Category Archives: What I’m reading

What I'm reading

Best journalism of 2014

Another year, another round-up of things I read online that I found amusing, though-provoking, challenging to my world view or simply validating of my smug sense of being right about everything. As with last year’s list, a piece will make the cut if I’m still thinking about it the next day (even if I’m thinking about it angrily). Some pieces are included simply because I enjoyed the writing style. The stand out publications for 2014 are The Appendix and Aeon.

This year I’ve introduced categories to make it easier for readers to ignore what they know is unlikely to interest them. The categories are fairly arbitrary but they have the advantage of showing up my biases. (Who would have thought I was such a cynic to have a whole category dedicated to the best writing on ‘nerd hubris’, and another for ‘activist hubris’? Alert: I do not think believe activism or nerdery is inherently hubristic.)

And if you only read two things from this list, make them:

  •  Andrew O’Hagan’s Ghosting: Julian Assange (London Review of Books, 6 March 2014). This is a superb piece of work from a brilliant writer who was commissioned to produce a biography of a narcissist and failed. The story of the failure becomes an eloquent biography in its own right.
  • Gene Weingarten’s The Peekaboo Paradox (The Washington Post, 22 January 2006). Technically not published in 2014, but this is when I read it. I enjoyed this piece because it reads like a fine piece of fiction.

Best writing on journalism and publishing for 2014

Best writing by or about writers and writing

Best writing on politics

Best writing on wealth inequality

Best historical writing

Best ethnographic and travel writing

Best writing on ethics and the examined life

Best writing on nerd hubris

Best writing on activist hubris

Best writing on children and parents

Best writing on sex

Most amusing writing (and photographs)

Best writing on feminism

Best writing on education and academia

Best writing on science

Best writing on language

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Collection fishing, What I'm reading

Anting-Anting Stories, And Other Strange Tales of the Filipinos

Newly digitised is this little treasure from the the library of the University of Michigan, Anting-anting stories: And other strange tales of the Filipinos (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1901).

Anting-Anting Stories and other strange tales of the Filipinos

I once got a hold of this as a cheap-and-nasty print-on-demand edition but now it can be read in all its original glory. Far from a genuine collection of Filipino folklore, it’s mostly a Boy’s Own series of adventure stories featuring brave Americans holding their own against superstitious, cruel and ignorant savages. Published in 1901 during the Philippine-American war the unapologetic racism must have had some propaganda value back in the United States, though one story — Told at the Club — is much more sympathetic. I don’t know who ‘Sargent Kayme’ was, but the Michigan edition includes the handwritten annotation ‘pseud.’ after his name. There is enough detail to suggest that the author was reasonably familiar with the Philippines to be able to describe details such as local architecture and the appearance of port towns like Dumaguete, but not quite clued in enough to know that gorillas are not endemic to the islands, for example. The front cover looks like a pastiche of various nineteenth century archetypes of the ‘savage’ from Africa to Australia.

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What I'm reading

Sorcery songs to kill Hanson

gurindji-journeyContinuing the Japan–Australia theme, I’m re-reading Minoru Hokari’s Gurindji Journey, ahead of the event To celebrate the life and work of Minoru Hokari 1971-2004 at the ANU.

I especially love Hokari’s radically pluralist approach to oral history and his persuasive but uncomfortable demand that “we need to question the politics of this act of ‘rescuing and being respectful of’ the Aboriginal experience.”

But quite apart from all that, here’s a fun excerpt (p85):

When I told them that Japanese ‘law’ became more Westernised, they sympathised with me and said, ‘Kartiya way everywhere.’ My Asian background certainly created a particular dynamic between the Gurindji people and me. Here is another example: one day, a young man approached me and asked if I knew Pauline Hanson. He explained that she does not like ‘my mob’ and ‘your mob’. Then, he suggested that I sing sorcery songs with him to kill Hanson.

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