User Profile

Jim Brown

jamesjbrownjr@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 6 months ago

jamesjbrownjr.net English professor Teaches and studies rhetoric and digital studies Director of the Rutgers-Camden Digital Studies Center (DiSC): digitalstudies.camden.rutgers.edu

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Jim Brown's books

Currently Reading

2024 Reading Goal

58% complete! Jim Brown has read 41 of 70 books.

Sally Rooney: Intermezzo (Hardcover, english language, 2024, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 5 stars

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have …

Rooney doesn't deserve the hate

No rating

Sally Rooney gets hate, but I'm convinced that people are made that she's so good at such a young age. She's great at relationships. I want to write a paper about her use of the word "Yes" in this book - it comes up during so many internal monologues, across characters. Characters stumble into an understanding of something and say "Yes." I'm not sure if it's a tick across her novels - I've never noticed it before.

Martin MacInnes: In Ascension (2023, Atlantic Books, Limited) 4 stars

Leigh's upbringing in Rotterdam revolved around her fascination with the waterfront, which served as a …

Cixin Liu + Jeff Vandermeer

No rating

Beautiful book.

"Even at this distance, Jupiter is incomprehensibly vast. We stare through the porthole at its soft milky hue, the watercolour whirls, repeating our unbelief. K looks at the settings on the screen showing the camera feed. Something in the rendering of Jupiter looks too virtual, too predictable. It's exactly like the images I've seen of it before. This is a senseless thing to say, of course, but I expected the gas giant to appear different when I saw it myself, so close. It looks too perfect, too controlled. It lacks independence, as if conforming to our expectations, which is ironically not what we expected at all. You're in shock, Tyler says. We all are. It isn't the camera, or the screen, K, it's us. We don't know how to see it." (357)

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Message (2024, Random House Publishing Group) 5 stars

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of …

Tempting to think that a book might break through

No rating

The tide has certainly shifted in the U.S. when it comes to the conversation around Palestine, and this book is more evidence of this. It is tempting to think that because Coates is the author, this book will somehow break through or crack open the rhetorical situation and allow things to be said that have, to date, been deemed unsayable. But I think that's a dream. Unfortunately, the shift in public conversation has tended to coincide with a ratcheting up of the killing of civilians. Those who think that rhetoric and discourse are an alternative to violence will have to contend with that fact.

"An inhuman system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. Editors and writers like to think that they are not part of such systems, that they are independent, objective, and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their …

Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go (Paperback, 2010) 4 stars

Kathy, a clone about to donate all her organs and die, reflects on her past …

what's happening at the edges

No rating

In a recent review of The Remains of the Days, I said that Ishiguro's characters "revel in tedium," and this happens again in Never Let Me Go. This time, that tedium is their attempt to make sense of their lives. It's either unthinkable or too difficult for these characters to accept that they are just disposable, that they have no interiority. The book is evidence that they do in fact have that interiority, but the ending makes clear that there's a whole set of cultural machinery set up to treat them as resources rather than people.

In that review of The Remains of the Day, I said the book "is deep in the weeds of something that seems ridiculous while all of these other more important things are happening around the edges." I'm realizing that this is Ishiguro's modus operandi. He's not ignoring the important historical events - he's just …

Mercy Romero: Toward Camden (2021, Duke University Press) No rating

meditation on place

No rating

This is a beautifully written book that focuses on Camden, New Jersey, where I teach. I was also lucky enough to meet the author during a visit to campus. The strongest feature of this book is its ability to sit with the complexities of urban spaces that are constantly exploited, "revitalized," ignored, bulldozed, exoticized, and more. Romero grew up in Camden, and she wrote the book during a return visit to the city after her home was gone. It's a work of poetry, narrative, and analysis. It's rare to see an author pull of all of these at once.