some books wot I read
Aug. 13th, 2025 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kanadkaI am overdue on a life post (a LOT has happened, much of it shitty) but all that will be behind a filter anyway. In the meantime, something slightly more positive!
- Metropolis: A History of the City, Mankind's Greatest Invention, Ben Wilson
I actually really loved this, even though it was just an airport purchase some time ago and had stayed on the bookshelf (okay book pile. I am not that organised) increasing the gap of shame for like a few years. This particular non-fiction writer has a way with words and there are some really choice passages. There are some really lush turns of phrases here and I would recommend it just for worldbuilding alone. But I also really loved reading about the cities I didn't know much about esp in their historical contexts - like there are so many books about New York or London or Paris, there are far fewer books about Baghdad or Lagos or Manchester. In terms of population, most of the world is urban already, and at least according to this book, by 2050 the projection is that something like 70% of the Earth's population will live in cities. But when you think about it it's kind of interesting how cities came to be, why they work, what benefits or disadvantages they bring and how they've changed and morphed over the years mostly as our technology increases. One thing I thought was particularly interesting is that cities used to be this place where there was no private life, not really, and if you were a city dweller then your whole life was very much in the public eye (the notion of the Greek 'agora'), and then in the flow between the 1800s - 1900s the place to go became country estates which the concept of that may have informed suburbia, which is not a city but very close to one, which coincided with this privatening or closing-off of our lives, and now we are trying to get back into urban areas or urbanify the suburbs and create these 15-minute cities or locations while also preserving our very necessary privacy while also increasing our social community just enough that we don't feel completely isolated. Or similarly others are trying to make smart cities where it's more eco friendly and there's less food waste but there's also everpresent sensors to monitor these things to recoup waste so big data is mining every last bit of it. So ultimately, you have privacy, but you also super don't, and on both sides of the coin you only really reap the disadvantages of both positions. And that kind of feels like the city in general to me, at least in the modern meaning: you're all alone in a crowd. Sure, it's true that people have always found ways to be private in the middle of the city forever - one example Wilson gives is a caliph in 1100's Baghdad who just really wanted to indulge in some tasty street meat (mood tbh) so had to dress up incognito to go and get some chicken skewers from the local food cart without being known as, y'know, the fucking caliph - I kinda have that luddite-like impression that our modern age and/or technology has definitely made the isolated-but-spotlit problem scaled up and so much worse. Maybe just me.
One thing I think could be true about most cities, read in conjunction with Why Nations Fail, is that one of the reasons they so massively boost GDP is because that many people together naturally fosters creative innovation, even if the state or some other institution would be set on extracting all value out of it for their own richness or indulging in creative destruction (again, to keep lower class workers impoverished and needing to continue to perform subsistence instead of turning to entrepreneurship). Another thing I think could be true about Europe, in conjunction with this course on the early middle ages (so starting from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Vikings) is that not having an actual city proper for just about all that time (the cities of Europe were largely founded by Rome, and most cities piddled away once Rome fell) meant that all of Europe was a massively extractive zone where power and wealth and land was concentrated in the hands of the few instead of the many for a very, very long time, and I wonder if it might help explain why Europe did some of what it did.
(That Yale course is overall really great btw, would recommend. We started watching it mostly on a lark but kept going because it kept being interesting and it was just kind of heartwarming and nostalgic to have that lecture-like university environment. I have minor quibbles here and there with the content and how it's delivered but it's rare and I think it's due to it being a product of its time - the lecturer is an old white guy and this series is from 2012. This doesn't justify but does explain a bit.)
- The Membranes, Chi Ta-Wei
This book was AMAZING and I heartily 10000% recommend it. Unless you are the type of person who is easily shocked by things or need to search doesthedogdie (in which case I should note that since this book likely won't be on it yes there are dead dogs at some point in it). It's very cool cyborg-flavoured cyberpunk, technically post-apocalyptic but not in the YA or Fallout Sole Survivor kind of way, more in the 'everything is set up for our comfort! don't think about the outside world!' way, super clever, really well-written, with a lot of great twists and the pacing starts a bit slow but quickly absorbs you. Anyway I love love loved it, I would so much recommend it to everyone who likes cyberpunk or wants to like cyberpunk but doesn't want to read 1200 pages of Neal Stephenson because Chi's book is actually fairly short (more novella sized) and equally as entertaining and twisty but you could easily read this in like 7 hrs.
- Metropolis: A History of the City, Mankind's Greatest Invention, Ben Wilson
I actually really loved this, even though it was just an airport purchase some time ago and had stayed on the bookshelf (okay book pile. I am not that organised) increasing the gap of shame for like a few years. This particular non-fiction writer has a way with words and there are some really choice passages. There are some really lush turns of phrases here and I would recommend it just for worldbuilding alone. But I also really loved reading about the cities I didn't know much about esp in their historical contexts - like there are so many books about New York or London or Paris, there are far fewer books about Baghdad or Lagos or Manchester. In terms of population, most of the world is urban already, and at least according to this book, by 2050 the projection is that something like 70% of the Earth's population will live in cities. But when you think about it it's kind of interesting how cities came to be, why they work, what benefits or disadvantages they bring and how they've changed and morphed over the years mostly as our technology increases. One thing I thought was particularly interesting is that cities used to be this place where there was no private life, not really, and if you were a city dweller then your whole life was very much in the public eye (the notion of the Greek 'agora'), and then in the flow between the 1800s - 1900s the place to go became country estates which the concept of that may have informed suburbia, which is not a city but very close to one, which coincided with this privatening or closing-off of our lives, and now we are trying to get back into urban areas or urbanify the suburbs and create these 15-minute cities or locations while also preserving our very necessary privacy while also increasing our social community just enough that we don't feel completely isolated. Or similarly others are trying to make smart cities where it's more eco friendly and there's less food waste but there's also everpresent sensors to monitor these things to recoup waste so big data is mining every last bit of it. So ultimately, you have privacy, but you also super don't, and on both sides of the coin you only really reap the disadvantages of both positions. And that kind of feels like the city in general to me, at least in the modern meaning: you're all alone in a crowd. Sure, it's true that people have always found ways to be private in the middle of the city forever - one example Wilson gives is a caliph in 1100's Baghdad who just really wanted to indulge in some tasty street meat (mood tbh) so had to dress up incognito to go and get some chicken skewers from the local food cart without being known as, y'know, the fucking caliph - I kinda have that luddite-like impression that our modern age and/or technology has definitely made the isolated-but-spotlit problem scaled up and so much worse. Maybe just me.
One thing I think could be true about most cities, read in conjunction with Why Nations Fail, is that one of the reasons they so massively boost GDP is because that many people together naturally fosters creative innovation, even if the state or some other institution would be set on extracting all value out of it for their own richness or indulging in creative destruction (again, to keep lower class workers impoverished and needing to continue to perform subsistence instead of turning to entrepreneurship). Another thing I think could be true about Europe, in conjunction with this course on the early middle ages (so starting from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Vikings) is that not having an actual city proper for just about all that time (the cities of Europe were largely founded by Rome, and most cities piddled away once Rome fell) meant that all of Europe was a massively extractive zone where power and wealth and land was concentrated in the hands of the few instead of the many for a very, very long time, and I wonder if it might help explain why Europe did some of what it did.
(That Yale course is overall really great btw, would recommend. We started watching it mostly on a lark but kept going because it kept being interesting and it was just kind of heartwarming and nostalgic to have that lecture-like university environment. I have minor quibbles here and there with the content and how it's delivered but it's rare and I think it's due to it being a product of its time - the lecturer is an old white guy and this series is from 2012. This doesn't justify but does explain a bit.)
- The Membranes, Chi Ta-Wei
This book was AMAZING and I heartily 10000% recommend it. Unless you are the type of person who is easily shocked by things or need to search doesthedogdie (in which case I should note that since this book likely won't be on it yes there are dead dogs at some point in it). It's very cool cyborg-flavoured cyberpunk, technically post-apocalyptic but not in the YA or Fallout Sole Survivor kind of way, more in the 'everything is set up for our comfort! don't think about the outside world!' way, super clever, really well-written, with a lot of great twists and the pacing starts a bit slow but quickly absorbs you. Anyway I love love loved it, I would so much recommend it to everyone who likes cyberpunk or wants to like cyberpunk but doesn't want to read 1200 pages of Neal Stephenson because Chi's book is actually fairly short (more novella sized) and equally as entertaining and twisty but you could easily read this in like 7 hrs.
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