wrul (pre‐2023) rated Machines Like Me: 1 star
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in …
2023 Update: Although I may still finish up quoting and reviewing a few books through this account if they are already partly documented here, new book‐readin–posting is now going on through wrul@book.snailhuddle.org. See you there! 😊
they (en), yel (fr), etc. Nairm & Birrarung-ga, Kulin biik gopher://breydon.id.au | gemini://breydon.id.au | https://breydon.id.au/reading
Testing out a stenography system by remarking on the odd good sit-down. Sometimes nicking vocab from non-ficcy bits.
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Ratings, roughly: “Half” stars (to approximate zero) seemed almost pure harm and were poorly written. 1s were slogs and wastes. 2s I would have refused publication pending thorough rounds of redrafts, reframing, and/or reresearch. 3s read neither fantastically nor awfully, or they did both just enough that it cancelled out — unless they delighted but I barely began, so couldn’t reliably say. 4s held something, substantial, of distinct interest or especial enjoyment, which might richly reward a deliberate revisiting. 5s may not ring perfect to me, but I would gift or receive with unhesitating gladness.
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Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in …
Content warning the settler-colonial project etc
My opinion of Dark Emu, based on several flicks in and out a few years ago, amounted to grave disappointment in each of raving book-lender, skilled story-teller, and exciting publisher.
The second of the three, Bruce Pascoe, achieved the most monumental feat — especially for such a practiced raconteur and fierce devotee of his thesis — of rendering the inexhaustibly rich and intricate an aching bore. Extruded from a staunchly colonial corpus, observations (and more so their concomitant filters) were massed so carelessly over the argument of the book as to homogenise, beyond any real remnant intelligibility, the author’s representation of the pre-Invasion world(s) that he sought to (of all incongruous, unnecessary things) exonerate.
Shockingly, throughout each of the fumbling passages that I read, Uncle’s own framings and phrasings were disparaging and elitist; colluding in the task of replicating Western empire’s wrenchings of cultures into its dehumanising hierarchy, perpetuating the same ideological enormity upon which the lie of terra nullius fed, feeds. Rather than challenge the chauvinisms of British-cum-Australian occupation, the text sought to reposition the continent’s Aboriginal civilisation (including, on the odd moment he remembered, that of Zenadth Kes) more prestigiously within reinforced models of those. Scant to no understanding was demonstrated that one might celebrate, say, achievements in urban planning, without belittling those engaged in nomadic practices; or that farmers and foragers might both be respectable, deserving of self-determination in relationship with land/waters, or in no way fair game for genocide. (Being in selective quotation), citations even from settlers known to have gone in for overt massacre often came across the milder.
Yet as a speaker, Pascoe has the benefit of some charisma, the invocation of his more dependable and thoughtful — choice — public insights. It becomes easier to tolerate the dry and the spiteful, melded into the patient delivery of a casually cruel character who burbles on with or without the listener’s collaboration; where to read print (for meaning) is to necessarily engage in the cognitive manifestation of oncoming ideas, judgements, conceptualisations in a more immediate way, which (in such lifelessly skatable writing especially) can leave them overwhelmingly raw. But the audiobook is in, mostly, the kind of dreary Reading Aloud Voice that seems to take any attention for granted. Forty anorak-modelling minutes between structural thrusts can soften a text. As can ambiguity of quotations’ extents.
Still, in speech too, Dark Emu is worded to make its distance by the white, outmoded, institutional (even quasi-assimilationist?) book and throw societies under the bus. It serves as a project of pandering, a betrayal, a rejection of solidarity, robbings of validity, shoring up of shonky-scientific supposition, and a push to gamble entire peoples’ standing on a single proposition: an all too eager appeal to racism and its mechanisms of oppression.
This was one of several books chosen by the people of the home library service for my book bag of a couple of months ago. I was wary about Nelson, based on vague remembrance of trusted circles’ wry response to The Argonauts, but a tentative, curious nestle into On Freedom on the return date proved immediately inviting enough that I reserved a copy for trying again this round.
Intriguing and uplifting stories of the world's oldest plants, from the revered botanist and indigenous teacher Robin Wall Kimmerer
Living …
A dazzling history of Africans in Europe, revealing their unacknowledged role in shaping the continent One of the Best History …
Reborrowed (last week)! Left off further through than I had assumed (even considering what a little book it is), so I might move through a tad more slowly this leg than during the isolated bursts of last time. Then again, I am swimming in loans this month and should probably get Imagining Decolonisation back available to other people by the end of this borrowing cycle, rather than cling for too many more cumulative weeks.
Interesting to note the publication, in a list of community environment groups, of something with the term “urban forest” in it: “Friends of George St Reserve and the Urban Forest (Sandringham)” [pg 146]. I am curious as to who named it, when they did, and how it rang at the time.
Was Cassinia arcuata the “not long‐lived” shrub whose “flowers and seeds have a strong curry scent when crushed” [pg 120] who our Bun loved resting under? Sounds the right size, though I’m not sure about the form. And the leaves were saturated with the scent, too.
In this personal and wide-ranging exploration of how our collective imaginations fail to grasp the scale of environmental destruction, Amitav …
Many of these are crumbly sentences better suited to recitation, being shored into sense through practiced emphasis or author’s own knowledge, than to quick reading at a remove. (Not exactly a complaint).
The text in general is repetitive, making the big anxiety‐dulled plot pivots all the more frustratingly redundant to trace up close, as they each gouge the same contour.
But can Raynor Winn describe a sky!
[Boonwurrung Country, 2 January 2022]
Though I was enjoying how encouraging the opening tone is, the mood and utility of this book suffer heavily from the presumption that all readers are in temperate zones of western Europe, and a treatment of the rest of the present-day world as mere suppliers of raw materials. Easily mitigated had the subtitle been “A guide to natural dyes for [the intended audience]” or similar; near totally transcended by taking a more global view, in the manner of Susanna Lyle’s tremendous volumes on human-edible plants. That neither approach was taken for Wild Colour even three editions in (over nineteen years!) makes for a particular disappointment.
[Boonwurrung Country, 28 October 2021]