User Profile

Have by no means read all of Morrison's work but this is easily my favorite of hers so far.

In many ways, it's a book about stories, and just about every page or two packs an evocative, tightly-wound passage that one could imagine spinning off as an entirely separate story. Equally important, it's just a masterclass in style: Morrison's language feels both familiar and absolutely unique. Characters just jump off the page, and settings feel vivid and immediate.

It was a joy to read, though heavy at times, and I'm almost mad I rushed through it. Will likely return in the next year or two and take it a bit slower.

Link for short Mastodon thread with a few comments: techhub.social/@NearerAndFarther/113453091083307885

I am needing to clear out my Bookwyrm stuff a bit (have one or two DNFs and one or two updates), but I just started this as my first post-semester read... Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.

(And I'm not even fully done grading, lol.)

Burns is doing one of the AHA Washington seminars on the 13th (or thereabouts) and this has been on my list, so I thought I'd check it out from the library and see if it sticks. So far, so good!

Well-written and thoughtful narrative of the last few years of cryptomania, through the collapse and arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried. I don't know enough about this stuff to vouch for its authoritativeness, but some of the profiles of key crypto figures are wild.

This was fantastic even if the tightness of the writing and story got a bit fuzzy toward the last third or so. (By that point, however, pretty much everyone from Moctezuma to Cortes is high on hallucinogenics, so maybe fuzzy writing mirrors fuzzy turns in the story, lol...)

This was a library checkout and I didn't have a lot of time to jot notes... but one of the best things here is the author's revival of what Tenochtitlan and surrounds might have felt, looked, sounded, smelled like -- and his recasting of the conquistadors as pretty hapless, foolish in their courage when they have it but largely dwarfed and a bit cowed by what they find. There are a few passages I could see using in a survey course; would actually be fun to teach the novel as a whole as a way into re-thinking about the period of "conquest."

First "published in 2024" read of 2024, but was first published in Spanish in 2022 -- but whatever. When I first read a blurb for this back in December, I marked it as a must read. 25 pages in and definitely worth it so far!

The metadata for this is a bit odd, but this is the #LibraryOfAmerica volume of Woolson. It is not a complete collection (which is interesting) but rather collected stories, with a few missing from each of the volumes published during her lifetime and immediately after her death.

Have not read any Woolson previously, and excited by her apparent interest (implicit or explicit) in regionality. Not a whole lot of fiction writers from this period were dwelling on the upper #Midwest!

Very mixed feelings about both volumes individually and together. Like the first volume in the series, this has some beautifully written moments. It also feels a bit more dynamic (i.e. more stuff happens). But also like the first volume, a lot of the writing feels perfunctory, narrating characters bios or thoughts in a manner that often feels flat. There are big ideas in this generational saga about colonialism, intersecting identities, and history -- but I feel like they're hindered rather than helped by the writing itself.

I don't know. This really boils down to a first impression and I think I need some time to digest. On the plus side, a fictional glimpse into hippie culture in Morocco in the 60s/70s was fascinating! Has anyone written a truly transnational/global history of the hippie?

Part 2 of the In the Country of Others trilogy. I was initially iffy on the first volume, but I liked it enough to turn around and order the second.... we'll see how this goes.