Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, July 2025

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on modernist land art or Western Marxism. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after a preschooler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

(Left almost-finished in 2025, because I got interrupted, and posted in 2026, because I wanted to procrastinate about half-a-dozen research projects.)

Andrea Camilleri, The Overnight Kidnapper

Mind-candy mystery from a highly reliable author. (In fact, deliberately limit the pace at which I read Camilleri books, because there are only so man.) This is, I think, the second time in this series where I guessed whodunnit, but it hardly mattered. §

Lois McMaster Bujold, Demon Daughter, Penric and the Bandit, The Adventure of the Demonic Ox

Mind-candy fantasy from a highly reliable author, who is not afraid of putting beloved characters through the wringer. §

Erin Hogan, Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West

Mind candy: A fun travelogue which does what it says in the title. It pretty much satisfies any impulses I might have to actually see any of the artworks in question. No familiarity with art-critical jargon required, though long passages are (more or less explicitly) art criticism. §

ObLinkage: An interview with Hogan by the publisher.

Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas [doi:10.1525/9780520352575]

I am professionally interested in questions of holistic knowledge (what does it mean to say that one has knowledge of the whole of something? how can such knowledge be acquired? is holistic knowledge still in some senses selective? how can competing accounts of the whole be compared or adjudicated? etc.). I am also very interested, avocationally, in 20th century Marxist thought. I nonetheless found this book somewhat disappointing, because Jay seemed content to expound the authors he covers in more or less their own terms, rather than subjecting them to anything like actual epistemological or methodological criticism. He does make plenty of critical remarks, but at the level of style, or of their political connotations rather than their logical implications. §

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; The Progressive Forces; Philosophy; The Beloved Republic; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime