This weekend I read and really enjoyed Nanna Bonde Thylstrup’s The Politics of Mass Digitization (2018). The book considered the approaches, implications, and politics behind the early 21st century move to mass digitization. Thylstrup unpacks the responses, for example, to Google Books from the European Union and their Europeana portal or platform to the various shadow libraries that emerged to provide… Read More →
I’ve been writing and reading intermittently over the last month trying to get a basic draft of my introduction done on an unrealistic schedule and with delusional expectations on its quality. Who writes the introduction first anyway? Fools, that’s who. One nice thing is that I’ve had a chance to read some new stuff and go… Read More →
This weekend I had a couple of flights and took that quiet time to read Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men (Harvard 2018). The book has created a good bit of buzz lately, in part, because of Zuckerberg’s pioneering work at the web journal Eidolon and partly because any book subtitled “Classics and Misogyny in the… Read More →
After some nudging from Richard Rothaus and Kostis Kourelis, I read Connie Y. Chiang’s Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of Japanese Incarceration (2018). The book was pretty enthralling, in part, because I was not particularly familiar with the details of Japanese internment during World War II, but largely because Chiang manages to weave the… Read More →
Rachael Kiddey’s Homeless Heritage: Collaborative Social Archaeology as Therapeutic Practice (2017) is among the best books that I’ve read over the last few years. Kiddey describes the work of her and her colleagues, some of whom were homeless, in documenting the material culture of homelessness in York and Bristol. It also traces Kiddey’s own progress… Read More →
Over the weekend, I read Amara Thorton’s Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People (UCL 2018). The book documents the efforts by late 19th and 20th century archaeologists to publish popular and accessible works on archaeology. She brings together these books with deep dives in the publishers’ and archaeologists’ archives and offers intriguing perspectives on how… Read More →
On the way to and from the European Association of Archaeologists annual meeting in Barcelona, I read two J.G. Ballard novels, The Drowned World (1962) and Hello America (1981). These works are part of Ballard’s fascination with a post-apocalyptic near future shaped by ecological catastrophes. Ballard set The Downed World in in an inundated and tropic London, largely submerged… Read More →
A couple of weeks ago, Kostis Kourelis sent me the first volume of Grass Kings, a comic book by Matt Kindt and Tyler Jenkins. The comic tells the story of a the Grass Kingdom an independent trailer park situated on a lake somewhere in the heartland. The Kingdom is ruled by the troubled character Robert and his brother,… Read More →
Over the last few weeks I’ve been snacking on John Bintliff, Emeri Farinetti, Božidar Slapšak, and Anthony Snodgrass’s Boeotia Project, Volume II: The City of Thespiai: Survey at a Complex Urban Site (2017). It’s a big book that is both impressively synthetic and filled with many distinct observations on the distribution of ceramics and survey methodology. The… Read More →
This week, I’ve been sneaking in some time to finish Maya Rao’s Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier (2018). It is a familiar book and echos many of the themes and characters present in Blaire Briody’s The New Wild West: Black Gold, Fracking, and Life in a North Dakota… Read More →
It’s almost summer here in North Dakotaland and while I continue to dream about wrapping up my various projects from the spring (and the winter and the fall and last summer). You can check out my past reading lists here: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2011. A quick read of these lists presents a litany of failed ambition rather… Read More →
