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I keep telling everyone I know that I think they would love this book and I mean it. A new world struggles to be born! The descriptions are beautiful and inventive and visceral. Yeah it's full of blatant direct exposition but that's because it's counterculturally defying the form of the novel

Doesn't feel like Sally Rooney's other books but does feel extremely Irish

I am dispobsessed

Just started writing an essay about this and I think I’ve changed my mind about what it’s about. It’s my favourite book but it’s really hard to summarise. I am amazed.

Watery and frightening. I think Neil Gaiman understands childhood better than the vast majority of writers.

So far, an intense, multi-sensory reading experience. The landscape is almost a being, a person, and at once violent and beautiful. Vesaas’ psychological portraits are ambitious, concerned with his child characters as layered individuals, with first-person voices that interplay with his own. The intensity of their relationship is fed by the fact that there is really no one else in the story—not yet.

Who could answer his father?

I can’t believe I never learned this witch hunt stuff in school

Throw the whole capitalism away

So far, incredibly well written, clear and devastating. Hickel explains how fundamentally wrong the ‘story of development’, i.e. that of ‘developed’ countries and ‘developing’ ones at different places on a universal arrow of progress, is; that ‘aid’ is dwarfed on a huge scale by the flow of money and resources from the Global South to the North; and how ‘free markets’ have been violently imposed.

Gender is a fragile fiction and God is a self-important monster

So far I haven’t read much of substance here. Clear writes like a motivational speaker, not an expert. The dichotomy he has unquestioningly established between good actions and bad actions reminds me of diet culture and eating disorders, and some of the changes he’s suggesting seem like band-aid solutions to societal problems.

This is difficult to read. I wish more people knew about the war crimes and other atrocities that NATO has perpetrated and continues to perpetrate (in the name of humanitarianism). All that is liberal about liberal interventionism is its rhetoric—protecting civilians and promoting human rights—and beneath this facade it’s pure neo-colonial indiscriminate mass murder.

Hard going but interesting

Words fail me. If you want to understand what’s happening in the world, who is dependent on whose work and resources, and the financial motivations guiding governments, you should probably read this. I’m taking notes as I go to increase my comprehension.

The story is great but the writing style is just ok. The childishness feels less filtered than in Northern Lights. Calling this trilogy The Book of Dust implies deeper exploration of the metaphysics of HDM, instead there’s just low-effort Nazi/Inquisition imagery and some underdeveloped conversations about epistemology. The human relationships are nicely varied though.