books – Jenneral HQ

Interesting ACX 2024 Book Review Entries

I have finally got around to updating codex cc with all the book reviews from 2024!

Here are some interesting books/reviews that I’ve found that did not make the shortlist.

A Thousand Ways to Please A Husband (1917) (Goodreads, Review)

No, you cannot live on kisses,
Though the honeymoon is sweet,
Harken, brides, a true word this is —
Even lovers have to eat.
This charming vintage cookbook, with its innocently suggestive title, reads like a novel as it follows the fictional lives of a pair of newlyweds. Join Bettina and Bob as they eat their way through their first year of marriage, from the bride’s first real dinner and a Sunday evening tea to baking day, a rainy night meal, and Thanksgiving festivities. Menus for all occasions are seasoned with anecdotes about family life, friendships, household hints, and budgetary concerns.
Originally published in 1917, this volume offers a delightful look at homemaking before the advent of sophisticated appliances and fast food as well as the modern reality of women’s work outside the home. Unintentionally funny and historically revealing, the whimsically illustrated narrative abounds in simple and surprisingly relevant recipes.

Choosing Elites (1985) (Goodreads, Review)

A former special assistant to Harvard’s president analyzes how top universities handle admissions, suggests criteria for evaluating the success of those policies and discusses issues such as the use and misuse of standardized tests and the costs and benefits of affirmative action

Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy (1934) (Goodreads, Review)

All my homies love Cavafy! I feel like I’m hearing about him a lot in rat-adj circles recently. Unsurprised because his poems are great, kinda surprised bc rats dont generally read poetry.

Don’t Make No Waves…Don’t Back No Losers: An Insiders’ Analysis of the Daley Machine (1975) (Goodreads, Review)

This is simply the best book that has been written about politics in Chicago. In the words of Andrew M. Greeley, “It is a very astute and dispassionate analysis of Chicago political life — far and away the best I have ever seen. Rakove is without illusions about either the right or the left.” Rakove brings to his study an intimate knowledge of Chicago and the Daley machine, a practitioner’s understanding of street-level politics, and a scholar’s background in political theory. Blending anecdote with theory and description in a lively style, Rakove has bridged the gap between scholar and layman in a work that will appeal to both.

Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism (1960) (Goodreads, Review)

From the jacket of the first edition: “This book provides the most complete and authoritative account yet published of the theory and practice of world Communism. It presents a lucid summary of the fundamental ideas of Marxism, applying and developing them in relation to the present world situation. Its scope is indicated by the five parts into which it is divided – the philosophical foundations of Marxism, the materialist conception of history, the economics of capitalism, the transition from capitalism to socialism, and the problems of building socialism and communism. Written by a group of Soviet authors and edited by well-known ‘Old Bolshevik’ Otto Kuusinen, it was first published in the U.S.S.R. in 1960. The English translation follows exactly the text of the original Russian edition.”

Making the Corps (1997) (Goodreads, Review)

The bestselling, compelling insider’s account of the Marine Corps from the lives of the men of Platoon 3086—their training at Parris Island, their fierce camaraderie, and the unique code of honor that defines them.

The United States Marine Corps, with its proud tradition of excellence in combat, its hallowed rituals, and its unbending code of honor, is part of the fabric of American myth. Making the Corps visits the front lines of boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina. Here, old values are stripped away and new Marine Corps values are forged. Bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks follows these men from their hometowns, through boot camp, and into their first year as Marines. As three fierce drill instructors fight a battle for the hearts and minds of this unforgettable group of young men, a larger picture emerges, brilliantly painted, of the growing gulf that divides the military from the rest of America.

Metamorphosis (2013) (Goodreads, Review)

Metamorphosis has fan fiction. Metamorphosis has fan art. Metamorphosis has a fan-made 10 page fully-illustrated alternative ending, “I’m Gonna Fix That Girl”, with it’s own 6 digit code, 265918.

But, I think most tellingly, Metamorphosis has cosplay. It’s common these days for fans to dress up as characters from their favorite comics or TV shows. It is rather less common for fans to dress up as characters from their favorite pornographic work.

Metamorphosis is the only hentai I’m aware of with multiple fans cosplaying as the main character.

As implausible as this sounds, I think Metamorphosis is culturally significant. Beyond the explicit illustrations and shocking story content, it captures a deep fear present in the modern world. Stumble off the socially accepted path of high school to college to gainful employment, and it’s easy to be targeted by a predator and/or turn to drugs to try to escape. Metamorphosis may be “a tragic and preachy story”⁴, but the elements of the story are all too real.

Road of the King (2016) (Goodreads, Review)

Computer, generate a book that will teach me how to maximize my chances of winning tournaments for the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game. The contents must be written by one of the most prolific players of all time. Disable safety protocols.

Road of The King by Patrick Hoban is a fascinating read that promises to improve your performance in competitive games but at the risk of becoming a villain in the process.

Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange (1997) (Goodreads, Review)

This volume is not simply another general theory of world system. It is a theoretically and ethnographically informed collection of essays which opens up new questions through an examination of concrete cases, covering global and local questions of political economy.

Ethongraphic studies on various types of white guys my beloved

Review of The Divine Comedy

I’m Italian. I’ve translated for fun about one sixth of the Divine Comedy into English (not my first language, so there might be the kind of weird mistakes second language speakers make).I’ll shamelessly quote my own translation throughout this review. Some of it is in tercets, some of it is in couplets.It’s not online, and very, very few people have seen it, so I might as well have written it specifically for this review.

I just think this is very cool and I liked the rambly nature of the review. Relatedly, the most high-effort book review I’ve found in this contest so far is a 2022 review of Very Important People by Ashley Mears, also available on her Substack. Mears wrote an ethnography of the high-end NYC clubbing scene in the 2010s, the reviewer went clubbing a bunch to figure out what’s changed now that it’s the 2020s.

Obligate Dramatic Irony

The thing about sci-fi is that there’s stuff we can’t write anymore, and not in the culture wars sense.

In the 50s, before we reached a local maximum on robotics, we had stories about smart houses and ambulatory robot assistants.

In the 60s and 70s when we had no clue what the conditions were like on other planets, we had stories about sirens on Titan and planets that were ripe for human colonization because the atmosphere on them are by default earth-like.

In the 80s and 90s, when we had no fucking idea what this internet thing would be capable of, we had stories about metaverses and uber-powerful hackers.

Of course we can still write stuff about, like, civilizations on Jupiter or whatever, but when we do, we must do so through a filter/layer/film of something that we can call “obligate dramatic irony”. We now know for certain that the other planets in our solar system are devoid of intelligent humanoid life, so it gets that much harder to suspend your disbelief (a thing that takes work), and so the threshold for how cool a premise needs to be to use the scenario gets elevated. ¹

Sci-fi pushes at the frontiers of current science for inspiration, and I think this is rad! This lessens the work needed to suspend your disbelief, increases the wonder and delight because of a thrumming background sense of plausibility, and it’s not like our current understandings of science is not conducive to a wealth of new and fucking awesome premises in SF ².

The flip-side is just that previous frontiers are now largely blocked, and unblocked only through a self-consciously retro aesthetic (or something more clever), if writing, and a layer of obligate dramatic irony, if reading.

Anyways, this is probably something that’s already been talked about by McLuhan or DFW or the assholes who talk about hauntology/disenchantment or whatever. Please email me the key phrase to google if you know.

Jupiter Ascending is elevated and cool. stfu[↩]
not to mention the movies!!![↩]

Book Review: My Town

The Kitchener public library has a pretty substantial collection of local history books, which are generally very rare and can’t be taken out of the library. One book there that I’ve been really taken with is “My Town”, by E. Joyce Thompson Byrnes. I have found no record of it online.

It’s an incredibly cool book, about Hespeler, Ontario as a small town in the 1930s. (It is now a neighbourhood in my current municipality.) Writing from 2013, Byrnes is playful, reflective, and extremely funny. Each chapter deals with a different facet of life at the time – commerce, medical care, holidays and festivals, and so on. This being Canada, there was in fact an entire section dedicated to hockey and ice skating.

More than anything else the comparison that springs to mind for me is Anne of Green Gables, in that it’s a very saccharine view of life in the period. But it’s also really well researched and I think does a good job of cleaving to reality. Sometimes the suck leaches in from the sides of her cheerful stories – offhand mentions of her classmates dying of smallpox, how shitty winter jackets were for keeping you warm and dry, the whole great depression thing. I kind of appreciated that. It really made me appreciate how good we have it, from the big stuff (like not having 100% of cancers be fatal) to the small (man, ice skates really sucked at the time).

There’s this line of thinking that goes – once a way of life is gone, there’s no way to really understand it. As an example, some might say that people who are working on rolling back post-9/11 surveillance laws are aspiring to a pale imitation of what we once had, and the incredible, ridiculous amount of freedom that was commonplace before then would spook the shit out of this wimp-ass generation. Or in this case, something like – we’ll never get to a truly inalienated world again and we don’t understand how much we lost to industrialization and atomization.

But this book had such vivid descriptions of life in the deliciously slow old days, and I feel like I genuinely understand a lot more now about what was lost. It seemed like a tightknit and wonderful community. Shit, is this why historians like firsthand accounts so much???

Between stories of the hilariously dark and fucked up pranks that her mom would pull, her incredibly unique vantage point into the advancement of medical science at the time, and fond recollections of ridiculously cool things that you are no longer able to do ¹, what captivated me most was the descriptions of the horses.

The fucking horses, man. I cannot believe how cool they were, I had no idea how much of a tradeoff we made when we shifted to cars.

Get this. You are a milkman, because milk delivery was a commonplace thing back then. You have a horse and a cart attached to it, full of bottles of milk. You know what you were able to do? You were able to literally just chill and read a paperback between your deliveries, because your horse! Got! Your! Fucking! Route! Memorized! It will stop at the appropriate times and know what your routine is at each stop and when to get going again. I honestly had no idea that horses were smart enough to do that. So basically we literally had intelligent self driving transportation for centuries??? ²

Ok, sometimes horses threw a shitfit. There was a really funny story about the baker trying to teach his new apprentice how to do his route, but the horse really didn’t like the apprentice’s vibes. So when the apprentice tried to climb on, it protested by lying down on its side – toppling over the attached cart and sending baked goods flying into the street.

But you know, maybe we need more horse tantrums in our lives and that would make us all better people. I for one would like a greater percentage of my first world problems to be caused by something other than human coordination failures. I would pay money for more of them to be like “sorry, Applejack the horse threw a tantrum this morning and that’s why your package wasn’t delivered” instead of “the local amazon warehouse decided to cut workers and force the remaining ones to work longer shifts again”. Can the aspiring startup founders in the area start working on this please?

Anyways, this is what I got from the first third of the book. I’ve only been able to read it in fits and snatches since I can’t take it out of the library! I might start going over on my lunch breaks. Someone else should start reading it so we can start a fan club.

Final score: 10/10

Stuff like: getting freshly squeezed warm milk from the local farm a 10 minute bike ride away as a treat (she takes the time to assure you that this was nothing to worry about despite the lack of pasteurization, as “the cows had been tested for Tuberculosis”); being able to skate all the way to Guelph on the rivers that were frozen in the wintertime; have a favourite shoe design as a kid that your cobbler was always ready to make for you in the next size up[↩]
Byrne often jokingly questions whether or not society has progressed at all since the 30s after relegating some tale or another, but man, honestly I found myself nodding in agreement more than I expected to (so like – two times, instead of zero times).[↩]