Here’s August’s book haul: This month I enjoyed three novels. The most
experimental of which was Olga Ravn’s The
Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd
Century, which has the
form of a series of witness statements from the crew of a ship, now far away
from earth. The workers, both human and artificial, have been tending a number
of exotic objects from the planet New Discovery, and they find their lives
changed in subtle and not-so subtle ways. The novel touches on workplace
oppression, freedom, and longing for what is absent.
The other two novels were
Lords of
Uncreation,
the final entry in a series by Adrian
Tchaikovsky, and The Mercy of
Gods,
the first entry in a new saga by James S. A.
Corey Both Tchaikovsky and Corey are adept at
weaving together a compelling tale at interplanetary scale. I particularly
enjoyed The Mercy of Gods, which starts off with the petty academic politics
of research teams competing for funding, before all hell literally breaks loose
with an invasion from an implacable colonising force. We get to see our
research collective deal with the PTSD resulting from witnessing the
destruction of their entire way of life and being swept away to another world
to do the coloniser’s bidding.
For non-fiction, I enjoyed Ayşe
Zarakol’s Before
the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World
Orders
which gave me new insight into the history and politics of the
continent-spanning empires of Genghis Khan and his successors. Warren
Carter’s short Jesus and the Empire
of God: Reading the Gospels in the Roman
Empire
gave an interesting insight into the structure of the four Gospel’s narratives,
bringing out interesting parallels and divergences with biographies from
antiquities and stories of Emperors’ conquests and deification. The writers in
the early Christian tradition were no-doubt aware of some of the literary
conventions they were both following and subverting as they told the story of
the different kind of political and religious movement they were establishing.
The biggest book for the month, though, was Klaus
Vieweg’s sizeable
biography Hegel: The Philosopher of
Freedom.
I knew very little about Hegel’s life (and times), and it was good to get this
overview, not only of his intellectual development and the context in which he
produced his important work, but also the political, cultural and intellectual
environment in which he was formed, and in which his work took root. I found
the book hard going (not knowing as much of the context as I would have liked,
so I had to do work to put it all into place), but it was really worthwhile. I
recommend it highly.
Finally, for a change of pace (literally), I finished off with 80/20
Running
by Matt Fitzgerald. I’ve been a committed runner
since 2016. I noticed that my pace has been dropping off since moving to
Scotland, and I thought it’d be worthwhile to be a bit more intentional in my
practice. 80/20 running is the technique of spending 80% of your exercise time
with your heart rate in “Zone 2” (a level where you’re genuinely expending some
energy, but you can carry on a conversation while doing so—for me, currently,
that’s at around 125-130 BPM), while spending 20% of your time pushing yourself
further, whether at a moderate level or going genuinely flat out. I’ve been
working at this for the last three weeks, and it’s made a difference to my
running practice. So I recommend this book, too, if you’re regularly running
for exercise.
