#this is honestly just for fun because i love to list things. user professionalowl bookshelf reveal. please offer reviews if you have them
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professionalowl · 8 months ago
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Actually, while we're shaming people for their 452 unread books, here's a list of unread books of mine of which I own physical copies, attached to the year I obtained them, so that you can all shame me into reading more:
2024: Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (James Bridle; just started)
2021: Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (Cal Flyn)
2024: Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life (Steven Shaviro)
2021: The Unreal & The Real Vol. 1: Where on Earth (Ursula K. Le Guin)
2023: A Study in Scarlet (Arthur Conan Doyle)
2023: Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (Dmitri Xygalatas)
2023: Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things (Jane Bennett)
2023: The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present (Chris Gosden)
2018: Ways of Seeing (John Berger)
2022: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Ed Yong)
2020: Owls of the Eastern Ice: The Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl (Jonathan C. Slaught)
2023: My Life in Sea Creatures (Sabrina Imbler)
2020: The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think (Jennifer Ackerman)
2023: Birds and Us: A 12,000-Year History, from Cave Art to Conservation (Tim Birkhead)
2020: Rebirding: Restoring Britain's Wildlife (Benedict Macdonald)
2022: The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Siddhartha Mukherjee)
2022: An Anthropologist on Mars (Oliver Sacks)
2021: Sex, Botany & Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks (Patricia Fara)
2023: At The Mountains of Madness (H.P. Lovecraft)
2019: Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino; I have been trying to finish this forever and am so, so close)
2023: Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf (Sean Duffy)
2021: What is History, Now? How the past and present speak to each other (Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb; essay collection, half-read)
2020: Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England (Thomas Penn)
2022: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Silvia Federici)
2020: Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Touissant Louverture (Sudhir Hazareesingh; half-read)
2019: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (Hallie Rubenhold; 3/4 read)
2022: Lenin on the Train (Catherine Merridale)
2020: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (China Miéville)
2019: The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (Mark Roseman)
2019: Heimat: A German Family Album (Nora Krug)
2018: Maus I: My Father Bleeds History (Art Spiegelman)
2020: Running in the Family (Michael Ondaatje)
2022: Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys; also never technically "finished" Jane Eyre, but I did my time, damn you)
2023: Time Shelter (Georgi Gospodinov)
2019: Our Man in Havana (Graham Greene; started, left unfinished)
2019: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (John le Carré)
2021: Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race (Reni Eddo-Lodge; half-read)
2017: Rebel Without Applause (Lemn Sissay)
2022: The Metamorphosis, and Other Stories (Franz Kafka)
2011?: The Complete Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino; vaguely remember reading these when I was maybe 7 and liking them, but I have forgotten their content)
2022: Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Lea Ypi)
2021: Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland (W.B. Yates)
Some of these are degree-related, some not; some harken back to bygone areas of interest and some persist yet; some were obtained willingly and some thrust upon me without fanfare. I think there are also some I've left at college, but I'm not sure I was actually intending to read any of them - I know one is an old copy of Structural Anthropology by Claude Levi-Strauss that Dad picked up for me secondhand, which I...don't intend to torment myself with. Reading about Tom Huffman's cognitive-structural theory of Great Zimbabwe almost finished me off and remains to date the only overdue essay I intend to never finish, mostly because the professor let me get away with abandoning it.
There are also library books, mostly dissertation-oriented, from which you can tell that the cognitive archaeologists who live in my walls finally fucking Got me:
The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking (Thomas Wynn & Fred Coolidge)
The Material Origin of Numbers: Insights from the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (Karenleigh A. Overmann)
Archaeological Situations: Archaeological Theory from the Inside-Out (Gavin Lucas)
And, finally, some I've actually finished recently ("recently" being "within the past year"):
The Body Fantastic (Frank Gonzalo-Crussi, solid 6/10 essay collection about a selection of body parts, just finished earlier)
An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment (Patricia Fara, also a solid 6/10, fun read but nothing special)
Babel: An Arcane History (R.F. Kuang, 8/10, didactic (sometimes necessary) but effective; magic system was cool and a clever metaphor)
The Sign of Four (A.C. Doyle, 2/10 really racist and for what)
Dr. Space Junk vs. the Universe: Archaeology and the Future (Alice Gorman, 8/10, I love you Dr. Space Junk)
In Search of Us: Adventures in Anthropology (Lucy Moore, 8/10, I respect some of these people slightly more now)
The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin, 9/10 got my ass)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (A.C. Doyle, 7/10 themez 👍)
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