caused, but it was only a year ago.)

Provenance: Purchased by Dan from a Dutch bookstore, he ordered it as soon as it came out.

Fate: Holding onto it for now.