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.
2024
Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. Reprint ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 2012.
Toffler applies culture shock to the acceleration of everything (1970), and I read it as describing the same transition we’re in now, toward a cybernetic society. The diagnosis outlived its examples, still relevant, which is itself the alarming part.
Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. New York: Penguin Books, 2020.
Reread after Death’s End; this time the Victorian social satire was the real text, the dimensional puzzle its delivery system. A “math book” that smuggles a critique of arbitrary hierarchy.
About as good as the Very Short Introduction format allows, breaking from chronology to do each figure justice. What held me concentrated in Parmenides, Empedocles, and Heraclitus, the thinkers who still feel like live options to me.
Mismarketed as a book about birds and complex systems; it’s a Nobel laureate’s memoir. What survived the bait-and-switch: Parisi on metaphor as useful-but-inexact, and on letting ideas steep in the unconscious, matches my own experience and made me feel less stupid.
Beckman, Milo. Math Without Numbers. New York: Dutton, 2021.
A gentle lure into topology, analysis, and algebra that left me wanting more rigor. The keeper is the book’s quiet Platonism and my resistance to it; math works, granted, but “the universe is made of math” feels like a narrowly human conclusion.
Westerhoff, Jan. Reality: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
A short book that does real justice to whether the self, time, and the material world are “real,” and answers honestly: we don’t know, and may lack even a starting point. It grants permission: the vertigo I feel questioning the order of things is good company, not pathology.
Each scene dwarfs the one before until the scale is almost unbearable; the Singer chapter alone carries the last act. The trilogy’s final move is the thing: “you are bugs” inverted into something closer to awe than despair.
Easy to dismiss as platitude until the closing lines, which gave me chills. It took until now to land: meaning-making in ordinary life is a discipline of attention, choosing what to worship before something chooses for you.
The whole text reduces, for me, to “stop being rigid,” and you can see modern therapy’s anti-rigidity premise originating here. Le Guin’s version is the one I’d hand someone; what I want from it is integration, not admiration.
Rovelli, Carlo. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. New York: Riverhead Books, 2016.
Lovely prose, breezy on relativity and quanta, contentious on gravity, time, and consciousness. A caution: Rovelli’s physicalist account of mind is offered as settled when it’s vibes; there’s no bridge yet from neural firing to experience.
Watts, Alan. What Is Tao?. Novato: New World Library, 2010.
Watts lets you think you’ve grasped Daoism, then tells you the grasp is the proof you haven’t; only experience can carry it. On my fourth Daodejing: the comprehension I keep chasing comes by stopping the chase.
The dark-forest answer to Fermi (every civilization stays silent because announcing itself is suicide) is one of the bleakest, most generative ideas in SF. A single premise reorganizes the whole night sky.
Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Wark’s tripartite class scheme (pastoralist, capitalist, vectoralist against the hacker, over intellectual property) is the salvageable idea, with a welcome pushback on Marx’s stagism. But I couldn’t resolve what happens to IP as a commodity, and left feeling under-rewarded for the effort.
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. Le Petit Prince. Paris: Gallimard, 2012.
Reread in French, the fox’s lesson on apprivoisement landing harder each pass. It stands as a rebuke to adult seriousness, a touchstone I return to precisely to be mocked by it.
An early anthology of Chinese SF in translation; “Folding Beijing” is the one I keep. It shows how a literature reorganizes familiar genre concerns (class, technology) around a different social ground.
My first DFW; the essays run on a tension between cynicism and authenticity, and refuse easy political placement on purpose. The pull is the ethical demand buried in the method: he wants you to examine your own preconceptions, not adopt his.
Frase, Peter. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. London: Verso, 2016.
Frase crosses automation with scarcity to get four post-capitalist scenarios: communism, rentism, socialism, exterminism. Rentism reads as the most likely (manufactured scarcity via IP), and exterminism as the one Palestine already shows is not hypothetical.
Filiu, Jean-Pierre. Gaza: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Informative but oddly inert: events arrive without causation or agency. My diagnosis: I recognized the French academic habit of accreting notes into sequence rather than narrative, a problem of method, not of the facts.
Jadaliyya pieces from the moment the uprisings began, which now read like dispatches from another world, a lifetime ago. The standout, a translated post by an anonymous tortured Syrian dissident, is the one that stays: hope and defiance as method, not mood.
A Candide for the Palestinian condition: Saeed is an unwitting collaborator who can’t read his own situation. Habiby sustains the comic momentum to the end where Hašek’s Švejk flags, proof that political comedy is hardest to land, not easiest.
Siken, Richard. Crush. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Poems on power, masculinity, and loneliness from a gay vantage, a corrective that nonetheless feels less urgent now that the perspective is mainstream. I read it mainly as the staircase to War of the Foxes.
Darwish, Mahmoud. In the Presence of Absence. Brooklyn: Archipelago, 2011.
The self-elegy Darwish thought would be his last, a long prose-poem soaked in exile. The form itself is the marvel: a writer composing his own absence while still present enough to shape it.
The title novella reads like Steinbeck until its ending detonates; impotence, literal and figurative, saturates it. It shows how completely symbol can carry political argument without stating it.
Colquhoun, Matt. Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher. London: Repeater Books, 2020.
The first book on Fisher, strongest where Colquhoun writes his own grief and the community at Goldsmiths. Fisher’s “Outside” is what I drew from it, nearly the Lacanian Real, approached not by Land’s limit-experiences but by letting the outside in through collective strength.
Khalidi organizes the conflict as six Israeli “declarations of war,” narrated partly through his own family. The frame has power and a cost: it’s diplomatic-military history, with everyday Palestinian life left mostly off the page.
Essays across personal, infrastructural, and cultural registers; the infrastructure section gave me the granular texture behind the headlines about Gaza’s material collapse. Jamal’s “Let Me Dream” is where the abstraction becomes a person.
Storr, Anthony. Freud: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Storr’s useful move is to read Freud as a system-builder, not just a clinician; he was always more interested in the world than in the cure. Freud is a philosopher despite his protests, and that’s where his durability lies.
Stories by Alareer’s own creative-writing students, given terrible new weight by his killing. What stays is how humor works under occupation: his “The House” brings absurdity to bear where reportage would only flatten.
Darwish, Mahmoud. Mural. London: Verso, 2009.
Darwish uses poetry as the one home exile can’t confiscate, and since moving to Tunisia I’ve felt the same, that home is finally located in language, in the way it’s used. The poem vindicated a thought I’d had but not trusted.
Promised a Frankfurt-School-to-Fisher genealogy and delivered something thinner and more online; it misses Fisher’s CCRU, cybergothic, accelerationist core. What I kept was the Marcuse–Fisher link on capital and desire, and a method note: examine markets and souks, not just digital arcades.
Palestinian SF imagining 2048, a genre I’d struggled to find. As much came from Ghalayini’s introduction (her account of why speculative fiction has been thin in Arabic) as from the strong, uneven stories themselves.
Macfarlane, Robert. The Wild Places. Reprint ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.
Macfarlane travels Britain asking whether the wild has truly vanished, and the gift isn’t the answer but the attention, the anecdotes (moors, monasteries, the Wild Hunt) teach a way of looking I don’t otherwise practice.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: International Publishers, 1948.
Unconvinced by the prescriptions, but the diagnosis could have been written today: dependency theory and accelerationism both feel latent in it. What strikes me is how much of the analysis survives the program.
The Parable of the Law is the crux: the door stood open the whole time, and the man’s failure was to wait for permission. I read my own life in it: the endless quibbling over why I do or don’t do what I want, when I could simply walk through.
Hoffman argues evolution tuned perception for fitness, not truth; we see an interface, not reality. Persuasive until the last chapter’s “conscious realism,” which is too vague to hold. What remains is the Kantian cul-de-sac he can’t escape, and neither has anyone in two centuries.
The collected blog posts, of uneven quality and organized by topic when they cry out for chronology; you lose the arc of a mind changing. The Acid Communism intro is the prize, a counterculture reclaimed for postcapitalist ends, and the tragedy is that it stays a fragment.
Early Nietzsche; the Apollonian/Dionysian split (order against creative chaos) is the keeper, and I apply it to my own life. He’s wrong about Wagner and later knew it; useful to watch a thinker get something wrong in motion.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
A precise rendering of the human condition that I nonetheless resist: Meursault’s indifference is the absurdist conclusion, and it clarified my own position; I’ll take the existentialist diagnosis without the absurdist resignation.
Tanner, Michael. Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Not an introduction so much as Tanner arguing with other Nietzsche scholars, but the wit is the thing: his gloss on the impossibility of sincerely cataloguing your own false beliefs is the kind of philosophical comedy I wish were more common.
Fisher’s unpublished dissertation: gothic materialism, cybernetic capital, theory-fiction, all in raw form. Most valuable as the seedbed: you can see every later idea here before it learned to move.
Wells, Martha. All Systems Red. Murderbot Diaries, 1. New York: Tor Books, 2017.
Wells’ security construct would rather watch serials than interact, social anxiety rendered as an SF premise. Light, but the recognizability is the thing: the wish to do the job and be left alone is the whole appeal.
Tolle, Eckhart. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. New York: Plume, 2006.
The same content as The Power of Now, repackaged and duller, with marginally more on the “pain-body.” All it confirmed was that the earlier book had already said it.
Miéville, China. Perdido Street Station. New Crobuzon, 1. Reprint ed. London: Pan Books, 2011.
Miéville’s invention is staggering: D&D filtered through Marx and steampunk, and his refusal to tie off endings reads less as weakness than as priority: the world matters more than resolution. It grants a permission about form I’m not sure I’d grant myself.
Dąbrowski reframes breakdown as “disintegration,” the gap between who you are and who you could be, with self-actualization as a rare reintegration around your own values. It mapped onto what I was going through; I reject only his claim that the second disintegration is reserved for a gifted few.
The mindfulness core (act in the present, don’t carry past or future) is sound and ancient. Tolle loses me where he literalizes the metaphysics (feeling cells vibrate); the syncretism works only as long as it stays figurative.
Robinson, Dave and Judy Groves. Introducing Philosophy: A Graphic Guide. London: Icon Books, 2014.
A graphic-guide survey so compressed the ideas barely cohere, and wholly Western; nothing between the Hellenistic period and Descartes. Useful only as a map of what it omits.
Fisher, Mark. Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures. London: Repeater Books, 2020.
His last lectures, and his most hopeful: critical theory not as a museum but as a live tool for imagining what comes after. Reading them knowing they end where his life did sharpened the point: the imagining of the outside was the whole project.
Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books, 2016.
Fisher distinguishes the weird (two things that shouldn’t be together) from the eerie (presence where there should be absence, or the reverse). The eerie half is stronger, and the application that stuck is to capitalism itself, an agency you can’t see, hear, or touch, only infer.
Chambers, Becky. To Be Taught, If Fortunate. London: Hodderscape, 2019.
Chambers’ explorers reach me even as they do things I never would, which is the point: when a character’s specifics are alien but the response is recognizable, you’ve located something genuinely universal. Quiet evidence for a shared human substrate.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Reprint ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2018.
Camus’ answer to meaninglessness is neither the religious leap nor suicide but the absurd life: revolt, freedom, passion. What I keep is amor-fati-adjacent: the refusal of consolation is itself a fidelity. The technical first half is a slog you have to earn.
Fisher’s hauntology (artifacts that make us mourn futures we failed to take) is the durable idea; he dates the loss to 1979–80. The cultural references are British and generational enough that I couldn’t always evaluate them, but the melancholy frame transfers.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Sprawl Trilogy, 1. Reprint ed. New York: Ace Books, 2018.
Gibson describes nature in the language of technology, and the world runs on cybernetic feedback that can only accelerate, never stop. I read it through Fisher: capitalism as the “unnamable Thing” earlier societies warded off, now arrived and indestructible. The tragedy is that no one even fights it.
The journal prompts and the case for emotional “reparenting” have real value, but the framework privatizes mental health: #SelfHealing as a cult of the individual. My objection is political: healing modeled as solitary work reinforces the very structures that make us sick.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2009.
Fisher’s case that capitalism has naturalized itself as the only thinkable system, absorbing every resistance as its own fuel, reorganized more of my thinking than any theory before or since. Rereading it, what I drew shifted: under the despair is a buried optimism; he is one of the few who can actually imagine the outside, not just mourn its foreclosure.
Zimmer, Carl, ed. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023. New York: Mariner Books, 2023.
Climate and pandemic dominate, which is the collection’s honesty and its limit. I noticed something about the genre: science writing tracks current anxiety so closely it works as a record of what a year was afraid of.
Singer, Peter. Marx: A Very Short Introduction. Revised ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
A clean refresher, strongest on Marx’s intellectual formation. I part ways with Singer’s dim final verdict: the failure of 20th-century communist states doesn’t touch Marx’s force as a critic of capital, and his point about re-monopolization reads as current.
Kafka’s legalistic first person and his “as if” constructions make ordinary life surreal and, on a second look, funny. He may be the writer who best registers the modern condition of being permanently on trial, asked to justify an existence you can’t.
Wohlleben knows trees, but the book can’t decide what it is (memoir, polemic, primer), and the writing on indigenous peoples is careless. A negative lesson, but useful: a clear case of how a missing thesis sinks good material.
Robertson, Ritchie. Kafka: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Robertson’s thematic chapters on law and guilt did the most for me; they reframe Kafka’s stories around institutional power rather than biography, and dismantle the lone-misunderstood-genius myth. It made the fiction legible in a new way.
Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet. Reprint ed. Ballingslöv: Wisehouse Classics, 2016.
Gibran’s aphoristic wisdom wears Christian symbolism but leans east, his Lebanese Christian formation showing. The book enforces a reading instruction: go slowly, or the density passes through you unregistered.
Milne, A. A. The House at Pooh Corner. Winnie-the-Pooh, 2. New York: Puffin Books, 1992.
Tigger arrives and the literacy jokes start landing for the adult reader. The same thing carries over from the first book: the warmth is structural, not sentimental; Milne means it.
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Eagleton comes at reading as a theorist, not a critic, which slowed me down; the payoff is close attention itself: his reading of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” shows how much pressure a text will bear. Worth it for the demonstration more than the argument.
Gorman, Amanda. Call Us What We Carry. New York: Viking, 2021.
Gorman repurposes archival and found material to new ends, and reading it pulled Covid back from the blank spot it had become. The book’s real subject, for me, is how collective trauma gets forgotten, the way the Spanish Flu vanished too.
Milne, A. A. Winnie-the-Pooh. Winnie-the-Pooh, 1. New York: Dutton, 1988.
Came back to it as an adult via Hoff and found Milne’s whimsy and care hold up: the adverbs, the zaniness, the evident love of the subject. Some children’s books are written past the children, and reward the return.
Kaur, Rupi. milk and honey. Toronto: Self-Published, 2014.
The verse isn’t strong, but the emotional charge is real and largely universal, which forced the same question sin’s book did: whether I undervalue poetry that aims at feeling over craft.
Liu, Ken. The Paper Menagerie: and Other Stories. New York: Saga Press, 2016.
Liu uses SF and fantasy to hold diasporic identity against the genre’s usual ethics-and-technology concerns. What struck me was how naturally the speculative frame carries the weight of inheritance and loss.
Munroe solves ordinary problems by absurd over-engineering, and the real lesson is method: how to set up a problem so you can play with its variables. The xkcd energy that shaped me in high school, intact.
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Beautiful lines I couldn’t assemble into a whole; so dense with allusion it reads like a dish that tastes nothing like its ingredients. The honest question is whether that opacity is the point: whether we are only ever retelling the same stories.
A Daoist text heavy on internal-alchemy metaphysics, which struck me as the opposite of what the Daodejing asks: simplicity, not more cosmological machinery. Useful mainly as the contrast that clarified what I think Daoism is for.
Miéville, China. The City and the City. London: Pan Books, 2011.
Two cities share the same ground and citizens are trained to “unsee” the other, a noir premise that is really about how political reality is enforced by perception. The mystery resolves limply, but the conceit is one of the best literalizations of ideology I’ve read.
Hoff reads Daoism through Pooh, and the simplicity critics call simplistic is the actual argument; the uncarved block can’t be explained, only enacted. It sent me back to Milne, and it’s the rare primer whose form matches its content.
Trotta describes the universe using only the thousand commonest English words. An interesting constraint, but its limit shows: the vagueness the rule forces drains the cosmos of the emotional weight other popular astronomy keeps.
Rubin spends a year attending deliberately to each sense. The one durable change was practical: keeping my phone in grayscale, a small change that loosened its grip more than I expected.
Foster’s principle (never impose a reading, only propose possibilities drawn from the shared Ur-story) is the one I most want to carry into teaching. Intertextuality as generosity rather than gatekeeping.
Plait reconstructs what the sky would actually look like from other worlds: binary suns, a nebula seen from inside. It rewards patience: the book is dull until it isn’t, and the reward is in the detail, especially the footnotes.
Gay, Ross. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.
Mostly didn’t land for me, but the recurring figs sent me back to Foster’s point that repeated images carry weight whether or not the poet declares it. It taught me more about how I read than about Gay.
Chambers, Becky. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Monk & Robot, 2. New York: Tor.com, 2022.
The sequel turns the first book’s permission into a practice: how to live well once you’ve accepted you owe the world no productivity. The Monk & Robot books, I think, are doing theology in a minor key: grace without a god.
Vora splits “false” anxiety (the body signaling an unmet need) from “true” anxiety (what remains once needs are met, pointing at how you should be living). I’ve kept the distinction; my own true anxiety reads as a pull away from society, toward reading and writing.
Chiang, Ted. Stories of Your Life: and Others. Reprint ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.
The title story’s premise (that learning a language whose grammar is atemporal rewires how you experience time) is the clearest case I know of form determining consciousness. “Hell Is the Absence of God” lodged deeper: faith rendered as physics.
Chambers, Becky. A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Monk & Robot, 1. New York: Tor.com, 2021.
Chambers’ robot asks a human what people need, and the book’s wager is that the honest answer is “nothing,” that purpose is not owed. I read it at a point where that was the exact permission I needed.
Manai, Yamen. La marche de l'incertitude. Tunis: Elyzad, 2008.
A short Tunisian novel I read mostly to recover my literary French. What I drew was less the (somewhat melodramatic) plot than the reminder that reading in a second language re-sensitizes you to prose itself; you notice the sentence because you have to.