Reading 2018

I’d love to tell you want it all meant, but instead I’ll just share a partial [but unranked] list of the books I read this year.

Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif

The Grass Crown by Colleen McCullough

Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

Primeros Pobladores; Hispanic Americans of the Ute Frontier, by Frances Leon Quintana

God, Dr. Buzzard and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee talks about life on Sapelo Island, Georgia by Cornelia Walker Bailey and Christena Beldsoe

Les Passions Intellectuelles by Elisabeth Badinter

Do well and be well in 2019.

Dead Malls

mall_dead

This adds a whole other dimension to the concept of Lake Eery:

A local billionaire built it, and they did not come. The South China Mall was the most ambitious and largest retail space every conceived in China, if not the world, when it opened in 2005. Constructed smack in the middle of the Pearl River Delta between Shenzhen and Guangzhou, about 4 million people live within six miles of it, 9 million within twelve miles and 40 million within sixty miles. Nonetheless, six years later, the South China Mall only maintains a 1% occupancy rate at best. This unabatedly empty temple to consumerism remains unfinished on top floors and is only sporadically visited thanks to the attached amusement park, Amazing World. For the time being dust and dismembered mannequins reign over the 6.5 million square foot venture. Although China might be the fastest growing consumer market in the world, the South China Mall reveals the vulnerability of this burgeoning economic giant. Also, check out this short film done on the place by Sam Green.

Without looking back through, I’ve written about this before… but, yikes. Not a whole lot to say, just noting the passing of an epoch, I would hope.

Via Romm.

Dead Malls

Friday Reading Slideshow. Found by Mrs. Green.

The photo shows a former Pep Boys store in Columbus, Ohio, photographed in August 2009. Ulrich had spent a long day shooting at a mall down the street; it was 3 a.m. when he stopped here. Inside the lobby, he could see a dead bird. He went in for a close-up, not realizing a motion sensor was still active. “I started to step in, and this alarm went screaming,” Ulrich recalls. “It probably went off for half an hour.” This being a ghost store, though, no one came.