💬 they/them ; iel/lo
🍵 Lots of nonfiction, literary fiction, poetry, classical literature, speculative fiction, magical realism, etc. English, French, and many translations.
📖 Beaucoup de non-fiction, de fiction littéraire, de poésie, de classiques, de spéculatif, de réalisme magique, etc. Lecture en anglais et en français, et beaucoup de traductions.
💌 Find me on Mastodon: silvan.cloud/@gersande
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'' Elle croyait qu’ici, à l’autre bout du monde, au confluent de la rivière Klondike …
Ça a l'ai bouleversant mais très bon: www.lapresse.ca/arts/litterature/2023-09-16/la-version-qui-n-interesse-personne/le-roman-qui-devrait-interesser-tout-le-monde.php
Gersande La Flèche
boosted
Arthur C. Clarke winner and Sunday Times bestseller Adrian Tchaikovsky's triumphant return to fantasy with …
Ok, this book was very fun and gave me some of those excitement in the streets feels at moments I am just always there for. Going in blind to the story, it took me way to long to feel invested in the story, it being fantasy and starting off with a tale about god, I was pretty much ready to swipe left on this one. But then the world came into focus and I was hooked.
I read a review that said in the fantasy world, it's hip to be exploring the magic/creatures/polygod world's through a lens of the industrial revolution rather than bronze or medieval developments. And within this modern trend this is Adrian Tchaikovsky's contribution to that.
I couldn't help but map Marx's capital onto this world, updated by my stronger and stronger appreciation of Tchaikovsky's work and left politics. We have main characters from the factory works, …
Ok, this book was very fun and gave me some of those excitement in the streets feels at moments I am just always there for. Going in blind to the story, it took me way to long to feel invested in the story, it being fantasy and starting off with a tale about god, I was pretty much ready to swipe left on this one. But then the world came into focus and I was hooked.
I read a review that said in the fantasy world, it's hip to be exploring the magic/creatures/polygod world's through a lens of the industrial revolution rather than bronze or medieval developments. And within this modern trend this is Adrian Tchaikovsky's contribution to that.
I couldn't help but map Marx's capital onto this world, updated by my stronger and stronger appreciation of Tchaikovsky's work and left politics. We have main characters from the factory works, lumpen proles, sex workers, students, immigrants, and heretic theologians. The book explores a world colonized by an analogue of Roman Catholic conservatism and empire. There is even a parallel of Marx's theory of dead-labour embodied in commodities as magic embed in objects, which lends them value and can be distilled and extracted to produce further value.
Definitely a strong nationalist anti-colonialism bent to the societal tensions, with nostalgia and ghosts of feudal ethnic powers and the folk cultures and traditions lost to urbanization and proletarianization.
Reading it as a Marxist, one would be happy by its interpretation of struggle, class and modernization with greater heed paid to the lumpen proles and gender. Reading it as an anarchist, there are critiques to be made around the appeal of nationalism, hierarchy, and power as little fiefdoms and warlords struggle to remain dominant above and sometimes oblivious to the peoples struggles in the streets.
I would highly recommend this book, 1 of 2 in the series as of yet, as a fun read that gets your heart racing while both escaping from this world to better view it as an outsider.
Probably gonna stay in my top 5 of 2024!
At p41, my hold on this book in the library came through!!!
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who …
It is an attempt to use my own doppelgänger experience—the havoc wreaked and the lessons learned about me, her, and us—as a guide into and through what I have come to understand as our doppelgänger culture. A culture crowded with various forms of doubling, in which all of us who maintain a persona or avatar online create our own doppelgängers—virtual versions of ourselves that represent us to others. A culture in which many of us have come to think of ourselves as personal brands, forging a partitioned identity that is both us and not us, a doppelgänger we perform ceaselessly in the digital ether as the price of admission in a rapacious attention economy.
— Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (4% - 5%)
Pox Romana (2024, Princeton University Press)
A wide-ranging and dramatic account of the Antonine plague, the mysterious disease that struck the Roman Empire at its pinnacle …
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who …
My hold at the library just came through so I guess I'm throwing out my "currently reading" and TBR/PAL pile and diving into this while I have this.
In this classic work of developmental psychology, renowned psychiatrist and the coauthor of the #1 …
This book is really informative while being simultaneously a horrible read because the things we allow to happen to children is unbelievably horrible.
Gersande La Flèche
boosted
A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature …
We often think of dress as a costume: something that we put on over our internal self, which might reflect or obscure our true identity, but never reshape it. But while the distinction between ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression’ is a useful teaching tool, helping to underscore the point that we can’t tell anyone’s gender just from looking at them – I use it myself every time I deliver trans awareness training – the reality of our experience is often more complex. My own dress both reflects and reshapes my gender: sometimes it’s the case that I put on jewellery and a bright, fitted cardigan because I’m feeling less male and more non-binary on that particular morning, but sometimes the reverse is true. Both kinds of gendered experience are equally true for me: my gender isn’t less authentic because a pair of dangly earrings can change how it feels.
— Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam (Page 149)
I love this and relate a lot!
Montréal, 2020, en pleine pandémie. Narcisse Jane Cardinal, artiste militante, s’engage avec un groupe d’ami·e·s pour dénoncer les violences à …
In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration …
I think Leif may have a copy of this? This looks so interesting.
In this debut collection of body-horror fairy tales and mid-apocalyptic Catholic cyberpunk, memory and myth, loss and age, these are …
Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban parks. Human rights lawyer Marcus …
In this classic work of developmental psychology, renowned psychiatrist and the coauthor of the #1 …
More research for my book.
Par un soir de neige, deux nouvelles-nées sont déposées sur le perron d'une ferme bourguignonne …
Je lis trop de livres à la fois.
Le chef-d'oeuvre de Melville (1819-1891) comme on ne l'a jamais lu dans l'édition française : …
Vient juste d'arriver, j'ai hâte!
