Recent reading
Jan. 14th, 2019 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaA Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy (2014)
The genre of this is "wanting something better in the age of empire", a bit similar to Nisi Shawl's Everfair or possibly Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown (though it's very different in tone from that one). The empire here is called Borol and the geography is different, but it's still pretty much England. I mean, they wear top hats, ride trains, etc. The protagonist is a journalist who is sent out to the front to write about the glorious imperial war, but he defects to the other side. The other side are failed revolutionaries from a neighboring country who fled into the mountains and there joined forces with independent villages already living there, developing an anarchist mode of living together. This is my favorite of Killjoy's books so far, though there's something about her writing that makes me like her books rather than love them. Oh, and it does not in fact end in "cannons go off, everyone dies" but has a fairly optmistic ending. Also, gay main character, FYI.
I also abandoned White is the Color of Death, a collection of three connected short stores, one by Margaret Killjoy. What I read of it seemed to be grim pointless post-apocalyptic dystopia.
The Divide by Jason Hickel (2017, audiobook)
An account of how the present economic inequality between countries came about and how it's maintained, and how it's worsened since the 1960's. I already knew some of this, but not all--the stuff about how international trade works and how (for example) the capital outflows from Africa are far larger than the inflows was very interesting.
Kapitalet, överheten och alla vi andra by Göran Therborn (2018) [Capital, the upper classes, and all the rest of us, only in Swedish]
More about economic inequality, this time about changes in Sweden's class structure since the 1980's and how those changes came about. This is where those statistics I quoted yesterday came from. I picked this up on a whim at the library, and I'm glad I did. It's a popular account of a research project and really had a lot of stuff I didn't know about and also interesting analysis.
...maybe I should read some non-political fluff soon.
The genre of this is "wanting something better in the age of empire", a bit similar to Nisi Shawl's Everfair or possibly Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown (though it's very different in tone from that one). The empire here is called Borol and the geography is different, but it's still pretty much England. I mean, they wear top hats, ride trains, etc. The protagonist is a journalist who is sent out to the front to write about the glorious imperial war, but he defects to the other side. The other side are failed revolutionaries from a neighboring country who fled into the mountains and there joined forces with independent villages already living there, developing an anarchist mode of living together. This is my favorite of Killjoy's books so far, though there's something about her writing that makes me like her books rather than love them. Oh, and it does not in fact end in "cannons go off, everyone dies" but has a fairly optmistic ending. Also, gay main character, FYI.
I also abandoned White is the Color of Death, a collection of three connected short stores, one by Margaret Killjoy. What I read of it seemed to be grim pointless post-apocalyptic dystopia.
The Divide by Jason Hickel (2017, audiobook)
An account of how the present economic inequality between countries came about and how it's maintained, and how it's worsened since the 1960's. I already knew some of this, but not all--the stuff about how international trade works and how (for example) the capital outflows from Africa are far larger than the inflows was very interesting.
Kapitalet, överheten och alla vi andra by Göran Therborn (2018) [Capital, the upper classes, and all the rest of us, only in Swedish]
More about economic inequality, this time about changes in Sweden's class structure since the 1980's and how those changes came about. This is where those statistics I quoted yesterday came from. I picked this up on a whim at the library, and I'm glad I did. It's a popular account of a research project and really had a lot of stuff I didn't know about and also interesting analysis.
...maybe I should read some non-political fluff soon.
