Read in '21

Norman Mailer was an interesting personage. At times a horrible and repulsive egoist (check out his interview in the Dick Cavett Show with Gore Vidal from '71 for example), while at his best, as he is here in his much lauded Armies of the Night, an extremely intelligent writer with a keen observational eye and a capability for seeing and understanding every side of a complex situation with lots of factors simultaneously in effect. His sense of humor and self-irony are hilarious, as is his decision of writing himself into the narrative... in third person. It is impossible not to notice how very fond the man is of his own voice and hence he occasionally does lapse into his rambling mode, but luckily those moments are brief, and the overall whole stays compact and is very readable.

For school. The book introduces about 10 different contemporary subcategories of historical research, such as digital history, neurohistory, posthumanist history, history of memory and of things. The subject matter is quite interesting indeed, but many of the writers have way too much of a fondness for unnecessarily complicated academic jargon, so mostly the actual process of reading the book was not as great of a pleasure as it had the potential of being.

Forests. Love 'em, but I recently realized that I don't know nearly enough about them, so I decided to start learning. It's a good introductory piece, definitely not a mind-blower, but it's got valid basic information about the different forest types of Finland with pictures.