blogcutter

- Reading: 81 books to 13 Aug 2025.

DNFs: 5/86. I've had a higher percentage of dnfs than usual this year. Can't decide if my sense of personal mortality and the easy availability of other reading material is causing me to be pickier or whether I'm finally inside a demographic targeted for enough marketing guff to negatively effect my choices. Woe is me - the algorithms fail again &c. An especially surprising dnf was a book about trains and train travel that the author had mysteriously managed to make dull!

Current reading: 81. Perspectives by Laurent Binet, a library reservation with a waiting list, which was recommended by a discerning friend and is a good read so far (approximately 30% in).

Finished reading: 80. The Rings of Saturn, by WG Sebald, (translated by Michael Hulse), 1995 (1999), a patchwork of fictionalised (?) autobiographical essays and historical fact-tion and I-refuse-to-call-this-a-novel, 3/5. As I previously mentioned, I read this meditation on death and destruction while in similar settings to the framing story of a walk along the East Anglian coastline, and with the addition of extreme and bizarre weather this occasionally became a near-hallucinatory experience. I didn't find it engaging, however, nor as depressing as reading too much poetry by Thomas Hardy. Although I admit I over-identify with the habit of living like a refugee in your own life, as I'm sure many people exiled traumatically from their roots would. This is a better review of Rings of Saturn than I could ever write, lol (and, yes, three stars):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/221843487

- Holiday history, enslavement: there was a debate about whether I'd visit Castell Penrhyn while I was in the area (I'm a NT member so get in free). I'll note here that I have a permanent bee in my bonnet about the way enslavers such as the Pennants are described and especially the following normative wording (not this author, whose book I enjoyed, but the whole normative framing):

"the Pennants [family], received £14,683 17s. 2d. (around 1.3 million today) for the freeing of 764 enslaved people in Jamaica"*

Because what actually happened was that the British people collectively through the British state bought people enslaved legally under British law, and the British people chose to free those enslaved people after changing British law to make owning people as chattel slaves illegal (although that didn't end other forms of "slave" labour, as the continued use of "indentured labour" and the need for a Modern Slavery Act in 2015 demonstrates). Owners of enslaved people in the British Empire could have legally "freed" those people any time but they didn't want to do so. The act of the British state buying and freeing enslaved people is framed as "compensation" for the owners "freeing" slaves, but the owners were forced by law to allow their slaves to nominally go free, and I for one refuse to accept any framing that credits the enslavers and not the people who made them stop (and British taxpayers continued paying for that from 1833 until 2015). This belated, and expensive, partial justice isn't worthy of any praise or pride but we should at least be honest about who did what, and what exactly they did. Reminder: the abolition of chattel slavery only became a popular cause after successful revolts by enslaved people, and the British "sugar strike" that hit enslavers' profits (the boycott was mostly participated in by working and middle class British women), and William Wilberforce et alia wanted to slow down the freeing of enslaved people.

* Note: the ex-slaves received no compensation, obv.