Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Decoratively knowable

    Decoratively knowable

    Monstress is really getting cracking now. Volume Three: Haven is clearly still well within the originary story arc, without any of the far-fetched desperation typical of series that have been running too long. Of course much of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s opus is in many ways extremely far-fetched, but everything in the story so Read more

  • Making space

    Making space

    I funded this wonderful independent project on [insert name of well-known pre-funding site], and then when the slim volume arrived it somehow got mulched in my enormous piles of books and I never read it. I recently found it (hooray), and also found out it had a follow up (hooray) which somehow I never became Read more

  • The temporary truths of moving targets

    The temporary truths of moving targets

    The sociologist and social philosopher Pierre Bourdieu is one of those (many) writers and thinkers to whose ideas I have been exposed, and which I have haltingly deployed, without ever really investigating their work. I have finally got around to doing so, in Bourdieu’s case, by way of preparing to read another book that I Read more

  • A humane document

    A humane document

    Mother London was something of a surprise to me, inasmuch as it’s something I needed to read, something that should have been more or less top of my reading list, but which I simply happened to read by chance. Firstly it was chance that I happened to spot it in my friend Dave’s bookshop, and Read more

  • Angry apotheosis

    Angry apotheosis

    I read bits and pieces of Charley’s War as a kid, in copies of Battle picked up from jumble sales and charity shops, but I was never a big fan of war comics, so I didn’t exactly follow it. The episodes I did see made a big impression on me however. Even given Pat Mills’ Read more

  • Ammunition

    Ammunition

    Behave is a behemoth of a book. Unless you know quite a lot about neurobiology already, you’ll need to read the appendices: including those, it clocks in at seven-hundred and seventeen pages. You may well be familiar with longer reference books, or textbooks, or even novels, but this is a work of popular science – Read more