Salim > Recent Status Updates

A shallow book, with many statements and little substance. The book makes assertions without any evidence to support them.

The book conveniently starts the agricultural history of New York with the arrival of European colonial occupiers, ignoring the practices and customs of Indigenous people.

This book includes information about pickles in places that are not New York.
The books’s prose tells rather than shows: many declarations without much substance to support them

Rigorously researched, and slightly repetitive: artists are introduced multiple times with the same phrases and identifying terms, even if we encountered them one or two pages earlier

The author uses some unfortunate comparisons in the text: describing military rations as “meals rejected by Ethiopians” and a flavor think-tank as “benevolent Stasi”

The author’s structure is good, the writing hesitant to the point of minimizing the work

The author uncharacteristically adds off-color commentary to the historical record. It does not sit well with

Stilted prose, lots of repeated vocabulary

The book lacks structure, with the author leaving hints of evidence to come and then bringing it up again without support or context.
Many sentences have too many words, or too few. The author’s research is evident, although the book does not have enough coherence to provide a compelling narrative. A more linear organization might help; alternatively, a section focusing on different encounters might help

This author makes trash so much less exciting than it is. The author does not successfully connect their personal experience with the larger context of their city, nor of urban waste management, nor even of a job well done.

The author is really, really proud of the books he reads, yet manages to dull any influence they had on his interactions in the world.
The author trades in peculiar stereotypes about unhoused people, people with body modification, people who become doctors… the book includes many prejudices.

This book contains a surprising and unnecessary amount of sexual violence and rape.
The writing is more formulaic and less nuanced than others in the series, with the characters more shallow and the dialog lacking verve.

The author’s prose is looser than in other books, with more run-on sentences and comma splices; on a few occasions he has assumed the reader knows characters or plot developments that come pages later.