Literary-Fiction

** 36th book of 2021: Body Politic ** Everybody had politics, even if only some people had sex. * Narratives of collective action and dissonance are so often unsatisfying that mainstream culture has abandoned them. This is true in fiction, journalism, and even history. Politics and bureaucracy are dirty words. Individuals serve as the node for every story, and the anonymous and transparent cultural context reinforces a collective fundamental attribution error, hobbling our ability to understand ourselves and the world. Martine focuses on the blank spaces between individuals, and this is where A Desolation Called Peace shines. ...

**18th book of 2021: How the world ends. ** It’s not difficult to envision childhood trauma and sexual frustration as the shaper of global catastrophe. After all, men with childhood trauma and issues with women are the ones who already nearly ended the world. (see: One Minute to Midnight ) Once the wrong fires are lit, * “[t]he whole world now, one vast uncontrolled experiment . . . and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate” * ...

** 17th book of 2021: Sex, Politics, Apathy. ** I have a rule when it comes to scifi: if the main character starts talking esoteric politics while engaging in strange sex, I’m out. House of Suns takes as its premise that humanity has spread through the galaxy, and planet-bound civilizations rise and fall in mere millennia. The only way to maintain civilization for longer periods of time is through clone family lines, known as shatterlings. These families roam the galaxy, fix stars with pseudo-dyson-spheres, trade with new civilizations, and meet for family reunions every 200,000 years or so. Family lines spend most of their time either in cryo or traveling at relativistic speeds, free to wander the galaxy, but clone club has two rules: ...

Animal Farm levels of allegory about life-or-death instincts deployed in the pursuit of status, the willful blindness of the wealthy toward inequality of opportunity, and the thucydides trap.

** 79th book of 2020: Rhythm of ‘body keeps score’, followed by the rhythm of bore. ** Too often in fantasy, the hero’s journey consumes so much available bandwidth that, that the difficulties of high stakes situations are lost in the compression algorithm of novel writing. Elements like individual trauma or coalition politics are ignored entirely , leaving readers with conversation chess robots who plan every social interaction 4 moves in advance and stare at defeat and carnage unfazed in and deftness that mere mortals cannot dream of. ...

** 76th book of 2020: Class struggle isn’t new ** “What was it about these steep, western, water-locked cities, Seattle, Spokane, San Francisco? All three I’d visited, and in all three, the money flowed straight uphill.” The book exudes a bitterness about class society, where at the end of the belle-epoch, “all people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.” Our protagonists gawk at riding in rather than on the train car, or eating “gnocchi that might have been pinched from the ass of an Italian angel.” Yet beyond the cardboard cutout villain and our protagonist who mainly a narrative camera lens, it felt like the book didn’t have much to say. Even the title is a rehash of old concepts. The 8th century Tang poem comes to mind: 朱门酒肉臭，路有冻死骨: ‘While the poor masses freeze to death outside, the rich let wine and meat putrefy from excess.’ ...

75th book of 2020: Lost in Calculations Read through this in one sitting, which was about as long as I think I would be able to suspend my disbelief. The world itself held promise, like a rotary calculator working through a math problem. Every obvious crack in the worldbuilding is addressed by some expository aside. Yet characters are part of worldbuilding, and that’s where things fell apart. The main character was consistently mean, sarcastic and indefatigable. While this is a bold character choice, it strained credulity. The entire school, and premise of the book, is that everybody is playing Queen’s Gambit worthy mental chess with one-another in order to stay alive. There are themes about inequality, but the plot makes me think it should be a book about trauma. If only 50% of the students survive, there are no teachers in order to serve as emotional role models, it feels like the place would turn into hunger games faster than the hunger games themselves.

72nd book of 2020 - Nice Escape. It’s November 3rd, as the American republic follows perilously close to last days of the Roman republic: a contested election, extreme partisanship, and cries of criminality. I’m having flashbacks to 2016 when my candidate didn’t get elected and my girlfriend at the time left without warning. But wait! What is that coming in outside of the object of Jupiter? Surely, just because we can’t explain the strange trajectory or lack of spin that doesn’t mean life… but when the photos come back the evidence is clear. ...

Empty-handed I entered the world Barefoot I leave it My coming, my going Two simple happenings That got entangled For each of us, the last day is coming, like the terminus of a transcontinental railroad trip. It’s far enough away to put out of mind, but we all know the end is coming. If the afterlife is unknowable, at least we can learn from others what pulling into the station feels like. Japanese death poems collects the final poems spoken or written before death over a period of hundreds of years. By alternating between poems and commentary, there is just enough context to make the different poems enjoyable, and the book proves surprisingly snackable. Many of the poems are simple imagery, in some way comforting of how one can approach the last days with a sense of awe and wonder. ...

A Canticle for Leibowitz follows the arc of a post-apocalypse humanity, through three story arcs: Through the discovery of key artifacts during the new dark ages after a nuclear disaster. Another about the struggle for control of information and innovation between scientists and religious scholars A third in post apocalypse space age, where interplanetary colonization is possible, but nuclear war turns out to be a repeating cycle rather than a one off event. Perhaps the highlight of the book was the different characters, who seemed more real and flawed than typical protagonists. Unfortunately by the time I would become invested in any of them, the plot would fast forward by a few hundred years, with hardly a sentence spared about how our main character died an untimely death and was eaten by buzzards. As a remix of history, providing a scenario showing humanity in an apocalypse-rebirth-cycle, but the structure of disjointed stories made it hard to get into and I never really understood what I was supposed to pay attention to in each canto.