Reviews and Comments

I'm making headway in the 26 books I added to the to-read pile two days ago and one of the reasons for that is that seven of them were comics; six of which I've read now: the first four Yotsuba& tanks that were released in Swedish (still waiting for part five! I'm reading it in English for now), a collection of David Liljemark's Mad Magazine features, and now this Jason swashbuckler. (The last comic is Born Again by Miller and Mazzucchelli.) I'm not gonna review the Yotsuba or the Liljemark because I read so much comics that I can't review them all or my fingers would fall off from typing. I've even stopped keeping track of them in my techo. But I'll write up a few words about Isle of 100,000 graves later today. Seven books down (with the McCurdy biography), 19 to go! (+ everything I already had on my already overly long to-read list...)

Yesterday I massively added to my already stressful "to read" pile. 26 new books got added. In hardcopy, not ebooks. But 18 of those were from deep storage and it's always great getting books from there as opposed to buying new-to-me (outside fo the 18 from storage, three were from a second-hand shop and five were new from store, the latter including this intense Jennette McCurdy biography). Getting books I alreay own out of storage is good actually. It's better to rotate my own books than buying new. And it's either books I ought to have read years ago or it's cherished and/or overdue re-reads. I do feel stressed about the giant pile of 26 books in my tiny li'l mini apartment (uh, I mean, 26 + what I already i had in here which was probably sixty or seventy or so but not all of them are to-read, some are reference) because I don't really know where to keep them, maybe I'll put them in a bag or something. And the 8 new ones I feel even worse about but at least only a third were new-to-me and over two thirds were out of storage. Inluding the last few parts of Remembrance of Things Past.

So I'm gonna allow myself to feel the full ambivalence of stress over a "to-read" pile but also fully appreciate and savor the joy of a huge haul / hoard / treasure to dive into over the coming fall and winter months. The book exchange program in our building has made me stress less about books; anything I place there is gone within a few hours so I know I'm not contributing to the typical decay of free book shelves where after a while it's only David Eddings and rock star biographies. I know I'm putting down quality stuff there because people take it and that makes me happy. I'm melancholic and sad and this huge reading project (while tinged with the "why amn't I writing or drawing or playing music or saving the world instead of just consuming culture" lead lining of self-hate) is primarily a source of comfort and delight.

As a journalistic work this book is a strong reco (don't got confused by how the author's name is similar to a far right writer. It's one of those Naomi Klein or Naomi Wolf situations) I never read the back cover copy of books but this time that decision burned me since it'd've made clearer the throughline of this book as not only a larger essay on bot farms and propaganda machines but also synecdochically a biography of Willi Münzenberg.

The prose is hard to read with many ambiguously counterpunctual sentences, triply negated predicates, and skewedly applied similes. And politically I can get frustrated with Carlberg's initially trusting view of institutions like NATO.

But it's worth pushing through because the main point is great. How it sucks that there's so much secret propaganda and how the cure for that is never to fight fire with same but to instead stick to being honest. Yes please.

It was sickeningly transparent how Åkesson when, a few years after this book was written, SD was revealed to have a troll factory and he called TV4's reporting of that a "påverkansoperation", like how 45 appropriated the appellation "fake news". It's scary that SD has already bounced back in polls after their blatant lies.

This is a book that has gotten a lot of hype here in Sweden and inexplicably it was published in two editions; one a text-only edition and the other a richly illustrated and cleverly laid out bigger hard cover. The latter version is so amazingly good. This is such a passion project for the author Bea Uusma. I usually do not like non-fiction but this on eis hard to review substaially without just heaping on the superlatives. It's poetic it's sad it's thought-through it's a deep dive into a failed 1897 North Pole expedition. This was a re-read for me. I don't remember when I first bought it; I have the third printing of the first (2013) edition. I remember kicking myself for not buying it when it was available then finding it again in a bookstore a few months (or maybe years? My 2010s area blur) later and reading it right away that same night. But this reread had al the same magic. It was an "I ought to reread the first book since the sequel is finally out" duty reread but it wasn't a slog at all, just pure enthrallment from page one through the last page. I feel bad not being able to write a better review than how much I love it. I recommend it for fans of layout and graphic design since it's so unique and clever (Lotta Kühlhorn usually does a great job and here she knocked it all the way out of the park) as a book unlike any other book this side of" Building Stories". I recommend it for fans of adventure, of winter, of geography, and for people who hate all that but who want to see someone chasing the dream. But: it is very gruesome at parts.

One weird thing with the reread is that when I read it the first time I had no idea who Peter Wessel Zappfe was. I hadn't seen True Detective or read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. He is in this book and he ends up doing some very weird things. This book as a whole ends up as a wonderful companion piece to Conspiracy.. It celebrates (and struggles against) bare-faced entropy. It washes you away in a wave of mutilation. Except this book is much better reasoned, argued, written, though-through than Conspiracy is. A book to return to again and again. It's like one of my top three books of all time. But only when I want to go bleak.