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This is my favorite book of all time. I have read it at least once a year since I first discovered it, which was by stumbling across this quote: “Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
Jan 13, 2022
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I know I am technically late to this book but I just finished it and it has fundamentally changed me forever. Maybe its because I am an academic, or because I often introduce myself as the speaker of 2 and a half languages but it hit hard. It is vivid and spectacular and grief inducing and devastating. It has so much heart, so much love, yet so much despair. The attention to detail regarding history and conflicting philosophies, politics, religious beliefs and belief systems is so carefully and precisely constructed, it is in and of itself poetry. It's so vivid that I can taste it, I can feel the texture of the pages, different passages are rattling around my brain and I can remember where I read them, I am a different person from before I read this book. After the reading slump I was in, it feels like all along I was waiting to find this book, I didn't know I was missing it, or waiting for it and yet when I read it it is like all at once I suddenly knew that I had needed this book all along. Read it, if you are one of those people that gets skeptical of things that reach a certain level of popularity, just know that all the hype in the world has undersold this book. It is that good. And yes, I attached a low light photo of my copy because I have reread chapters of this so often that the pages are curling, fished it out of my backpack when I found random spots to sit or stand idly, accidentally smudged it when I immediately reached for it after writing sprawling pages in my notebooks. You see how my earphones aren't connected to anything because all I am thinking about is this book? Yeah exactly! This is a good fucking book I am so serious you guys if you have held off on reading it, bump it up your list.
Jan 9, 2025
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my mission in life is to get more people to read this book so we can gush over it together. so tender so spacious so clarifying.
“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together…It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.”
Jan 26, 2024
Best book I’ve ever read, I can’t stop thinking about it. I really want to re-read it but I am trying to wait until I forget some of it because I want to experience how good it was again.
Jan 2, 2025
Top Recs from @brian-karlsson
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This is a photobook by Richard Billingham, and one of my favorites. It’s a very raw documentation of his family, and I find the brutal honesty of the photographs to be very compelling. There are a whole host of videos on YouTube of people flipping through the book since it is expensive and relatively hard to find, but the one I linked above is the best, despite misspelling his last name as “Bellingham”.
Jan 13, 2022
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This album by Reanimator (not to be confused with Re-Animator, which is a British thrash metal band that for some reason shares the same artist page on Spotify) is a beautifully produced, sample-heavy instrumental record that I’ve listened to countless times. I highly recommend listening to it straight through, in order.
Jan 13, 2022
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A talkative taxi passenger, a UFO buff who insists the U.S. has been on the moon since the 1950s, a JFK conspiracy theorist, an elderly anarchist who befriends a man trying to rob his house, a television set collector, and a hipster woman trying to sell a Madonna pap smear. (taken from Wikipedia) Slacker is a movie unlike any others that I’ve seen, following the various characters within for no more than a few minutes each before seamlessly cycling to the next. Every few minutes you realize how far removed you are from where you’d just been before, and it’s incredible. The whole movie is available for free on YouTube, linked above.
Jan 13, 2022