reviews

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Reeling for the Empire was the first of Karen Russell's stories that I read, and it's still one of my favourite short stories today. The set up skips in time and builds a vivid, layered, world before ending it as it comes to a climax. The rest of the stories in this collection are similar, giving you a peek into a life, a context, before finishing right when you don't want them to. My favourites, other than Reeling for the Empire, were Vampires in the Lemon Grove, The Barn at the End of our Term, and The New Veterans.

Auto-Ethnographies

Picked up this book at a book swap thinking "wow that looks pretentious but like a quick read." I was partly right. It took me at least a few weeks to read. I can now un-confidently say I know what an auto-ethnography is. I think I've gained weird niche points of view on topics I really don't know much about at all. Some of my favourites were Loyalty and Treachery in the Kalahari; Doctors with Borders; Gatekeeper or Helpful Counsel? Practices and Perceptions in Academic Peer Review; Teaching and Learning Across Borders; The Torso in the Thames: Imagining Darkest Africa in the United Kingdom; Censorship, Surveillance, and Middle East Studies in the Contemporary United States; The Auto-Ethnography That Can Never Be and the Activist's Ethnography That Might Be; and An Anthropologist Undone.

I admit that those essays make up the majority of the book.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Having finished this book, my initial reaction is that it's inspiring but lacks actionable advice. Lacks a direction. I think this is an unfair reaction. Odell talks about multiple different ways to detach yourself from the attention economy, from personal anecdotes about her learning to pay attention to the world through bird watching to describing what it is that we need besides a constant news cycle. I also think characterizing the book as purposeless would deny the spirit of it; much of the focus is on a push back against that sort of productivity culture. I enjoyed it.