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Books I want to read this year
At the start of every year, I usually sit down and draw up a list of fifty or so books that I would like to get through during the year. Even though I have never managed to read even half this list, the mere idea of planning my read list in advance helps me push…
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Reading in 2022
One of the only few areas I’m qualified to do a “recapping” for 2022 is reading, as usual. I made some “resolutions” earlier this year to try to change things up a little from before and approach reading with more intention. Essentially, I managed to evade book ratings altogether (not giving ratings to books I…
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Books in 2021
I didn’t intend to read so much this year but reading sort of became (once again) my procrastination mechanism aka my excuse to not do actual work. So I just picked up one book after another whenever I saw them recommended somewhere on the Internet, or popping up in the catalogue of my library. Clearly…
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Reading resolutions
Reminders for self, to change up my way of reading going forward. At least for the next while. Read more well-established works. Don’t just skid around and pick up books that only pique my interest in superficial ways (pretty covers, intriguing titles, cool synopses). Selecting books this way is fun and can open me up…
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So… how do you live?
I just finished a book titled How Do You Live?, written by Genzaburo Yoshino almost a century ago. It’s a heart-warming and humane story published in the midst of one of the ugliest, most brutal eras of Japan. The coming-of-age story of fifteen-year-old Copper and his friends and uncle was dedicated to a generation of…
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Advice for reading more
I have been asked by a few friends about how I read so much and I never really managed to give a good response. Typically it would be a shrug, or some (genuinely ashamed) comments about how reading too much in fact negates my ability to do anything else. More than as an encouragement to…
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How climate solutions are anthropocentric, and why that is okay
I recently read the book Under A White Sky (2021) by the science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Through snippets of her trips to various locations around the world to report on strategies of combating environmental destruction, Kolbert introduces in this book a whole new dimension to what we typically refer to as the Anthropocene. Her previous Pulitzer-winning volume The Sixth…
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Climate “inactivism” and the risks of inflicting guilt in environmental politics
Earlier this year, Michael E. Mann, who is widely recognized as one of the creators of the famous “hockey stick” graph depicting historical increase in global temperature, published a book titled “The New Climate War”. Despite being written by a renowned climate scientist, the book is fully politicized in its argument against climate “inactivism”, broadly defined as…