Books

a wonky wiki, a digital garden

All my notes on books

All my reading notes on books by year

2025
  1. :green_book: Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. by Eric Hayot :herb:

    As Hayot writes in the intro, this book “reclaims and redescribes the work of humanist thought [and…] scholarship as a form of reason [and…] truth-seeking”.

  2. :green_book: The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. by Thomas Richards :herb:

    Thomas Richards analyses the ways in which the Victorian organization of knowledge was enlisted into the service of the British Empire.

  3. :green_book: Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge by Natalia Cecire :herb:

    Cecire argues that experimental writing should be understood as a historical phenomenon before it is understood as a set of formal phenomena.

  4. :green_book: Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom by bell hooks :herb:

    In the third book of her teaching trilogy, hooks discusses how teachers can practice and encourage critical thinking, working with students to create new ways of thinking and being that can bring us away from dominator cultures.

  5. :green_book: Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey :herb:

    The author describes his experiences serving for three seasons as a park ranger in southeastern Utah.

  6. :green_book: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison :seedling:

    Morrison maps how American authors invented and deployed tropes associated with America’s constant ‘African’ presence, using these tropes as a foil to organize their growing sense of ‘Americanness’.

  7. :green_book: Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything by Wiliam Germano & Kit Nicholls :herb:

    You know how film has the idea of a MacGuffin, a device that sets the plot in motion but fades in importance? Well, this book absolutely does discuss the role a syllabus plays in a course—but it quickly expands into addressing larger concerns such as pedagogy, community, and activity.

  8. :green_book: Oil on Water by Helon Habila :herb:

    A young journalist tries to help find and negotiate the release a British oil executive’s wife, who has been kidnapped by militants in the Niger Delta.

2024
  1. :green_book: Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse? by McKenzie Wark :herb:

    Wark asks us to think about information less like Marxists and more like Marx.

  2. :green_book: El oro de los sueños by José María Merino :herb:

    A edition of José María Merino’s book, adapted by Yolanda Pinto Gómez.

  3. :green_book: Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes by Flower Darby & James M. Lang :herb:

    Darby and Lang offer a wealth of small interventions one can make to improve the experiences of online learners and teachers. I definitely recommend this for anyone who teaches online.

  4. :green_book: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick :herb:

    Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter searching for escaped androids in a radioactive Northern California where social status is measured by caring for live animals, as an indicator of empathy.

  5. :green_book: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles :herb:

    Hayles examines literary fiction and technological texts for her study of how information became conceived of as immaterial, of how the figure of the cyborg was invented in cultural and technological discourses, and how this cybernetic discourse altered the understanding of the liberal humanist subject.

  6. :green_book: Infomocracy by Malka Older :herb:

    Twenty years into a global experiment with micro-democracy, and Information workers (or antagonists) hope to protect this political experiment through the next world-wide election cycle.

  7. :green_book: Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution by Maurice S. Lee :herb:

    Lee explores the history of how various cultural formations around literature and information grew through the 19th Century Information Revolution.

  8. :green_book: Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order by Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts :herb:

    Hall and cowriters provide a classic analysis of the rhetoric of a moral panic.

  9. :green_book: Extra Focus: The Quick Start Guide to Adult ADHD by Jesse J. Anderson :herb:

    Anderson’s Extra Focus provides a truly ‘quick start’ guide to dealing with ADHD as an adult, with useful ways to reframe situations and find motivation.

2023
  1. :green_book: Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State by James Purdon :herb:

    Purdon examines modernist fiction to trace how writers experienced information culture as a disturbing interruption and governmental intrusion.

  • :seedling: = emerging note
  • :herb: = established note
  • :evergreen_tree: = evergreen note
  • open access = open access
  • :closed_lock_with_key: = paywalled
  • general web link = general web link

Leave a comment