yeah whipping girl is cool but i can confidently say you are already probably beyond it. i read it when i was a teenager lol
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Reading Farthest Shore right now.
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I finished Farthest Shore. It was good. On to Tehanu.
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I finished Tehanu. It was pleasant.
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i going to be out of consistent internet this weekend, so im thinking of either giving gene wolfe’s “the shadow of the torturer” another shot or trying to read another of his works, “the fifth head of cerberus”.
i actually really love shadow of the torturer. i think the prose is something ive never seen before and im constantly mesmerized by the setting.
but something by the middle of the book, when the protagonist is looking around town for a flower so he can duel some mysterious figure that challenged him, just made me lose focus too much. its been a couple months since i stopped reading it and it always bums me out when i remember that
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fifth head of cerberus is gene wolfe’s most directly proustian novel so if you have any special affection for proust you should go for it (it’s also one of the most shockingly thoughtful postcolonial novels ever written)
shadow of the torturer (and the rest of the book of the new sun) is certainly well worth your time
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i dont have a position on proust whatsoever but
is a bit enticing to me.
i do feel really bad about leaving the book of the new sun to hang, so i might try dipping my feet back at it before going to bed over the next couple days to see if i can still catch up to it. that opening sequence at the necropolis, the whole stuff with the coin and the dog and the lady . . . . . its just so strong. i need to know more
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i think that book of the new sun actually has a lot more proust in it, fifth head feels like more of a pastiche to me.
both are definitely worth reading. i found fifth head a really breezy read.
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Have been meaning to write up thoughts on what I’ve been reading for ages but always get behind. Some bits and pieces.
Trawl - B.S. Johnson
Johnson I think still ranks as my favourite but this is probably his least interesting work so far. It’ highly autobiographical in a more direct way than his other works and mostly constitutes a man remembering the minutia of his life trying to figure out why he can’t hold stable relationships. Formally it’s a discourse on why memory isn’t always recalled in a linear way but the Untouchables is much better at this. The memories of being a child during WWII are probably the highlight. Full of tangents and misrememberings that the author deems not part of the main quest and keeps cutting them short but they’re more interesting for providing some life fabric. Not an ultimately satisfying read but interesting to see where Johnson starts from.
House Mother Normal - B.S. Johnson
My favourite read this year. It’s set in a nursing home and allows the reader an omniscient awareness of everything the characters think and say. Each chapter concerns one character and they’re all 21 pages long. Every character’s lines are synchronised by position on page so you can actually follow coherent dialogues if you flip between chapters. What someone says on page 4 is synchronised with another person’s response on their own page 4 for example. A character’s reaction to an event or utterance might not be revealed until 5 chapters later as everyone is ultimately isolated. The residents of the care home are all subject to different stages of bodily and mental decay (summarised in a short profile at the start of the chapter) which is played for comic effect often but is mostly horrifying and sad taken as a whole. The chapters involving people with severe memory loss or an inability to even think, let alone speak, coherently build the climax up.
Reading across chapters you come to see what is going on (there is no 3rd person narrator describing events clearly, only splintered accounts, some of which are in great cognitive decline). You also start to realise that what is going on is fucked, most likely as a part of Johnson satirising the state of care in the early 70s (though it hasn’t improved much based on some accounts). The final chapter is the House Mother’s perspective which draws it altogether into a highly surreal and unsettling commentary on the nature of being in a ‘second childhood’ and how both knowing or not knowing people’s internal thoughts can be the basis for mistreatment. The short chapter framework makes it a breezy pace as well.
Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
It concerns an artist living in the immediate postwar years of Japan witnessing the new generation adapt to its rebuilding. Uses family and memory as the main lenses to do this through. I didn’t ultimately enjoy it. It does some clever things with leaving much of a first-person account unreliable. Misremembering is everywhere. Nobody actually talks directly about their grievances out of a sense of decorum but I couldn’t really sympathise with the guy. I’m not sure you’re meant to since the lead turns out to have been a war propagandist but I sure had to spend a lot of time with him justifying his life internally. Interesting but not enjoyable for me.
Woman of Pleasure - Kiyoko Murata
Story of a 1903 Japanese pleasure district mostly from the perspective of its underage talent, a girl taken from a southern island village of fishers and amas (women divers). Good though it often felt like the author’s research notes since news articles and legal changes regarding women’s rights and prostitution of the time are frequently explained or quoted word for word. Prostitutes were required to learn how to write to provide formal letters to entice upper class clientele and they work well as a mechanism of exploring both the theme of education and multiple character voices over time. The irony of education provided to both entrap and liberate them is both historical and key to the climax. Again, the research is laid bare given that the book culminates in The Shinonome strike which was apparently a real strike though I can’t find much on it online. There’s naturally a lot of brutality toward girls and women in the book so comes with a caution but themes are resonant. Beyond this it also explores Japan’s internal regional discrimination, particularly religious differences between remoter villages, ‘mainland Japan’, and Salvation Army missionaries.
What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice - Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman
I think someone here recommended it. I’ve been unsure about having children for all sorts of reasons and this book is a good dissection of the many arguments and counterarguments about having them. Gets into the weeds of certain philosophical arguments against as well as panics about overpopulation. It remains level-headed and ultimately sees the decision to have children as an extension of your own reason to live. If it’s not part of your fulfilment in life then it shouldn’t necessarily feel like an obligation though it’s careful to acknowledge that this only really becomes a proper choice in the context of accessible birth control. The account of the tedium of being a parent to an infant I found fascinating. They’re unsure how to describe it other than ‘boring’ but provide a real insight into a human experience I don’t think I could have without becoming a parent myself. While there’s much to be pragmatically cautious about, it seems there is no universal argument for not having children which one could probably guess without reading this. As for myself, I feel surer (and a bit less sad) that we’re unlikely to become parents any time soon but maybe if/when it feels right.
Keep it on the Positive. Fallin’ Up. My Story. Taboo of the Black-eyed Peas with Steve Dennis - Jaime 'Taboo' Gomez and Steve Dennis
I have a perverse fascination with Taboo since he seems like the Ringo in a group of Ringos, not remarkably talented but just happy to be there. The way he carries himself has always read as awkward to me so I decided to get this. The book covers his life growing up, his decline into hard drug use and car crash scandal, then subsequent rehab. It’s actually a decent story as music autobiographies go. He himself seems oblivious of how bad most Black Eyed Peas lyrics are and the book makes it abundantly clear that the Black Eyed Peas really had to sell out and do dance music to do well despite initially being a more traditional hip-hop trio. Taboo does, however, seem to realise how lucky he is not only to survive the various overdoses he went through but also to be part of a highly profitable music career. ‘Fallin’ up’ indeed. It’s endearing even if the guy makes some awful decisions and feels it necessary to always mention the exact type of car or product he’s wearing in a given scene. He turned it around and stays connected with people he worked with from the start. It takes guts to write about how you once got so wasted you shat yourself and had to get through the rest of the evening without incident as your exhausted colleagues patiently secure an exit. The guy’s decent and I have a new appreciation for how consistently bad the lyrics are.
Billionaires in World Politics - Peter Hägel
About 2/3 through reading it. A full-on academic thesis and I don’t read a lot of international relations literature so this is hard-going at times. The scope of the study is to examine how much power billionaries really exercise in an international context specifically. It uses the Forbes list rules so monarchs and heads of state (including Trump) are considered beyond scope since they have a natural incentive to influence international relations regardless of wealth. The thing about studying billionaires is there are comparatively very few of them, they actively do not want to be accessed by researchers, and generalisable claims are subject to all sorts of caveats due to the small amount of them and the circumstances from which they come (inherited, ‘self-made’, 1 billion vs multibillion, liquid vs solid asset proportion). It provides some interesting stats on billionaires like what leads to increases in their numbers (peace and global markets = good; war and protectionism = decline).
It also reveals that many of the case studies actually wield comparatively little power in their chosen area of desired meddling influence. Also, when accounting for other factors and influences, their actions are proportionally marginal (though still enormous when measured against the average person’s wealth). The issue seems to be that international issues of healthcare, charity, media influence, and warfare are all extremely large that even multibillionaire wealth is something of an (admittedly large) drop in the ocean. There are specific cases where they clearly enact influence but in the grand scheme of things the thesis seems to argue that the power of billionaires is more limited than you’d initially assume. Even the billionaires themselves are often confronted with the fact that their impact is hard to measure when you account for all the other influences on the biggest international problems. An amusing collision of ego-driven projects that meet problems of epistemology (how do you know you actually did what you intended to enact?). Even though it tries to retain an academic neutrality, the author clearly can’t resist getting barbs in at how obviously selfish and deranged the celebration of billionaires and their worst actions are.
Excession - Iain M. Banks
Couldn’t stop reading. The plot is a bunch of stepping stones for exploring how a broader conspiracy might function in the Culture’s utopia but is actually just a vehicle for lots of short world-building entries to explore cool ideas. Even though the Culture clearly has issues I kinda just wish I lived in it. A book where the pleasure of imagination is front and centre. So much so that the overarching story it tells is probably less interesting as a narrative. I can’t put my finger on how Banks writes descriptively in such a compelling way. I’m less a fan of his dialogue which can make many characters sound like they can’t wait to sass each other a lot of the time. Enjoyable read and am thinking of working through the rest of the Culture novels but I fear I’ve read the best ones between this and Player of Games.
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re Iain M Banks, the best Culture novel is Use of Weapons so you still have one book that is even better than Player of Games to read
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I finished reading Everything Is Cinema, a biography and critical survey of Jean-Luc Godard. I got it because I had seen several of Godard’s films and heard that he was a bit of an asshole. I was also fascinated by his career trajectory, which is really singular and oddly inspiring.
After I finished reading it, I can confirm that he is truly one of cinema’s greatest assholes, just a master of burning bridges and painfully self-righteous. I strain to empathize with him. There’s a certain logic to being a jerk and only respecting people who fight back. IDK, maybe he just got bored too easily. It’s telling that the phases of his career overlap so cleanly with his romantic relationships.
Godard’s personality definitely threatens to overshadow his work, but I still want to see most of what he has directed. I’m particularly interested in everything after his “return to cinema” in the late 70s.
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right before we left Vancouver one of the rep cinemas there screened goodbye to language in 3D and I figured I may as well catch it because that’s a pretty rare experience and it’s such an antagonistic movie, literally hard to watch without getting a headache, I was shocked it got such good reviews 10 years ago
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I hate and admire him for that.
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i saw goodbye to language at the bfi imax and it’s hilarious that they put it on that screen where the effect will just break for 50%+ of the audience
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godard’s films from the 80s onto his death are his best.
it’s a shame people only watch the 60s stuff. it’s got some nice energy but the later stuff is so much more confident in the possibilities of cinema. the early stuff looks gimmicky in comparison.
if you must only watch one make it Hélas pour moi.
also yes he’s a dickhead.
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dipped into reynold’s futuromania; as a collection of thoughtz about electronicisms of the last 20 years it’s pretty comprehensive, but i just have to accept that the man is no expert at prose whatsoever
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My dad got me a scifi book, Exodus The Archimedes Engine, for Christmas which it turns out is a tie-in to the Matthew McConnaughey-promoted video game Exodus, which is not even out yet. It’s due for pre-alpha release in 2025 and doesn’t even have a Steam page. This book is 893 pages long and basically seems to be a world bible. It is book 1 of ?
Peter F. Hamilton is the author who I have no familiarity with but for someone to write such a long book for a yet to be released media tie-in is triggering my grift alarm. I think the intention was for it to be released alongside the game since it was all announced at the Game Awards in 2023. I’m not sure who this is for and the project has some kinda stink about it. Kinda worth keeping the book as another artifact of industry hubris.
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I finished Tales of Earthsea after avoiding it for weeks. I’m glad I did. Basically read the entire last story in one night. These books are treasures.
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you calling Tehanu “pleasant” really shook my confidence in recommending books to people
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I am in a lot of pain all the time and having that mirrored back to me in a story that seems, contrary to my life, meaningful, was nice.
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