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Reading

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Previously read

History

The Dawn of Everything - A New Human History

Something about this book never quite sat right with me. It sets up what seems like an questionable strawman - that our understanding of human history was fixed French philosophers during the French Revolution era (think Rosseau) and hasn’t evolved since - and spends long sections arguing against this strawman. Maybe this is a widely held view in academia and the authors are doing the necessary work to update it, but I found these sections tedious.

However, I read to the end for the wide variety of vignettes of pre-history and early history social structures in North and Central America, as well as the Middle East.
★★★☆☆

Voyagers: History of the Pacific

A great history of the Austronesian expansion into the Pacific which is an incredible (and underappreciated) feat of discovery. The scope is broad and the book isn’t too long, so it’s necessarily high-level, but I found it a great introduction to this history.
★★★★☆

Fiction

On Fragile Waves

This is a moving story about a family of Afghan refugees to Australia and the long-term impact of their experiences in an offshore detention camp.
★★★★☆

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

When I first opened this book I really struggled to get into it. I picked it up again a year later and found it wonderful. It is funny and irreverant and warm and melancholic all at once.
★★★★★

Dreams of Trespass - Fatema Mernissi

This novel tells the story of a girl growing up in a harem in 1940s Morocco (based heavily on the author’s childhood). I appreciated it mostly for the window in to a world that is incomprehensible to me. Mernissi is able to take the harem, which we tend to treat as one-dimensionally bad, and give each of the characters depth and integrity, without ever losing sight of the fundamental injustice of it.
★★★★★

Others