Grand unified books thread

[Oexmelin]

Long list of the Cundill Prize revealed:

• Gary J. Bass, Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
• Lauren Benton, They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence
• Joya Chatterji,  Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century
• Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
• Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories
• Catherine Hall, Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism
• Julian Jackson, France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain
• Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World
• Ruby Lal, Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan
• Andrew C. McKevitt, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America
• Dylan C. Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights
• Stuart A. Reid  The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination
• David Van Reybrouck,  Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World

[Sheilbh]

Already heard very good things about Revolusi, Judgement at Tokyo and Native Nations. But a few others on there that look very interesting.

Really interesting to see Amitav Ghosh on there. I'm a big fan but I've only read his fiction and honestly didn't know he wrote non-fiction too.

[Gups]

Already heard very good things about Revolusi, Judgement at Tokyo and Native Nations. But a few others on there that look very interesting.

Really interesting to see Amitav Ghosh on there. I'm a big fan but I've only read his fiction and honestly didn't know he wrote non-fiction too.

Looks like it's the same subject as his latest fiction. I read the first and loved it. Not sure why I didn't follow up with the others

[Oexmelin]

Really interesting to see Amitav Ghosh on there. I'm a big fan but I've only read his fiction and honestly didn't know he wrote non-fiction too.

AFAIK, that book is made up of stuff he researched for his fiction.

[Sophie Scholl]

There is a recently released Star Wars book written by a World War I scholar that looks incredibly intriguing. It is written in character as a historical chronicle of events. It seems to have really good reviews, too. I am definitely looking forward to giving it a read as it combines aspects of my favorite reading options: history and Star Wars. 

From the description blurb:

A history of the dark times

"So this is how liberty dies―with thunderous applause."

-Senator Padmé Amidala

When Palpatine declared the birth of his new Empire, he expected it would stand for millennia. Instead, it lasted only 24 years. This is the story of how a tyrannical regime rose from the ashes of democracy, ruled the galaxy with an iron fist, and then collapsed into dust.

It is a story of war and heroes, of the power of propaganda and the dangers of complacency. But most of all, it is a story of normal people trying to live their lives in the face of a brutal dictatorship.

From the ruthlessness of Darth Vader's campaigns to the horrors of the Tarkin Initiative, this book offers fresh new insights into the dark entity at the core of Star Wars.
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[The Brain]

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia, by Hopkirk. Informative and readable account of The Great Game. Published in 1990, so it's possible that more information has been extracted from Russian archives since then. I had never really read details about The Great Game so I found it interesting. While he does mention the Indian undercover agents his focus is on the Brits and Russians who played the game.

Viking Britain: A History, by Williams. Readable account of Viking Britain. Not saying anything new so if you already know a lot about the subject it is not mandatory reading.

[Sheilbh]

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia, by Hopkirk. Informative and readable account of The Great Game. Published in 1990, so it's possible that more information has been extracted from Russian archives since then. I had never really read details about The Great Game so I found it interesting. While he does mention the Indian undercover agents his focus is on the Brits and Russians who played the game.

Fascinatingly the last Soviet-backed Afghan President, Najibullah, was working on translating that into Pashtun after he lost power. In a weird echo I believe Hamid Karzai regularly used to push copies of Return of a King, William Dalrymple's book on the First Anglo-Afghan War, on his American interlocutors towards the ed of his presidency.

Hopkirk's Setting the East Ablaze is really worth a read.

But yeah, no idea the extent to which the period the Russian and Soviet archives were open and easily accessible has transformed the history.

[Sheilbh]

Got through the 2023 Booker list. Not a great year.

I wasn't a huge fan of the winner, Paul Lynch's Prophet Song. It as fine but felt very on the nose.

I always enjoy Sebastian Barry and thought Old God's Time was great. I also thought The Bee Sting by Paul Murray and Ayobami Adebayo's A Spell of Good Things were strong. But my favourite, by a distance, was Tan Twan Eng's The House of Doors which I loved.

Separately I didn't fully get on with the books but I think Martin MacInnes' In Ascension, Chetna Maroo's Western Lane and Jonathan Escoffery's If I Survive You are all those writers first or second books. As I say I didn't love them but will definitely keep an eye out - all either had really interesting ideas or some fantastic writing but, in my view, not all fully together yet.

Taking a pause now to read Huck Finn. I've never read any Twain but I think the buzz around Percival Everett's James probably means it's the favourite - but I feel like I need at least a base level awareness of Hucklerberry Finn first. So once I've read that - onto the 2024 list (then I'll be up to date).

Edit: Oh - also read this year's International Booker shortlist and Crooked Plow was robbed

[Savonarola]

I finished "The Angel Makers: A Study in the Psychological Origins of Historical Change 1750-1850" by Gordon Rattray Taylor.  The premise of the book is an exploration of how, in the United Kingdom, the libertine 18th century, Regency and Romantic periods gave way to the moralistic Victorian period.  The authors initial assessment is that society moved from a matrist centered society to a patrist centered one.  He finds this unsatisfactory and adds in additional dimensions based on religious movements, Freudian psychology and pantheism to the point in which he is discussing, with all sincerity, "Anal Puritans."  I got there and realized that "The Anal Puritans" would be a great name for a band.

The book tends to take the same astounding leaps of logic as Freud's own works (see Freud's work on Leonardo da Vinci's childhood as an incredible example of that).  In this case Taylor demonstrates that economics (at least in the 18th and 19th century) is a patristic science because it emphasizes masculine labor rather than feminine land.

[The Minsky Moment]

The book tends to take the same astounding leaps of logic as Freud's own works (see Freud's work on Leonardo da Vinci's childhood as an incredible example of that).  In this case Taylor demonstrates that economics (at least in the 18th and 19th century) is a patristic science because it emphasizes masculine labor rather than feminine land.

First part of the paragraph: "Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture."

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.

Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program

The Victorian era also saw the abandonment of Ricardo's labor theory by non-socialist economists and the embrace of mathematical models based on marginal analysis.  If you want to analogize by metaphor, marginalism is a theory about desire (marginal demand) and fulfillment (supply) which goes against the conventional view of the Victorian era.

[Razgovory]

So I read Adam Kirsch's book on Settler Colonialism Titled "On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice"

It quotes several theorists on the subject and then read some of the essays that the theorists wrote.  I had forgotten that Academics write using such absurd language.  New favorite phrase: Necropolitical Transfer.

There was a quote from an article called "Decolonization is not a Metaphor" By a Canadian indigenous woman a self-described trespasser K Wayne Yang

I will quote the conclusion in whole with the quoted part in bold

An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast
to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about
rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with
questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be
the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these
questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a
framework.
We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer those questions -
decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to
Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge the questions of those wary
participants in Occupy Oakland and other settlers who want to know what decolonization will
require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can't be as long as decolonization
remains punctuated by metaphor. The answers will not emerge from friendly understanding, and
indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics -
moves that may feel very unfriendly. But we will find out the answers as we get there, "in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give [decolonization] historical form
and content" (Fanon, 1963, p. 36).

To fully enact an ethic of incommensurability means relinquishing settler futurity,
abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples. It means
removing the asterisks, periods, commas, apostrophes, the whereas's, buts, and conditional
clauses that punctuate decolonization and underwrite settler innocence. The Native futures, the
lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone - these are the unwritten possibilities made
possible by an ethic of incommensurability.
when you take away the punctuation
he says of
lines lifted from the documents about
military-occupied land
its acreage and location
you take away its finality
opening the possibility of other futures
-Craig Santos Perez, Chamoru scholar and poet

(as quoted by Voeltz, 2012)

Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to
justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an "and". It is
an elsewhere

I can imagine a commissar telling people "Communism is not accountable to you kulaks!"

[jimmy olsen]

https://bsky.app/profile/shrecknet.bsky.social/post/3l6bztb5vb32f

"I'm Engaged to Mothman" can be purchased in brick and mortar Barnes and Noble

[grumbler]

Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy is now out in Kindle Unlimited, for those that have the service and haven't read the books yet.  Very highly recommended.

[Gups]

Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy is now out in Kindle Unlimited, for those that have the service and haven't read the books yet.  Very highly recommended.

Seconded. Pretty much the only decent fantasy books I've come across in the last 10 years or so.

[crazy canuck]

What sets it apart?