aen [he/him]
reading, gayly
I’m reading Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappé (an Israeli academic), it’s pretty interesting so far. I think it’s supposed to be an introduction to Israel and Palestine and aimed at people who don’t know anything about it, so if anyone’s curious, I might recommend it (I haven’t finished it yet so I can’t say if it’s good or not).
I’ve been having a hard time reading and this is technically not a book, but I’ve been reading a speculative evolution project called Serina: A Natural History of the World of Birds
It’s fascinating and has great illustrations, I recommend it
I decided that the best way to motivate myself to read again is to read something short, so I just read Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills. It’s very good and I wasn’t expecting the history aspect of it, which I also loved!
Ahhh, I get it. I read fanfiction for the exact same reason. Sometimes I feel lazy and I want to read but turn my brain off, so I’ll open up AO3
Also (back in my sad cringe era) I did read a couple “gamer” fics which are like the fanfiction version of LitRPGs but worse. The problem with those was (other than the terrible writing and the sexism) the lack of a clear ending, so they go on forever and eventually fizzle out
I’ve been struggling to motivate myself to read lately, so I’m still reading The Bright Ages
I only got back into reading last year when I joined a book club and the first book I read as part of that club was Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty, which completely opened my eyes to the death industry (at least in the United States)
talking about corpse stuff
The worst part was when families would want to see the body before it gets cremated, so they do a lot of weird shit to the corpse to make it look presentable and human. It’s called embalming and the part where they “set the features” or make the face look normal really creeps me out. I really hope that when I die, my family cremates my body immediately instead of getting to look at my decomposing body one last time…
I finally finished The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins, a very depressing book about the US and its role in the 1965 coup in Indonesia, as well as the massacres that followed it. I was expecting it to be pretty specific to Indonesia but I came out of this book with a broad sense of what was going on in the Cold War (from the American perspective) in the third world.
For example, we hear about how domino theory was used to justify the Vietnam War, but the main country that they were afraid would fall to communism after Vietnam was Indonesia. When Sukarno was overthrown in Indonesia, it was like the Americans didn’t need to win Vietnam anymore, because they had won a bigger prize in the region. Also, the events in Indonesia were used to justify other massacres across the third world, with US backing. It’s depressing because, as the book notes, there is no way that Indonesia will acknowledge those massacres anytime soon, and most people still believe propaganda.
I’ve started reading The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry. It’s a revisionist history of the “Dark Ages” that tries to address misconceptions that people have about that era of history. So far it’s really interesting! I’ve just started my master’s degree so it’s very likely that the next book I read will be a textbook, so I’m going to enjoy this while I still can 😅
I’m (still) reading The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins and Barack Obama just showed up
I had to read that paragraph again, it surprised me that much! Apparently his stepfather was Indonesian so he lived in Jakarta for a bit in the early Suharto years