What Nails It
by Greil Marcus. Yale UP 2025
5 stars - Dec 2025
A lovely little volume in Yale’s “Why I write” series. In this short book (not even a hundred pages) Marcus covers the difference between writing what you know and writing what you wish you knew (drawing on his own stranger-than-fiction family background); how Pauline Kael’s criticism provided a model for his whole-person approach to writing criticism; and then some musings on his take on high art vs popular art: particularly, how his experience of the art itself sways how we feels about this on any given day – and isn’t that how it ought to work? I will re-read this, and probably assign it to students.
Humankind
by Rutger Bregman. Back Bay Books 2020
4 stars - Dec 2025
A beast of a book that (journalistically) covers a huge breadth of social science research into human behaviour, all assembled to question the commonplace idea that we are all nasty: what Bregman calls the “veneer” theory, in which civilization is just a thin veneer stretched over our violent animal natures, to be revealed at the slightest stress. He begins with Hobbes’ Leviathan as the first systematic version of this theory, but chapter by chapter points out how it is evident in literally dozens of familiar anecdotes, studies, and popular mythologies, from the Stanford Prison Experiments to Kitty Genovese’s death through neighbourly neglect to the ‘thin blue line’ to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One by one, Bregman shows that the actual research, the actual stories behind these commonplaces, tells a much different story than we have been led to believe: in fact, the popular accounts of these things are typically easily (because we’re so used to the ‘veneer theory’ idea) digestible interpretations of what are in fact much more complicated – and often completely contrary – accounts: the Stanford Prison Experiments were largely fraudulent; Kitty Genovese was not really ignored by 37 neighbours; in Katrina (as Rebecca Solnit famously covered) people banded together for mutual aid; and so on. The overall effect (and the author’s intent) is to get us to break out of the mindset in which we all-too-easily succumb to pessimistic accounts and instead recall that people aren’t so bad after all. More helpfully, he also asks us to consider who stands to gain from the popular, negative view of human nature.
Bunny
by Mona Awad. Penguin 2020
5 stars - Dec 2025
Total wacky, totally fun – a literary fairytale horror story – which requires several recalibrations of one’s expectations in the first hundred pages or so. It begins as a ‘mean girls at Ivy league school’ story (in fact, an MFA writing program at a thinly disguised Brown University, which the author actually attended). But it quickly gets extremely weird and surreal, and the quicker you give up on your grip on its ostensible reality, the quicker you start to enjoy the ride – which isn’t quite as true for the protagonist, but if she’d been smarter, it should have been.
Strandings
by Peter Riley. Profile Books 2022
5 stars - Oct 2025
This is quite unlike anything I’ve ever read; passed to me by my friend Karen who said, I’ve never read anything like it. This is nonfiction, a weird sort of ethnographic psycho-memoir. Riley is haunted, both in his mind and in his lived experience in the UK, by a series of whale strandings. He attempts to make sense of the whales, but also, significantly, the people who are attracted to whale strandings for a wide variety of murkily-articulated reasons: subsistence scavengers, black market collectors, pagans, brexiteers, and so forth. In coming to learn about all these people, he attempts to exorcise his own cetacean demons. Wildly genre-bending, it’s also quite funny in parts, while also being devastatingly sad.
The Book Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives
by Adam Smyth. Basic Books 2024
4.5 stars - Oct 2025
This is first rate. Adam Smyth, a prof of English and History of the Book at Oxford, has written a book that might, in a more conventional treatment, have been eleven books. Each chapter – on such topics as printing, binding, papermaking, and zines – revolves around the biography of one or more key individuals. The chapter on typography, for instance, centres on John Baskerville and Sarah Eaves. His attention to biographical detail and appreciation of the particularities of craft means that each chapter is incredibly rich – almost as if he were devoting a whole volume to that topic. The ones that work best are those in which he is best able to muster the documentary and biographical trivia to paint a picture of a human being at work: bookbinder William Wildgoose, printer/publisher/inventor Benjamin Franklin, librarian Charles Edward Mudie, and small press entrepreneur Nancy Cunard are the highlights here. But the other chapters are also rich in their detail. A couple deal with the inspired book-craft of women who cut-and-pasted custom editions of the gospels, and the wacky world of ‘extra-illustration,’ in which books become scrapbooks through the semi-fanatical practice of assembling massive image collections within the pages of text – neither of these I’d heard of before. The chapter on the 19th-century private-press movement bypasses William Morris as much as is possible, focusing instead on the tragic tale of Thomas Cobden-Sanderson. The best piece in the book is on the interwar small press of socialite Nancy Cunard and her literary circle; this story could have been told through Virginia Woolf, but Cunard’s story is perhaps even more colourful. I saw Cunard’s would-be revolutionary circle of writers, artists, and printers as a piece of high modernism that animated young people right through to the tail end of the 20th century. In September we lost Kelly’s mum, Sandy Frances Duncan, who to me embodies that figure: building a better world, not just through writing but through publishing, and organizing, and bringing younger folk with them in the process.
Mr Norris Changes Trains
by Christopher Isherwood. Penguin 1935
5 stars - Sept 2025
Isherwood is great, I already knew. But this book is a treat: set in Germany in the early 1930s, it follows the (not quite autobiographical) narrator as he gets to know a circle of shadowy figures (Mr Norris central among them) in Berlin, and gradually comes to understand the web of misdirection that surrounds him. It’s part of a larger work Isherwood had planned, but never completed; the other part of which was adapted to become Cabaret – which is to say the popular image of decadent Weimar Berlin, just before the Nazis consolidated control, comes significantly from Isherwood. It is, by the by, also a portrait of the depressing nazification of Germany, which looks all too familiar just now. Also reading the Wikipedia pages around the book – which elaborate the real people and situations that inspired this – was amazing, a story at least as interesting as the one Isherwood wrote!
Paris Spleen
by Charles Baudelaire. Trans by Martin Sorrell. Alma Books 2003
3 stars - Aug 2025
Perhaps the end of my “summer of poetry”; this isn’t really poetry, or at least, it isn’t verse, but rather the prose poetry that apparently inspired people like Lisa Robertson. This edition has the original French on one side and the English on the other, which caused me to look at the original a lot while reading it… and also I (who can barely read French) felt like I would have made some different choices? In any case this is largely interesting, occasionally luminous, and also often pretty ugly: his famous misogyny is on full display in some of these pieces. Obviously this can never read as thrillingly new and revolutionary as it did in the 1870s.
The Nature of Things
by Lucretius; Translated by Amanda Stallings. Penguin 2007
4 stars - Aug 2025
There have been so many references to Lucretius; most recently in various of Lisa Robertson’s books, but everywhere else too; plus we have a 1515 Aldine edition in the SFU collection. So I thought maybe I’d read it. There are countless English translations, and most of them are pretty unreadable, so I went for this one: Amanda Stallings is an award-winning contemporary poet, and Penguin Classics usually are pretty reliable. What I didn’t expect is that this is like reading children’s poetry! She set her translations in “fourteeners,” which is rhyming couplets of heptameter, and I immediately recognized the scheme as the same as my beloved Captain Cat and the Carol Singers – a brilliant Christmas book about a retired seagoing cat who helps a church full of mice sing a selection of traditional carols and (of course) find the Christmas spirit along the way. That book features many egregious rhymes; so does Stalling’s Lucretius. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it made this 250-page didactic poem fun to read. I got through some of the tedious bits by simply enjoying some of the more ludicrous turns of phrase she finds to navigate her chosen meter and rhyme scheme. Here’s an example chosen more or less at random:
Or consider the peacock’s tail flooded with sunlight – how a feather
When turned this way and that gives off one colour then another,
Each hue produced by an angle of the light. You should not doubt it –
And there is not a single hue could come about without it.
It’s not really science but it is an extended case made for common sense born of observation. Lucretius works really hard to extend his model of a world made of atoms to explain everything, which is a bit hard for modern ears. Nevertheless it is a strikingly sensible book, generous in the pains it takes to explain worldly phenomena, and always with warmth and humanity. I liked it!
The Baudelaire Fractal
by Lisa Robertson. Coach House 2020
5 stars - July 2025
When in doubt, dig deeper. Following on my inability to read 3 Summers I re-read Nilling and found it intensely rich. I then moved on to re-read Robertson’s 2020 novel The Baudelaire Fractal and was once again rewarded – this is more fluid to read than her essays, while still being as rich. This is such a slippery and subtle book – there isn’t much plot, beyond her retelling/reimagining her callow youth seeking dissolution and aesthetic transcendence in Paris, which serves as a frame to re-interpret Baudelaire (Baudelaire’s life more than his poetry) and then to deconstruct the possibility of female agency (or identity, or even being) within the cultural net that produced Baudelaire – and, for that matter, herself. I found it helped immensely to have immediately been through two of her other books, because Robertson’s signature keywords were so much more obvious to me – folding, figure, identity, pronoun (especially “I”), beauty – and duly recognized, they provide something of a scaffolding for navigating her mercurial text. A pleasure in this book is her subtle doubling of the 1840s and the 1980s: a past tense that includes both while while gently confusing them. I don’t know, though; if you didn’t come of age in the 1980s maybe this reads differently.
Nilling
by Lisa Robertson. Bookthug 2012
5 stars - July 2025
This is, I think, the third pass I’ve made at this book. Lisa Robertson is, as I say, somewhat difficult. This book is prose. Essays, about a cluster of topics that revolve around a set of very Robertsonian tropes: it’s about reading and thinking, about the phenomenology of reading and thinking. Which is elusive, right? But, in my third attempt at this book, it started to come clear to me, and I was struck by how insightful she really is here. That reading is like thinking, first in the way Hannah Arendt identified: that thinking is inconspicuous, nothing meaningful showing from the outside. Robertson goes some distance toward elaborating the way time unfolds in reading: a doubling, between the time elaborated in the text (or rather, inside the reading) and time as experienced by the reader, outside the text. The beautiful figure (‘figure’ being one of her watchwords) is how this doubling is never stable: we constantly bounce back and forth between losing ourselves and being taken by the text, and falling “through” the text into our own reveries, as we passingly identify with and lose identity with what we read. In a later section, she talks about noise as our failure to be able to make sense of figure and ground in the sound of the city. And finally, a lovely argument for poetry being the redemption of the increasing codification of language – in a piece written almost a decade ahead of our “AI” moment but beautifully prescient.
3 Summers
by Lisa Robertson. Coach House 2016
? stars - July 2025
I went on a short island holiday and thought I would bring poetry to read, that I could allow myself to just read the poetry and let it take me where it would. This was hard: harder than I’d imagined. I don’t really know how to read poetry. Also Lisa Robertson is hard; I know and absolutely love her prose – which is also poetry although there are at least sentences and paragraphs – but it is also hard. This, in verse, was kind of pleasant in the moment, but if I had to say what this was about I am lost. At first I read it as if it were chapters of a larger whole, but then I realized it was just separate poems, and that dismayed me somewhat.
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of the Sixteenth Century Miller
by Carlo Ginzburg. JHU Press 1992
4 stars - June 2025
This is hailed as one of the great history books of the 20th century, and maybe the central masterpiece of “microhistory” – where the study of the details of ‘ordinary’ people’s lives is the method of figuring out what the world was like for them. Ginzburg’s subject, of the 16th-century Italian miller Menocchio, is hardly ‘ordinary’ but he is a nobody. He was, however, tried and executed for heresy in the 1590s. His extensive trial records (over two trials 15 years apart) provide an amazingly detailed picture of what a not-quite-peasant was thinking. The big question is: how did this barely literate dude from rural Friuli come to have such a well-articulated idea of God, theology, and the church (yet not drawn from any obvious existing sect). Ginzburg answers this by comparing his testimony to the handful of books that get mentioned in the trial (among them the Decameron and the Gospels in vernacular, both which were censored by the Vatican at the time). It’s a pretty fascinating tale, also very sad, as Menocchio begins to resign himself to his fate. The larger message is about how the world of so-called backward people isn’t necessarily so backward nor uninformed.
Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray. BOMC 1991
3 stars - June 2025
This was a slog. I know, this is one of the great pieces of English literature, and I admit it’s very clever and full of figures, references, turns of phrase that are now baked into our language/culture. But reading this was work. Originally serialized in 1847, a lot of the references in here are lost on me now; and the Book-of-the-Month-Club edition I found at my Little Public Library didn’t include any of Thackeray’s original illustrations. The characters are indelible, they are all archetypes by now, and the overall storyline is pretty compelling. But God what a cynical and bloody-minded take on humanity this book is! There is absolutely nothing and no-one in here that anyone can like – over 750 pages! The best we can do is root for the underdogs while they remain underdogs, but then they all are exposed as frauds or fakes or fools, and that’s where Thackeray leaves us. I’m struck by the difference with Proust. Proust does just as good a job of exposing and poking fun at the conceit and deceit on which society thrives, but he managed to do it with a bit of human warmth. Thackeray rather comes across as a thorough misanthrope. The biographical sketch of him in Wikipedia suggests otherwise, so I suppose we must give him the benefit of the doubt, but this book doesn’t provide much to love. Am I glad I read it? Maybe.
Humanities in the Time of AI
by Laurent Dubreuil. Minnesota, 2025
4 stars? - June 2025
This is a sprawling set of essays that seek to elaborate what actually matters in the humanities and how our encounter with “AI” might actually bring that into sharper relief for us. I’m going to have to re-read this, because this book is dense and rich; Dubreuil is a French literary scholar/philosopher working in the USA (he leads the Humanities Lab at Cornell). The book comes at this issue from a wealth of perspectives, all of them erudite and complex. Key to his analysis is a historicizing lens – looking at how the humanities have evolved, especially in the US, over the last century, and the tropes that shape how we think and talk about the university, scholarship, humanities disciplines, and “AI.” Part of Dubreuil’s earlier work is a consideration of ‘intellect’ outside of what is traditionally called ‘cognition’ which opens up the scope beyond the current handwringing about language and thought. Dubreuil is concerned with epistemologies more broadly – and the media and technical apparatus that we have long taken for granted in their construction. Technical note: this is the first book reviewed here in a long time that I read digitally; my memories of it (and even my notes from it) are much weaker as a result.
Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite
by Ian Penman. Semiotext(e) 2025
4 stars - May 2025
I love Ian Penman’s music criticism; his 2023 It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track collects a bunch of his pieces from the LRB and other venues, and establishes his in the absolute upper echelon of rock critics for me. This is a little bit of a departure: his musings on French impressionist/surrealist composer Erik Satie (1866–1925). Everyone knows a bit of Satie: his little intimate piano pieces (e.g., Gymnopedie #1) have been wrung and washed through endless movie soundtracks and commercials. But I’m not sure I learned that much about Erik Satie in this book. First, because as a (short!) biography it felt much more about that whole Belle Époque circle: Jean Cocteau, Claude Debussy, Francis Picabia, Suzanne Valadon, etc. This makes a certain amount of sense in that one can’t understand anything about Satie without understanding that incredibly prolific and tight-knit world. (Really, the tiny bit on painter and model Suzanne Valadon was almost worth the price of admission alone; I want to read her biography now.) But I learned more about Ian Penman here than I did about Satie… the book is really about how Penman feels about Satie’s inscrutability, about the things we want to express about art, but can’t. In Penman’s case it’s a terribly complex tangle of things, from admiration, puzzlement, curiosity, and exaltation to minimization, identification, longing, anxiety, relief, melancholy… At the end of all that, I think Penman comes off a little smaller than I had earlier held him. The extent of his research is grand, but the scope of his imagination about Satie seems oddly limited: he keeps looking to his card file of other heroes to find comparables. And he knows it’s limited, and that grates on him. So it’s not the most satisfying biography, but it is a fascinating set of reflections and musings on the ineffable – those fleeting glimpses out of the corner of our eye – in art and history, filtered through Penman’s encyclopedic perspective (but thankfully without a Pink Floyd reference :-).
…two books on “AI”
The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, by Emily M Bender and Alex Hanna (Harper 2025)
Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence by Dan McQuillan (Bristol University Press 2022)
4 stars each - May 2025
Two very different books, both at work debunking and cautioning, trying to shed some much-needed critical light on the overabundant hype of the so-called “AI” revolution we are supposedly witnessing. Emily Bender, a computational linguist at UWashington, is famous for the 2021 article “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots,” which established her as a key critic and explainer of the rise of Large Language Models (e.g., ChatGPT). Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, and who also has a high profile on social media today, trying to wrench the popular discourse away from the “booster” vs “doomer” discourse – both of which are well-funded attempts to make an established fact of AI’s ascendancy – and back to what is actually going on with these models, the companies and agendas behind them, and the layers and layers of bad stuff going on in the background, from mass-scale copyright theft, horrific offshore labour conditions sifting some of the crap out of the models, and the fascistic purposes to which these models are being put. Bender and Hanna’s book is up-to-date, thoroughly researched and referenced, and presents an arsenal of information that should make anyone think again about whether this so-called revolutionary technology is something we should embrace. McQuillan’s book is a bit older, so he doesn’t talk as much about the big companies, the big egos, or the hype, but offers instead a really pointed political-economic critique of the fascistic underpinnings of the current AI movement: not just that the people driving it are fascists (though they may well be) but that the very idea of AI as currently positioned is completely toxic to the ideals of democratic and humane society that have motivated people over the past few hundred years. Both books should be required reading.
Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age
by Ada Palmer. Chicago 2025
5 stars - Apr 2025
This 700-page tome is one of the most enjoyable academic books I’ve ever read. Palmer is a fantasy novelist and podcaster in addition to being a history prof at the University of Chicago, and she knows a thing or two about storytelling. The basic point of the book is that the Renaissance wasn’t just one thing but a tangle of adjacent movements and forces and her interest in how these things all play together, as seen from the perspective of a couple of dozen key personalities, who she introduces us to across the chapters. The tone is also quite unlike most academic history: it’s more 21st-century social media than the usual academic prose. Example: she consistently refers to the Florentine Republic’s government by sortition (a complex system of randomly-selected representatives) as “the Nine Dudes in a Tower.” She gives a lot of coverage to Niccolo Machiavelli (whom she consistently refers to as “young Nic”, painting a complex picture of his loyalties and motivations. The Renaissance in Palmer’s telling comes off as a bit of a hellscape – one decorated with a lot of amazing art and narrated by a lot of high-minded writers, but mostly a hellscape anyway. I laughed, I cried.
The Harder I fight the More I Love You
by Neko Case. Grand Central 2025
5 stars - Mar 2025
Damn, I just loved this. To be fair, I’m a huge Neko fan. But this book isn’t about her music, really. It’s not about her songwriting, or her haunting vocals, or any of that. Rather, it’s the absolutely stranger-than-fiction story of her early life: stranger and also more tragic. The book is about her experience of those early traumas, and how they shaped her, and how she managed against the odds to turn herself into a successful version of her damaged self. Or, not really about how she did that, because it’s not “Here’s how I overcame it all” so much as: “Here are the good things and good people that helped me make it through.” The most astounding thing about this book is that she manages to end it in a satisfying way. Which, if you read my books reviews, is a complaint I have of most books: the more complicated they are, the the more disappointing the ending. But this one defies that. What a mind!
Doppelganger
by Naomi Klein. Viking 2022
3.5 stars - Mar 2025
This is really quite rich, and – perhaps more ambitious than it is able to actually pull off – also kind of disappointing. It begins with Klein’s long experience of being mistaken for writer Naomi Wolf, delving deeply into Wolf’s unexpected turn to right-wing politics: this once famous feminist ends up an infamous vaccine denier and frequent Bannon podcast guest. Along the way, Klein talks deeply about all the things: the frustrations of the left, the limitations of liberal society, democracy, fascism, populism, the Covid experience, public health, Jewish identity, Palestine, and so forth. It seems as though Klein is weaving these into a larger perspective that might make sense of them all – and our current fraught moment. But it doesn’t come together: she ends on a disappointing We have seen the enemy and they is us note, and the only takeaway I really got was that lots of people are selfish assholes. So… it’s a good read, for the first three-quarters at least, as long as you don’t expect it to wrap up with a big idea.
Radio Treason
by Rebecca West. McNally Editions 2025
4.5 stars - Mar 2025
This is a new edition of British journalist Rebecca West’s 1949/1964 book, originally titled The Meaning of Treason, and it is her account of the trial – and life – of William Joyce, known to Brits during the Second World War as “Lord Haw Haw,” the silky upper-class voice of Nazi propaganda broadcast across the English Channel. The trial itself is only so interesting, but her analysis of Joyce as a character – and along with that, fascists more generally – is both fascinating and timely as hell. I’m currently also reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger and what she says about Steve Bannon rhymes strongly. The latter chapters of this lag a bit, as they trace Joyce’s (and his wife’s) experience in Germany as the war comes to its conclusion, but all in all it’s a powerful read, especially today.
In Praise of Paths: Walking Through Time and Nature
by Torbjørn Ekelund. Greystone 2020
3 stars - Feb 2025
A tangled and meandering track through the wilderness of this writer’s mind. I never got the impression this book was about anything in particular, or that there was a point to it; perhaps that was the point, the journey was the destination. Still, it was a confusing read. I picked this up expecting something more like Rebecca Solnit’s scintillating writings about walking, and that’s not what this is at all… this is a stew of memory, memoir, anecdote, personal struggle, and a bit of history thrown in for extra flavour. Hard to place, as it were.
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
by Dominic Smith. Picador 2017
4 stars - Jan 2025
Yet another book based on history and featuring a dual time-frame plot: the Dutch Golden Age and today, again featuring art historians. This is a much looser fictionalization than the previous two books I read, but there are similarities. Here, a young – again Australian – protagonist gets into a sticky situation as hired expert/conservator/forger to art thieves and the story is about how she deals with the consequences of that – which includes some pretty icky exploitation of her. And again the weakness of the story is the author’s inability to make characters believable; here, it is the young female protagonists (both in the 1630s and in modern times) who don’t come across as fully real, while the older men around whom the plot turns are, unfortunately, better fleshed out.
Horse
by Geraldine Brooks. Viking 2022
4 stars - Jan 2025
Also based on a true story: of Lexington, the world-famous racehorse from the 1850s and the Black groomsmen and trainers who made him go. The story is told both in the 1850s and from the perspective of a modern day duo of Nigerian-American art historian and an Australian conservator (of bones, not of paintings), who piece together some interesting remnants of Lexington’s legacy. But the whole book is about American racism: in the 1850s, with its enslaved horsemen and the imminent Civil War, and especially today. The story is gripping, and lush with detail. Brooks writes from several characters’ POVs, and I think the weak spot is, unsurprisingly, her portrayal of Black men in the mid-nineteenth century; Brooks’ Australian biologist is much more believable.
Mary and the Rabbit Dream
by Noémi Kiss Deáki. Coach House 2024
3.5 stars - Jan 2025
Based on a true story… this absolutely wackazoid tale about a woman who is forced to “deliver” rabbits, and the many people around her, from peasants to noblemen, who think they can take control of the situation for their own gain. It is a story about poverty and misery and desperation and also a story about gender and class and the very beginnings of what we might today call media literacy.
The Serviceberry
by Robin Wall Kimmerer. S&S 2024
4.5 stars - Jan 2025
This is such a simple little book about abundance, and what the implications of starting with the idea of abundance – as opposed to scarcity, as in most modern economic thought – might provide for the way we live our lives and organize our societies. It’s such a simple book, written in the lucid (if not luminous) prose that RWK is by now famous for. I have to admit I read this book with sadness, struck by the distance between its message and the rapacious, careless way our world is trending.