#some of the other ones i've got are long nonfiction or political texts that i know i'll never get through

[apocalypticdemon]

for all i bang on about consumerism being bad i sure do like to purchase books, huh.

[doctorcolubra]

Books, 2024

Hey I have a tumblr I should use it. I'm gonna post about books I'm reading.

My reading habits fell into a dismal slump during the Obama administration and for awhile at its worst, most of the books I read in a year were books I had edited. My wife C, in similar condition, started a reading-challenge minigame with me (Orilium, and yes you bet your bippy I made a stereotypical smug elven princeling character for it) and ngl it kept me going.

The book that got me out of the slump was...

...Edward Said's Orientalism, for which I earned a healing potion. Should have read it a long time ago in university, but I was thoroughly catechised in Western liberalism back then in 2001 and found the back-of-the-cover thesis distasteful. I had to fix my heart. Now my besetting sin in terms of non-reading is scrolling the news, so I've tried to replace that urge with reading nonfiction (which feels easier than fiction for me now, for whatever reason). It's so much better for my brain to read a book about Palestine instead of scrolling helplessly through headlines about Gaza.

But apart from this being an important book, it's just so good you guys. I read a LOT of mediocre academic writing. LOT. Good ones stand out within one paragraph and they're such a pleasure. Said is just personal enough, another thing which is rare, giving enough biographical detail to feel his conviction and authority while still operating very coolly in the argumentative portions, with sardonic moments. I had read very few of the authors he cites and I didn't mind at all, but I will be checking out some of them in future to see more fully how all the pieces fit together.

Other favourite book of 2024 is Reza Negarestani's Deleuzian/Lovecraftian theory-fiction Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. This is absolutely at the other end of the spectrum from Professor Said's lucidity: the worst, most nightmarish academic writing you can possibly conceive of, something utterly inimical to understanding. To quote Calvin & Hobbes, "an intimidating and impenetrable fog." Fog is indeed part of the ecosystem of metaphors Negarestani creates in pursuit of an argument, which I will try to summarise: oil is sentient, it wants to be used, and it asserts its will through politics and war, as part of its eternal rivalry with the Sun. Its ultimate goal is to eradicate the idolatrously vertical nature of life on the surface of the Earth, through nuclear holocausts and/or climate change to turn the whole planet into a lifeless desert where nothing stands or walks anymore, a Black Dead Sun.

There are frequent digressions about subjects like Zoroastrianism and Persian magic, the humours, Mesopotamian gods, numerology, and occasional video game references. There is fog, moisture, dust, oil, desert, war and warmachines, idols and iconoclasm. There's a wonderful (if misleading) fictional foreword written by Kristen Alvanson (who also designed the wonderfully eerie diagrams)—I thought that this book would be a little more House of Leaves-like with more layers of fiction wrapped around the theory but alas, no, it's just a fun opener before school's in session.

If you know Deleuze well already you'll have an easier time than I did (didn't do much Continental at my school, sadly), but the sheer infuriating quality of the prose is Part of It and about halfway through a switch just flipped in me where I wasn't going to let Reza win. I did some googling about Deleuze and read somewhere that it was an unhelpful impulse to try to control the text by needing to always understand it. I know! But I took this advice and just read it the way I would a difficult poem, just appreciating the qualities I'm able to appreciate right now...because this prose is something, it's so bad when reading it as a beleaguered academic editor but it hits different when viewing the prose as a character, our window into pseudo-author Hamid Parsani. I would have liked to see more contrast and variance between Parsani's voice and Negarestani's own, since they do alternate somewhat, but maybe I would notice some more structure there on a reread.

Despite its frustrating nature, I found this book unforgettable, and the lenses it provides are surprisingly fun and useful once I tried on the goggles. Built a lot of confidence too, finishing it was very satisfying.

Fiction

It was mostly disappointments and rereads in a very scanty list last year so my favourite fiction read of 2024 was Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust. Waugh is as bitchy as you like throughout a very mean story about money, adultery, divorce, the aristocracy, social parasites, and (of course) an English country house. Unlike Brideshead, this one was (oh no!) renovated with no taste in a ghastly neo-Gothic Victorian style, something Waugh is at pains to make you think is unforgivable. Renovating the house is the true primary sin of the main character, Tony, the only semi-sympathetic person in the novel. It's quite short and punchy due to all the nasty people creating compelling conflicts; Waugh's style is lighter here than in Brideshead Revisited, brittle, satirical, cruel. I loved it BUT I gotta warn you that unfortunately, this book is effectively unfinished: Waugh was unsure of how to end it and tagged on a section from a short story to finish it, and it shows. No spoilers but just expect a very light connection between the story and its ending.

Will post more about January books soon!