It was clever to check my Amazon orders before finishing my library tidying Tuesday night: Two more books arrived yesterday.
Category Archives: books
New books, etc.
Following a three-month break, I returned to my work in a nearby school last week… and I am tuckered. Admittedly, the heat, from which we will enjoy a temporary respite for the next few days, is probably a bigger culprit than the job. The alarm may, too, play a role. I do, after all, prefer awakening to being awakened.
Thank goodness for three-day weekends, eh?
In spite of myself and with a little help from my friends, I did manage to shelve my latest acquisitions last night. Those same friends also helped me retrieve from the attic the ottoman that matches my favorite reading chair. I don’t know why I didn’t think it would work in the space, but it’s perfect.
Reading along
Thanks to Robin, I finally read War and Peace, so I will most certainly join her for the Kristin Lavransdatter readalong.
After an HPB* run
*Half Price Books
Acquisitions
“And many consider themselves loners.”
From Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (2017):
p. 88
For this community, making an effort to gather in person was no trifling thing. Members spend much of the year scattered across the country. Often they lack the gas money to drive long distances in a straight shot. And many consider themselves loners. Among the hermits, RV Sue has cultivated an especially solitary reputation, pleading with her blog readers not to drop in on her campsites unannounced, explaining that “blogging suits me well because I can interact with all kinds of interesting people without having to actually meet them.” Some of her fans have written about coming across a familiar seventeen-foot Casita during their travels — then realizing who that trailer belonged to and immediately hightailing it in the other direction.
A few new books
Newly acquired
“Being squeezed involves one’s finances, one’s social status, and one’s self-image.”
Janesville (Amy Goldstein), Nomadland (Jessica Bruder), and Squeezed (Alissa Quart) have formed a fascinating — and sobering — trilogy.
Among other things, being middle-class is a matter of having access to certain goods and services. It’s not just the house or the car you can buy. This status is also more granular, reflecting refined varieties of knowledge and information: the middle class knows where to send their children to school, where to get medical treatment, child care, career advice or training, or other kinds of help. Perhaps most importantly, class status is about how you even find out about these things to begin with, which again brings us to “cultural capital.”
When I recall “cultural capital,” I think of my favorite theorist from when I was a graduate student, Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu theorized that capital extends beyond economics, encompassing credentials, skills, and tastes. Financial capital is convertible — if you have the latter, you can gain cultural capital through education. Then, if you have the former, you can convert that back into even more economic capital through the right social networks.
Rereading Moby Dick
Chapter 41: Moby-Dick
Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals — morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire — by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be — what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life, — all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?
Nerdishly 