Books I Read March 9th, 2025

This week I was grateful for books. Not mine so much. Other peoples.

She Who Waits by Daniel Polansky – Quite candidly, I'd hoped it would be better. On the other hand, re-reading it did lead me to recognize a flaw in my writing style which I still sometimes do, so that was something. And I was like, 25 when I wrote it.

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell – A surrealistic multi-generational re-telling of the modern history of the state of Zambia. As a sub genre, I kind of wish we'd let this die with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I guess that's on me for picking it up.

A Shining by Jon Fosse – A man gets lost in the forest in another of Fosse's short, sharp fantasies. I enjoyed it but am looking forward to reading something of his that's a bit more substantial.

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gerard Prunier – An exhaustively research, compellingly intimate dissection of the Congolese war of (roughly) 96-02, the ethnic and political complexities of which make the dissolution of the Balkans look like the American Civil War. Prunier does an extraordinary job of walking us through the minutia of the conflict while offering what seems a genuinely even-handed insight into what started and prolonged the deadliest conflict since WW2, albeit one that was virtually completely ignored by the foreign press (a situation which, alas, continues in the region to this day). Excellent, if horrifying.

As an unrelated note, it's a source of constant annoyance to me how difficult it is to find works of popular history about Africa, or for that mater the third world, or for that matter the second world, or for that matter basically anything that isn't about Nazis or the founding fathers. Forty fucking books about the Normandy landings come out every year but heaven forbid I want to learn something about the Biafran conflict or say, post-Colonial North Africa.