Otherlands
last updated: 2025-08-15 17:00:28.432263
Gift to me from: My partner, DB Purchased from: Zabriskie — Berlin, Germany Edition: Paperback, Penguin (2023) ISBN: 9780141991146 Blurb: „This is the past as we've never seen it before. Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant. Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in the fossil record. Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.“
The Wretched of the Earth
last updated: 2024-09-23 12:04:28.454897
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm
last updated: 2024-09-23 12:03:34.353195
The Screaming Sky: In pursuit of swifts
last updated: 2024-09-23 12:02:37.963670
Malayland
last updated: 2025-02-08 03:51:14.405685
Purchased from: Tintabudi — Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Edition: Paperback, Faction Press and Ethos Books (2024) ISBN: 9781913090111 Blurb: „What does it mean to be Malay in the 21st century? Especially in a country like Malaysia where identity politics is questioned on an almost daily basis, and policed by the state. 16 years later after the publication of I Am Muslim, Dina Zaman returns to write a memoir, writing about what it means to be Malay, and Muslim in the 21st century. The writer embarked on Malayland during the Covid pandemic, to understand the anger and frustrations of her fellow ethnic Malays who were fighting against (imagined) enemies and a new world order impacted by a virus that killed over seven million people globally. She grew up in a Malaysia that was seething with anger, bubbling underneath the many nightclubs Malaysia was famed for in the 1980s, that witnessed how secularism killed its Malay Muslim heritage. The 1998 Reformasi movement changed Malaysia and whether for the better, is left up to Malaysians to decide. Today race and faith are discussed and embraced frenetically, where hateful extremism is hidden under the guise of nationalism. Young Malaysians are asserting their political and birth identities through social media. And along the way, the sense of irony and humour that Malaysia is known for, has lost its way. Malayland is a reflective book: memories and flashbacks of a childhood filled with earthquakes, spooks and a sense of wonderment and curiosity about a country that is fighting for a desired identity.“
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
last updated: 2024-09-23 12:06:41.711771
Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979
last updated: 2024-08-05 07:04:38.752386
Edition: 2004 Duke University Press eISBN: 978-0-8223-8511-0
LOTE
finished: 2025-08-12 16:53:10.104563
Purchased from: She Said — Berlin, Germany Edition: Paperback, Jacaranda Books (2020) ISBN: 9781913090111 Blurb: „Lush and frothy, incisive and witty, Shola von Reinhold's decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscurement of Black figures from history. Solitary Mathilda has long been enamored with the 'Bright Young Things' of the 20s, and throughout her life, her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists' residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the 30s. The artists' residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions?“
Happy All The Time
finished: 2025-04-08 17:31:20.317757
Briefly Very Beautiful
finished: 2025-02-07 17:54:41.689949
The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker
finished: 2024-07-03 22:00:00
Edition: 2023 Semiotext(e) ISBN: 978-1-63590-185-6
Glory
finished: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Sinkhole: Three Crimes
finished: 2024-05-06 22:00:00