Books I've finished, newest first, with a few sentences on each. The ones marked put down I abandoned — which is usually a statement about timing rather than about the book.
2 finished · 2 this year
Second reading, and better than the first. The core claim is about legibility rather than about planning: states must simplify what they govern in order to govern it, and the simplification destroys the local knowledge it replaces. Uncomfortably close to what survey instruments do.
I resisted this for years because the title sounds like a textbook, which it is. The chapter on turning a topic into a question is worth the whole book, and I now hand it to anyone who says they don’t know what their thesis is about.
This entry exists to show what an abandoned book looks like in the list. Stopped around chapter four — the argument was already clear and the remaining chapters were examples of it. Delete this file once you have real books logged.