Category: Reading
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Tomorrow Will Be Different by Sarah McBride
I absolutely tore through this book. Partially out of personal interest in McBride’s story, as she is my state senator and has a really good change to be the first out transgender member of the US House of Representatives, but mostly because she’s an engaging storyteller with an incredible story to tell. This is pretty…
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Everything is Combustible by Richard Lloyd
Downloaded this audiobook from the library after Tom Verlaine’s passing put me in a Television mood. It’s read by the author, which is usually great, but Lloyd reads as if the manuscript was written by someone else and placed before him shortly before the session began. His voice betrays no real attachment to any of…
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The Idiot by Elif Batuman
One morning, on my way to a lecture on Balzac, it came to me with great clarity that there was no way that that guy, the professor, was going to tell me anything useful. No doubt he knew many useful things, but he wasn’t going to say them; rather, he was going to tell us…
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Horror Stories by Liz Phair
If you were expecting a linear memoir Liz Phair, or “here’s what happened the night I wrote ‘Flower,’ you’re going to be a bit disappointed. Phair abandons the linear format that plagues many otherwise interesting memoirs and instead presents a series of stories that seek to answer the question “why are you like this?” She’s…
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How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
A few thoughts: “There’s a marvelous peace in not publishing, there’s a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don’t publish, they don’t know what you’re doing. You can keep it for yourself.” Anyway, I really want to think about this ideas that this book is posing. Like, really think…
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The purely aesthetic form
I’m about halfway through Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. So far, it’s a good read. It portrays Ive as someone with exquisite taste who was in the right place at the right time, willing to work harder and care more than his competitors. It never descends into hagiography (in spite of the…