@compostablespork Ooh, I'm very interested to hear what you make of this book. The premise seems both intriguing and fraught.
moving to outside.ofa.dog replied to Bookspork's status
Bookspork replied to moving to outside.ofa.dog's status
@eldang bear with me! This is my first status reply! I take it you mean Origin? (I don't love the layout of this page, so it's not 100% clear to me which book you mean.)
Origin - I've been jumping around a bit (as sometimes happens with nonfiction) trying to find a place that'll grab me. I realized one huge incompatibility with my brain and getting hooked here is that I've never been good at time. Like 200 years feels like 600 years, I can't get the sense of the difference. So big revelations like "they thought it was 12000 years ago but it's really 18000 years ago!" is just... I can't feel it. So my eyes glazed over a lot in the whole first section which was a lot of "here's what white people used to think" and while some of the stories were fascinating, I couldn't really glean …
@eldang bear with me! This is my first status reply! I take it you mean Origin? (I don't love the layout of this page, so it's not 100% clear to me which book you mean.)
Origin - I've been jumping around a bit (as sometimes happens with nonfiction) trying to find a place that'll grab me. I realized one huge incompatibility with my brain and getting hooked here is that I've never been good at time. Like 200 years feels like 600 years, I can't get the sense of the difference. So big revelations like "they thought it was 12000 years ago but it's really 18000 years ago!" is just... I can't feel it. So my eyes glazed over a lot in the whole first section which was a lot of "here's what white people used to think" and while some of the stories were fascinating, I couldn't really glean more overall than there were a lot of really wrong racist ideas that were really entrenched.
So I turned to the second section, where she talks more about her specific work, and I'm finding that more engrossing, but I'm not far into it and it's due back on Thursday. So, I may not have many conclusions!
moving to outside.ofa.dog replied to Bookspork's status
@compostablespork No worries! I have been finding that threading here takes a bit of time to get used to, because it's in that territory of being similar to but not quite like mastodon's, so sometimes I make wrong assumptions. But anyway, yes I did mean Origin. That first section sounds like rehashing arguments that I'm reasonably familiar with (and you clearly already were too), but it's the added detail I'm interested in because I haven't read anything book length on the subject.