Cameron's Book Round-Up, late November and Early December 2023

This is somewhat shorter than my normal book round-ups. Normally, I would let this sit until it was a bit more full, but it’s finals week and I don’t have the brain power to really dive into something else.

Book reviews, Written by: CameronCameron SummersDecember 13, 2023Red Pill, Hari Kunzru, Perdido Street Station, China Miéville, System Collapse, Martha Wells, Murderbot, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James C. Scott, Roarings from Further Out: Four Weird Novellas by Algernon Blackwood, Algernon Blackwood, Xavier Aldana Reyes, Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic, Franck BoulegueComment

On Forbidden Knowledge: The Big Other and Social Censorship

This makes cosmic horror an interesting genre – what we are looking for in it is something that we tend not to think of as anywhere near desirable: we are looking for someone to assure us that an individual person’s life doesn’t matter. This is not simply a way of understanding cosmic horror, but a way of using cosmic horror as a lens through which to read other events.

CommentaryCameron SummersOctober 26, 2022Cosmic Horror, Carcosa Shit, A Lush and Seething Hell, The Laundry Files, H.P. Lovecraft, A People's History of the United States, Mutant Epistemologies, The Shape of Water, COINTELPRO, Phillip K. Dick, Thomas Ligotti, China Miéville, Libidinal Economy, John Hornor JacobsComment

Future Less Vivid

It’s not about the missing period of history, or about what was but about what could have been. The thinking that there was a time when things could have been different, and what that different future – with its attendant alternate present – might have been like.

Cameron SummersSeptember 15, 2021Hauntology, Mark Fisher, China Miéville, Jacques Derrida, Ontology, Ghosts of My LifeComment

Cameron's Book Round-Up -- 2020, part 1

Okay, I knew I was going to do these on the Facebook page, but I haven’t done that, and I’m under a great deal of time pressure right now — I had to get a replacement phone yesterday, and in 12 days begin my first class intended to be a completely online class. So…yeah. Let’s jump in to the seventeen books I’ve read thus far this year.

How Exhausting It Is To Live Through History (Time of Monsters, #3)

I’ve been thinking for a while that society is a machine for transforming the raw material of time into history. A way to process the steady drip of seconds and the slow slosh of the seasons into a record of things that have happened. Before we had history, we had legend and myth, but with the advent of written records we had history. Even as those written records have declined in importance and acknowledgment, they are still there, still produced by those who see the benefit of knowing what went on before.

Written by: Cameron, Time of Monsters, Political, PhilosophyCameron SummersJuly 22, 2020History, Historiography, Metaphysics, Time, Current Events, Portland, V. I. Lenin, Dark City, Deleuze and Guattari, China Miéville, Politics, Anti-OedipusComment