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Category: Reading Journal

  • Nostalgia for politics: The Hours Have Lost Their Clock by Grafton Tanner

    Subtitled “The Politics of Nostalgia”, Tanner’s book is divided into three sections, of which I found the first to be the most interesting: this is where Tanner unearths the history of nostalgia as a diagnosis (broadly medical before becoming more specifically psychological) which was literally lethal in its earliest manifestations among soldiers of the Napoleonic…

  • Through a Dylan, darkly: Invisible Republic by Greil Marcus

    I have, I confess, never understood the reverence in which Bob Dylan is held by music fans of the generation prior to my own. I mean, I understand it as a fact, as a thing that is inescapably true; and I think I understand its as a historical contingency, much the same as I can…

  • books read 2022

    Yep, it’s that time of year again. 103 books finished (of which 20 were graphic novels); dates indicate when I finished reading; one asterisk means a re-read, two asterisks a second re-read, three asterisks a many-times-re-reading; a zero indicates a book left unfinished. Graphic novels Maggie the Mechanic Jaime Hernandez 19 Jan * The Girl…

  • the true name of the sun

    Comfort-reading A Wizard of Earthsea. Of all the books I read in my childhood, only Le Guin’s have been so reliably enriched by time, experience and re-reading. She was a worker of the same true magic she wrote of.

  • were you a fisherman, before?

    No surprise, really, but in case you had any doubts: Kate Beaton’s Ducks is a masterwork. Funny and sad and profound and tragic, an exposure of the world and of the self, the weight of the story perfectly balanced by the lightness of the style. Stayed up to the early hours to finish it in…