This year I re-read my favorite novel — White Noise by Don Delillo. It’s one of the very few novels I’ve read more than once, and I think this was my third or fourth time through. I won’t recommend it to you, because, and for good reason, there are very few other people who enjoy this novel as much as I do. Most people hate it. However, I’d like to write a bit about...
This year I read both Seeing Like a State and Against the Grain, two books by anthropologist James C. Scott. Seeing Like a State showed how governments systematize and abstract information about a populace in order to make it visible, measurable, and above-all administrative — in particular, Scott talks a lot about how that process of abstraction necessarily loses important on-the-ground...
So I finally read the book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic and just as everyone had said: it’s very, very good. The book tells two stories in parallel: the first is the tale of the development and marketing of Oxycontin by the now-disgraced pharmaceutical giant Purdue and the second is the story of how a relatively unsophisticated (or at least loosely-organized)...
I’m taking advantage of the quarantine to get caught up on a lot of my long-overdue reading and this week I finished Evicted by Matthew Desmond and it was incredible (it won a Pulitzer, so it’s not like I’m the first person to say that). The book does an incredible job of blending ethnographic study with policy analysis in a way that brings the actual problems that actual poor people face to...
I just finished Distancia de Rescate (Fever Dream) by Samantha Schweblin and, after a bit of a slow start, I really, really loved it. The reviews call it a “horror” novel, which it is, I suppose, but in a very different way than any horror novel I’m familiar with. I was afraid that it would be something like a pulpy Stephen King novel — something that keeps you up at night but doesn’t provide a...