Lily Ellis > Recent Status Updates

Hilarious, frequently pretentious, and often deep. Fantastic book.

I’m finally doing it! So many people have told me to read it, it’s one of my roommate’s favourite books, I’m reading it. So far, so good!

[cont. from last update] They’re doing this because they’re political anarchists and they’re showing that plenty of humans managed to get by with basically a Presbyterian form of government instead of kings. The anarchism is the annoying part of the book. The part I like is that I am no longer asked to believe something I know is false: that prehistoric humans are either savage beasts or sinless angels.

Graeber and Wengrow are telling a different story of prehistoric humanity—not Neanderthals, but indigenous societies. They’re essentially like “Rousseau had a theory of how humans were innocent and then farming brought on the original sin of civilisation.” They go through archeological evidence making the argument that prehistoric people were actual people. [TBC next update]

I’ve read Uncle Tungsten before, but I didn’t realize that I didn’t remember the whole first part of it. Why? It’s boring. To me, at least. Oliver Sacks goes full element-nerd-plus-family-reminiscing and it’s a little dull. Later, when he starts talking about photography and cuttlefish, it picks up.

Both War and Peace and Buddenbrooks open with discussions of Napoleon and his effect on the respective nations (Russia and Germany.) Being faced with my complete lack of historical knowledge, I watched an hour of The Napoleonic Wars by Oversimplified. I am now educated. I may continue. (Napoleon was a crazy guy.)

Goodreads has declared that it is in fact close enough to the end of the year for me to get my stats—and I declare No! We ain’t finished yet.

However, I do have a small problem. Do audiobooks count as books? I’m counting them for the sake of numbers, but they throw off the page count.

Already read essays that are unreasonably engaging: the 2000 campaign trail of John McCain, politics and English linguistics debates, and Kafka’s funniness.

I am NOT reading the first essay in this book, which covers the “adult film” industry, and nobody wants to read about that.