13:04, Wednesday 31 Dec., 2008 Link

Books read December 2008, with date finished:

• Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1st, r.)
• When Species Meet, Donna J. Harroway (8th)
• Welcome to Mars, Fantasies of Science in the American Century: 1947-1959, Ken Hollings (18th)
• The Holocene: An Environmental History, Neil Roberts (30th)
• A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, Tom Phillips (31st)

I've also read a few sci-fi novellas using Stanza on my phone (One-Shot, James Blish; Invaders from the Infinite, John Campbell; The Colors of Space, Marion Zimmer Bradley) but for some reason, being texts and not books made out of paper, I don't feel they belong here. I am capricious with my list of books read.

I'm not feeling too wordy today, so let's keep it brief.

The Holocene: scale, the big picture like Annals of the Former World (read May this year), nature and culture as a single thing, the tortuous paths of cause and contingency, the planets and its natureculture and geological structures and histories as metaphor mines: the planet as self.

Hollings: a collage mixing facts and facts of fiction, a portrait of post-war America (it's my favourite period), the back-drop to cybernetics, flying saucers and suburbia.

A Humument: a text found in the pages of the novel A Human Document, each page a painting, a play between text where we are trained to silently ignore everything but the encoded information, and the visual surface where every position, colour, reference, juxtaposition, quality is important, and to ricochet between these two. Poetry.

You should read Welcome to Mars, def.