Category: Books
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Digital piracy, crisis of the negro intellectual, pindar’s odes, my face hurts!!!!!
Like most elder millennials, I’ve engaged in my fair share of digital piracy. When I was in college, we had an app called MyTunes (and another one that did the same thing, called OurTunes) that let you download any of the files in the iTunes folder of anybody in your dorm. I downloaded a lot…
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Adjusting To The Nonfiction Writer Lifestyle
I’ve been working on my nonfiction book recently. It’s called What’s So Great About The Great Books and is tentatively due out from Princeton University Press sometime in 2025. I am having so much fun. It’s an amazing privilege to get to pick apart the issue of the canon and the classics in detail. But…
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Extracted and analysed ten years worth of my Kindle highlights
Have spent a dozen hours this week slowly getting my highlights out of the Amazon cloud and then putting them into my own note-taking software. This lets me access roughly ten years of highlighted passages from over 500 books (it doesn’t include the large number of public domain books that I read and highlighted, which…
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Switching to Android; and reactions to Aldington’s DEATH OF A HERO
Hello friends. I got a new phone, and it’s an android. My wife said moving to android had impacted our marriage way more than me transitioning did. She’s not wrong! I just wanted a change, and I got tired of feeling beholden to a hardware company. Nothing wrong with Apple, but I should be able…
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Books show people at their best; Twitter at their worst
I’ve gone off the socials lately. I got really sad for a few days and was like, the socials are just making me unhappy. Not because of envy: mostly because of how dumb and transphobic everyone is. The number of people who are overtly transphobic in my end of the literary world is just depressing.…
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“Long life brings many shames. At most before his fortieth year is full, it is seemly for a man to die.”
Been having a lot of self improvement energy lately. This happens to me periodically. I get amped, make a lot of plans, develop new systems and new ways of being, and oftentimes see really good results. I mean, I lost a lot of weight and kept most of it off for almost ten years now.…
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Gone full productivity nerd, also a review of Hitler’s Commando
Hello friends, I’ve gone full productivity nerd. It’s a bit of a problem! Around the same time I started doing nerdy things like installing Typora, switching to windows, and cataloguing all my books, I also installed a note taking system called obsidian. Like Typora, obsidian is markdown based, which means you’re more “future-proof” than when…
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Spent my India trip reading Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian
Hey friends, I went to India and then had various weather-related childcare interruptions that’ve meant I haven’t done as much work as I wanted to (and absolutely no posting). I also haven’t read that much fiction either (compared to my usual). At some point I wanted to just read a long, complicated classic novel. After…
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The Good Fight, Emily The Criminal, Natalia Ginzberg, and Alessandro Manzoni
Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg – Nowadays when I’m looking for something to read, I just look at the New Directions back catalogue. They’re a superb small press that brings over tons of European writers. I love New Directions’ tastes. They’re aesthetes. They prefer writers who are known as stylists or formal innovators. Their books…
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Reviews of books by Dag Solstad, Julien Benda, and Mary Wollstonecraft
I have read ALOT of books recently, and I wanted to get back into doing that thing where I write capsule book reviews, so let’s start: Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad – The only bad thing about this Norwegian novel is its uninspired title, which I assume comes from its place in the…