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Trevor Burrows Locked account

NearerAndFarther@books.theunseen.city

Joined 11 months, 3 weeks ago

Wide reader but tend toward: - Fiction: literary fiction, historical fiction, fiction in translation - NF: history; philosophy/theory; language; music

Poetry in the mix, too.

Mastodon: @NearerAndFarther@techhub.social

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Matthew Kneale: Pilgrims (2021, Atlantic Books, Limited, Atlantic Books) 2 stars

Good idea that never takes off

2 stars

A motley group of people makes a pilgrimage to Rome. The book is the story of the group told through the first-person voice of many of its participants. We learn of individuals' backstories and reasons for making the journey, while the group itself faces challenges and drama, adding and losing members along the way.

This never took off for me, and I almost DNF'd it. It sounds perfect for me, and I like ensemble novels that pull on multiple individual stories to create something larger, but it just felt very redundant and tedious after a while.

100% might have been where my brain was while reading, but this never clicked, and I was glad to finish it and put it away.

Samantha Harvey: Western Wind (2019, Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated) 5 stars

Ridiculously good

5 stars

A mystery told backwards set in early modern Britain. The narrator and one of the main characters is a priest, John Reve, who has to deal with the fallout of a death in his small village. As the story progresses, every piece of it grows more rich and complex, with special attention paid to themes of time, adaptation in a changing world, mortality, and faith. The whole book has the feel of a good ensemble film or tv show, where even small characters become important and the village itself - with its daily work, its gossip, its petty and not-so-petty dramas - is a key character.

The backwards structure might sound gimmicky on paper, but it serves the plot well and reflects one of the book's central themes (the nature of time). You could easily pick the book right back up after finishing it the first time, and re-read it …

Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon (1996, Knopf) 5 stars

Song of Solomon is a 1977 novel by American author Toni Morrison, her third to …

Top of the top.

5 stars

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.

Jeremy Schipper: Denmark Vesey's Bible (2022, Princeton University Press) 4 stars

Recommended.

4 stars

This was really good overall, although the title is a bit misleading. Everything we know about Vesey's use of biblical references is effectively second-hand, and often oblique or general. But after unpacking what we do know, Schipper contrasts that with local (Charleston) discussions of the affair that relied substantially on biblical references. This includes biblical defenses of slavery, and some really interesting discussion of proper religious instruction for enslaved persons.

So even though we don't know as much as we'd like about Denmark Vesey's understanding of the bible, we know how Charleston responded to the bible's invocation in the context of the planned rebellion. The book reads texts from several important voices of the time, effectively reconstructing a very local version of theological/religious debates over the meaning of biblical references to slavery.

Short and concise, but with great footnotes and a lot to chew on, I could see using this …

started reading Milton Friedman by Jennifer Burns

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!

In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it; celebrities like Tom Brady …

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.

Natasha Wimmer, Álvaro Enrigue: You Dreamed of Empires (2024, Penguin Publishing Group) 4 stars

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."