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As one could guess from the title, this is a book about humiliation, with each short story exploring a different face of this sentiment. The hints in the blurb that it is somehow about the dictatorship are misleading, and I started to think all Chilean are marketed as dictatorship-related out of laziness or maybe because it supposedly sells. But I am going off a tangent. Almost all the stories are told from the perspective of children. I particularly liked the title story Humiliation (about a girl witnessing his unemployed dad being humiliated, and for the first time being able to interpret what has happened), Talcahuano (about being very young poor but not so unhappy in Talcahuano, and then getting old enough to lose the bless of obliviousness and being disappointed in one's parent and moving to Santiago to lead a poor and not so happy life) and the Last Vacation (about the well meaning efforts to "rescue" a child from poverty and the working-class condition, and the boomerang effect of said child's pride and loyalty to his mum. I was happy to find a good book about Chile.

50% an argument against 'fast' (neoliberalised) academia, and its negative consequences on academics' health, research, teaching and social life, 50% advice on how to resist it from within, by slowing down academic practice.

Clearly, the authors themselves are ultra-aware of the problem: fastness is a structural conditions, and individuals have only that much agency, and yet by not adopting the corporate language, by insisting that learning and understanding cannot be quantified, and by refusing to treat each other as valuable 'contacts' or tools for upward mobility we can make a difference in our own local environment.

Perhaps, a few more words could have been spent on junior and/or people with precarious contracts, for whom slowing down seems a lot more difficult. While the book acknowledges it in passing, it doesn't have any magical tricks for slowing down while keeping your job, let along getting a permanent one.

I think I was slightly disappointed, because it sells itself as a call to action, but it gives little advice, and relatively vague. Perhaps that's part of the problem: there aren't magic tricks, a matrix for 'thinking slowly' and yet thrive in academia, nor replicable formula, but just the encouragement that comes with knowing some people are trying their best.

Re-read after maybe 10 years and still loved it. I was inspired because Tascha read it in English and fell in love with it, and I was surprised, because my memory of it was that it's a book that depends on the familiar language of Northern Italy, infatti non so perche' sto scrivendo i miei appunti in inglese, le malagrazie, le negriture, scempio, e' un mondo intimo e pieno di nostalgia, la sua ma anche la mia. Forse dimostra che neppure io ho abbastanza fede nelle abilita' dei traduttori e delle traduttrici, che evidentemente se la sono cavata bene.

Un'osservazione evidente e' che Ginzburg si dilunga su certi aspetti, la descrizione di abitudini e modi di dire, di personalita' (i genitori sono entrambi cosi' convincenti, ebrei torinesi borghesi e di sinistra, un po' distaccati dalla realta' lui burbero, lei un po' capricciosa, pieni di amore per la propria famiglia e sgomento per il fascismo dilagante) e cambiamenti, mentre quasi non dice niente su altri avvenimenti cruciali, sia  a livello storico (per fare un esempio, la promulgazione delle leggi razziali) che a livello personale.

Another re-read (I feel quite good about re-reading books these days, it seems almost an act of defiance to indulge in re-experiencing a book I liked, or didn't, rather than running around to catch up on must reads and add to the pile). I love Jackie Kay, that's the starting point.

Some of the stories I remembered well, obviously the one about the sad lesbian couple breaking up in slow motion because one has fallen in love with a Martis Amis’ fan, which Tascha had picked for a book club meeting in Hong Kong. That is such a good story, with all the despair and sadness of the rejected party coming through, but also conveying how the relationships had really become a little stale...except that when I put it like that it sounds trite and banal, but Jackie Kay weaves it all in such a subtle and humorous way. (You go when you can no longer stay)

Wish I was here is the cringe-inducing, funny story of the lady deciding to surprise her best friend by showing up at her holiday hotel, where she's gone with a new, young and hip partner. Again, the perspective of the rejected party (in love with her, clearly desperate for a relationship, and now feeling left behind as a friend) works very well, describing the kind of desperation that gets almost grotesque, but doing so with empathy.

Sonata (during a train journey, a stranger opens her heart to a fellow passenger, telling her of her lost love, destroyed by her own jelousy), I finally realised, is a tribute or retelling to the Kreutzer Sonata, and I have resolved to read that in 2020.

Then there were a few stories that I enjoyed but didn't quite captured me as much, such as the one where a woman gives birth to a fox, or how to get away with suicide.

The last story, The Mirrored Twins, I still remembered. Two 'bear-y', scottish gay men in a beautiful relationship, going hiking and getting into trouble. In my memory, it was the story of the death of one of them, but this time I saw it as much more open ended. I is extremely romantic and sweet, tender and oh very very sad.

She's such a brilliant writer!

Gaitskill's novella was written in response to the #metoo movement, and it has been predictably divisive. It is the story of Quin, who works in media, and surrounds itself with beautiful young women. With them, he builds genuine friendships and flirts, and enjoys exploring the line between teasing and offending, seducing and assaulting (he would not put it like that), hurting and pleasuring. Most of the time, he does so only through words, inappropriate as they may be, though he does not shy away from non-consensual touches, which he promptly stops when he is asked to.

I think Gaitskill is trying to explore the nuances of women's agency here...Margot (the co-narrator) stopped Quin from touching her between her legs on one of their first encounters, and has since enjoyed his friendship, though she's often angered by him, his carelessness and inappropriateness. Angered and charmed. Why can these other, younger women not do the same, and simply say no to what they don't want to happen? Why are they accepting Quin's favours, if they think he's a creep? Yes, Margot recognises, there's an uneven power dynamic, but she seems to think Quin is just on the right side of the acceptable line, and that these girls have taken advantage of the situation as long as they could, and now the punishment that has fallen on him is out of proportion.

I would be harsher on Quin than Margot is, and way less charmed by his explorations of sexuality and sexual fantasies, which clearly is best undertaken outside of one's work network. But I do see how fiction is a good means to talk about these blurry lines, and it takes a good dose of courage to do so.

The gist of the book is clear: to be better than the patriarchy it wants to dismantle, feminism must be anticapitalist. The framing of the problem is simple, perhaps deceivingly so: there is the feminism of social movements, and liberal feminism, and we need to take side, supporting the first and disowning the latter. Woman emancipation must be the emancipation of all women, not the diversification of elites. Throughout, there are good examples of 'good' feminist initiatives and of the selling out of feminism at the hands of liberal economic elites.

It is a manifesto, so it is clear that bold ideas are necessary, and that it must be interpreted as a provocative call to action, rather than a sociological treaty. But it grates on me to divide the world into two camps, because the camps are never two, and are never so clearly divided: between the radical feminist movements and Sheryl Sandberg are millions of women who would not support all of the theses proposed here, but call themselves feminist. Purging is so 1930s; and Nancy Fraser is such a fine thinker that I was expecting more.

Starting from the title, On earth we're briefly gorgeous is an exceptional, poetic book. If I had noticed ReadEra's new quoting function, I would have quoted the hell out of it.

Little Dog - Ocean himself, it would appear, is growing up gay in the suburbs of New York (New Jersey?), brought up by his Vietnamese mum and grandma, both with mental health problems. Around him, malls - where to go on a Sunday afternoon, all dressed up, to stroll and suck on two hardly-earned Godiva pralines - fields - cultivated with tobacco, handpicked by Latino workers - and opioids - relentlessly destroying Little Dog's friends, one by one.

The book is told in the form of a letter to the narrator's illiterate mother. The two stories waved into it are how Little Dog's family came from Vietnam into the US in the aftermaths of the war, and Little Dog's romance with Trevor, a white boy from a messy, unloving background, ashamed of being gay, intent on proving how tough he is all the time, but capable of being really sweet to Little Dog. I liked the romance, I liked the power dynamics between the two, Trevor being white, but far from rich, and son to an alcoholic, violent father, Little Dog being Asian, more 'urban' but poor, son to a mentally unstable but loving mother.

It was a great book to start 2020.

I don't why I find self-help book (so often written by straight white men) so reassuring - even if I can see they're flawed and politically dubious. Oh well.

Poor Cal sounds like a bit of nutter - it is not so much his super regimented mechanisms of self control and scheduling that grate, but his assurance that his way will benefit everyone. I made a list of the suggestions that I found relevant: - plan to work deeply in chunks, aiming for 3-4 hours a day. try to make your chunks reasonably long (60-90 minutes). - schedule these blocks in advance, working around shallow work you cannot avoid. Remember that deep work is more important, so call in sick if it needs be. - have rituals for opening and closing blocks of deep work, and for shutting down at the end of the day (something that tells your brain it needs to stop thinking about work). - the internet and social media are the biggest threat to concentration. don't mindlessly browse in your short breaks during sessions. schedule 'browsing times' rather than internet blocks. think very carefully about which social media you need to use, if any. - be mindful, purposeful and ambitious about what you CHOOSE to do in your free time. Don't let it slip past. - reframe time-planning as a way to be mindful, rather than controlling what happens in your day (it is OK to redraw the plan 6 times a day) - Make your progress visible, ideally on a board you see from your work station - Force yourself to finish at 5:30, with few exceptions - Don't take Cal too seriously

The story of an abusive relationship between women, interspersed with reflections and literary discussions about queerness and abuse. Machado's central preoccupation concerns the importance of documenting her story - given the erasing of queer people's lives in literature, and the general denial of victims' experience of abuse. Some of them were very clever, but I was most fascinated by the more narrative parts, as I think she has a knack to sketch out her ex's character, so elusive and yet so convincing. At times she sounded very sick, as in, mentally unstable, to the point that I questioned to what extent she can be held responsible for her actions - perhaps a question the author herself had to grapple with, and concluded, hell yes, to a great extent because the alternative is to blame the victim.

Every chapter is narrated in a different literary genre, or perhaps a different space, moment or concept through which to make sense of the story: Deja Vu, Cautionary Take, Apartment in Philadelphia. It could easily be 'try-hard', but I thought it worked quite.

Commercial surrogacy is not a radical, qualitative change in modes of reproduction, since children are already treated to some extent as commodities and, crucially reproductive labour is already unfairly distributed, among genders, classes, races and geographies. Two implications follows: first, commercial surrogacy is wrong only in the sense that is an acute manifestation of broader problems; second, we should treat surrogacy as work, e.g. alienated labour: "I am sympathetic to the impulse, in that the advancing frontier of commodification elicits, in so many of us, a form of recoil that feels almost beyond words. I think I get it. We refuse the concept that the most precious things should be for sale, as though that will change the reality that—exploitatively, yet consensually—they are".

Where I felt the book falls short, or maybe just irritates me, is in the righteous take down of diverging positions, especially since it comes from a self-defined utopian manifesto that can allow itself to smooth over practical difficulties within its vision and tensions or contradictions within its argument. Lewis attacks liberal feminists for its blindness to class issues in the surrogacy business model (rightly!), attacks what she defines as surrogacy-exclusionary feminism (without really giving a satisfying account of their arguments which may not be the point of this particular book but would have been interesting). And finally, she attacks those who attacks the customers of surrogacy as moralist, while at the same time most of the book present those same customers as having drunk the koolaid of reproductional capitalism and reaping the advantages of their class privilege. So, basically, 'they' are all wrong, regardless of where they stand on this issue; even if Lewis agrees with them, she charges them of thinking the right thing of the wrong reasons. She attacks attacks attacks without conceding any ground, any area where her vision or arguments may be prone to appropriation or be weak or harmful, which is only possible because both vision and argument are intentionally vague. Ultimately, the reflection around surrogacy becomes a basis to call for a rethinking of family, again, on similar lines as Haraway: "For if babies were universally thought of as anybody and everybody’s responsibility, “belonging” to nobody, surrogacy would generate no profits. Would it even be “surrogacy” at this point? Wouldn’t the question then simply be: how can babymaking best be distributed and made to realize collective needs and desires?".