Following Suboptimalism’s lead, I’m opening myself up to trade books with you, my dear readership. All you have to do is send an email to “saddleblasters [at] gmail [etc]” stating the book you’d like me to read, along with a brief justification, or perhaps a question you’d like me to puzzle over as I read it. Fiction or non-fiction, prose or poetry — it’s all acceptable, so long as you’re sincere. In return I’ll send you a book recommendation of my own, likely in response to yours. Assuming I’m not completely inundated with trades, I’ll post about each book I read after I finish it. You are welcome to do so as well in return, but there’s no obligation.
For the sake of completeness, allow me to reproduce Suboptimalism’s (trademarked) book trade offer in full:
send me a book you want me to read (my email is the site name @protonmail.com), and i'll read it provided you agree to read a book i choose. nothing is off the table but be aware, if you propose anything particularly objectionable (e.g. “romantasy”) be prepared for me to offer in exchange something enormously long and/or dry like hegel’s phenomenology of the spirit. my book choices come with no guarantees, you can always decline the trade offer, i have absolutely no idea if this is something i'll be good at, i may come at it from different angles, basing it off your vibes, specific desires (if any), or at complete random. on my honor i will hold up my end of any book trade agreement, but i'm not sure how i'll enforce it on the other end if needed... perhaps through a campaign of online harrassment, or sending envelopes stuffed with menacing powders, or by demanding satisfaction in a duel.
My own motivation in attempting this is as an exercise in the art of the book review. Whenever I’ve set out to write reviews of books I love in the past, I get lost in the many different approaches I could take, often feeling the need to restart the book from scratch, unconvinced that I actually comprehended it. The book trade allows me to approach each book with a sense of distance — this book (and therefore the review) originates from someone else — and yet in writing the review I pull some small portion of this externality inside of me. And beyond anything else, having a single individual at the forefront of my mind does wonder when it comes to verbalizing my thoughts.
So with that, let’s begin the trades.
Trade #1: The Elementary Particles, recommended by Suboptimalism, to whom I recommended Wang in Love and Bondage.