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salt marsh

mouse@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 5 months ago

it's me, I'm the creator and admin of BookWyrm

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salt marsh's books

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Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart (2001, University of Texas Press) 2 stars

The earliest known author of written literature was a woman named Enheduanna, who lived in …

Very interesting material, not so interesting book

2 stars

The subject matter of this book is fascinating but I found the book itself disorganized and not terribly well written, and the author seems to be projecting intensely onto Enheduanna from scant evidence.

While I don't know anything about Sumer, I found a lot of her scholarship kinda fishy, and frankly it had a bit of TERF-y smell (although that might just be a second-wave-feminist smell that has developed a bad association for me).

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018, Holt & Company, Henry) 2 stars

Jaron Lanier, the world-famous Silicon Valley scientist-pioneer who first alerted us to the dangers of …

Disappointing and poorly defended

1 star

This was such a frustrating read because I agree with so many of the problems he identifies with social media, but I found his reasoning deeply flawed.

To the extent that this is a diatribe about how unpleasant social media is in his personal experience, I was mostly onboard, but the difference, I think, between a rant and a book is rigor.

His citations were mostly news articles and wikipedia entries, and he relies heavily on a superficial understanding of popular, flawed studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment. He makes bold, sweeping, and imprecise statements about the a number of things, particularly the nature of addiction and how addicts behave, without any backup or indication that he is speaking in any way besides entirely off the cuff.

I was disappointed as well in how stuck his reasoning is within the frame of capitalism and tech solutionism.

Nearly Roadkill (1996, High Risk Books) 5 stars

"A novel written in cyberspace, Nearly Roadkill is an Infobahn erotic thriller without any boundaries …

like Hackers (1995) but with GENDER

5 stars

This book has the energy of Hackers (1995) but with an incredibly interesting and thoughtful exploration of gender, loads of sex, and a prescient read of corporate influence on internet culture.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020, Tor Books) 4 stars

A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget.

France, 1714: in …

I didn't ship it

3 stars

This book was fine, I can see why people really liked it. It's well written and the plot is solid, but I found the picture perfect artsy Brooklyn courtship tedious, I didn't find either of the main characters all that compelling, and the tropes it relies on a little uninteresting. I was disappointed by how lacking in oddness or eccentricity it was, how credible but unremarkable the characters are.