I read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
This would be a great book if it wasn’t for all the racism and sexism.
Content warning: At one point he rapes a woman.
George Orwell maybe not such a good dude.
He’s like making good points about employment and poverty and then he’ll go on an anti-Semitic rant for a bit.
Weird how he’s a well respected author and not cancelled.
He’s the fucking worst. 1984 is 80% hating women, 20% fantasising about the perfect invincible boot he’s created.
Julia by Sandra Newman is a great book if you want a read a woman write about what a loser and a creep Winston Smith is and how he probably deserved what was coming to him.
I think it’s because the kind of people citing 1984 all the time agree with Orwell’s most reactionary positions. Homage to Catalonia is a bleak portrait of the kind of guy who talks a big game but is ideologically deeply opposed to anyone actually trying to positively change society, so his views align with both modern liberals and conservatives
I read the 500+ page biography of Lorne Michaels. I dont really have anything to say about it I just want to clarify the kind of freak im becoming
fascinated by the microgenre of like “writer with a somewhat successful career doing a licensed novel”
sci fi authors gotta eat too
christopher priest did the existenz adaptation, my favourite licensed thing is jim woodring writing an aliens comic for some reason
speaking of licensed things i’m abt 3/4ths thru pattern recognition by william “unproduced alien3 script” gibson. i haven’t read too much of their work so maybe i’m missing something but not really feeling this one - there are some fun ideas and the premise is great but would seem to suggest something more, like, venomously specific than the book feels like being, and idk if i buy cayce as such a blandly innocent naif in this setting given the nature of her work. i guess it was being written when 9/11 Happened and reworked afterwards which maybe explains the odd feeling of two different time periods, a wired late 90s of anxiety abt globalization and authenticity and a 2000s of like weird political somnambulism where nobody cares anymore… there are so many descriptions of the heroine falling asleep. i think summing my mixed feelings is the scene where she finally meets the film creators, which on the one hand feels like a very corny, nigh-creepypasta vision of what art is or where it comes from. but then also brings up an incidental detail i thought was sorta moving (that neither of the sisters in this weird insular crime family knew if the enthusiast subculture around their film was real or just some kind of staged audience fiction put on by their relatives).
i guess it’s the feeling of a book abt obsession, or at least charged hyperspecific elements of interest, which doesn’t really feel like it’s ever really being more than dutiful in its own obsessions… in that light it’s funny that the only interest that feels real here is the guys running a blackmarket in sinclair zx81s.
some day i’ll get around to reading evenson’s licensed stuff
I’ve been curious about the Dead Space book in particular for years now. I’ve read almost everything else Evenson has written.
i think a lot about how the pocket books star trek series started with them asking well known sf authors if they wanted to write star trek books and then half of those early books turning out to be mid or awful because as some sf author involved with that process once put it nobody wants to put their best ideas into something they don’t own especially when they already are writing their own ip. when licensed books are amazing though it rocks so hard but i definitely don’t begrudge anyone treating it purely as a work for pay assignment
I enjoyed Pattern Recognition mostly as a hang-out book, where this girl is gonna show you around all these hip and and cool places in London and Tokyo at the turn of the century, mainly inspired by the places Gibson visited and wrote about for Wired. None of the rest of his novels are really like that. The ending is kind of stupid, though.
this was good and I’m glad it’s selling well
It’s nice and breezy so far.
I picked up a Spanish language edition of 2666. I’m not sure if this is hubris because I’ve never read a book in Spanish before, but so far, his prose is fairly easy to parse.
I’ve adored Gormenghast for about 430 of its 588 pages. But this slow conclusion that its crawling towards has nearly eliminated my favorite aspect of these stories: there’s very little dialog happening! The descriptions of everything are lively and beautifully detailed. But at this point in the plot the characters are independently involved in different things which makes for chapter after chapter with maybe just a couple lines of spoken dialog. Disappointing. I was really enjoying this one so much, but now I feel like it has really been hurt by its conclusion.
Okay I take it back. There was just a long, long stretch without getting to hear anything from these characters I adore. But I was just feeling impatient more than anything, I think.
Fuscia, nooooo!
