Look, everyone doing theory: a VERY fine book can be done in fewer than 200 pages. Use this as a model in future, especially if you want to be read.

Some favorite bits:

“speculative realism is an event rather than a philosophical position: it names a moment when the epistemological tide ebbed, revealing the iridescent shells of realism they had so long occluded.”
“all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally. The funeral pyre is not the same as the aardvark; the porceletta shell is not equivalent to the rugby ball. Not only is neither pair reducible to human encounter, but also neither is reducible to the other.”
“The power of flat ontology comes from its indiscretion. It refuses distinction and welcomes all into the temple of being”
Unit “is an ambivalent term, indifferent to the nature of what it names. It is also isolated, unitary, and specific, not simply the part of a whole or ontologically basic and indivisible like an atom.”
“units operate. That is, thing constantly machinate within themselves and mesh with one another, acting and reacting to properties and states while still keeping something secret.”
“Since units remain fundamentally in the dark about one another's infinite centers, the unit operations that become relevant to them differ”
“Everything whatsoever is like people on a subway, crunched together into uncomfortably intimate contact with strangers”
“Lists remind us that no matter how fluidly a system may operate, its members remain utterly isolated, mutual aliens” [except see what context does, via Harper's Index]
“Ontographical cataloging hones a virtue: the abandonment of anthropocentric narrative coherence in favor of worldly detail.”
“The tire and chassis, the ice milk and cup, the buckshot and soil: things like these exist not just for us but also for themselves and for one another, in ways that might surprise and dismay us.”
“For the ontographer, Aristotle was wrong: nature does not operate in the shortest way possible but in a multitude of locally streamlined yet globally inefficient ways.”
“anthropocentrism is unavoidable, at least for us humans. The same is true of any unit (for the bats, chiropteracentrism is the problem”)
“Objects try to make sense of each other through the qualities and logics they possess. When one object caricatures another, the first grasps the second in abstract, enough for the one to make some sense of the other given its own internal properties.”
“No matter how we may feel about eating or abstaining from meat, appeals to feeling and suffering exemplify the correlationist conceit: the assumption that the rights any thing should have are the same ones we believe we should have; that living things more like us are more important that those less like us; and that life itself is an existence of greater worth than inanimacy.”
“Metaphorism is necessarily anthropomorphic, and thus it challenges the metaphysician both to embrace and to yield to the limits of humanity.”
“It's possible to generalize, of course. For example, one could argue that no matter what sort of thing a unit is, it ought to have the right to be preserved and not destroyed. This is an impractical sentiment, however, because beings often need to eat or molt or burn or dissolve.”
Aristotelian final causation tends to be human-oriented
“Take another, weirder case: theories, concepts, and memes. Is there an ethics of ideas? Not an ethics for their application, as by human hands advancing a political cause, but an ethics for the interactions of ideas as such? When I utter a phrase, does it owe more than its utterance? …. When I encounter a catchy chorus on the radio or a clever edition of a web comic, does its desire to propagate create duty?”
“When we ask after the ethics of objects, we are really asking if moral qualities exist as sensual qualities. I'll float a categorical response: no. When the vegan eat the tofu, she bathes in its moisture, its blandness, its suppleness, its vegetality. Yet the soy does not bathe in her veganism.”
“An object enters an ethical relation when it attempts to reconcile the sensual qualities of another object vis-à-vis the former's withdrawn reality”
“Despite the fact that Levinas claims ethics as first philosophy, what he gives us is not really ethics but a metaphysics of intersubjectivity that he gives the name 'ethics'”
“Object ethics...can only ever be theorized once-removed, phenomenally, the parallel universes of private objects cradled silently in their cocoons, even while their surfaces seem to explode, devour, caress, or murder one another.”
“Ethical judgment itself proves a metaphorism, an attempt to reconcile the being of one unit in terms of another. We mistake it for the object's withdrawn essence.”
“If anticorrelationsim amounts to a rejection of only one correlation and an embrace of multiple correlations, then centrism is inevitable—whether it be anthropocentrism, petrocentrism, photocentrism, skylocentrism, or any other.”
“things render one another in infinite chain of weaker and weaker correlation, each altering and distorting the last such that it sense is rendered nonsense. It's not turtles all the way down, but metaphors.”
AVOID ACADEMIC MUMBLESPEAK!! “a sentiment of precision while, at best, delaying the moment when the writer actually has to be precise.”
“Like a space probe sent out to record, process, and report information, the alien phenomenologist's carpentry seeks to capture and characterize an experience it can never fully understand, offering a rendering satisfactory enough to allow the artifact's operator to gain some insight into an alien thing's experience.”
“We apply 'rigor', the scholarly version of Tinker Bell's fairy dust, in adequate quantities to stave off interest while cheating death.”
“To wonder is to suspend all trust in one's own logics, be they religion, science, philosophy, custom, or opinion, and to become subsumed entirely in the uniqueness of an object's native logics—flour granule, firearm, civil justice system, longship, fondant.”
“Let's leave rigor to the dead.” ( )