Library
This library is a record of books that I’ve read, with a written response to each. There are no ratings here. I limit recommendations, and I do not write with the aim of reviewing. A book might make me think about something else, I may engage extensively with one passage, or I might evaluate the argument of the text as a whole. The texture of my responses will shift depending on the text.
One caveat: the write-ups from before 2024 read more like book reviews, because that’s what they were. Most started life on Goodreads, a few in graduate seminars, back before this site existed.
Some of my responses are short (perhaps a few paragraphs) while others may be entire essays. The amount written is a reflection not of the quality of the book, but of my own thinking.
My books are listed in reverse-chronological order by when I completed them. Each entry is listed in full bibliographic form, with a short annotation below. Some of these I own, others I do not.
2016
Very much a textbook: information-dense, with France at the center rather than any specific colony, and structures and policies over actual lived experiences. Don’t expect a page-turner; the last few chapters, on colonial culture and especially decolonization, interested me most.
Lucid and easy to understand; for anyone seeking an introduction to the Austrian School I’d absolutely recommend it. But Mises never puts perpetual growth under scrutiny and completely misses the global, colonial nature of capitalism, so the reader gets an incomplete view.
Gorky, Maxim. Mother. Citadel Press, 1992.
A product of its time: however important it may have been in the USSR and for Leftism across early twentieth-century Europe, this book is no longer worth the time it takes to read it.
An informative sweep of Cambridge’s ethnographic collections from the voyages of Cook, Vancouver, and the First Fleet: introductions to each voyage, notes on each geographic area, and details on representative artifacts. Certainly not for everyone, but it serves its purpose of introducing the collections.
Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. China in the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Good for those new to China affairs, bad for anyone already familiar with contemporary China: the pre-Maoist history is quite weak and frankly shoddy, but as an introduction to modern Chinese society it does its job.
One of the finest, most elegant books I have ever read: the plot seems still at times, but the novel is a window into the human experience, unmoored from any marked passage of time. I was sad to finish it; now to dive deeper into Japanese literature.