Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Reading Journal

  • 2020 in books

    This year, as many years before, I had hoped to both increase the amount of books I read and write about what I read here on the blog. The latter has been rather less successful than the former, though not without good reason; after two months of preparing to relocate and near-as-dammit ten months of…

  • “A part of the world’s worlding”: Sofia (2000), Container Technologies

    Sofia, Z. (2000). Container technologies. Hypatia, 15(2), 181-201. I first read this back in the heady days of 2016 or so, on the direct recommendation of its author; I don’t get to name-drop very often, but Zoe Sofoulis (writing here as Zo Sofia, as she sometimes does) is a good friend, and served as a…

  • Fables of the deconstruction: Salmon (2020), An Event, Perhaps

    Nice little biography of Derrida, this. A more manageable size than many of the man’s own books, it does a neat job of relating the philosopher and the philosophy, without being a hagiography in the case of the former, nor a full-bore “reading” in the case of the latter. Which makes it perhaps the ideal…

  • Thirst, fear, faith : Butler (1993), Parable of the Sower

    Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is another canonical work of sf / dystopia / climate fiction which I’d never got round to reading. It was interesting to go through it with the LUCSUS Masters students, because they picked out things I might not have noticed, or would otherwise have passed over as a given…

  • Fear of a blank planet: Atwood (2003), Oryx & Crake

    I ended up running a hybrid book-club-seminar thing with the students on the LUCSUS Masters course earlier this semester, for which I was asked to suggest a list of “cli-fi” books that the students could choose from. (Yes, I know, “cli-fi”; I’ll return to that bone of contention some other time.) Long story short: the…