Yes, austerity combined with the loss of their colonies made the 90s particularly painful for russia, but yeltsin only came into power because of the popularity of conservative “russia first” chauvinism. How can the depradations of the mid 90s have caused the ultranationalism of 1991?
Certainly, the subsequent decades of national humiliation poured fuel on the fire of russian fascism but that shit was already there
Between reading another way better book I finished Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison, a short story collection. Here’s my review.
I mainly picked this up to get a sense of if I liked Ellison’s writing style when he was forced by format to keep it succinct and carve down to just the meat of the thing. Turns out, he’s just a baby with a poopy daipey about everything he writes about. There’s occasional sentences here and there that had a nugget of potential, but nothing made up for entire stories being naught but misogynistic rants and paper-thin one-sentence gags stretched like an SNL sketch. This felt like he was just trying to get words on the page for some magazine or publication, and this meant any annoyance he’d encountered recently would be tortured into a shitty monster story. Uggghhh.
Read bell hooks’ ‘The Will to Change’. It’s an extended feminist essay examining where masculinity is in culture and current feminist discourse and enough of it still rings fairly true to be resonant. It concerns the ‘normal traumatisation’ of boys and simply explains the effect on patriarchy on the restriction of boys’ lives and eventually the emotional stunting and non-relational, homophobic inculcation of most men. I found myself feeling very sad reading it but in a good way. I’ve been processing a lot of what the book discusses in therapy (not deliberately at first) and the scars are clearer to see from reading it. My own dissociation from most men in society can be explained as a rejection of the pater-ideology rather than some essential problem of men. Was reassuring as I figure out some gender stuff (currently in the nb zone) and explore why I can’t access the emotions I want.
Sadly as much as relational, constructive, positive masculinity might be desirable it is not so simple to access as it goes widely underdiscussed in both the mainstream and in feminism. hooks repeatedly calls for naming patriarchy as the main cause in the relevant contexts as a solution. A lot of men’s mental health championing and youth guidance sort of confronts the problem without doing so and it’s interesting to wonder whether such a sea change could happen. Harder to imagine the disinfection of masculinity than the end of the world etc.
geek love by katherine dunn is shaping up to be my best reading experience in the last few years, the last book that gripped me this much was when gravity fails
Really enjoyed The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann. What an absolute nightmare. Here’s my review.
I also posted a few excerpts over here:
For some reason I had it in my head that this was going to be a work of fiction, but no, this actually happened and I greatly appreciated how much research was put into lining up the various firsthand accounts with their interests and their intended presentation for the eventual review of the British Imperial Navy court martial. The gaps are filled in very elegantly by some informed fiction here and there, usually supplemented by evidence from other sailors and officers of the time, or other explorers throughout history. This results in a book that goes down very easy, despite it being what is essentially a nonstop torture circus where men become as beasts, the social contract collapses and death becomes a numbing routine.
I think it’s that constant scattershot death that stuck with me the most. Men would become sick with some horrible malady like scurvy and cling to life for months, only to die in a room full of other sick men when the walls of the vessel are breached. Men go scavenging and simply die on their feet, as if the presence of their fellow shipmates were the only think keeping them together. Men die to simple hopelessness when realizing their recent torturous efforts were for nothing - one dude, upon realizing they had backtracked two weeks in error in their shitty overstuffed life boat, stood, let out of a cackling madman laugh, and died on his feet. There’s this element of purpose and luck being the only things that will keep you alive, and if you lose either, you’re dead. Having any reason to keep going, any hope at all, will literally keep you alive. I was frequently moved by this as each new cruel pox or disaster befell them.
Great read, I’m definitely going to check out Grann’s other books.
Thinking about picking up a French language book. Anyone know about these?
La Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes seems like it’s up my alley.
Finished The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester and greatly enjoyed it. Written way back in 1956, originally with the much more fitting title of Tiger! Tiger!, this was one of two banger novels Bester penned before turning to TV for more or less the rest of his career. Here’s my review.
I was really pleasantly surprised by this one. I’d heard it was very influential to the cyberpunk genre but I had no idea that it originated a ton of the core elements we’ve seen in the 70 years since. Honestly too many to list, you start to realize the coolest ideas in Babylon 5 or Edgerunners or Neromancer or Blade Runner or The Expanse were largely drawn from this book. Crucially, though, they’re all used well, they are introduced and they are used to great effect to enhance the story and add dimension to the action. For as many great ideas as this book packs in, they all add to the whole in a creative way, they have rules only as far as are needed. That’s a rare thing.
Very much appreciated how this book treats the reader like an adult, that expects you’re able to parse morally grey people in their moments of monstrosity and moments of nobility, even going so far as to make it core to the story. The main character is a vile barbarian driven by rage at the uncaring world that left him for dead, and man, it is just really cool seeing how this anger at the world never leaves him, despite growing in intelligence and capability and experience, and his ability to navigate each space of the have-nots and the haves in his unrelenting tiger hunt. The ending of the book took me by surprise in the best way.
I could go on forever but this is how it’s done. Every outlandish idea adds something, but does not distract from that core message, that beating heart. Looking forward to checking out The Demolished Man soon.
Gibson has referred to his own early work as warmed over Alfred Bester.
I don’t know if he’s ever expressed such humility about the stuff with the alternate universe where Hillary won.
As Mothra’s 2026 Book Backlog Project continues apace, I have finally gotten around to reading I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. Here’s my review.
This is a book I kinda wish I’d read growing up, because it is simply a much better version of the many, many similar post-apocalyptic stories we’ve seen in the 70 years since. Stories that have come far short of evoking the despair of being the last man on Earth, the hollowing absence of purpose that waits at the end of each day survived. Like Tiger! Tiger!, this is an instance of the thing that inspired a genre doing it masterfully the first time.
I went into this with pretty tame expectations. The various adaptations have had good ideas here and there but ultimately blah stories and no real character work. I’m generally a Will Smith enjoyer and he did manage to capture the manic aspect of Neville a little bit, with the mannequins and the wry ramblings to himself, but well, the movie just doesn’t revel in the nothingness like Matheson’s Neville does, lacking the courage to haunt him and torment him and consume him. The Neville we meet in the book has already been broken, simply staying alive out of nothing more than a fear of death and this nagging thread of curiosity that he comes to hold on to for dear life. For much of the book, it would be so much easier to just let himself die, but he can’t, and he hates himself for this.
I was not expecting how moving Matheson’s writing would be. You feel the anger and the despair and the listlessness and the breaks of hope, you see these plumes of self-hatred erupt when one little thing is reasonably forgotten and he feels the terror once again, having allowed it back in to claw at him. One of my favorite moments of the book is when he spends too long in a building without windows and doesn’t realize how late its become, recklessly pushing his station wagon to the limit as he catastrophizes, knowing he’s too late, that the creatures will be waiting for him.
It’s also kind of funny in a way that worked for me, simply because it was believably a moment of play that he allowed himself in facing the absurdity. Neville just vamping to himself, doing bits to nobody, amusing himself and becoming tickled by an idea voiced to nobody, it’s shit we’ve all done in the car or in some place where we cannot be heard. Very authentic. When the despair compounds and he starts being frayed apart, well, it’s really gripping stuff. I love seeing this dude tormented!!!
Also need to give props to Robertson Dean as the VA for the audiobook. One of the most impressive performances I’ve heard yet, it fit the tone of the character perfectly. I found this video that inexplicably has the whole thing up, I assume not for terribly long, but gives a sense of how he does the reading. After the conclusion of I Am Legend a comically different, overall fairly ridiculous guy takes over for the readings of Matheson’s short stories, and it’s hard to separate the two but I generally didn’t care much for his short stories.
I reread I am legend very recently. man that neville guy has it so good. then I was going to reread dracula, reading each chapter on the dates the letters are marked but I didn’t end up doing that. I’m reading warlock by oakley hall instead now
oh hell yeah, this seems like a parker novel
i like earth abides better
I quite like I Am Legend! You’re spot on with your analysis here. There’s a pretty good comic adaptation which is more faithful to the original book, if that strikes your fancy.
I finished Moby Dick. I really liked it. Was very easy after reading Wuthering Heights earlier this year.
Now I am on to The Drowning Pool, the second Lew Archer book. I appreciate that it isn’t a retread of The Moving Target. Blazed through about half of it tonight after taking out an electronic copy from the Toronto Public Library.
I’m a decent ways into God Emperor of Dune. I think it’s shaping up to be my favorite of the sequels so far, just for how odd it is. For those who don’t know, I have my background in religious studies (I often forget I have my masters degree in subject), so that’s usually where my mind goes first when picking apart something I am reading/watching/playing/listening to. For God Emperor of Dune I am struck by how much, at least in a formalistic sense, the text resembles the Bhagavad Gita. For those who aren’t familiar with the structure of that text, it is almost entirely a conversation between the disillusioned prince Arjuna, and his chariot driver Krishna (who is the 8th avatar of the god Vishnu). The prince and the god discuss duty, wisdom, and all manner of subjects all while carting around and waiting for battle. Reminds me a lot of the dialogue between Leto II on his worm-mo-bile and the various Duncan Idaho’s.
So much of Dune is associated with allusions to Catholicism, Buddhism, and of course Islam, that I wonder if Herbert was thinking of the Gita when he was writing God Emperor.
Also my library just got a lot of Zizek audiobooks, so I’m gonna listen to those I guess
Really enjoyed The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley! I was recommended this one after being underwhelmed by the unearned love in This is How You Lose the Time War, and sure enough, Ministry puts in the time to let the relationship breathe. Here’s my review.
A very pleasant romance with just enough to say about history, imperialism, and the immigrant experience to keep me engaged all the way through. It’s pretty dire that this is my metric now but: Characters actually talked to each other, they spent time together, they’d have undramatic moments, moments of vulnerability and moments of the mundane. You could believe they cared about each other.
I think weaving in the trauma of the expats with the trauma of the modern immigrant was a very affecting angle to take, that push and pull between assimilation and identity, feeling that betrayal of one’s past in adopting to the present. What you need to give up to survive, and how slowly that happens, such that you don’t even notice. For me, this was the meat of the connection between the protagonist and her love interest, clearly where the author was drawing from personal experience and thus, had something to say. It didn’t go as deep as I’d like, but it was a very good throughline.
Kaliane Bradley’s writing style is great. It’s evocative, it’s often funny without feeling artificial, it conveys the personality of a variety of characters while keeping them distinct. So many stories like this stumble in trying to be sardonic or unexpected or quirky, but this felt like her trying to entertain herself, and it worked for me.
There are some gripes. I put most of them in the review but yeah, the main character isn’t super interesting. She’s another person that things happen to, she wants to return to normalcy, and though this anxiety not to stand our or confront the status quo is a theme, it’s still underwhelming in the sense of her being one half of the pairing and being the boring half.
Of course, the author watched The Terror during lockdown (as noted at the end of the book) and wrote a self-insert to date Tom Weston-Jones, which, can’t blame her! I like the self-indulgence! I think she elevated that idea a lot with the immigrant and refugee elements, and I think she kept aflame the heat of that wish-fulfillment premise of dating a witty, charming British officer, while gracefully dealing with all the baggage that comes with that. A worse story would’ve lost the flame, or contrived the premise too far, but she sailed that passage nicely without getting stuck in the ice.
The time travel story itself is like, fine, I don’t really care for spy stuff much. In this case, people being from different eras with different motivations - particularly those from the future - made it very easy to believe their commitment, which went a good way toward making the danger feel real. I liked that. I honestly haven’t yet read a halfway decent time travel story, and this didn’t change my mind on that front, but it kept on-theme and did not distract from the good stuff.
Definitely plan to check out her next novel.
A Void by G*org*s P*r*c
Such comic fun is in choosing unfamiliar paths to a phrasis. Without a fifth symbol, 1 is claustrophobically up against his limits. ‘Synonyms out!’ said author.
Our protagonists and antagonists = similar to principal casts in works of dir. W. Andrson. Not so much souls as arbitrary actors full of quirks and quality, nouns as playthings for a plot.
In summary, it’s a shaggy dog story, mandatorily so. 25 tracts roughly follow a puzzling lark. Playful as it is with a formal hint that a fifth symbol is missing, mais oui, from A Void’s world. But only so many things can spawn forth as words. Our sojourn baits us on a tour around our Anglo canon, A Void works as translator for notorious scripts such as William S’s lyrics or that famous horror monolog about a black bird. Such jocularity! And what a task to finish transcription from Francish to Anglo-Saxon!
For all its split hairs and woozy yarn-spinning, it stays notably gripping, mostly to proof it and find unfamiliar plays on formula. I will find a quantity of Oulipo to scan plus ultra I think.
The twist in the letter (just got it’s literally called a LETTER) they read towards the end in that is the only time a novel has made me Laugh Out Loud. If you liked that I also recommend The Exeter Text found here which doesn’t use A, I, O or U in it at all.
Perec’s the only writer who I’ve found consistently rewarding through my own life, with the books I read of his when I was young still as dense and serpentine as an adult, stemming from watching this adaptation of his novella The Man Who Sleeps and spiralled outwards from there (he also wrote a really good crime film called Serie Noire that’s worth watching). Life: A User’s Manual gets called The French Ulysses in ways that Schattenfroh is called The German Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow The American Ulysses and other nonsense but if you want to read more I’d recommend that one.
I recently read The Vivisectors which I liked a lot and Greed by Elfriede Jelinek (The Piano Teacher) which I have mixed feelings about bad politics of the author aside. Currently chugging through The Bewitched Bourgeois by Dino Buzatti after liking The Tartar Steppe and am eyeing something by Malzberg next, probably Galaxies.
A few weeks ago I finished in a non-fiction book by the Jewish-American author and journalist Milton Meyer, called They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945. It’s basically about interviewing some acquaintances he made in Germany on a trip in the 30s, where he intended to interview Hitler. But after being denied to interview Hitler during his initial visit, he thought it would be more insightful to return in the 50s to interview everyday people, or, commonplace Nazis. These men from a small town he calls “my Nazis friends” and spends the majority of the book basically asking “what was it like to become a Nazi? How did it happen? How could you let it happen?” And it’s a really dour outlook on what happens when people become ingratiated to a system of violence and oppression, which nevertheless affords them their creature comforts and a stable livelihood. These men he interviews are not the SS officers in Indiana Jones movies or which you gleefully murder in Wolfenstein. These are sons of farmers, they are tailors, teachers, and, yes, police officers. And almost the entire book is dedicated to conversations with them which reveal the cognitive-dissonance and contradictions that their history as German citizens who became members of the Nazi party, who now have the vantage of looking back on that period, and who now can attempt some kind of diagnosis of themselves and German people in general.
It is a challenging and complex read, and maybe more than it really needs to be. It is not so much a book of facts, but of mythology and psychology. The author is a good writer, but his depiction of the material context of the lives of these German men, these Nazis, is less sweeping than the emotional and symbolic realm in which “the German, and the German Spirit” emerge. As you read the interviews, it’s worth wondering if these men are being read as psychological subjects by Meyer, or if they are weaponizing psychology to appear to Meyer a certain way. This ambiguity creates a constant sense of tension as you read. Meyer’s ten Nazi friends are contradictions in so many novelistic ways that I think there is a serious danger in Meyer’s rendering of these men that lets his readers take them perhaps too easily at their word.
Defeated and proud, socially insignificant but also the very atomic element of society, ignorant but still deeply knowing… In the ambiguity created by this kind of contradiction, there is ample material here, in the little lives of these ten ordinary Nazis, to examine as if they were characters in a realistic novel. I kept thinking about this as I read: how easy it would be to accept realism as a kind of mythology to shortcut understanding, and begin, horrifyingly, to sympathize with these guys. This is definitely the aim of Meyer’s book, to show that these people were and are a lot more relatable than is comforting to admit.
I do believe Meyer is exploiting this instinct in readers like myself as a bit of rhetoric, and it’s really up in the air whether that is a moral thing to do as an author dealing with as subject like this. Though I am personally not going to criticize him one way or another. It’s clever, and compelling, and I’m not all that interested in if it’s a “good” thing he did this or not.
The narrative device which grounds all of these interviews is a historical moment in their town in the late 30s, if I remember, when in the middle of the night a synagogue “caught fire” and was allowed to burn. Each of the interviewees lived in the town at that time, and has lived there until the publication of this book in the 50s. So around this event Meyer explores how these people remember Germany before, during, and after Hitler. He gets them to reflect on what they did and what they did not do. He asks them how it is they justify their decisions to themselves. And through these conversations there are so many moments of irony that you really must be alert to, lest you buy the guilt-ridden Nazi line too hard.
Many of these men lived their lives as members of the party happy to hold steady employment, receive vacation time, to be able to buy the things they wanted to buy themselves and their family. And nearly every single one of them, twenty years on or so, state over and over that very few of them (most of them included) had very little against Jewish people. Most of them, they say, had no idea what was happening, beyond unpleasant rumors which no one liked to talk about in the first place. Very few of Meyer’s Nazi friends claim to have known many Jewish people at all. So it is unfair of Meyer, some of them suggest, to paint the decisions they made as members of the Nazi party like it was a choice between refusing an injustice or helping to perpetuate it, because the fact of the holocaust was not at that time a fact they could reasonably entertain. All that the Nazi party gave them was too much to trade for a mere possibility, they say.
If it’s fair to suspect this willingness to compromise, to look the other way, to chose ignorance when it cannot be feigned, to participate in a calculus of death, as something not endemic to Germans in the 30s, then this is easily the most harrowing thing about Meyer’s book.
I’ve seen a lot of people online pick this book up after the 2016 election, leaving reviews that say more or less “this is the book of our times, truly.” But I think if someone stops short of interpreting this thing as an analogy of Hitler:Trump, they have made a grave analytical error in their reading. It’s greatest takeaway is that dictatorships in industrialized economies can buy the willing support of its populace relatively cheaply, without much violence or resistance, letting fascism become commonplace and evil invisible in exchange for a stable pay cheque, vacation time, cultural belonging, and other comforts.
The last third of the book, titled The Germans, I ended up skipping past because it left behind narrative and became totally occupied creating a theory of the fascist subject by wielding mythology and sociology a little too casually. But the rest of this book was probably one of the more interesting and moving works of non-fiction I have ever read. It’s a difficult recommendation to make, but this has been my careful attempt!
Got through The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi at 2x speed, simply to have it read and back on the shelf. I got a copy of this ages ago and never read it, and well, as I knew it would after having suffered through Redshirts, it sucked! Here’s my review.
There’s some interesting world-building here and there with the genetic engineering, the social engineering, and the transhumanist elements (looking at you, space borne gamera rock soldiers), but these are just told to you in long, dull infodumps, and rarely mean anything. Everyone in the Ghost Brigades is mind-linked and is never alone and this is just not really explored much, despite it presumably being THE thing you would revolve this story around. This squad of child clone soldiers are made to do these horrible war crimes but it’s always presented as a “necessary” thing to ensure humanity’s survival. Them force-sterilizing an alien infant with nanobots and then killing her on a call with her father - after having made him commit to attacking his ally instead - is presented as a tough but ultimately just act to prevent their destroying humanity.
The arc of the book is extremely centrist-brained where your superiors know best for you, should never be questioned (because you don’t “have all the information”), and the worst thing anyone could do is try to change the status quo. The world they live in is considered the best possible situation for humanity’s survival, and there isn’t really any cost too high for that, so nobody feels any way about the continuing evils they must perpetuate. They just make wry jokes about it, in the voice that is John Scalzi’s because everybody thinks and talks in the same voice.
The plot is a sort of Killmonger situation where the villain is completely right but he “does it wrong” and his plan randomly involves genocide, so they have to kill him and maintain the dire status quo, because that’s what it means to be a soldier apparently. I honestly would be here for any of this if the book had something to say about it, if it wanted you to despair at the situation, or to be angry about it, but the vibe is that everything is under control, you need to trust your leaders, and you need to not obsess over the war crimes. I could even endure that if the military scifi action was good, but it’s written like this is a TV screenplay, with zero attempt made to put you in that place, and feel what the characters feel.
Blah. I’m of course done with Scalzi but I did get this book read and back on the shelf. I will consume the remainder of OMW in the manner it was intended: By skimming the plot summaries for the next four books and then forgetting them days later.