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June 2025

	francis bacon: the logic of sensation (deleuze) ★★★ ½ this was a gift from a friend. I never really liked francis bacon until I read this book, and it even convinced me to regard some of his figures as highly as my favourite abstract art. it was also helpful as a concrete demonstration of deleuze's concepts. I have a complete list of the referenced artworks here.
	anna karenina (tolstoy) ★★★ speedread in 10 days so I would have it finished before I went to see the ballet. I first tried reading anna karenina in high school and I'm proud to prove that I've improved my attention span since. I loved anna and vronsky and I couldn't stand levin (kitty was ok). I really thought he was a caricature of the 19th century romantic only to find out he was tolstoy's own self-insert. anna didn't deserve to kill herself (hover to view spoilers) and it turned the entire book into a justification for misogyny. but I liked tolstoy's subtleties in his character writing. dostoevsky does it better though.
	the accursed share, volume i (bataille) ★★★★ bataille writes on political economy like it's ancient esoterica. it was fun, though my enjoyment of the prose caused me to read it less closely than I normally would for a philosophical text (had this problem with nietzsche, too). but a philosophy/economics of excess appealed to my materialist and poststructuralist tastes. bataille and d&g have justified doing nothing for me, I like watching ducks and squirrels and my dog do nothing and wondering why I should be morally condemned for doing the same thing.
	oil! (sinclair) dnf read 80% of it. I was rewatching there will be blood (a favourite) and I was surprised to notice in the credits that the movie was inspired by a book by upton sinclair (the jungle is a favourite). but I'm disappointed to admit that it does not live up to the movie … though it is funny how paul thomas anderson washed it entirely of sinclair's politics, he would have hated that. I actually loved the book through the first half; the prose is a lot of fun, especially on dad's driving habits, and I liked the sarcasm that never felt like obnoxious cynicism. but it was too long. By the second half, it was getting harder and harder to read what was substantially the same thing over and over again. bunny loves dad, dad does evil oil baron thing, bunny compromises on his ethics. and it felt like bunny was aging too fast for how long his naivete stayed unchanged. I just think it could have used some heavy editing.