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diagonalizable.bsky.social
@diagonalizable.bsky.social
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diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf.
Author|Maurice Natanson. Title|The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature. From inside cover|"How does literature illuminate the way we live?...Natanson...draws upon [phenomenology's] unique power to show how fiction can highlight aspects of experience that are normally left unexamined. By exploring the structure of the everyday world, [he] reveals the 'uncanny' that lies at the core of the ordinary." We can say it took Natanson his whole life to write this book since it was finished the year before he dies. I've been off/on reading this very book since the late 90s. Why keep it for so long? It's phenomenology, philosophy, literature all in one, plus Natanson was one of my teachers, plus a memory I have of seeing him walking slowly in the rain without an umbrella & stopping to give him a ride.
December 5, 2025 at 5:03 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
Choose books from your current TBR/TBRA shelves in some general order.
Title: High Adventure. Author credits: Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fleming, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, James M. Cain, Edgar Rice Burroughs, & Others. [This tattered old paperback with the obvious Indiana Jones allusions (same font & colors as movie title, hat, leather jacket etc. -- but no man-purse hmm) is one I've read some of but not all so TBR since "read" (past tense) means all pages read. "High Adventure" has a particular meaning that doesn't involve recreational drugs. I'm not sure of the meaning but fear and courage are necessarily involved. What else? Probably something about which you would say "glad that's over" and "hate to go through it" but also "glad I did it".]
December 4, 2025 at 2:53 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf.
Title=Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an anti-tourist. Author=Daniel Kalder. From back cover="...the anti-tourist seeks out the dark, lost zones of our planet, eschewing comfort, embracing hunger and hallucinations, and always traveling at the wrong time of year....Kalder visits locations that most of us don't even know exist---Tatarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El, and Udmurtia. He loves these places because no one else does, because everyone else passes them by..." [I read this years ago, & I'll read it again (hence TBRA) because it's how most of us travel around. We're mostly like everyone else around us and yet not. We're cheap. We're like that person you vaguely remember who stayed a few days in the cubicle of plywood & chain link next to you in Rangoon (speaking old english). If you get noticed you're like Toussaint Charboneau who gets mentioned in some obscure notes, maybe described in a book a century after you die for a few pages. But that's the epitome of fame and high adventure. 99% of us knew and were known by a few good people and the occasional bad one. We arrived, we stayed a bit, we departed. We're happy.
December 4, 2025 at 4:04 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
December 3, 2025 at 4:16 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge 💙📚 Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
Augie's Revenge. Alex Kudera. Author of Fight For Your Long Day. [And from back cover:] An adjunct teacher who is called "professor" (in the US I think that is really a job title, so "adjunct" is accurate) has been adjuncting for [only] ten years. The teacher joins with 2 or 4 others to plan a "revenge-robbery" for "a pile of cash" -- and "justice" meted out to someone who stole inheritance, beat, molested the teacher. [Theme of book is not my usual cup of tea, this "Breaking Bad" vibe. Nevertheless I suppose even teachers can willfully shade from jedi to gray jedi to gray sith to full on sith. But even Alan Shore stopped at gray sith when he became Raymond Reddington. I haven't read this book so maybe the teacher stops before full sithness.]
December 3, 2025 at 12:10 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves.
Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework. David M. Estlund (from 2008){From the inside cover} "David Estlund shows why [a merely] procedural justification of democratic procedure doesn't work, and he offers a groundbreaking alternative based on the idea that democratic authority and legitimacy must depend partly on democracy's tendency to make good decisions. . . . avoids epistocracy, or the rule of those who know . . . [by arguing] that while some few people probably do know best, this can be used in political justification only if their expertise is acceptable from all reasonable points of view . . . [it's] recognizably democratic---laws and policies actually authorized by the people subject to them."
December 2, 2025 at 10:44 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
(Authors) Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcommandante Marcos. (Title) The Uncomfortable Dead: a novel by four hands (what's missing is missing). (from back cover) "In alternating chapters, Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos and the consistently excellent Paco Ignacio Taibo II create an uproarious murder mystery with intersecting storylines. The chapters written by the famously masked Marcos originate in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, while those penned by Taibo star his Coca-Cola-and-cigarette-consuming series detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne. The two stories collide absurdly and dramatically in the sprawl of Mexico City."
December 2, 2025 at 2:17 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves.
Science and Partial Truth: A Unitary Approach to Models and Scientific Reasoning. Newton C.A. da Costa, Steven French. (From inside cover) Should we regard scientific theories as true or empirically adequate? Authors develop "machinery of 'partial structures'". (This book is over 20 years old and I got it because primarily of da Costa, whose recent death is a huge loss, who was one of the first authors I read that opened the wonderful area of paraconsistent logics etc. for me way back.)
December 1, 2025 at 4:47 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
Alain Robbe-Grillet DANS LE LABYRINTHE roman Les Éditions de Minuit A guy is wandering in a city, it's snowing, the rowhouses look the same. Is he lost? Maybe. Details repeat. He has a box and he needs to give it to someone. He belongs there and is not of there. Dead ends, repeating his steps, his observations.
November 30, 2025 at 4:44 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
Zermelo's Axiom of Choice--Its Origins, Development, & Influence. Gregory H. Moore. m=2m=(alephnull)m=(msquared) (from back cover) "The axiom of choice is the most controversial axiom in the entire history of mathematics. . . . This treatment is the only full-length history of the axiom in English . . ."
November 25, 2025 at 4:34 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
Janelle Monáe (author). The Memory Librarian and other stories of dirty computer (title). Cover designed by Paula Russell Szafranski. "Contents" however lists the following "collaborators": Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, Eve L. Ewing, Yohanca Delgado, Sheree Reneée Thomas. "Dirty Computer introduced a world in which thoughts --as a means of self-conception-- could be controlled or erased by a select few. And whether you were human, AI, or other, your life and sentience were dictated by those who'd convinced themselves they had the right to decide your fate. That was until Jane 57821 decided to remember and break free. Expanding from that mythos, these stories fully explore what it's like to live in a totalitarian society . . . and what it takes to get out of it."
November 23, 2025 at 4:28 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
(Title) Deliberative Politics in Action, Analysing Parliamentary Discourse. (Authors) Jürg Steiner, André Bächtiger, Markus Spörndli, and Marco R. Steenbergen. (Series) Theories of Institutional Design. (Back cover) "...This book provides the first extended empirical study of deliberative politics, addressing in particular questions of the preconditions and consequences of high-level deliberation. ..."
November 22, 2025 at 5:05 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
(Novel) The Carmudgeon. (Author) J. Hayes Hurley. (Cover art) "Squaring the Circle", Douglas Leichter. (Back cover) "Marty Parrish is a logician whose powers of thinking are most impressive. His mind operates lucidly and systematically. He has full command of any argument presented to him, but only while he is in his classroom at San Francisco State University. . ."
November 21, 2025 at 3:58 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
The Real World of Democratic Theory. Ian Shapiro
November 20, 2025 at 1:29 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Top rectangle holds name of the "collection" or series: Epistemologies of the South. Bottom rectangle holds title: The Pluriverse of Human Rights, the diversity of struggles for dignity. [And editors:] Edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Bruno Sena Martins. Also in the rectangle is the publisher's logo, an R in which the left leg says "Routledge" and the right leg is curved to form two silhouettes, one white, and one that emerges from the background color. Behind the rectangles a 2017 picture by Mário Vitória, Animismo urgente de future. The image contains flying fin-creatures, a luminescent moon, blue and black clouds, a tower with a lengthy chunk missing, apparently.
November 17, 2025 at 10:18 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Title: Dealing With Dictators -- dilemmas of U.S. diplomacy and intelligence analysis 1945-1990. Editors: Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow. Cover divides into two rectangles white and black. Not quite centered, leaning to right is another rectangle divided into four rectangles: (starting NW quadrant clockwise) pictures of Mobutu Sese Seko, Saddam Hussein, Ferdinand & Imelda Marcos, Jiang Jie-shi (Chiang Kai-shek). (Probably could also be called Dealing With Authoritarians.)
November 16, 2025 at 1:23 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Title: Question Authority --- a polemic about trust in five meditations. Author: Mark Kingwell. The cover shows 8 pin-on buttons, 3 showing pin side, 5 showing comments: "but not your mother", "trust no one", "no, they don't know either", "before it questions you!", "these are not the droids you're looking for". Cover was designed by Michel Vrana.
November 15, 2025 at 11:47 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
November 11, 2025 at 5:39 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Title: On Global Justice. Author: Mathias Risse. Bottom of page: Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford. The cover of this hardback book is blank. Hence the title page. The idea of this book retains local concerns and global concerns in the interests of everyone. If you think inconsistencies make it impossible, think epistemic paraconsistent logics. If that's obscure, think Federation of Planets.
November 8, 2025 at 2:43 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Author: Gregory Benford. (partially covered by an old B. Dalton price sticker of $2.95, but I bought it for less than 25cents at a library sale). Title: Timescape. Published in 1980, this printing is 1981 by Pocket Books of Simon & Schuster. I mention that because the cover is remarkable. There's Earth surrounded by 3 rings. The remarkable part is that Earth and the rings are raised (like it was impressed by an old notary public's metal tool), the countries on Earth are raised also. Tactile surprise & pleasure indeed. The context of the book's content is a message is sent from future sucky 1998 Earth to 1962 Earth with information on how to avoid the suckiness.
November 7, 2025 at 4:45 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
The circle in the middle is divided into fifths. Author: Manu Saadia. Title: Trekonomics. Between the author and title is: "Foreword by Brad Delong". Below the title is: The Economics of Star Trek. Below in the final fifth is a blurby prediction: "A Star Trek future might be closer than we think. -- New York Times --". (It's easy to "predict" mere possibilities (absence of inconsistency) which are easily true as possibilities -- & almost as easy to predict feasibilities (physical possibilities). Especially when "we" is left vague. So, yawn. But the enthusiastic optimism is cheery, yet had nothing to do with my motive for purchasing this first edition book (cheaply, added by cheap me).) Circle is encircled by, well, I can't be sure: ladders? frameworks of crates? schemas of filing cabinets? stacked, inserted? Squares and rectangles. From the inside: cover design by Jennifer Bostic, cover art by John Powers. "Economics" defined broadly as "art and science of managing, producing, and exchanging resources as a society". What "really matters" is the "social distribution" of Star Trek's utopian prosperity. The book contains excellent uses of fundamental Star Trek foundational principles and values. I'll read this book again (hence from my TBRA shelf).
November 6, 2025 at 1:22 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR[A] shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
top line (who cares): "Award-winning author of The Dispossessed and The Lathe of Heaven". Author: Ursula K. LeGuin. (There's a rectangle picture with white clouds blue sky, blue ridge, black trees outlined. Apparently it's supposed to be windy, a really clever play on the title (arggh). Title: the wind's twelve quarters, stories. The gold gear-circle with open book in center and words around it "National Book Award Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. At the bottom an unnecessary blurb: "Delicious...her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry. -- Library Journal." ("Delicious", really? As Q asked Worf: "eat any good books lately?".)
November 4, 2025 at 5:29 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR[A] shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Author: Kurt Vonnegut. Title: Timequake. Left corner is 1.50, library sale price. In the right corner the cover yells at us "The New York Times Bestseller". On the left in the middle cover spits "A New York Times Notable Book", "This is the indispensable Vonnegut -- San Francisco Chronicle", "Wry and trenchant ... highly entertaining --- The New York Times Book Review". Though there are 24 blurbs on the back cover and 2 pages inside from people I couldn't care less about, the picture on the front cover is not credited to anyone. It's a circle in space with a few stars. The circle is divided in the middle. Represents earth and clock I guess. Roman numerals XII and IX in appropriate clock places. Clock hands disconnected and laying haphazardly on circle. The tree on the right has one apple and a snake on it. Shiver me timbers, what could that symbolize? Two lions in front. Zebra at river. Some 4 leggeds in background. Vonnegut wrote it. It's about time. It's science fiction. Ergo I bought it.
October 31, 2025 at 3:14 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR[A] shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Title: montreal noir. Editors: John McFetridge, Jacques Filippi. Picture of rain clouds late afternoon perhaps shadows of jacques cartier bridge and la ronde.
October 30, 2025 at 12:50 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR[A] shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Title: Games Iteration Numbers, A Philosophical Introduction to Computability Theory. Author: Luca M. Possati. Top right corner: Studies in Logic. Background has shadowy words, numbers, symbols. Offhand the book's masquerading as something simple, yet it's not doing that as well. On first glance,there are relations between unbelievable and plain things that are fascinating and repulsive. To a casual observer the writing looks simple enough.
October 29, 2025 at 4:09 PM