Recent Reads 5.14.2023

 A few thoughts on Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet

This is an adaptation (in part) of the Beowulf poem. The art is cute, and the adaptation is adjusted to the battles children fight with themselves and the specter of growing up. (I like the freedom, but who invented work? They need to send that guy to the big rock candy mountain).

It is a quick read and I think it makes me want to go re-read the original (in translation, of course).

 

 

 

A few thoughts on The Heavy Bright

This is a weird book. I couldn’t really grasp what was going on or why. I get the pacifism and feminism and unity of all souls but there was something missing. The world building was such that I would call it dreamlike if I were being charitable but otherwise it was a miss for me.

 

 

A Few Thoughts on Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

 

Shandy is an amazing book. More than anything it made me think of a late 1990s vibe with Seinfeld and David Foster Wallace. I can imagine the discourse that must have grown up around it. It I about memory and storytelling but also about nothing but also childbirth and siege warfare. I’m glad I read it; it was worth it even if it took a while.

 

A few thoughts on Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson.

 

The format of this book is really interesting. There are two essays by Anderson about the structure of the market and then private corporations and their control of their workers. Then there are a few response essays by scholars of various fields and then her response to the respondents. In one way, you can basically make the gist of her argument in the title. The real drawback to the form is that her original essays don’t get into enough depth. I was personally surprised that there were very few references to Marx. The index only has three references, and the next listing is “masterless men” which has even more than Marx. The other thing I don’t like is that that have an economist as one of the respondents – good! But that economist is Tyler Cowen – bad! It would have been better if they had found someone from the academic mainstream because in my opinion, Cowan just kind of sucks.

 

A few thoughts on The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

 

I read this more for historical relevance more than anything else. I do like the thought behind it, finding the individual experience of religious feeling and events. James was trying to bring some empiricism here, and that is good. I kept thinking about how this could be done again with the 20^th century fruitfully to see what has changed and what has stayed the same. My big, big complaint is that the book focused almost entirely on the west, and Christian experiences. There is but passing references to Islam, Hindu, or Buddhist experiences. And with a 500-page book, they could have found some room. A smaller complaint is the formatting of the text in this edition. There’s a lot of references, which makes sense since James is quoting people and getting their experience. But a lot of the quotes aren’t written as well as the main body of the text James writes. And there are in text references and then some that are dropped to the notes which are in like 4-point font and really hard to read.

 

A few thoughts on Prisoners of the American Dream by Mike Davis

 

In this book, Davis reviews a lot of the class struggle in America with amazing granularity of the 20^th century through the early 80s. The big takeaway from this is that the workplace has always been a place of contention and struggle. I think leftists of my generation forget that as we look back to the period that was often seen as a time of relative peace as the economy was growing after the second world war, but there was always a struggle. And there always will be!