funferall

@funferall.bsky.social 🦋 • Joined 7 days ago

tensor topographer 🗺️ shoggoth conspirator 🦑 joyce junkie 📖 building @riverrun.quest

Library

Reviews

Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikingsby Neil Price(5 ⭐)

Read half

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Bankingby Saifedean Ammous(3 ⭐)

Heavily biased libertarian fever-dream. Some good points though.

Animaliaby Jean-Baptiste Del Amo(5 ⭐)

Savage and beautiful.

The Sigla of Finnegans Wakeby Roland McHugh(5 ⭐)

This beats the Skeleton Key in terms of reckoning with the Wake. I will be referring to this in my future readings. The sigla approach looks very fruitful. I'm a fan of McHugh's approach.<br/><br/>This book cleared up some (certainly not all) of my confusion over Issy, Shem, and Shaun.<br/><br/>The "circled-cross" sigla fascinated me. A temporal aspect of the letter/FW to correspond with the spatial box/4-sided aspect...?

Ducks, Newburyportby Lucy Ellmann(5 ⭐)

Historians will turn to this book to study the pre-COVID Trump years.

Signs Preceding the End of the Worldby Yuri Herrera(2 ⭐)

Ight Imma verse

Steppenwolfby Hermann Hesse(2 ⭐)

Mostly out-dated Nietzsche fanfiction told through the male gaze.

The Queueby Basma Abdel Aziz(2 ⭐)

Billed as a Kafkaesque, Orwellian dystopia based loosely on the Arab Spring, Basma Abdel Aziz's The Queue never gains any momentum. It feels like waiting in the DMV, and not in a clever way.<br/><br/>Perhaps it's the translation, but the writing is torn between surrealism and a compulsion towards historical realism without adequately conveying either one through it's allegory. This results in nonexistent tension throughout the entire novel (spare for one short chapter three-quarters of the way through).<br/><br/>The story gives a lot of vignettes at the psychology of people living under a totalitarian state (gaslighting, chilling effect of surveillance, propaganda, rise of religious conservatism, normalization). But this story just didn't do it justice. I would look into her nonfiction work if there are translations because it feels like she has a good handle of the source material/actual situation on the ground.

The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenidesby Aeschylus(5 ⭐)

This is the horror that we think is in the archaic past, but it is everpresent with us, deep down, behind the veil. This is the birth of civilization, the evolution from tribal revenge to Olympian justice, a dawning democracy.<br/><br/>Absolutely transcendent trilogy of tragedies. Gripping, loaded with meaning, and metal as hell. I paired it with Nietszche's The Birth of Tragedy to nice effect. Death and rebirth of the twice-born god.<br/><br/>"So he goes down, and the life is bursting out of him—<br/>great sprays of blood, and the murderous shower<br/>wounds me, dyes me black and I, I revel<br/>like the Earth when the spring rains come down,<br/>the blessed gifts of god, and the new green spear<br/>splits the sheath and rips to birth in glory!"

The Birth of Tragedyby Friedrich Nietzsche(5 ⭐)

Hail Apollo! Hail Dionysus!

To the Lighthouseby Virginia Woolf(5 ⭐)

An absolutely beautiful view into the minds of a family and their guests out on the Hebrides. At times surreal, but always intensely poetic and moving. Woolf tackles the question of memory, the shifting entropy of consciousness, and the impossibility of knowing the other. It's like reading watercolor as perspective shifts from character to character, present to past, reality to imagination. I enjoyed this more than The Waves, though it is similar.

Story of the Eyeby Georges Bataille(5 ⭐)

I had already read some of Bataille's other fiction (My Mother, Solar Anus) beforehand. However, what pulled me in was his intriguing philosophical ideas (base materialism, eroticism and death, excess, sacrifice) and inspiration (Nietzsche, Mayan ritual, potlatch economy).<br/><br/>I can't say how well any of these notions are represented in this text given that I already was looking for them coming into it. But the story invokes the feelings that these ideas elicit in the most bewildering way. <br/><br/>I would recommend prior reading on what Bataille was trying to go for and what he later expounded in his nonfiction works.<br/><br/>I didn't go into Story of the Eye blind. Even so, The Eye's surreal debauchery hit my weak stomach viscerally. Stomach, and mind, churning.

Finnegans Wakeby James Joyce(5 ⭐)

Absolute lunacy. A masterpiece.

The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuriesby Carlo Ginzburg(4 ⭐)

Interesting survey of the evolution of a complex of myths in Italy. Ginzburg attempts to show how the Church and Inquisition morphed an ancient agricultural folk cult into the traditional witches sabbath. I found myself thinking of this as a meeting of two Heideggerian 'worlds' where the Inquisitors, baffled by the seemingly contradictory "good witches" they encountered, tried to shoehorn the benandanti into the Church's closest conceptual analog i.e. witches, the devil, and the sabbath. Of course, the benandanti are the ones in direct opposition to the witches!

Tales of the Elders of Irelandby Anonymous

A historical document for specialists.

The Fishermanby John Langan(3 ⭐)

Some of the writing felt clunky at parts and took me out of the horror feel. The exposition started off solid then we take a radical swerve into the Reservoir's backstory. I never felt absolutely taken with the story which was heavily influenced by Lovecraft to the point of feeling like it was just a rehash. We might as well be back in Innsmouth. Describing the personal tragedy and grief of the two men is where the author shines.

The Wendigoby Algernon Blackwood(3 ⭐)

The descriptions of the wilderness. the desolation of the woods and its impacts on the psyche are certainly the most outstanding parts of this story. I think Blackwood could have abstracted away the Wendigo from the story even further, leaving us to wonder if there ever was a monster at all. But maybe back in 1910 that would be too close to reality?

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil Warby Drew Gilpin Faust(3 ⭐)

This is very dry and academic book. It reads more like a prolonged history essay paper than a novel and tends to become repetitive as Faust quotes source after source after source. There is some good information in here about the founding of the national cemetery system, the evolving ideas around heaven, authors and poets of the time, and conceptions of death in mid 19th century America. There is not a lot of background detail given around the context of the Civil War or battles so this book should be regarded as a supplement for any understanding how the war affected the nation's populace.

A People's Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolutionby Orlando Figes(5 ⭐)

Engrossing and informative. A very readable dive into this historical period.

The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russiaby Masha Gessen(5 ⭐)

Very relevant to the current political time in the USA.