Kev Nickells (Author of Taylor Swift for Adults)

Kev Nickells rated a book it was amazing Practicing Social Ecology: From Bookchin to Rojava and Beyond (FireWorks) by Eleanor Finley	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The strapline 'from Bookchin to Rojava and beyond...' is the interesting bit for me - I'm keen to read more about Rojava on account of having a faint idea that they're doing democracy right at the moment. Bookchin I should know more about, as he's ba ...more
Jan 11, 2026 10:28AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Practicing Social Ecology by Eleanor Finley. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Practicing Social Ecology by Eleanor Finley <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Kev Nickells liked Phoenix Scholz-Krishna's review of A Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses: "I read this in bits and pieces (which is nice, considering the format) and finished it today. A very interesting voice, whose cadences and idiosyncratic sentences remind me of Tim Etchells (and that's a very good thing)."
Jan 04, 2026 04:44AM · see review
Kev Nickells rated a book it was amazing Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes from a Trap Feminist by Sesali Bowen	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Academically this is a top-tier ethnography. Less formally, it's a touching set of anecdotes of lived experiences. Bowen is brilliantly articulate and, importantly, very happy to switch modes - much of this is in the language of the trap - meaning, l ...more
Jan 04, 2026 04:33AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Bad Fat Black Girl by Sesali Bowen. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Bad Fat Black Girl by Sesali Bowen <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Kev Nickells rated a book it was amazing In the Dust of This Planet (Horror of Philosophy, #1) by Eugene Thacker	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This ticks a few boxes for me (especially with regards pre-enlightenment philosophy and Theology). We are of course boycotting Zero at the moment so do buy it second-hand if you can. So this is dealing with a few ideas from pre-enlightenment or 'scie ...more
Dec 31, 2025 03:42AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of In the Dust of This Planet by Eugene Thacker. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — In the Dust of This Planet by Eugene Thacker <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Kev Nickells wants to read In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent by Graham Priest	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Dec 30, 2025 02:12PM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of In Contradiction by Graham Priest. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — In Contradiction by Graham Priest <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Kev Nickells rated a book it was amazing Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun Harrison (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
A present from my partner for Christmas which allowed me to whip through it in about a day. It's a fairly short number. It's got lovely typesetting (important to me). It deals with stuff that I don't necessarily know about first-hand - transness, bla ...more
Dec 28, 2025 09:04AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Belly of the Beast by Da’Shaun Harrison. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Belly of the Beast by Da’Shaun Harrison <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Kev Nickells rated a book it was amazing There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I'm not much of a one for sci-fi or fantasy or narrative fiction so I'm not sure if I'm qualified to comment on this. But FWIW I enjoyed it muchly. I don't want to give too much away but the premise, such as it is, deals with antimemetics - an agency ...more
Dec 21, 2025 07:33AM · like · see review
Kev Nickells rated a book it was amazing Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
A better book than I was expecting. Semiotext(e) books have tended towards the dusty Marxist side of things for my liking and Wang's book is definitely not that. It feels like a collection of essays but the point is coherent and congruous. There's a ...more
Dec 05, 2025 09:24AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Kev Nickells rated a book really liked it The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics by Eusi Kwayana	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
It's a particular vantage on leftist politics and post-colonial thinking. Kwayana is speaking from transitory Guyana which is fractured along multiple lines: post-colonial entities, trade unionism, multiple ethnic disparities etc. Kwayana speaks for ...more
Nov 16, 2025 09:24AM · like · see review
Kev Nickells rated a book really liked it Dialectic of Duration by Gaston Bachelard	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
It's one of those books where I'm aware of Bergson - this book is a riposte to him - but I haven't read enough of Bergson to give a proper assessment. There's a fascinating problem in philosophy with time - is it experienced continuously or atomicall ...more
Nov 16, 2025 09:23AM · like · see review

Kev Nickells rated a book it was amazing

Practicing Social Ecology by Eleanor Finley

Practicing Social Ecology: From Bookchin to Rojava and Beyond (FireWorks)
by Eleanor Finley

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The strapline 'from Bookchin to Rojava and beyond...' is the interesting bit for me - I'm keen to read more about Rojava on account of having a faint idea that they're doing democracy right at the moment. Bookchin I should know more about, as he's ba The strapline 'from Bookchin to Rojava and beyond...' is the interesting bit for me - I'm keen to read more about Rojava on account of having a faint idea that they're doing democracy right at the moment. Bookchin I should know more about, as he's bang in the middle of what I see of debates on ecology, environmentalism, and anarchism.

So you could say this book is a bit of a 'state of the nation' in terms of contemporary leftist practice. There's a series of imperatives at play here, and ones that are familiar - the problem of the nation state, the creation of non-national groupings, the organisation thereof, and the present climate catastrophe. Finley weaves together the subjects deftly and there's a decent heft to her case studies in specific subject areas (social ecology, eco-communities, assembly-based democracy, democratic confederalism). And if that sounds like it's going to be a book of abstract theory - it's resolutely not. While there's plenty of theory, there's a decent amount of case studies and interviews to pick out how movements like the PKK in Rojava work.

It's subtly fairly feminist as well - perhaps less overtly dealing in feminist theory but certainly dappling the importance of including minority voices. Importantly, that's not limited to demographic representation but also noting the modes of democracy - for instance, the tendency for traditional 'debate' to take a combative tone, while noting a more feminist take whereby people's perspectives are reconciled to larger projects.

Finally the case is made for democratic confederalism - a form of direct democracy that looks close to the federalism of 20th century anarchism. The key being that the studies Finley highlights are ones that seek to redress power imbalances and return land rights to natives. There's plenty here that extends beyond (traditional) political organisation - generating charters which guarantee equity among members could be taken to any organisation of people, from book clubs to event promotion.

I'd stress this is also a book which does contain theory but it's by no means dry or unreadable - I'd say it has an academic integrity but it's a long way from impenetrable theory, and perhaps most encouraging of all, it dares to be optimistic about the future of leftist organisation in the fact of climate catastrophe. ...more

Kev Nickells liked Phoenix Scholz-Krishna's review of A Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses:

A Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses by Lucy Corin

"I read this in bits and pieces (which is nice, considering the format) and finished it today. A very interesting voice, whose cadences and idiosyncratic sentences remind me of Tim Etchells (and that's a very good thing)."

Kev Nickells rated a book it was amazing

Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes from a Trap Feminist
by Sesali Bowen

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Academically this is a top-tier ethnography. Less formally, it's a touching set of anecdotes of lived experiences. Bowen is brilliantly articulate and, importantly, very happy to switch modes - much of this is in the language of the trap - meaning, l ...more

Kev Nickells rated a book it was amazing

In the Dust of This Planet by Eugene Thacker

In the Dust of This Planet (Horror of Philosophy, #1)
by Eugene Thacker

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This ticks a few boxes for me (especially with regards pre-enlightenment philosophy and Theology). We are of course boycotting Zero at the moment so do buy it second-hand if you can.

So this is dealing with a few ideas from pre-enlightenment or 'scie This ticks a few boxes for me (especially with regards pre-enlightenment philosophy and Theology). We are of course boycotting Zero at the moment so do buy it second-hand if you can.

So this is dealing with a few ideas from pre-enlightenment or 'scientistic' epistemology - demonology, occultism - and how those principles are refracted through horror. The key insight of Thacker's that struck me was that he was keen to circumscribe that (eg) demonology isn't rendered as something to be considered in broader sociological terms (where many thinkers would say something like 'the demon is a manifestation of social anxieties'). Rather Thacker uses the manifest-unknown to think through ideas like nihilism (we might say the nihilate - thought tending towards nihil), which is to say, taking the sources not as antiquated curios so much as key sources in the unknown.

This in my head is similar to a thread that runs through a lot of 20th-century theology - that of taking the predicate of (nominally) antiquated text as serious in its own terms rather than justifying it exclusively in contemporary terms. A kind of non-condescending use of older texts - which is worth saying that in contemporary theology can quickly lead to some volatile conclusions (say the Exclusivism of Daniel Strange). This approach to demonology also problematises a kind of fixed Heideggerian dasein - not least because demonology is so diffuse in its horror. As Thacker points out, it is not merely the anthropic which is saturated with demons (or horror), the landscape (trees, mountains etc) can be writ with demons. The principle of a this and not-this, a thing-in-itself is made complex when horror is invested in the object-in-itself.

A counterpoint to the above would be 'that's a silly way of seeing things' and that's reasonable. Worth noting that Thacker is often drily witty here - there's a sense that Thacker's sincerity isn't per se to reify occultism (which is likely true of his medieval sources) but rather to use the unhewn impulse of horror to think-towards the nihilate. His use of contemporary and earlier horror (say, Dante's inferno through to early 20th-century literature) ends up articulating a contemporary-to-us horror of climatology. Which is an interesting subject for 'reification' in the definitive sense of 'making the abstract concrete' - climate apocalypse leaves us with philosophical quandaries of our own annihilation (how to think the absence of humans-to-think) and is hugely abstract - we're left with a litany of effects but the holistic view of climate-in-general is unknowably diffuse.

That is to say, in conclusion, that this work does a great job of bringing us closer to the horror of the unknown. Not really a happy conclusion but the world is on fire so this feels like a necessary work for the coming horror. ...more

Kev Nickells wants to read

In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent
by Graham Priest

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Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
by Da’Shaun Harrison (Goodreads Author)

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A present from my partner for Christmas which allowed me to whip through it in about a day.

It's a fairly short number. It's got lovely typesetting (important to me). It deals with stuff that I don't necessarily know about first-hand - transness, bla ...more

Kev Nickells rated a book it was amazing

There Is No Antimemetics Division
by qntm (Goodreads Author)

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I'm not much of a one for sci-fi or fantasy or narrative fiction so I'm not sure if I'm qualified to comment on this. But FWIW I enjoyed it muchly.

I don't want to give too much away but the premise, such as it is, deals with antimemetics - an agency I'm not much of a one for sci-fi or fantasy or narrative fiction so I'm not sure if I'm qualified to comment on this. But FWIW I enjoyed it muchly.

I don't want to give too much away but the premise, such as it is, deals with antimemetics - an agency devoted to documenting and handling Unknowns. Per se I'd probably say this is dystopian, insofar as the agency never quite qualifies itself as successful. The fiddly part of this is that Unknowns are typically hidden from view and deliberately un-knowable. And so the caprice of mnestics operates within the antimimetics division - means of not-forgetting or rendering manifest the Unknowns.

Now that could've been a convoluted mess but qntm deals with it well. I've seen some reviews saying this book is difficult to follow and I'd probably agree there are degrees of opacity, as well as a non-continuous narrative. For my money that's all spice to the soup though - as the main storyline deals in opacity and oblique presences, so too does the structure appear discontinuous and foggy.

The thing for me that probably interests me most is the metaphors that arise from the principle of seeing-the-unseen. You can read a few narratives into that - Theological ones, magical ones, technological ones (insofar as our very-digital world is often abstractions obscuring abstractions), political ones... the mechanics of hypostasis (in its many definitions), the perilousness of unseen malicious presences. Perhaps there's also the political ambiguity of conspiracy there - per se we know that state-level conspiracies have happened, which doesn't qualify all conspiracy; but the germ of speculation (as in, to see through the deliberately-obscured) easily grows into neo-fascist conspiracy (or decent political analysis).

So all of that is kind of speculative 'what next...' for the concepts in this book. It's probably the case that not everyone cares about that stuff, and good for them. I'd say the engine of suspense here works because there's a very broad conceptual field that's activated as maliciously opaque, at once everyday and fantastical. I liked this book a lot. ...more

Kev Nickells rated a book it was amazing

Carceral Capitalism
by Jackie Wang

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A better book than I was expecting. Semiotext(e) books have tended towards the dusty Marxist side of things for my liking and Wang's book is definitely not that. It feels like a collection of essays but the point is coherent and congruous. There's a A better book than I was expecting. Semiotext(e) books have tended towards the dusty Marxist side of things for my liking and Wang's book is definitely not that. It feels like a collection of essays but the point is coherent and congruous. There's a great dissolving of the line between critical essays and poetry (especially towards the end) which is arguably a great detournement from the coldly academic and opens up the book's space to more voices. There's also frequent references to Wang's incarcerated brother, giving an emotional, personal perspective that carceral (il)logic that (perhaps) prevents incarceration from appearing as an unjust abstraction.

Primarily this is focused on incarceration and capitalism, as you'd no doubt imagine from the title. It's all of a piece with anti-racist / leftist notions of incarceration - conceptually I'd probably draw a line from Foucauldian conceptions of the carceral nature of institutions and join that line to Black Panther / Black Lives Matter ideas around the criminalisation of minorities in the US, especially black folk.

There's plenty in this that cuts right to the quick in detailing the abject horror of the combination of capital and prisons in the US - I was particularly shocked by the references to cycles of punitive capital where an entirely minor infraction leads to cycles of imprisonment and debt - and the two systems being complementary. Someone gets caught stealing a can of beer and ends up in a whirlpool of for-profit legal / prison networks. Speaking as a Brit - where black Britons are definitely treated terribly - the extent of this in the US took me aback, though I'm aware the situation is and always has been fucked.

The broad notion of carceral capitalism perhaps is that prison systems, capital, technology and the very real immiseration of black Americans are all of a piece, complementary and insidiously so. The discussion on PredPol - technology 'enhanced' predictive policing is chilling but not conspiratorial. Speaking as someone who works in tech in 2025 I very much recognise that the entirely loaded presuppositions of an algorithmic system to do the complex and enormous work of criminal sociology without reference beyond self-selecting cohorts (eg, carceral and capitalistic systems) are entirely typical and ghoulish. Put another way - algorithms operating with incomplete and inherently racist data will necessarily reproduce racist, criminalising outcomes.

I want to emphasise again how much I enjoyed the interlacing of arguments with poetic and citational effects - it's dark and gruelling subject matter and something about the poetic effect humanises that.

I've seen other reviews saying that a lot of this material appears elsewhere. Which may be true but I think this is a succinct and emotionally-charged rendering of the material and holds up particularly well with a bit more remove from its context (post-occupy, early BLM) - we can see from Carceral Capitalis that the US' decline into authoritarian and fascistic politics is entirely contiguous with the institutions of the carceral state. ...more

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The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics
by Eusi Kwayana

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It's a particular vantage on leftist politics and post-colonial thinking. Kwayana is speaking from transitory Guyana which is fractured along multiple lines: post-colonial entities, trade unionism, multiple ethnic disparities etc. Kwayana speaks for ...more

Kev Nickells rated a book really liked it

Dialectic of Duration
by Gaston Bachelard

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It's one of those books where I'm aware of Bergson - this book is a riposte to him - but I haven't read enough of Bergson to give a proper assessment.

There's a fascinating problem in philosophy with time - is it experienced continuously or atomicall ...more

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	Taylor Swift for Adults: Taking Swift Seriously 3.56 avg rating — 32 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
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