Ben Turner
Infinite City changed how I thought about San Francisco, the Bay Area and pretty much every cit I have lived in. The love and attentiveness paid to the multitudes contained within SF as a city and as a place (spiritually, socially, psychologically) is truly breath-taking. I would read a version with 10 times as many essays.
Helpful reminders for how to think through writing, to be clearer and to communicate important ideas concisely
I love Jesse, his Good One podcast and I especially loved this book. He breaks the book down into a series of separate but overlapping and interconnected essays, with titles like “Audience”, “Truth”, “Context” and “Connection”. I couldn't be more grateful to consume an appreciation of comedy with such a thoughtful lens (and it's funny, what more can you ask for?)
I so thoroughly enjoyed this book, and in large part of what Dederer doesn't do: she's not preachy, she's not minimizing of the severity of her task (making sense of the art of “monsters”). Rather, she takes seriously both the work of some many great and their crimes, moral if not also legal. She does this while taking you along for the ride and forcing (helping?) you interrogate how you square what you love with what you believe, as she does so well in this passage:
“[W]ho is this ‘we' that's always turning up in critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking the mantle of easy authority. It's the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist. Can you? When I say ‘we', I mean I. I mean you“
Hilarious in ways I didn't know books could be - tweet-like vignettes - that give way to a deeply moving, heartbreaking set of experiences that awed me
A really beautiful book telling the story of a grandmother and her relationship with her granddaughter. Between the use of different styles of storytelling to the humour and warmth of the writing, this book was short but very sweet
A review on the back of the book likened the writing to having a thoughtful friend's opinion and insight into a number of issues. I fully agree. I would have never thought of so directly connecting the worlds of tech to nature and simply being. Thoroughly recommend to anyone for whom the description speaks to them at all.
Ocean Vuong has a way of using words that conjure such vivid images for me - truly mesmerizing
Kyle's writing, in all its venues, has meant a great deal to me for a very long time. He gives words to the thoughts I didn't think could be put to paper, and he does so with care, reflectiveness and a deep perceptiveness. This book feels like the beautiful byproduct of so much of his writing over the past few years, weaving together observations and experiences about the internet, culture, art, design and human beings. Sometimes, the conclusions he arrives at feel somewhat obvious: for instance, we should be more intentional about how we curate our own taste. But this “obviousness” betrays a radical, humanistic reminder: we are what we consume and if we do so a little bit less online and with some love, maybe we too can be the better for it.