The urge not to post until I’d finished reading a few more books was strong but I think it’s more important to be fairly more consistent about posting these things. Besides, my brain needs a break from the academic work I’ve been doing this weekend. I’ve been pretty overwhelmed with work, personal and health matters plus trying to keep some sort of writing schedule. The readings I’ve been doing lately have as usual mostly been related to various articles and research projects. I’m also examining multiple PhD dissertations so that’s been a heavy chunk of my reading the past few weeks.
Nevertheless, here’s a limited update:
Book(s) I have completed reading:
- Kartography — Kamila Shamsie : this was actually for work/supervision but I enjoyed it so much it goes on this list. I’m now very hungry to read more books by Shamsie because this was amazing.
- Network Effect by Martha Wells : the heftiest entry in The Murderbot Diaries, it has been my comfort read at night when I have energy for it. It’s also for me the most emotional book in the series, I cried with Murderbot, I cheered, I rooted and I almost didn’t want to finish it. What a glorious book! Anyway, clearly for me (and many others) this is the year of Murderbot. I’m really sad that I’m now at the last book. Hope there’ll be more.
Books I am currently reading:
- Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction — Sonia Sulaiman (ed)
- System Collapse — Martha Wells
- The Shadow Rising (WOT #4) — Robert Jordan (reread)
- The Night Country — Melissa Albert
- Ancillary Justice — Ann Leckie (reread)
I’m also rereading way too many theory/philosophy things for work, but I can share a snippet: The Poverty of Historicism by Karl Popper, Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, and it’s always necessary to reread Julia Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror at least 2-3 times a year not just for my own research but for my supervisees who gravitate to abjection and hauntology (cannot count how many times I reread Derrida, honestly). Also, various books related to Animal Studies and the Environmental Humanities since that’s the active research grant I received as research leader.
Books I recently purchased:
I didn’t buy many ebooks but I did get a couple: Meteor Strike and Saturn’s Army by K.M. Praschak. And in my last entry I forgot to mention that I also bought Dale Stromberg’s Mæj!
Published in Petaling, Selangor, Malaysia (10 August 2025)