Hello!
Before we dive into today’s reviews, I want to tell you that I will be putting a temporary pause on paid subscriptions. There is a book I’d like to write (you can find my first two here!) and I want to immerse myself in that without the pressure to write essays every week or so. I still plan to share monthly book review roundups, essays when I feel drawn to write them, and you can always find me pontificating over on Notes.
Now onto the reviews!
January: Reads + Recommendations
February: Reads + Recommendations
March: Reads + Recommendations
I read six books in April; there was thrilling sci-fi, disappointing horror and fantasy, nature essays that made me swoon, and much more.
There Is No Antimemetics Division
by qntm (2020)
A secret organization hunts reality-warping threats that can erase knowledge of themselves from human memory, forcing its agents to fight an enemy they can’t remember exists - even as it closes in.
What a fun read! This is thrilling, high-concept sci-fi and I couldn’t put it down. Brilliantly executed, fast and sharp and mind-bending.
Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not you first day.
Fatal Strategies
by Jean Baudrillard (1983)
Baudrillard suggests that in a hyperreal world saturated by too much information and simulacra, the only real strategy left for people is to implement “fatal strategies,” which is to push things to their extreme until they implode under their own logic.
This is the third of Baudrillard’s books I’ve read this year and it’s my least favorite. He moves away from sociological diagnosis and toward more deliberate provocation, at times turning the book itself into a “fatal strategy.” It’s still enjoyable because his way of seeing and writing is always compelling, but this work feels less memorable overall because it feels entirely abstract.
We mustn't believe we are living the realization of some evil utopia - we are living the realization of utopia, period. That is to say, its collapse into the real.
Between Two Fires
by Christopher Buehlman (2012)
A fantastical horror set during an outbreak of the plague in medieval France, where a fallen knight and a mysterious girl move through a ravaged world.
The premise was promising and I was expecting something rich and apocalyptic but by halfway through I found myself skimming. It turns into more of a roadtrip across France during the end of the world, and starts to feel meandering, disconnected, and - despite aiming for a somewhat transcendent metaphysics - unrelentingly bleak.
You just have to say yes or no. But it will be harder for you if you remember. Love is always harder. Love means weathering blows for another’s sake and not counting them. Love is loss of self, loss of other, and faith in the death of loss.
The Age of Entitlement
by Christopher Caldwell (2020)
A sweeping critique of post-1960s America that argues that civil rights reforms reshaped the nation’s legal and political order in ways that displaced the original constitutional framework and the cost – both economic and cultural – was born by those that it disenfranchised the most.
This is an excellent, engaging chronicle of the ways the cultural, social, and legal transformations of the 1960s created long-term structural consequences, from expanding federal obligations and debt to reshaping ideas of meritocracy and citizenship. The core argument - that civil rights law has effectively become a kind of parallel or “shadow” constitution – that undermines the rights enshrined in the actual constitution is powerfully compelling. A must-read book.
The reforms of the sixties, however, even the ones Americans loved best and came to draw part of their national identity from, came with costs that proved staggeringly high - in money, freedom, rights, and social stability. Those costs were spread most unevenly among social classes and generations… The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible - and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out.
Brigands & Breadknives
by Travis Baldree (2025)
The third entry in this cozy fantasy series shifts from small-stakes shopkeeping to a more traditional quest, sending its characters into a more dangerous adventure.
I liked the first two books in this series, Legends and Lattes and Bookshops and Bonedust. Baldree didn’t invent “cozy fantasy” (high fantasy, low stakes) but he popularized it and contributed to turning it into what is now a distinct and beloved genre. The first two books were charming, warm, and grounded in simple pleasures: opening a coffee shop, running a bookstore, figuring out cinnamon rolls and reluctant customers, with just a light dusting of necromancers and cursed objects around the edges.
But this third book broke the formula. It sent Fern, a bookshop-owning ratkin, on a journey with a legendary elf and a captured goblin and it just didn’t work for me. The adventure elements were not quite thrilling enough and the plot itself was a bit aimless. Also unfortunate is that Fern’s most notable character trait is her constant cursing. The whole book had a very millennial too-earnest-but-fuck-this-faux-edginess that began to grate.
“Hey,” said Fern, “I couldn’t help but overhear you working on your lyrics back before you clobbered me in the face, and I just thought you should know that ‘avenge’ and ‘scavenge’ don’t rhyme, you feculent sack of shitweasels.”
Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
by Annie Dillard (1982)
A collection of meditative essays in which Dillard observes the natural world and human experience with an attention that turns ordinary reality into something luminous and strange. This wasn’t quite as strong as Holy the Firm - it feels more disjointed and at times repetitive - but Dillard is such a phenomenal writer that it hardly matters. There are passages here that linger because she has this rare ability to make the simplest things in nature feel charged with meaning, almost radiating holiness.
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to “World.” Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.
Turns out, it’s not the boys being radicalised to hate women through the Manosphere, as so many chattering class Cathy’s have hysterically claimed. According to polling commissioned by the New Statesman, boys are quite found of girls, actually.
So the left wing media has actually admitted that it’s girls being radicalised to hate men, through far-left political ideology, including but not limited to, feminism.
Older women are responsible for laying this burden on young women. For filling their tender young minds with fear porn, alarmism, slandering men, failing to teach or model gratitude for the immense physical comfort we live in, failing to reign in the worst emotional excesses of female youth, failing to open a goddamn window and let some fresh air in — metaphorically speaking — instead of just keeping them locking inside an emotional prison. These young women have had their minds broken. They did not do this to themselves.
Multiculturalism is Dead: The Great Experiment Has Failed, Here Comes the Reckoning
by Celina101
The defining political project of the post-World War II Western world has been the systematic replacement of its historically homogeneous, nation-based societies with a novel experiment in multiracial and multicultural coexistence...
The political and social failures of multiculturalism are not just the result of flawed policies, they are the inevitable consequence of a flawed philosophical foundation. The entire multicultural project is built upon a set of radical, anti-realist ideas inherited from the Enlightenment and supercharged in the post-war era. These ideas “blank-slate” humanitarianism, which posits that all human groups are interchangeable; egalitarianism, which denies the reality of innate group differences; and universalism, which seeks to impose a single political and moral framework on all of humanity are not noble truths but dangerous falsehoods.
DEI is about to Starve South Africa to Death: Another Decolonization Success Story
by The American Tribune
In summary, when black dictators steal the land of competent farmers and hand it to their co-ethnics with no care as to if those who receive the stolen acres can farm, it goes poorly and those who the government claims it aims to help—poor blacks—tend to starve.
That is what South Africa is on the verge of learning, as the Zimbabwean experience shows. The Boers, whose name means “farmers” in Afrikaans, are leaving. They are the ones who produce over 95% of South Africa’s corn, 98% of its wheat, and 96% of its chicken, to name but a few examples of their massive productivity. In total, the Boers produce more than 80% of South Africa’s food despite owning just 70% of the farmland, meaning they produce food far in excess of their relative land ownership. Further, they do so despite being denied the water licenses and hundreds of millions of aid dollars that the government hands to black farmers.
Thus, as the South African government steals land from white farmers under the guise of racial economic equity so that it can refuse to pay compensation, land will increasingly be taken out of the hands of hyper-productive Boer farmers and placed in the hands of utterly incompetent friends of the regime.