Oct 23, 2023
Binti just finished crime and punishment
The book tells the story of Raskolnikov, an isolated, impoverished former student who believes he is greater than most men, therefore can murder with justification. He murders two women, and then falls ill while the investigation is ongoing.
The book offers an at times openly stated critique of western, enlightenment philosophies such as utilitarianism, showing them as cold, inapplicable modes of viewing the world. Rationality in that sense is impossible. You cannot factor everything into how you make decisions as there are so many variables claiming you can be truly rational is folly.
I greatly enjoyed it, going to read some smaller books before i take on Notes from the Underground and Brothers Karamazov next year
real
Oct 23, 2023·1 replyThomas Ligotti - Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works
If you’re looking for frequently great spooky season reading material (and have already exhausted Barker’s Books of Blood) then I definitely recommend picking up either of these compilations!
Easily approachable without sacrificing detail, Ligotti’s verbose and stately tales of the weird hold no shortage of living nightmares, impossible dimensions or thousand-dollar words. Like all other short story writers in the horror genre, he finds a good thing and repeats it endlessly. You might grow tired of his preoccupations with old New England houses, the smell of the woods at night, skeletally thin old men, and prismatic, nearly imperceptible demonic evils which lay just outside the scope of human perception. But there’s always some descriptive flourish to be found that makes the page worth paying attention to! And the implications can be gruesome, even though compared to Barker he’s a sterile virgin academic
He wears his influences on his sleeve (Lovecraft, Poe, Borges, the usual) and can’t resist letting you know about it even when you’ve already clocked it. But that’s ultimately fine, it feels almost required if you’re writing horror fiction anyways. Not surprising to anyone who’s read his doomer tract Conspiracy Against the Human Race, but there is absolutely zero hope in any of these stories and even the characters themselves seem incapable of it. That’s a plus for me! His ponderousness is ultimately preferable to King’s, even though I enjoyed his stories most when the monsters are human. A great gift for the goth in your life that needs to kill time on their commute
Oct 24, 2023·2 repliesHad quite the reading run.
Weep not, Child by Ngugi Was Thiongó
3.5/5
First of all, beautiful cover. This bok centers around the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and how it affects everyday people in terms of how they relate to their land. It's part coming of age, part family drama, part political, and is a good starting point for anyone looking to get into Ngugi's work.
Lines I liked:
"One could tell by her small eyes full of life and warmth that she had once been beautiful. But time and bad conditions do not favour beauty"
"Nganga was rich. He had land. Any man who had land was considered rich. If a man had plenty of money, many motor cars, but no land, he could never be counted as rich. A man who went with tattered clothes but had at least an acre of red earth was better off than the man with money. "
"‘Blackness is not all that makes a man,’ Kamau said bitterly. ‘There are some people, be they black or white, who don’t want others to rise above them. They want to be the source of all knowledge and share it piecemeal to others less endowed."
"It’s strange how you do fear something because your heart is already prepared to fear because maybe you were brought up to fear that something, or simply because you found others fearing"
"Hope of a better day was the only comfort he could give to a weeping child. He did not know that this faith in the future could be a form of escape from the reality of the present."
"Yesterday I found some people being beaten and they were crying, oh so horribly, begging for mercy. I don’t know what’s happening. Fear in the air. Not a fear of death – it’s a fear of living."
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
3/5
This book has two stories: The titular story and another shorter one called Moonlight Shadow. Both center around grief, although the second story is much better to read. Overall, it was okay. Nothing to write home about.Line I liked:
"In retrospect I realize that fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung."
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
4/5
King Von does it again. This time, the story covers a narrator who's trying to uncover the story of one Felix Hoenniker, a scientist who's responsible for the atomic bombs that dropped in Japan during World War II. This is the second book that I've read from Kurt Vonnegut, and it didn't disappoint. There are moments of humor and poignancy in a way that's unique to Mr Vonnegut. I still think that Slaughterhouse Five is above this one, but this was worth my time too.
Lines I liked:
"American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love"
"You may quote me:” he said. “Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.”"
"A pissant is somebody who thinks he’s so damn smart, he never can keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he’s got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he’ll tell you why you’re wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a b*** all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better."
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
3.5/5
I enjoyed this way more than I thought I would, given that I hated the author's debut. Set in 2000-2001, this story follows a yuppie New Yorker who decides to...well...nap for a year, and we see her interact with her best friend, Reva, while going back for her supply of sleeping pills to a batshit shrink of sorts, and she's also dealing with her broken family and how it's affected her. This story was written well enough to make it a propulsive read. I thought that the narrator was fascinating enough to follow till the end, but the ending resolution itself was tacky.
It's not for everyone, and very much a love it or hate it book, but I liked it enough that it stayed with me for a but after I read it because this is clearly someone dealing with depression, but I understand why some people are rubbed off the wrong way because of who she is.
Lines I liked:
"I wanted to hold on to the house the way you’d hold on to a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t."
"My father was busy dying—within a year of his diagnosis, the cancer had spread to his pancreas, then his stomach—and my mother busy being herself, which in the end seemed worse than having cancer."
"Once I started sleeping full time, I didn’t look out my windows very often. A glimpse was all I ever wanted. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. That hadn’t changed, and it never would."
"Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion."
"Pain is not the only touchstone for growth,"
Maru by Bessie Head
3/5
This story is about the prejudices revolving around the Masarwa people in Botswana. Margaret is one such girl, and as she grows up to be an intelligent woman, she goes to a village called Dilepe where she finds out that her people are treated as less than human, but then comes a romantic interest...or two...including the titular character, a man called Maru.
This book is hard to categorize. It's a lot of things and not just one, but the one thing front and center is Bessie Head's writing. She was one of the best authors to emerge from Botswana. I thought the first half was tighter than the latter half but still this was a good read.
Lines I liked:
"It is preferable to change the world on the basis of love of mankind. But if that quality be too rare, then common sense seems the next best thing"
"An allowance for life had always been made for really vicious people, who for too long had said the kind of things to helpless people which really applied to their own twisted, perverted hearts. Those who spat at what they thought was inferior were really the ‘low, filthy people’ of the earth, because decent people cannot behave that way"
*"All the force of her life was directed to her eyes, as though that were the only living part of her"
"The young girl had no confusion of heart, only the experience of being permanently unwanted by society in general"
Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball by Haruki Murakami
3/5
These are the first two novels that Murakami wrote, and the first novels in the "Rat Trilogy" with the third being A Wild Sheep Chase. Most Murakami fans would tell you to start with wild sheep chase and that's a good pick. This two pack is strictly for the enthusiasts and is rather unremarkable.
Lines I liked:
"And so I continue writing this, plying my consciousness with cigarettes and beer to prevent it from sinking into the sludge of time"
"Lies are terrible things. One could say that the greatest sins afflicting modern society are the proliferation of lies and silence. We lie through our teeth, then swallow our tongues."
- Oct 24, 2023·1 reply
Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
4/5
This was an entertaining read but it's not for everyone because of the structure. Still, that structure is what ties it together in the end. Without giving away too much, you've got three POVs: one of a mother hunting for her husband who murdered their son, a girl who learns that her kind has ferocious amounts of power that makes her guardian scared enough that he won't hesitate to kill her, and a young woman who is coming to terms with her place in the society she was raised in.
The magic system is pretty cool since it centers around geology and moving rocks. I don't like how abrupt the ending was because I like standalone books but this is cut off in an unsatisfying cliffhangery way. Still, I had a good time with this one.
I have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
3.5/5
Short story that shows the terrifying nature of AI in the future as imagined in the 60s.
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
5/5
This book should bore you. At least that's what you would think. I mean, it focuses on a stuffy butler, Stevens, recollecting his past life and what it takes to have dignity in his field. What I didn't expect was the subtle unraveling of Stevens, when he questions his loyalty after his old boss turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer. It also looks at the cultural differences, given that his new boss, Mr Farraday, is an American, but the story, above all, has subtlety so ingeniously written, that once you get to the end, you're looking at a man who wanted to give his best in life, but is unsure if it was all worth it in the end. I absolutely hung onto every word. A harrowing read and one that's going to stick with me for a very long time.
Lines I liked:
"I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it"
"After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?"
Oct 26, 2023·1 replyCRACKASTEPPAVEGANHad quite the reading run.
Weep not, Child by Ngugi Was Thiongó
3.5/5
First of all, beautiful cover. This bok centers around the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and how it affects everyday people in terms of how they relate to their land. It's part coming of age, part family drama, part political, and is a good starting point for anyone looking to get into Ngugi's work.
Lines I liked:
"One could tell by her small eyes full of life and warmth that she had once been beautiful. But time and bad conditions do not favour beauty"
"Nganga was rich. He had land. Any man who had land was considered rich. If a man had plenty of money, many motor cars, but no land, he could never be counted as rich. A man who went with tattered clothes but had at least an acre of red earth was better off than the man with money. "
"‘Blackness is not all that makes a man,’ Kamau said bitterly. ‘There are some people, be they black or white, who don’t want others to rise above them. They want to be the source of all knowledge and share it piecemeal to others less endowed."
"It’s strange how you do fear something because your heart is already prepared to fear because maybe you were brought up to fear that something, or simply because you found others fearing"
"Hope of a better day was the only comfort he could give to a weeping child. He did not know that this faith in the future could be a form of escape from the reality of the present."
"Yesterday I found some people being beaten and they were crying, oh so horribly, begging for mercy. I don’t know what’s happening. Fear in the air. Not a fear of death – it’s a fear of living."
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
3/5
This book has two stories: The titular story and another shorter one called Moonlight Shadow. Both center around grief, although the second story is much better to read. Overall, it was okay. Nothing to write home about.Line I liked:
"In retrospect I realize that fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung."
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
4/5
King Von does it again. This time, the story covers a narrator who's trying to uncover the story of one Felix Hoenniker, a scientist who's responsible for the atomic bombs that dropped in Japan during World War II. This is the second book that I've read from Kurt Vonnegut, and it didn't disappoint. There are moments of humor and poignancy in a way that's unique to Mr Vonnegut. I still think that Slaughterhouse Five is above this one, but this was worth my time too.
Lines I liked:
"American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love"
"You may quote me:” he said. “Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.”"
"A pissant is somebody who thinks he’s so damn smart, he never can keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he’s got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he’ll tell you why you’re wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a b*** all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better."
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
3.5/5
I enjoyed this way more than I thought I would, given that I hated the author's debut. Set in 2000-2001, this story follows a yuppie New Yorker who decides to...well...nap for a year, and we see her interact with her best friend, Reva, while going back for her supply of sleeping pills to a batshit shrink of sorts, and she's also dealing with her broken family and how it's affected her. This story was written well enough to make it a propulsive read. I thought that the narrator was fascinating enough to follow till the end, but the ending resolution itself was tacky.
It's not for everyone, and very much a love it or hate it book, but I liked it enough that it stayed with me for a but after I read it because this is clearly someone dealing with depression, but I understand why some people are rubbed off the wrong way because of who she is.
Lines I liked:
"I wanted to hold on to the house the way you’d hold on to a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t."
"My father was busy dying—within a year of his diagnosis, the cancer had spread to his pancreas, then his stomach—and my mother busy being herself, which in the end seemed worse than having cancer."
"Once I started sleeping full time, I didn’t look out my windows very often. A glimpse was all I ever wanted. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. That hadn’t changed, and it never would."
"Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion."
"Pain is not the only touchstone for growth,"
Maru by Bessie Head
3/5
This story is about the prejudices revolving around the Masarwa people in Botswana. Margaret is one such girl, and as she grows up to be an intelligent woman, she goes to a village called Dilepe where she finds out that her people are treated as less than human, but then comes a romantic interest...or two...including the titular character, a man called Maru.
This book is hard to categorize. It's a lot of things and not just one, but the one thing front and center is Bessie Head's writing. She was one of the best authors to emerge from Botswana. I thought the first half was tighter than the latter half but still this was a good read.
Lines I liked:
"It is preferable to change the world on the basis of love of mankind. But if that quality be too rare, then common sense seems the next best thing"
"An allowance for life had always been made for really vicious people, who for too long had said the kind of things to helpless people which really applied to their own twisted, perverted hearts. Those who spat at what they thought was inferior were really the ‘low, filthy people’ of the earth, because decent people cannot behave that way"
*"All the force of her life was directed to her eyes, as though that were the only living part of her"
"The young girl had no confusion of heart, only the experience of being permanently unwanted by society in general"
Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball by Haruki Murakami
3/5
These are the first two novels that Murakami wrote, and the first novels in the "Rat Trilogy" with the third being A Wild Sheep Chase. Most Murakami fans would tell you to start with wild sheep chase and that's a good pick. This two pack is strictly for the enthusiasts and is rather unremarkable.
Lines I liked:
"And so I continue writing this, plying my consciousness with cigarettes and beer to prevent it from sinking into the sludge of time"
"Lies are terrible things. One could say that the greatest sins afflicting modern society are the proliferation of lies and silence. We lie through our teeth, then swallow our tongues."
Petals of Blood by Wa Thiong'o is an all timer for me, so good
- Oct 26, 2023·1 reply
This one was a fine, enjoyable at times sci-fi fantasy story. I have the feeling that this was supposed to be short stories that were unpublished and packed into one novel (or three novellas, depending on what you count). It had weird pacing issues and the stakes were never really clear, but it also had a lot of really impressive writing and an incredible setting. Delaney is a talented sci-fi author, but I think his truest strength was surrealism. And there's plenty of that here.
This s*** is insane. At times reading this it felt like watching language being invented. Saramago is truly a wizard. Jesus comes fully to life in this book, and I got to share in his confusion, sorrow, love, guilt, all his emotions. There's a pivotal moment towards the end where Jesus speaks to the Devil and God to learn the ultimate plan for himself. Some of the most incredible writing ever here, with characters who are basically ubiquitous in much of the world transformed into jealous, vulnerable, self-obsessed images of themselves. Truly beautiful stuff, this has to be in my top 10 ever.
I think I'm mostly over Murakami outside of his masterworks like Wind Up Bird or Kafka on the Shore (or my personal favorite, Hard Boiled Wonderland). It's a fine book, with some pretty passages. I read it after hearing it referenced in a conversation about Silent Hill 2, and I can see that parallel with the haunted (?) hotel featuring heavily in this book. However this seemed like another rote Murakami to me: the protagonist makes pasta, a woman disappears, he doesn't really care, he's obsessed with earlobes. I might pick up his newest novel when it's published in English, but otherwise I think I'm over it
- Oct 27, 2023HrdBoildWndrlnd
Petals of Blood by Wa Thiong'o is an all timer for me, so good
It's on my TBR. He got arrested for writing that book so I'm very curious.
Oct 27, 2023Tender Is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica
I have been wanting to get back into reading for a long time, and I mostly randomly picked this book to get started. It's about a world where all animals have been infected with a virus and then humans resort to cannibalism.
I didn't really care for book's main angle which I guess is to get you to reflect about the horrors of the meat industry by making humans the product. But ultimately it just falls flat because cows aren't people.
Maybe it does say something about hurt people living in a broken system, even knowing and constantly thinking about how broken things are, but still ultimately choosing to be complicit in that system to heal their pain. Idk. That's what I couldn't stop thinking about when I finished it. I don't think I would recommend this.
Nov 3, 2023·1 replyCRACKASTEPPAVEGANHad quite the reading run.
Weep not, Child by Ngugi Was Thiongó
3.5/5
First of all, beautiful cover. This bok centers around the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and how it affects everyday people in terms of how they relate to their land. It's part coming of age, part family drama, part political, and is a good starting point for anyone looking to get into Ngugi's work.
Lines I liked:
"One could tell by her small eyes full of life and warmth that she had once been beautiful. But time and bad conditions do not favour beauty"
"Nganga was rich. He had land. Any man who had land was considered rich. If a man had plenty of money, many motor cars, but no land, he could never be counted as rich. A man who went with tattered clothes but had at least an acre of red earth was better off than the man with money. "
"‘Blackness is not all that makes a man,’ Kamau said bitterly. ‘There are some people, be they black or white, who don’t want others to rise above them. They want to be the source of all knowledge and share it piecemeal to others less endowed."
"It’s strange how you do fear something because your heart is already prepared to fear because maybe you were brought up to fear that something, or simply because you found others fearing"
"Hope of a better day was the only comfort he could give to a weeping child. He did not know that this faith in the future could be a form of escape from the reality of the present."
"Yesterday I found some people being beaten and they were crying, oh so horribly, begging for mercy. I don’t know what’s happening. Fear in the air. Not a fear of death – it’s a fear of living."
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
3/5
This book has two stories: The titular story and another shorter one called Moonlight Shadow. Both center around grief, although the second story is much better to read. Overall, it was okay. Nothing to write home about.Line I liked:
"In retrospect I realize that fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung."
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
4/5
King Von does it again. This time, the story covers a narrator who's trying to uncover the story of one Felix Hoenniker, a scientist who's responsible for the atomic bombs that dropped in Japan during World War II. This is the second book that I've read from Kurt Vonnegut, and it didn't disappoint. There are moments of humor and poignancy in a way that's unique to Mr Vonnegut. I still think that Slaughterhouse Five is above this one, but this was worth my time too.
Lines I liked:
"American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love"
"You may quote me:” he said. “Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.”"
"A pissant is somebody who thinks he’s so damn smart, he never can keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he’s got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he’ll tell you why you’re wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a b*** all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better."
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
3.5/5
I enjoyed this way more than I thought I would, given that I hated the author's debut. Set in 2000-2001, this story follows a yuppie New Yorker who decides to...well...nap for a year, and we see her interact with her best friend, Reva, while going back for her supply of sleeping pills to a batshit shrink of sorts, and she's also dealing with her broken family and how it's affected her. This story was written well enough to make it a propulsive read. I thought that the narrator was fascinating enough to follow till the end, but the ending resolution itself was tacky.
It's not for everyone, and very much a love it or hate it book, but I liked it enough that it stayed with me for a but after I read it because this is clearly someone dealing with depression, but I understand why some people are rubbed off the wrong way because of who she is.
Lines I liked:
"I wanted to hold on to the house the way you’d hold on to a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t."
"My father was busy dying—within a year of his diagnosis, the cancer had spread to his pancreas, then his stomach—and my mother busy being herself, which in the end seemed worse than having cancer."
"Once I started sleeping full time, I didn’t look out my windows very often. A glimpse was all I ever wanted. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. That hadn’t changed, and it never would."
"Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion."
"Pain is not the only touchstone for growth,"
Maru by Bessie Head
3/5
This story is about the prejudices revolving around the Masarwa people in Botswana. Margaret is one such girl, and as she grows up to be an intelligent woman, she goes to a village called Dilepe where she finds out that her people are treated as less than human, but then comes a romantic interest...or two...including the titular character, a man called Maru.
This book is hard to categorize. It's a lot of things and not just one, but the one thing front and center is Bessie Head's writing. She was one of the best authors to emerge from Botswana. I thought the first half was tighter than the latter half but still this was a good read.
Lines I liked:
"It is preferable to change the world on the basis of love of mankind. But if that quality be too rare, then common sense seems the next best thing"
"An allowance for life had always been made for really vicious people, who for too long had said the kind of things to helpless people which really applied to their own twisted, perverted hearts. Those who spat at what they thought was inferior were really the ‘low, filthy people’ of the earth, because decent people cannot behave that way"
*"All the force of her life was directed to her eyes, as though that were the only living part of her"
"The young girl had no confusion of heart, only the experience of being permanently unwanted by society in general"
Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball by Haruki Murakami
3/5
These are the first two novels that Murakami wrote, and the first novels in the "Rat Trilogy" with the third being A Wild Sheep Chase. Most Murakami fans would tell you to start with wild sheep chase and that's a good pick. This two pack is strictly for the enthusiasts and is rather unremarkable.
Lines I liked:
"And so I continue writing this, plying my consciousness with cigarettes and beer to prevent it from sinking into the sludge of time"
"Lies are terrible things. One could say that the greatest sins afflicting modern society are the proliferation of lies and silence. We lie through our teeth, then swallow our tongues."
Remains of the day is one of those books where it just sort of hits you towards the end that you're reading a masterpiece. I really grew to root for Stevens so much, the absolute idiot.
Also, that ending for my year of rest and relaxation
I mean I hated the whole thing but the ending is just f***ing hilarious- Nov 4, 2023Bizzle
Remains of the day is one of those books where it just sort of hits you towards the end that you're reading a masterpiece. I really grew to root for Stevens so much, the absolute idiot.
Also, that ending for my year of rest and relaxation
I mean I hated the whole thing but the ending is just f***ing hilariousYeah that ending for my year of rest was crazy. I mean, suddenly her depression is gone and she's out and about like nothing happened, but then the story gets even more insane with the 9/11 bit. What was the author doing? I couldn't believe the book wrapped up the way it did
- Nov 10, 2023·edited
These are pretty much one book. The first one is the basis for Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. There's a lot more time spent on the ground in Vietnam, and Hasford sprinkles in a lot of magic realism. It was originally supposed to be a werewolf soldier story, but fellow writers told him to just write the dirt. It's crazy how well he manages both. Anything beyond the pale is maddening and vibrant.
He served so he's got all the lingo down. Wonderful prose. Enrapturing from start to finish. He died while working on the third installment unfortunately. Probably the best anti-war fiction I've encountered. Far better than any movie. Better than Journey to the End of Night as well. Not to say I agree with everything. Def some noble savage, anti-industrial, soldier-woe-is-me, confederate apoligism and the like- but it's all very compelling.
5/5
BACKLOG
Jonathan Lethem's As She Climbed Across the Table - 3/5
Zeke Faux's Number Go Up - 3/5
Norm Finkelstein's Method & Madness: Israel's Assault on Gaza - 3/5
Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker - 2/5
Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven - 2/5
John Swartzwelder's How I Conquered Your Planet - 4/5 - Nov 10, 2023HrdBoildWndrlnd
This one was a fine, enjoyable at times sci-fi fantasy story. I have the feeling that this was supposed to be short stories that were unpublished and packed into one novel (or three novellas, depending on what you count). It had weird pacing issues and the stakes were never really clear, but it also had a lot of really impressive writing and an incredible setting. Delaney is a talented sci-fi author, but I think his truest strength was surrealism. And there's plenty of that here.
This s*** is insane. At times reading this it felt like watching language being invented. Saramago is truly a wizard. Jesus comes fully to life in this book, and I got to share in his confusion, sorrow, love, guilt, all his emotions. There's a pivotal moment towards the end where Jesus speaks to the Devil and God to learn the ultimate plan for himself. Some of the most incredible writing ever here, with characters who are basically ubiquitous in much of the world transformed into jealous, vulnerable, self-obsessed images of themselves. Truly beautiful stuff, this has to be in my top 10 ever.
I think I'm mostly over Murakami outside of his masterworks like Wind Up Bird or Kafka on the Shore (or my personal favorite, Hard Boiled Wonderland). It's a fine book, with some pretty passages. I read it after hearing it referenced in a conversation about Silent Hill 2, and I can see that parallel with the haunted (?) hotel featuring heavily in this book. However this seemed like another rote Murakami to me: the protagonist makes pasta, a woman disappears, he doesn't really care, he's obsessed with earlobes. I might pick up his newest novel when it's published in English, but otherwise I think I'm over it
I've read 3 Saramago I think and they've all been great. That one is def my favorite. Here's a really nice profile on him if you're interested.
Nov 10, 2023·1 reply
5/5
Damn. THIS is what I needed rn. The messaging of this book rings even clearer to this day
- Nov 11, 2023·1 replySir Swagalot
5/5
Damn. THIS is what I needed rn. The messaging of this book rings even clearer to this day
why
Nov 11, 2023Finished Disgrace by Coetzee, despondency done extremely well
- Nov 11, 2023shaedonsharpe
why
themes of community and looking out for other people, even when you’re in dire need of help
- Nov 17, 2023·edited
The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
finally read my first book from her and…wow. i am disturbed to my core. i’m gonna attempt to read everything she’s written
Nov 18, 2023babylon shermThomas Ligotti - Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works
If you’re looking for frequently great spooky season reading material (and have already exhausted Barker’s Books of Blood) then I definitely recommend picking up either of these compilations!
Easily approachable without sacrificing detail, Ligotti’s verbose and stately tales of the weird hold no shortage of living nightmares, impossible dimensions or thousand-dollar words. Like all other short story writers in the horror genre, he finds a good thing and repeats it endlessly. You might grow tired of his preoccupations with old New England houses, the smell of the woods at night, skeletally thin old men, and prismatic, nearly imperceptible demonic evils which lay just outside the scope of human perception. But there’s always some descriptive flourish to be found that makes the page worth paying attention to! And the implications can be gruesome, even though compared to Barker he’s a sterile virgin academic
He wears his influences on his sleeve (Lovecraft, Poe, Borges, the usual) and can’t resist letting you know about it even when you’ve already clocked it. But that’s ultimately fine, it feels almost required if you’re writing horror fiction anyways. Not surprising to anyone who’s read his doomer tract Conspiracy Against the Human Race, but there is absolutely zero hope in any of these stories and even the characters themselves seem incapable of it. That’s a plus for me! His ponderousness is ultimately preferable to King’s, even though I enjoyed his stories most when the monsters are human. A great gift for the goth in your life that needs to kill time on their commute
Read this a year or so ago, p weird stuff with that cosmic dread hanging over the stories. And mannequins.
Nov 19, 2023
There were some spots that I had to re-read because they were particularly dense, however I found this book to not only be highly engaging, illuminating, and insightful, but also incredibly funny at times and often put me in a pleasant aporia. Highly recommend to anyone interested in philosophy, although you probably should read up on the Mill-Russell/Frege distinction before you hop into it in order to get the most out of it.- Nov 22, 2023
avoided reading this for years then finished it in 3 days
made me cry the most i have in about a decade - Nov 22, 2023
One of my all time favorites. Delillo can make any sentence feel like it's really happening. The central theme of this book is the way terrorism has coopted many of the aspects of art: the search for meaning, the way it inspires society, and the "death of the author" problem of interpretation. It's just a fascinating book with a truly high concept premise that delivers on all it's promises.
Holds up shockingly well to today's time. It's told as a series of journal entries from a friend of Dr. Jekyll and the police procedural tone keeps it tense and propulsive. I think one of the great strengths of this book is how it can be viewed as an allegory for endless things: addiction, homosexuality, nonsensical Victorian social mores. It's a quick read, but it is fantastic.
I read the first book in this series earlier this year and was pretty disappointed. It's a truly unending cast of characters, and many of them follow superfluous and distracting paths. There's this bizarre tonal whiplash caused by the author's insistence on including immortality in his future human society. When characters can just body hop to a new clone when they die it's extremely hard to give any section of the book much urgency. This second book is far more fast-moving than the first, which is absolutely a good thing. In the first 1000 page book there were probably 500 wasted pages, in this second one there are maybe 200 wasted. Not a great series to spend 2000 pages with, but it shines through in various moments of tension.
Nov 27, 2023·1 reply
This book got me out of my reading slump. my 2nd Toni Morrison book and yea... she's incredible. The book really comes full circle in this final conversation between the two main characters and just.. wow, so good so good. gotta decide what my next Toni Morrison book will be.
- Nov 29, 2023·1 replyearthwalka
This book got me out of my reading slump. my 2nd Toni Morrison book and yea... she's incredible. The book really comes full circle in this final conversation between the two main characters and just.. wow, so good so good. gotta decide what my next Toni Morrison book will be.
waiting for this to come in the mail
The Bluest Eye is something else man - Nov 29, 2023Sir Swagalot
waiting for this to come in the mail
The Bluest Eye is something else manyea she's incredible man
- Dec 7, 2023
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
I feel like this book may be about the jadedness and desensitization of people in this society. We have this character who has essentially lost all feeling and attempts to regain some of that back by doing what I can only describe as a human's version of a hard reset. I was engaged for pretty much the entire story. Mainly because the main character is just so damn interesting. Her upbringing is peculiar and the people around her are just as strange. Things do get a bit repetitive towards the middle and I began wondering where this was actually going. By the end, I don't know if it really ever got where it was trying to go. All in all, I was invested in the narrator's journey and to me that was enough to say this was a good book.