from south asia - with love & chai

On The River Benares, 1883, Weeks, Edwin Lord

please recommend some articles/essays & books on the environment, fiction or non-fiction.

thanx, no hurries.

hi! here you go (you’ll find more fiction on my tbr than one i’ve actually read)

fiction

the hungry tide by amitav ghosh — set in the sunderbans in the bay of bengal, where a marine biologist comes to study the region and particularly looking for a species of dolphin and encounters the politics and the complexities of the region; explores the relationship between human community and nature, the man-animal/wildlife conflict; also the landscape is really beautifully weaved into the story

the people in the trees by hanya yanagihara — revolves around an immunologist who discovers a lost tribe on a micronesian island with a condition that retards aging; also explores colonialism, imperialism, exploitation unleashed in the name of science, also what happens when very different cultures clash; excellently written; makes you think a lot

essays

the climate club by william nordhaus

himalayan rivers and india's water policy by jayanta bandyopadhyay

the decolonial ecologies issue of the funambulist

los angeles confronts its shady divide by alejandra borunda (also generally the planet possible series)

understanding the gender dimensions of energy poverty by c. pavithra

non-fiction

the omnivore's dilemma by michael pollan — about food processing and how humans extract food from nature; its implications for our lifestyles; and how we might do the whole thing in better ways; also check his in defense of food, which is in many ways a follow-up

the end of the end of the earth by jonathan franzen — essays on the environment, conservation, climate change and their complexities; offers very well-thought out, well-argued, and nuanced takes on a lot of subjects; also about finding meaning when the world is dying

chasing the monsoon by alexander frater — a travelogue where he follows the monsoon throughout the indian subcontinent; it’s a lovely, hopeful, and lighthearted book, which also looks at the landscape and the ecology and people

the great derangement by amitav ghosh — about climate change, how we think about it, and better ways to think about it; it’s mostly about how our  narratives all fail to explain it and tackle it

for non-fiction and essays i'm also going to add a few from my reading list for my course on environmental history. most of them were very academic and jargony, but these are the fun ones. they're also all on libgen.

and here are some on my list

the hidden life of trees by peter wohlleben

the overstory by richard powers

outpost by dan richards

walden by henry david thoreau

landscape and memory by simon schama

southern reach trilogy by jeff vandermeer

freedom by jonathan franzen

2021-08-22

Canon EOS R6 + RF15-35mm f2.8L IS

Authorship: Barthes, Death of the Author; Foucault, What is an Author?

Formalism: Eichenbaum, The Theory of the “Formal Method”;  Brooks, from The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry

Structuralism: Saussure, Course in General Linguistics ; Barthes, from Mythologies

Psychoanalysis: Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; Lacan, The Mirror Stage & The Significance of the Phallus

Ideology: Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses; Foucault, Truth and Power

Feminism & Queer: Sedgwick, from Between Men; Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa; Wittig, One Is Not Born a Woman; Butler, Gender Trouble

Deconstruction: Derrida, from Of Grammatology;

Postcolonial: Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth; Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?

Cultural Materialism: Adorno & Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception; Williams, Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory  

At the moment they're in a very chaotic pile in top of our bookcase! My granddad has kept a diary every year of his life since about 1970 and keeps them all neatly arranged on one shelf in the back bedroom, whenever I see them I think: that’s what I want in future. Just to put them all in one place. I would like to have a dedicated shelf for them all one day but we're low on space and as I'm always using them it seemed easier to keep them in reach.

This is about half, the other half are in a drawer at my parents’ house still: x3 undergraduate notes from lectures (one per year), x1 undergraduate poetry dissertation/portfolio notes, x4 postgraduate degree notebooks, some diaries, scripts and plays and stories I wrote as a child, pictures I drew, and planners from my school years. I keep all these things, I don’t know what for. 

I see this post about having one book per year from 2017 copied aaaall the time now which is kind of funny.