Archive for the 'bookmaggot' Category
Thursday, May 8th, 2025
Whatever we think of the historicity of the orthodox account, we can admire its ingenuity. For this theory—that all authority derives from certain apostles’ experience of the resurrected Christ, an experience now closed forever—bears enormous implications for the political structure of the community.
Posted in bookmaggot | Comments Off on the gnostic gospels, by elaine pagels
Thursday, April 17th, 2025
…the ‘ancestors’ and the ‘communities’ we believe we have shucked off (where I come from, at least) are still present. They haunt us, not least because they make it possible for us to be alive.
Posted in australia, bookmaggot, grief, history | Comments Off on blueberries, by ellena savage
Tuesday, April 15th, 2025
British colonisation was the beginning of the end for natural Australia.
Posted in australia, bookmaggot, grief, history | Comments Off on the ferals that ate australia, by guy hull
Tuesday, April 15th, 2025
The plunders and even the occupation of earth by the Europeans violated the land. Bennelong hoped they could be taught that fact. It might have been one of the reasons he stayed so long in Sydney Cove, and risked his soul.
Posted in australia, bookmaggot, grief, history | Comments Off on a commonwealth of thieves, by thomas keneally
Monday, March 17th, 2025
The enduring lesson of the Rum Rebellion was the power of the big men of New South Wales.
Posted in australia, bookmaggot, grief, history | Comments Off on killing for country, by david marr
Sunday, February 9th, 2025
Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped by what he could think of only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with. It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being
Posted in bookmaggot, grief, history, politics | Comments Off on stoner, by john williams
Friday, January 24th, 2025
It dawned on me then that all immigration policy around the world was used the same way by every country: to control labor.
Posted in bookmaggot, politics | Comments Off on illegally yours, by rafael agustin
Wednesday, January 15th, 2025
When competition becomes as powerful as faith, it also functions, in Marxist terms, as an opium of the people. Most young Chinese I knew were too numbed and too distracted by the struggle for success to think hard about the big picture.
Posted in bookmaggot, politics | Comments Off on other rivers, by peter hessler
Wednesday, January 1st, 2025
Hard to write about this book without spoilers, so let me just say I raved to the group chat that this deserves to be as well known as Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and a dear Goth friend got it from the library and read it and replied Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Which is the correct reaction.
One of the most spectacularly unreliable narrators I have encountered, telling an entirely different story from the one she thinks she is. So brilliantly and exquisitely done. Just read it. (NYRB Classics is about my favorite publisher these days, reprinting so many twentieth century women writers who should be incessantly praised.)
Posted in bookmaggot, history, ireland, women are human | Comments Off on favorite books i read in 2024: good behaviour
Wednesday, January 1st, 2025
This was Katherine May’s pandemic book, a book haunted by lockdowns and mass death. Needing to feel grounded, May dug into the earth beneath her feet. Not in an ickily sentimental way – she makes it clear that Whitstable’s stone circle is modern, and that the sacred spaces of Dungeness are its WW2-era sound mirrors and Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. She admits that her garden is a mass of weeds and that staying up late to watch meteor showers is tiring and chilly.
May’s pragmatism makes awe accessible. She learns the names of wildflowers (viper’s bugloss! Known to Australians as Salvation Jane or Paterson’s curse) and attends a class on bees. I listened to this book between drives to Rancho Viejo and bike rides to Heron’s Head, my own sacred landscapes. Big storms are coming. There’s no way out but through, and enchantment is one of the ways through.
Posted in bookmaggot, grief, hope, i love the whole world, little gorgeous things, mindfulness, san francisco, sanity | Comments Off on favorite books i read in 2024: enchantment
Thursday, December 26th, 2024
Few and far between are the writers that can kick off an authentic hyperfixation, alas, but Adam Higginbotham has done it to me twice now. His Midnight in Chernobyl is up there with Svetlana Alexeivich in the definitive bibliography of that clusterfuck. Now he takes on the other great engineering catastrophe of the first half of 1986. His is an oddly specific niche.
I am so profoundly torn about the shuttle program. It represented the democratization of space. Its astronaut class, the thirty-five new guys, was the first to include women and people of color. Dad and my brothers and I got up before dawn to watch Columbia’s first launch. When I took the kids to see Endeavour in Los Angeles, I cried. This awkward camel of a spacecraft made the universe bigger: no shuttle, no Hubble Ultra Deep Field. I’m such a fucking fangirl, I have NASA plates on my car.
But NASA straight up murdered the Challenger 7. The agency’s budget peaked during the Apollo program, and the diversity of astronaut class eight was an attempt to build public support for space exploration. It kind of worked! Everybody loved Sally Ride, the hot bi butch with the name right out of Mustang Sally! That line of reasoning led to putting a social studies teacher on top of a missile and, in the presence of her parents who were on camera as these events took place, blowing her up.
NASA’s position was: look at all we can do, with how little money! Everyone can play, even the girls and the brown people! Just keep letting us fly rockets. Politicians were all, I wish to associate myself with these impressive feats! But no, you can’t have any more money. Meanwhile engineers at Morton-Thiokol knew the O-rings would fail at low temperatures. There was an impassioned conference call about it the night before the launch. NASA had so many chances not to kill these seven incredible and accomplished people, and it missed them all.
And then seventeen years later, it did it again.
I think this particular book hit so hard in this election year because we are all of us helpless passengers on a spaceship out of control. Anyway, my hyperfixation – after this book I borrowed everything the SFPL had on the space programs. My standouts: Michael Collins is the best writer of the Apollo astronauts – as somebody somewhere said, his Carrying the Fire reads like EB White got a trip to the moon. First Man is an extraordinary, very literary biography of Armstrong, adapted into maybe my favorite space movie since The Martian. (Armstrong was a near-contemporary of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, whose An Angel at my Table made a striking compare-and-contrast to First Man. Tl; dr much better to be a weird clever man in the 20th century than a weird clever woman.)
Bringing Columbia Home is the kind of awkwardly written but almost unbearably moving account of the recovery of those astronauts. Leaving Orbit, about the last flights of the shuttle, has a similarly elegiac mood. Finally, the podcast The Space Above Us, which deals with crewed space missions one at a time, kept me and Jeremy enthralled on an entire 12-hour road trip home from Portland. A gem of the genre.
Posted in bookmaggot, grief, history | Comments Off on favorite books i read in 2024: challenger
Thursday, December 26th, 2024
(I usually end up short-changing good books toward the end of my list so this year I’m going to split things up into separate reviews instead.) Ed Yong’s An Immense World turned up on everyone’s lists of favorites the year it came out, and deservedly so. Late to the party, I listened to the audiobook which Ed Yong himself read brilliantly. Not to be a shallow bitch but the narrator of an audiobook makes a huge difference. A bad narrator leaves you struggling to parse whatever sense the author was trying to make, whereas the author reading his own work competently draws you by gentle degrees all the way into his own sphere of perception.
Check out that segue! Because this book is about animals’ spheres of perception – their umwelt – and how their various sensory capabilities, so different from ours, mean that they live in overlapping but fundamentally nonidentical universes from us and from one another. This is, in fact, a book about empathy. However well the narrator reads, we can’t experience life from the point of view of another being, but in spite of the impossibility of doing so, it’s incredibly important to try.
I did think about my political opponents, listening to this book before the election. I tried to imagine the world from their point of view, and how their choices – ruinous from where I’m standing – might make sense to them. It was hard and probably futile but it was one small thing that helped me to clamber out of the impact crater in the awful days immediately after.
Posted in bookmaggot, grief, i love the whole world | Comments Off on favorite books i read in 2024: an immense world
Saturday, August 10th, 2024
It’s a dream still, the dream of being allowed full participation. The dream is alive, I suppose. The dream is still in the process of coming true.
Posted in bookmaggot, i love the whole world, women are human | Comments Off on leaving orbit, by margaret lazarus dean
Thursday, August 8th, 2024
Last night the Saturn V looked very graceful, suspended by a cross fire of searchlights which made it sparkle like a delicate opal and silver necklace against the black sky. Today it is a machine again
Posted in bookmaggot, i love the whole world | Comments Off on carrying the fire, by michael collins
Saturday, August 3rd, 2024
He could watch long, solitary waves rise up in the middle of a relative nowhere, deep in the South Atlantic or far off the Alaskan coast, giant walls of water that were built up until they broke over themselves, having come and gone, gorgeous, and having been invisible to everybody but him.
Posted in bookmaggot, i love the whole world | Comments Off on out of orbit, by chris jones
Tuesday, July 30th, 2024
We might discover life in other solar systems someday, but for now there’s nothing but chaos and blackness and desolation for billions of light-years in every direction. Yet here in the middle of all that is this magnificent place, this brilliant blue planet, teeming with life. It really is a paradise.
Posted in bookmaggot, hope, i love the whole world | Comments Off on spaceman, by mike massimino
Sunday, July 28th, 2024
I can remember with perfect clarity the night we found Jupiter.
Posted in bookmaggot, hope, i love the whole world | Comments Off on the smallest lights in the universe, by sarah seager
Tuesday, July 23rd, 2024
“The problem with Challenger wasn’t the machine. The machine was trying to talk to us, but we didn’t listen.”
Posted in bookmaggot, grief, history | Comments Off on the burning blue, by kevin cook
Sunday, July 21st, 2024
It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived here how much we start to miss nature. In the future there will be a word for the specific kind of nostalgia we feel for living things.
Posted in bookmaggot, i love the whole world, mindfulness | Comments Off on endurance, by scott kelly
Monday, July 15th, 2024
Human intelligence is not a gift. It’s an occasionally useful plague.
Posted in bookmaggot | Comments Off on fifteen dogs, by andre alexis
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