Reviews and Comments

I have come across this book several times in research and kept meaning to get a copy. So I got one from the library.

Have wanted to read some Thich Nhat Hanh for a while so I am starting with this one from the library.

Proxopera is a relentless novella, set in the Troubles in Northern Ireland and told at a furious pace. It is ostansibly about a family held hostage by three IRA members while one of them is told to drive a bomb into the local town.

On a subtler level it speaks to the senselessness of violence, winding and weaving through snippets of old stories remembered by the central character. Brutal, poetic, and sometimes darkly funny, it is a harsh reminder of the violence of the near past in Northern Ireland.

A friend and old punk who runs a book stall recommended I buy this small book from him. He reads a lot and has good taste, so I'm trusting to that.

Loved a quote from this book in this Mastodon post and so adding this to my list.

I liked Bridle's writing in Emergence Magazine so took this book out of the library for a look.

This is the third book in the series Kinship. It is a series of essays and poems, this volume focussed on relationships betqeen human and nonhuman kin. Like the first two, it suffers from a white bias and a US-centric viewpoint in some of the essays, but mostly it contains some wonderful writing and is the best in the series so far.

Standout articles are by the always-brilliant Anne Galloway and her kinship with sheep, Merlin Sheldrake's thoughts on fungi and lichen, and Richard Powers' thoughtful considerations on the degrees of separation between us and other creatures (although that essay also contains one of the series' most damning howlers in reference to the Rwandan genocide). Great, broad essays and a worthwhile book.

Donella Meadows is one of the 20th Century's most well known systems theorists, mostly due to her landmark book Limits to Growth. This follow-on, written in the 90s and published in 2006, is a high-level introduction to systems theory.

As a basic book on a subject, it is accessible and sometimes enjoyable. It is strongeSt when Meadows is exploring comcepts like nonlnear systems, where as a reader you can consider the implications. But the book is not well written, and uses far too many examples, sometimes contradictory ones, without useful evidence or theory. While it is refreshing to see a stance in the 90s that supports systemic change, other more recent books do this better.

Also, the unapologetic references to Garrett Hardin are pretty unpalettable to anyone who knows about him.

This is a research object presented as a series of essays and musings on data infrastructure in different nations and political regions. It is as much a philosophical dive into the idea of data centres as it is a technical or sociological book. Although the metaphor of 'farms' never really materialises in the text (despite the editor's promises at the beginning), the deeper connections of data to infrastructure and geopolitics make for fascinating and thoughtful reading. The design is also terrific.

Although the chapters are by different authors, the overall voice feels like it is collective and cohesive. There is a tendency for the essays to repeat musings on infrastructure, as there are natural overlaps in different studies, which could have been trimmed out.

A friend loaned me her copy of this as she felt I'd like it, so I'm giving it a go. Her copy is covered in notes, scribbles and marginalia, which I think will add to the experience.

This is a strong collection of essays, poems and artworks by philosophers, poets, academics and artists writing on multispecies storytelling. It includes well-known figures like Vinciane Despret and Helen V. Pritchard alongside others who are newer to the field. The essays are all very different, taking perspectives from rodents, cockroaches, dogs, penguins, fungi and many others in an array of stories.

The diversity of the essays is a strength and a weakness for reading this through, as it is hard to move from one to another fluidly. However, this is not that type of book. It is exploratory and playful. The best moments are in a poetic and fun exploration by Gillian Wylde, an artistic collaboration with cockroaches by Adam Dickinson and a wonderful essay of a journey of learning with cows by Emily McGiffin. Worth a read for anyone interested in this area.

Nan Shepherd is famous today for her wonderful book exploring the Cairngorm mountains, The Living Mountain. This book, The Quarry Wood, came earlier and is s novel, concerning a protagonist Martha and her life going into university education.

The narrative flows very well, and the dialogue is brilliant, written in part in Scottish phonetic. However, the story doesn't ever really get going, and although it does describe an interesting set of characters and time, I found the book too slow to enjoy fully. It is more a poetic description of a time and place than a novel.

I love Pamuk's writing and am excited to start his most recent novel.