Ughubughughughughughghlug
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 14 de Mayo, 2019
I went back through recently looking at my record of books I'd read. I usually score them 1-6 but my standards drift around over time. I just kind of reclassified them into a category of favorites (like, really good shit that excites me, would put on a bookshelf if I didn't buy them on Kindle) and stuff that's more regular good. There's other stuff I've read that's worthwhile, but this is the more curated list.
I'll start with the 23 top tier novels (as an exercise in extreme, competitive autism). This is a giant task collecting together reviews, so I'll just add them in batches until I get bored or you tell me, "Fuck off, nobody cares."
(This got EXTREMELY out of hand. I was having a slow day, kind of tired after everything that's been going on, and I just sort of mindlessly relived more pleasant parts of my life while typing. I never planned to spend this much time writing this much shit. I feel like it's the hurricane that's at the bottom of all this, I wasn't afflicted but I think some part of me was disturbed by the idea that these catastrophes can just as easily happen to me as to anyone else.)
THE UGHUBUG AWARDS
Categories:
- Greatest of All Time
- Best in Alternate History
- Best in Animal-Perspective Fiction
- Best in Realistic Fiction
- Best in Science Fiction
- Best in Dystopian Fiction
- Best in Mathematical Fiction
- Best in World Historical Fiction
- Best in American Historical Fiction
I'll start with the 23 top tier novels (as an exercise in extreme, competitive autism). This is a giant task collecting together reviews, so I'll just add them in batches until I get bored or you tell me, "Fuck off, nobody cares."
(This got EXTREMELY out of hand. I was having a slow day, kind of tired after everything that's been going on, and I just sort of mindlessly relived more pleasant parts of my life while typing. I never planned to spend this much time writing this much shit. I feel like it's the hurricane that's at the bottom of all this, I wasn't afflicted but I think some part of me was disturbed by the idea that these catastrophes can just as easily happen to me as to anyone else.)
THE UGHUBUG AWARDS
Categories:
- Greatest of All Time
- Best in Alternate History
- Best in Animal-Perspective Fiction
- Best in Realistic Fiction
- Best in Science Fiction
- Best in Dystopian Fiction
- Best in Mathematical Fiction
- Best in World Historical Fiction
- Best in American Historical Fiction
- THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION
- CELESTIAL MATTERS
- THE PESHAWAR LANCERS
There are three solid candidates here. I've read some other alternate history, including The Difference Engine (appreciate what it tried to do, didn't personally like it, bored out oy my gourd) and The Atlantropa Articles (very unique horror concept, but just kind of left me bummed out). When it comes to my favorite alternate history, it clearly comes down to these three.
The Peshawar Lancers is good pulp, but that's about all I can say. It's wonderfully creative. Most alternate history is "dur err what if like WW2 but Nazi won? <drools>," but some authors make some really unique stuff by taking a question nobody would have ever asked and playing it not as a wargame but to create a unique constructed world that derives its strength FROM it's rooting in our own world. The Peshawar Lancers did this masterfully with a portrayal of the British Empire based not in the Isles but in the Raj and a Great Game between said Raj and a death cult Tsarist regime. It's a setting that feels remarkably real even though it walked straight out of a "two-fisted tales" style comic book, lot of interesting descriptions of Angrezi (Anglo-Indian syncretic) culture and imperialist action. But at the end of the day, it's a dumb pulp novel. It kind of lost me at the end when it had badass English princesses fighting with swords (gay). On the other hand, it had Disraeli get eaten by cannibals or something. It's that kind of history autism where it KNOWS that its target audience wants to read about Sikhs shooting Pashtuns with muskets, but also wants to read about cannibal Cossack psychic death cultists.
Worse in writing quality but much better in high concept is Celestial Matters, an absolute treasure of a novel. This one is a masterpiece because it, creatively, is an alternate SCIENCE book. It asks: what would a science fiction adventure look like in a world where Greek philosophy was right about everything? In the distant future Alexander the Great (seemingly a republican unifier of the Greeks instead of a megalomaniacal ruler) has spread Greek civilization to the seven continents and Greek philosophy has created a world of incredible technological progress. Based on the eternal truth of things like Aristotelian physics, Copernican astronomy, humor theory in medicine, and so on, the Greeks have even begun to settle the stars. But they are locked in a battle to the death with the Chinese, who have a totally different understanding of science based on Taoism.
The story is one of a science ship sent to collect a chunk of Sun to develop into a superweapon. Along the way their ship will suffer sabotage, the heroes will have to cooperate with the villains to survive, and along the way they will learn to reconcile the differences of their seemingly incompatible, but actually mutually necessary, worldviews to solve their problems. Not just scientifically, in synthesizing Daoism with philosophy, but in their understanding of history, understanding why two superpowers locked in a forever war don't seem to be able to overrun each other even as both feel that they're losing. And they make the grounds for a world peace. You almost have what feels like Thomas Kuhn's scientific revolutions turned into a story about history and hope.
It's cool as Hell! It's also fairly amateurish, utilitarian writing. I like pretty writing. But it's okay when you have a high concept that amazing. And yet, it still isn't the best alternate history I've ever read. That honor goes to the GOAT, Yiddish Policemen's Union. It is a perfect example of how wonderful AH can be when it focuses on things besides Hitlerconfederates. An obscure proposed policy from real life (the Slattery Report) gets passed in Depression Era America and the United States accepts the creation of a federal territory in Alaska, Sitka, as a Jewish ethnostate. Decades later the Jews of Sitka have developed a major metropolis, but everywhere they go there will always be conflict, with themselves if not with the locals (like the Tlingit: from the river to the sea, Alaska will be free).
The hero, a Jewish detective, is investigating a minor suicide (I think? been a while since I read it) that turns out to be a murder, and along the way our hardboiled noir hero will uncover a conspiracy that goes to the top of the US government, dealing with the Messianic prophecies of a Haredi cult trying to bring about the red colt, the messiah, and the retaking of the Holy Land in cataclysmic war.
Where YPU shines is worldbuilding and characterization. Maybe this is more common than I think and I just haven't read enough of the genre, but the main character feels like a badass drunk noir stereotype at the immediate start, but he quickly blossoms into someone very, very human and sympathetic. Man who pressured his wife into aborting a baby with a very severe genetic disorder, had his marriage fall apart. It's been a while, but I remember just being very moved by his situation. Really feels like a real person in a real world. Sitka is painted in such detail (from the Yiddish-Filipino-Tlingit patois of language and food, to little factoids about the literal and human geography of the city, to local history that you look up and it turns out to be real) that it feels more real than real Alaska does. It's honestly a strong candidate for GOAT novel of all time. I fucking love it and am distraught the Cohen Brothers didn't get around to making a movie of it (I feel like they're probably the only people who could have a hope to get it right).
- CELESTIAL MATTERS
- THE PESHAWAR LANCERS
There are three solid candidates here. I've read some other alternate history, including The Difference Engine (appreciate what it tried to do, didn't personally like it, bored out oy my gourd) and The Atlantropa Articles (very unique horror concept, but just kind of left me bummed out). When it comes to my favorite alternate history, it clearly comes down to these three.
The Peshawar Lancers is good pulp, but that's about all I can say. It's wonderfully creative. Most alternate history is "dur err what if like WW2 but Nazi won? <drools>," but some authors make some really unique stuff by taking a question nobody would have ever asked and playing it not as a wargame but to create a unique constructed world that derives its strength FROM it's rooting in our own world. The Peshawar Lancers did this masterfully with a portrayal of the British Empire based not in the Isles but in the Raj and a Great Game between said Raj and a death cult Tsarist regime. It's a setting that feels remarkably real even though it walked straight out of a "two-fisted tales" style comic book, lot of interesting descriptions of Angrezi (Anglo-Indian syncretic) culture and imperialist action. But at the end of the day, it's a dumb pulp novel. It kind of lost me at the end when it had badass English princesses fighting with swords (gay). On the other hand, it had Disraeli get eaten by cannibals or something. It's that kind of history autism where it KNOWS that its target audience wants to read about Sikhs shooting Pashtuns with muskets, but also wants to read about cannibal Cossack psychic death cultists.
Worse in writing quality but much better in high concept is Celestial Matters, an absolute treasure of a novel. This one is a masterpiece because it, creatively, is an alternate SCIENCE book. It asks: what would a science fiction adventure look like in a world where Greek philosophy was right about everything? In the distant future Alexander the Great (seemingly a republican unifier of the Greeks instead of a megalomaniacal ruler) has spread Greek civilization to the seven continents and Greek philosophy has created a world of incredible technological progress. Based on the eternal truth of things like Aristotelian physics, Copernican astronomy, humor theory in medicine, and so on, the Greeks have even begun to settle the stars. But they are locked in a battle to the death with the Chinese, who have a totally different understanding of science based on Taoism.
The story is one of a science ship sent to collect a chunk of Sun to develop into a superweapon. Along the way their ship will suffer sabotage, the heroes will have to cooperate with the villains to survive, and along the way they will learn to reconcile the differences of their seemingly incompatible, but actually mutually necessary, worldviews to solve their problems. Not just scientifically, in synthesizing Daoism with philosophy, but in their understanding of history, understanding why two superpowers locked in a forever war don't seem to be able to overrun each other even as both feel that they're losing. And they make the grounds for a world peace. You almost have what feels like Thomas Kuhn's scientific revolutions turned into a story about history and hope.
It's cool as Hell! It's also fairly amateurish, utilitarian writing. I like pretty writing. But it's okay when you have a high concept that amazing. And yet, it still isn't the best alternate history I've ever read. That honor goes to the GOAT, Yiddish Policemen's Union. It is a perfect example of how wonderful AH can be when it focuses on things besides Hitlerconfederates. An obscure proposed policy from real life (the Slattery Report) gets passed in Depression Era America and the United States accepts the creation of a federal territory in Alaska, Sitka, as a Jewish ethnostate. Decades later the Jews of Sitka have developed a major metropolis, but everywhere they go there will always be conflict, with themselves if not with the locals (like the Tlingit: from the river to the sea, Alaska will be free).
The hero, a Jewish detective, is investigating a minor suicide (I think? been a while since I read it) that turns out to be a murder, and along the way our hardboiled noir hero will uncover a conspiracy that goes to the top of the US government, dealing with the Messianic prophecies of a Haredi cult trying to bring about the red colt, the messiah, and the retaking of the Holy Land in cataclysmic war.
Where YPU shines is worldbuilding and characterization. Maybe this is more common than I think and I just haven't read enough of the genre, but the main character feels like a badass drunk noir stereotype at the immediate start, but he quickly blossoms into someone very, very human and sympathetic. Man who pressured his wife into aborting a baby with a very severe genetic disorder, had his marriage fall apart. It's been a while, but I remember just being very moved by his situation. Really feels like a real person in a real world. Sitka is painted in such detail (from the Yiddish-Filipino-Tlingit patois of language and food, to little factoids about the literal and human geography of the city, to local history that you look up and it turns out to be real) that it feels more real than real Alaska does. It's honestly a strong candidate for GOAT novel of all time. I fucking love it and am distraught the Cohen Brothers didn't get around to making a movie of it (I feel like they're probably the only people who could have a hope to get it right).
- THE PLAGUE DOGS
- THE BEES
I have a huge enthusiasm for what TV Tropes calls "xenofiction," but what I, for clarity, have started calling "animal-perspective fiction." Fiction that depicts the lives of NORMAL animals from the animals' perspective, just with the minimum amount of human thinking necessary to get into their minds. People unfamiliar with it usually get it if I pitch it as "like Watership Down." And guess who the king of it is? Yes, Richard Adams.
Unfortunately, most of this stuff SUCKS. "The White Bone" (elephants) sucks. "Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey" sucks (you want to read pigeons moralizing about how foolish anti-Black WW1 era racism is? want to read about a real-life war hero, who there's no proof was gay, cruising the streets looking to suck some cock)? But there are two that are pretty dang good that I've read in adult life.
The Bees wasn't the best literary experience. Good enough, don't get me wrong. But it shined in its high concept. Let me pitch it to you like this: a woman lives under a brutal, totalitarian regime. In her dystopian society everyone is bred from the genetic material of a single dictatorial matriarch, and they are terrorized by a population police who will summarily execute any mother who births a child and the child itself. So imagine the terror when our hero, an ugly misshapen monstrosity of the lowest caste in a society obsessed with genetic and literal sanitation, gives birth to a sort of messiah, a baby boy in a society where all but the decadent royal harem of boytoys are sterile females. Over the course of the story she will move throughout society, struggle to save her baby, unintentionally seduce (get raped by? don't remember) a prince, and ultimately be at the center of a violent power struggle, when the plotters of the hive bust out their knives and their own secret champions, their own biological superweapons, for a battle royale to coup the queen, purge the opposition and violently seize control of a civilization spiraling downwards.
You know what's badass? Every bit of that is real life, just described in human terms. Every bit of that happens in real bee hives all the time. Bee queens get worn out and old, the female drones can mature to become fertile and they have a power struggle. It's just interpreted, not even with much exaggeration at all, through a human news to show how fucking metal and historic the natural world can feel. Something like a rat getting into the hive is portrayed as being like a dragon attack that will be remembered for 100 generations.
So what could possibly be better? The Plague Dogs, maybe. Honestly, I like TPD more for what it has to say than what it is. The Bees is a better read. More fun. But TPD is writing with a point to it. From Richard Adams, the man who did Watership Down and who likes to play with spirituality and animal experiences in his work (he was a real life conservationist, too), you get a story of two dogs that escape from a cruel medical research lab. When the scientists realize that the dogs could have escaped having contracted bubonic plague from some rat experiments, they try to cover it up, but their ineptitude outweighs their cravenness and it leaks to the press. Through a series of unfortunate misunderstandings it blows up into a nationwide manhunt for the dogs and mass hysteria as everyone panics over Black Death 2 literally sweeping the countryside.
See a little connection? See a little bit of, uh, parallels to the modern situation? Y'know, the whole COVID laboratory leak Fauci dog-experiment shit?
Adams wrote this decades ago.
Adams had something to say about how cruel the world is to animals and how unjustifiable animal torture experiments are. What will never leave my mind is the passage in which one dog tells another a creation story about how God made Man, put him in charge of the world, and then Man kept fucking it up repeatedly until God finally disowns them. It went a long ways towards developing my understanding of Christianity, eventually leading to me realizing that it WAS Christianity the whole time, Adams was a Christian. I didn't really "get" the Garden of Eden, in a meaningful way, until I saw reexpressed, far more elegantly, through this story, focused on a specific aspect of humanity's purpose and a specific aspect of humanity's moral failure, written so elegantly that I feel like I am reading God's words expressed through Adams' pen.
Unlike in the movie, the doggies get a happy ending, but it feels a little cheap and cheesy, like he couldn't bring himself to kill them for real. All the same, I prefer his happy ending.
- THE BEES
I have a huge enthusiasm for what TV Tropes calls "xenofiction," but what I, for clarity, have started calling "animal-perspective fiction." Fiction that depicts the lives of NORMAL animals from the animals' perspective, just with the minimum amount of human thinking necessary to get into their minds. People unfamiliar with it usually get it if I pitch it as "like Watership Down." And guess who the king of it is? Yes, Richard Adams.
Unfortunately, most of this stuff SUCKS. "The White Bone" (elephants) sucks. "Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey" sucks (you want to read pigeons moralizing about how foolish anti-Black WW1 era racism is? want to read about a real-life war hero, who there's no proof was gay, cruising the streets looking to suck some cock)? But there are two that are pretty dang good that I've read in adult life.
The Bees wasn't the best literary experience. Good enough, don't get me wrong. But it shined in its high concept. Let me pitch it to you like this: a woman lives under a brutal, totalitarian regime. In her dystopian society everyone is bred from the genetic material of a single dictatorial matriarch, and they are terrorized by a population police who will summarily execute any mother who births a child and the child itself. So imagine the terror when our hero, an ugly misshapen monstrosity of the lowest caste in a society obsessed with genetic and literal sanitation, gives birth to a sort of messiah, a baby boy in a society where all but the decadent royal harem of boytoys are sterile females. Over the course of the story she will move throughout society, struggle to save her baby, unintentionally seduce (get raped by? don't remember) a prince, and ultimately be at the center of a violent power struggle, when the plotters of the hive bust out their knives and their own secret champions, their own biological superweapons, for a battle royale to coup the queen, purge the opposition and violently seize control of a civilization spiraling downwards.
You know what's badass? Every bit of that is real life, just described in human terms. Every bit of that happens in real bee hives all the time. Bee queens get worn out and old, the female drones can mature to become fertile and they have a power struggle. It's just interpreted, not even with much exaggeration at all, through a human news to show how fucking metal and historic the natural world can feel. Something like a rat getting into the hive is portrayed as being like a dragon attack that will be remembered for 100 generations.
So what could possibly be better? The Plague Dogs, maybe. Honestly, I like TPD more for what it has to say than what it is. The Bees is a better read. More fun. But TPD is writing with a point to it. From Richard Adams, the man who did Watership Down and who likes to play with spirituality and animal experiences in his work (he was a real life conservationist, too), you get a story of two dogs that escape from a cruel medical research lab. When the scientists realize that the dogs could have escaped having contracted bubonic plague from some rat experiments, they try to cover it up, but their ineptitude outweighs their cravenness and it leaks to the press. Through a series of unfortunate misunderstandings it blows up into a nationwide manhunt for the dogs and mass hysteria as everyone panics over Black Death 2 literally sweeping the countryside.
See a little connection? See a little bit of, uh, parallels to the modern situation? Y'know, the whole COVID laboratory leak Fauci dog-experiment shit?
Adams wrote this decades ago.
Adams had something to say about how cruel the world is to animals and how unjustifiable animal torture experiments are. What will never leave my mind is the passage in which one dog tells another a creation story about how God made Man, put him in charge of the world, and then Man kept fucking it up repeatedly until God finally disowns them. It went a long ways towards developing my understanding of Christianity, eventually leading to me realizing that it WAS Christianity the whole time, Adams was a Christian. I didn't really "get" the Garden of Eden, in a meaningful way, until I saw reexpressed, far more elegantly, through this story, focused on a specific aspect of humanity's purpose and a specific aspect of humanity's moral failure, written so elegantly that I feel like I am reading God's words expressed through Adams' pen.
But I want you to remember all the time that if I've made you the most powerful animal it's so that you can look after the others - help them to do the best they can for themselves, see they're not wasted and so on. You're in charge of the world. You must try to act with dignity, like me. Don't go doing anything mean or senseless.
Because thou hast done this thing, thou art cursed above every beast of the field. They will continue to live their lives as before, without reflection or regret, and I will speak to them in their hearts, in hearing and in scent and instinct and in the bright light of their perception of the moment. But from you I shall turn away for ever, and you will spend the rest of your days what is right and looking for the truth that I shall conceal from you and infuse instead into the lion's lea and the assurance of the rose.
Because thou hast done this thing, thou art cursed above every beast of the field. They will continue to live their lives as before, without reflection or regret, and I will speak to them in their hearts, in hearing and in scent and instinct and in the bright light of their perception of the moment. But from you I shall turn away for ever, and you will spend the rest of your days what is right and looking for the truth that I shall conceal from you and infuse instead into the lion's lea and the assurance of the rose.
Unlike in the movie, the doggies get a happy ending, but it feels a little cheap and cheesy, like he couldn't bring himself to kill them for real. All the same, I prefer his happy ending.
- A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES
- STRAIGHT MAN
I read very little of what I'd consider realistic fiction (contemporary and only-a-period-piece-because-the-march-of-time-made-it-so), so this ain't much of a category.
Straight Man is delightful to me, but mostly for personal reasons. It's the story of an English department chair facing a coup. His life is kind of falling apart, he's a sarcastic but goofy and lovable asshole, there's something of a midlife crisis going on (not just with him but with half of his colleagues), he threatens to kill the geese that aggravate him in the park, and he's facing being ousted from the chair through office politics. The character is one that I can sympathize with and pretend "that's totally me," except it's not me because he's the guy everyone loves to hate at work but in fact is friends with half of them, and he has charisma (I've started to get some lately; most it's the performative kind for lecturing) and takes life in stride and I don't. It's a sort of balm to pain.
If you don't know much about academia this one probably doesn't have much to offer, to be honest. It also doesn't rank so highly for me as the story, while genuinely very funny, rambles around with no point and suddenly runs out of steam. I was kind of shocked when it happened. Straight Man's humor comes from its cast of eccentrics, people that are larger-than-life but also believable at the same time. Freakshows that infest humanities. Every single character you meet is a launching point for a series of anecdotes and stories that flesh them out like a real person. Every little store or restaurant or street in town has a tale behind it. It's a very rich, very intimate fictional world the author built up that I would have loved to explore in other books of his, had he ever written any. Very comfortable. A safe community to read from the outside.
In a similar vein of books that hit close to home in some way, I read A Confederacy of Dunces because Kiwi Farms (and I think other Alt Right sites before it) pitched it as being an absurdist adventure of someone who is bascially Alt-Right decades before the Internet. It is. Now, I never enjoyed it near as much as most people do. I just didn't, I'm sorry. But I DID enjoy it, quite a bit. ACoD is the author's love letter to 20th Century New Orleans, not a touristy French voodoo New Orleans but an authentic version that would have to come from a local. It's got a tragic story, too. The guy died (suicide, I think it was?) young and his mother knew it was gold and she insisted, as much as a tribute to his memory, that it be published. You can tell that his "hero" is drawn as a sort of grotesque, exaggerated parody of himself. The Virgin Ignatius Riley is a fat pretentious sperg with an obsession with Medieval philosophy and society. He judges the entire world around him through the bizarre lens of the kind of person who would give a fuck what the Byzantines are. He is m'lady and deus vult incarnate, but he can't deus vult effectively because the slightest inconvenience sets his "valves" to spazzing out. He is a glutton, a sloth, an absolute moral reprobate. A weird little racist and sexist and Catholic moralist that is arrested for buying porn and who the love of his life is a Jewish Communist slut. Along the way his rambling adventure to Get a Job so he doesn't have to live off Mommy's Tendies introduces him to a wide range of people that all fall under the description of "normalfaggot" but are just as deranged and weird in their own normalfaggot ways.
Honestly I've pumped myself up to go read it again. It's a cult classic for a reason. My favorite part was the Crusade for Moorish Dignity (he decides to go unionize the "Moors" (Louisiana black folks) or something like that.
There's is a little (let's be honest, a lot) of Ignatius Reilly in all of us here. That's VERY BAD.
- STRAIGHT MAN
I read very little of what I'd consider realistic fiction (contemporary and only-a-period-piece-because-the-march-of-time-made-it-so), so this ain't much of a category.
Straight Man is delightful to me, but mostly for personal reasons. It's the story of an English department chair facing a coup. His life is kind of falling apart, he's a sarcastic but goofy and lovable asshole, there's something of a midlife crisis going on (not just with him but with half of his colleagues), he threatens to kill the geese that aggravate him in the park, and he's facing being ousted from the chair through office politics. The character is one that I can sympathize with and pretend "that's totally me," except it's not me because he's the guy everyone loves to hate at work but in fact is friends with half of them, and he has charisma (I've started to get some lately; most it's the performative kind for lecturing) and takes life in stride and I don't. It's a sort of balm to pain.
If you don't know much about academia this one probably doesn't have much to offer, to be honest. It also doesn't rank so highly for me as the story, while genuinely very funny, rambles around with no point and suddenly runs out of steam. I was kind of shocked when it happened. Straight Man's humor comes from its cast of eccentrics, people that are larger-than-life but also believable at the same time. Freakshows that infest humanities. Every single character you meet is a launching point for a series of anecdotes and stories that flesh them out like a real person. Every little store or restaurant or street in town has a tale behind it. It's a very rich, very intimate fictional world the author built up that I would have loved to explore in other books of his, had he ever written any. Very comfortable. A safe community to read from the outside.
In a similar vein of books that hit close to home in some way, I read A Confederacy of Dunces because Kiwi Farms (and I think other Alt Right sites before it) pitched it as being an absurdist adventure of someone who is bascially Alt-Right decades before the Internet. It is. Now, I never enjoyed it near as much as most people do. I just didn't, I'm sorry. But I DID enjoy it, quite a bit. ACoD is the author's love letter to 20th Century New Orleans, not a touristy French voodoo New Orleans but an authentic version that would have to come from a local. It's got a tragic story, too. The guy died (suicide, I think it was?) young and his mother knew it was gold and she insisted, as much as a tribute to his memory, that it be published. You can tell that his "hero" is drawn as a sort of grotesque, exaggerated parody of himself. The Virgin Ignatius Riley is a fat pretentious sperg with an obsession with Medieval philosophy and society. He judges the entire world around him through the bizarre lens of the kind of person who would give a fuck what the Byzantines are. He is m'lady and deus vult incarnate, but he can't deus vult effectively because the slightest inconvenience sets his "valves" to spazzing out. He is a glutton, a sloth, an absolute moral reprobate. A weird little racist and sexist and Catholic moralist that is arrested for buying porn and who the love of his life is a Jewish Communist slut. Along the way his rambling adventure to Get a Job so he doesn't have to live off Mommy's Tendies introduces him to a wide range of people that all fall under the description of "normalfaggot" but are just as deranged and weird in their own normalfaggot ways.
Honestly I've pumped myself up to go read it again. It's a cult classic for a reason. My favorite part was the Crusade for Moorish Dignity (he decides to go unionize the "Moors" (Louisiana black folks) or something like that.
There's is a little (let's be honest, a lot) of Ignatius Reilly in all of us here. That's VERY BAD.
- ALIEN IN A SMALL TOWN
- THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM
- THE UNINCORPORATED MAN
- THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS
- DELTA-V
I don't feel like going in super great detail with these. Delta-v is a great little book that feels like The Right Stuff meets The Martian. It's a race to be the first to mine an asteroid. A cave diver gets recruited, after saving some people, and is selected after a brutal boot camp. The mission: a top secret mission to beat the company's rivals. Billionaire tech bro space race. Everything goes to Hell. There's nothing special, I just really, really enjoyed reading it. One of few novels (and the other one is in this list) where law, in this case real life space law, plays a major role in the plot.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is classic Heinlein, and as great as Starship Troopers can be, I think this one is a much better story. Moon is simultaneously a company town in space (as far as the utilities are concerned) and a minarchist state (as far as everything else about their society is concerned). Populated like Space Australia full of mostly men (living in polyandry) and exploited, unsustainably, by the Earth, they wind up kicking off their own American Revolution with the assistance of a supercomputer controlling the utilities that has developed sentience. Tons of great science fiction concepts, real love letter to America, fun cultural stuff (the line marriages, Loonie talk being Russian grammar based), really fun.
The Unincorporated Man is amazing, was a candidate for my favorite thing ever, until it shit the bed near the very end. It's a science fiction legal thriller. A billionaire comes out of cryogenic stasis hundreds of years into the future to find that he is part of a world that is as transformed socially as it is economically. In the distant future mankind has adopted a minarchist state, but they have also adopted a principle of governance that every individual must be legally incorporated, their own life buyable and salable stock. This is their main debt mechanism: an IPO to fund college, sell stock to get a mortgage. The minarchist society is everything the tech bro billionaire wanted, but that one principle terrifies him, because the big corporations want him to incorporate - a necessary step to integrate into society - and he refuses to sign away his freedom. It's libertarianism vs libertarianism. One that is heroic and individualist, libertarian in spirit, the other that is libertarian only in outward form but not in its underlying values.
It's very interesting in the high concept, works as a good thriller, interesting legally, and it has some absolutely genius worldbuilding. Has this one plot point where, in the past, they had a virtual reality plague. Everyone became epic gamers and died from gaming and gooning constantly. I'm making light of it, but it's absolutely bone-chilling, could be a standalone short story, could be a Twilight Zone episode. I say that because at one point the hero has to, like everyone normally does as kids, attend the Museum of Virtual Reality. It's like their version of Germany's Holocaust ritual. He's first eased into virtual reality (this shit is perfect, a perfect simulation that feels more real than real life, more like a literal virtual reality than a video game) to show what it's like, and then he's simulated the life of one of his employees from the past. How he gets his first exposure to VR through a trip. How VR gradually becomes cheaper to the point it enters the home. How at first it revolutionizes their lives, but then it slowly consumes them with all-consuming addiction. How the world then collapses when people only care about fantasies and not the real thing. And then they all die. It's inspired by a famous parable from Nozick and it's just absolutely genius.
In another chapter he visits another museum. They've put the Empire State Building inside of another, even bigger hollow skyscraper and have every floor be a living history museum to a different year in 20th-21st Century NYC, with the windows displaying the skyline as it once was. It's cool. I wish it existed in real life.
The Three-Body Problem is great. Unfortunately I kind of think that much of what really speaks about it to me is just my own interpretation, not what the author intended. I was hooked from the first chapter. I know a girl who was born in China but adopted into the US and thinking about how lucky she got messed me up a bit. You see a struggle session depicted, old professor getting killed for disagreeing with Marx's Eternal Truth. Then the bulk of the book is about space aliens, of course. I thought the whole Three Body Problem game was a metaphor for Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, but if it is, it's that AND literally space aliens drying themselves out and making computers out of their own bodies. I really, really dig that environmentalists are portrayed as what they are: death cultists that hate humanity. I love the idea that they want to sabotage people's faith in science itself as a way to sabotage the rest of human progress. It's really good, excited to read more of it.
Lastly, Alien in a Small Town is a special book. I have a sick fetish for brown women dressed like pioneers (go see my AI art in that thread), so the premise of an Amish Indian-American ex-engineer having a romance with a rock tentacle monster sounded hilarious and right up my alley. What I got was way, way more thoughtful than it had any right to be. Hundreds of years in the future the Amish of Pennsylvania are chugging along as they always have even as first contact has resulted in Earth being made the protectorate of rock monsters. Indira is an Amish (father was a convert) ex-engineer, black sheep of the community, returned home after being overwhelmed by the ugliness of the outside world. It's a world where transhumanism drives a lot of people to Romantic creeds of simplicity. One day, a rock monster named Dwight blows into town, builds a house, becomes a practicing Amish like the rest of them.
Of course he's so out of place that this extremely insular community has some trouble getting used to him, but they're Amish, they're very kind by nature. A friendship starts (and Paul being a rock monster, you get a lot of sci-fi "how do they talk, what's their society like," all that stuff) and bit by bit Paul falls in love with the Amish girl. It's completely asexual, though. He's a rock monster. He's into sexy rock monster ladies. But as a very lonely, troubled creature completely out of his normal element, Paul comes to latch on to the one human he really feels an attachment to.
When it finally comes out it scares the girl, of course. You find out why Paul came to adopt his Christian fanaticism - intense grief and guilt over a massacre he was responsible for - and Paul takes the lessons he learned from human society to go right some wrongs among his people as a civil rights leader. In the end comes back and they find some brief happiness at the end of their lives.
For such a bizarre premise I found it to be a very moving book with a very tender exploration of Christianity from the perspective of an agnostic author. Ending is really something. Explores the feelings of grief of someone that's lost someone to old age, of all things, and in a way that's both beautiful and heartbreaking.
- THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM
- THE UNINCORPORATED MAN
- THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS
- DELTA-V
I don't feel like going in super great detail with these. Delta-v is a great little book that feels like The Right Stuff meets The Martian. It's a race to be the first to mine an asteroid. A cave diver gets recruited, after saving some people, and is selected after a brutal boot camp. The mission: a top secret mission to beat the company's rivals. Billionaire tech bro space race. Everything goes to Hell. There's nothing special, I just really, really enjoyed reading it. One of few novels (and the other one is in this list) where law, in this case real life space law, plays a major role in the plot.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is classic Heinlein, and as great as Starship Troopers can be, I think this one is a much better story. Moon is simultaneously a company town in space (as far as the utilities are concerned) and a minarchist state (as far as everything else about their society is concerned). Populated like Space Australia full of mostly men (living in polyandry) and exploited, unsustainably, by the Earth, they wind up kicking off their own American Revolution with the assistance of a supercomputer controlling the utilities that has developed sentience. Tons of great science fiction concepts, real love letter to America, fun cultural stuff (the line marriages, Loonie talk being Russian grammar based), really fun.
The Unincorporated Man is amazing, was a candidate for my favorite thing ever, until it shit the bed near the very end. It's a science fiction legal thriller. A billionaire comes out of cryogenic stasis hundreds of years into the future to find that he is part of a world that is as transformed socially as it is economically. In the distant future mankind has adopted a minarchist state, but they have also adopted a principle of governance that every individual must be legally incorporated, their own life buyable and salable stock. This is their main debt mechanism: an IPO to fund college, sell stock to get a mortgage. The minarchist society is everything the tech bro billionaire wanted, but that one principle terrifies him, because the big corporations want him to incorporate - a necessary step to integrate into society - and he refuses to sign away his freedom. It's libertarianism vs libertarianism. One that is heroic and individualist, libertarian in spirit, the other that is libertarian only in outward form but not in its underlying values.
It's very interesting in the high concept, works as a good thriller, interesting legally, and it has some absolutely genius worldbuilding. Has this one plot point where, in the past, they had a virtual reality plague. Everyone became epic gamers and died from gaming and gooning constantly. I'm making light of it, but it's absolutely bone-chilling, could be a standalone short story, could be a Twilight Zone episode. I say that because at one point the hero has to, like everyone normally does as kids, attend the Museum of Virtual Reality. It's like their version of Germany's Holocaust ritual. He's first eased into virtual reality (this shit is perfect, a perfect simulation that feels more real than real life, more like a literal virtual reality than a video game) to show what it's like, and then he's simulated the life of one of his employees from the past. How he gets his first exposure to VR through a trip. How VR gradually becomes cheaper to the point it enters the home. How at first it revolutionizes their lives, but then it slowly consumes them with all-consuming addiction. How the world then collapses when people only care about fantasies and not the real thing. And then they all die. It's inspired by a famous parable from Nozick and it's just absolutely genius.
In another chapter he visits another museum. They've put the Empire State Building inside of another, even bigger hollow skyscraper and have every floor be a living history museum to a different year in 20th-21st Century NYC, with the windows displaying the skyline as it once was. It's cool. I wish it existed in real life.
The Three-Body Problem is great. Unfortunately I kind of think that much of what really speaks about it to me is just my own interpretation, not what the author intended. I was hooked from the first chapter. I know a girl who was born in China but adopted into the US and thinking about how lucky she got messed me up a bit. You see a struggle session depicted, old professor getting killed for disagreeing with Marx's Eternal Truth. Then the bulk of the book is about space aliens, of course. I thought the whole Three Body Problem game was a metaphor for Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, but if it is, it's that AND literally space aliens drying themselves out and making computers out of their own bodies. I really, really dig that environmentalists are portrayed as what they are: death cultists that hate humanity. I love the idea that they want to sabotage people's faith in science itself as a way to sabotage the rest of human progress. It's really good, excited to read more of it.
Lastly, Alien in a Small Town is a special book. I have a sick fetish for brown women dressed like pioneers (go see my AI art in that thread), so the premise of an Amish Indian-American ex-engineer having a romance with a rock tentacle monster sounded hilarious and right up my alley. What I got was way, way more thoughtful than it had any right to be. Hundreds of years in the future the Amish of Pennsylvania are chugging along as they always have even as first contact has resulted in Earth being made the protectorate of rock monsters. Indira is an Amish (father was a convert) ex-engineer, black sheep of the community, returned home after being overwhelmed by the ugliness of the outside world. It's a world where transhumanism drives a lot of people to Romantic creeds of simplicity. One day, a rock monster named Dwight blows into town, builds a house, becomes a practicing Amish like the rest of them.
Of course he's so out of place that this extremely insular community has some trouble getting used to him, but they're Amish, they're very kind by nature. A friendship starts (and Paul being a rock monster, you get a lot of sci-fi "how do they talk, what's their society like," all that stuff) and bit by bit Paul falls in love with the Amish girl. It's completely asexual, though. He's a rock monster. He's into sexy rock monster ladies. But as a very lonely, troubled creature completely out of his normal element, Paul comes to latch on to the one human he really feels an attachment to.
When it finally comes out it scares the girl, of course. You find out why Paul came to adopt his Christian fanaticism - intense grief and guilt over a massacre he was responsible for - and Paul takes the lessons he learned from human society to go right some wrongs among his people as a civil rights leader. In the end comes back and they find some brief happiness at the end of their lives.
For such a bizarre premise I found it to be a very moving book with a very tender exploration of Christianity from the perspective of an agnostic author. Ending is really something. Explores the feelings of grief of someone that's lost someone to old age, of all things, and in a way that's both beautiful and heartbreaking.
- A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ
- THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS
- RASH
Rash is a favorite of mine, the most underrated dystopian novel of all time. Unfortunately, it was more timely in the past than it is now. Rash satirized (in a lazier form) many aspects of contemporary America, but it took aim at two main ideas and the conflict between them: we live in a nanny state, but we also live in a police state. We incarcerate a huge number of people, on victimless crimes, and throw them into a prison system (partially privatized) where we consider things like murder and anal rape acceptable and expected, and yet we also act as guardians of each other's safety to a degree that our ancestors would have found insane and in a way that raises kids to be pussies.
In Rash the state has gone far beyond just big soda bans. Football, illegal. Running, better put on your helmet. Hurting someone's feelings, that's a misdemeanor. But the laws are so harsh that most people can't live by them, and so the one third of the population that fucks up wind up in the fully corporate prison system working as slaves for the support of everyone else. They're not there permanently. They do get some pay for it. This isn't grimdark dystopia. It's everyday, this-is-the-world-right-now-but-slightly-exaggerated dystopia. And it's depressing. Rash was aimed at high schoolers, so it's short and simply-written, but to me that also makes it effective and sweet. Where I think it's become a little outdated is that, really just starting a few years ago, the government more or less gave up on the whole "enforcing laws" business, although the nanny state part is arguably more relevant than ever.
The Camp of the Saints is one of the most genuinely unsettling works I have ever read. Unsettling because of how relevant it is today - prophetic - and unsettling because of the attitude towards a person's fellow man that Raspail had. Raspail writes about people of the Third World like they are monsters. Deformed monsters. Ugly monsters. Inhuman. He clearly relishes in the idea of slaughtering them, and that actually works to make the book even better because it gives an element of horror (both at the author and at what he's describing). But pretty much everything that happens in the book comes true, and in a very rich prose. The Third World, dying in agony, sets off in a ship to Europe, daring them to blow them out of the water. When the Europeans, slaves to their pathological altruism, let them in, it unleashes a flood as imitators set off all around the world. They come as barbarians, savages, to rape and pillage. The churchmen hustle down there as fast as possible to offer them aid. The media hides their crimes for them. The Communists welcome them in as a destroying force. The death of the West is the goal. Kind of messed me up reading it. Very, very dark vision of humanity and it rings very, very true.
Lastly, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a brilliant three-act novel of... well, I suppose you could say of human nature. Mankind has nuked itself into oblivion (it was written back during the Cold War), and like the last time civilization collapsed, when Rome fell, it falls on the Catholic Church to preserve what is left. They become the guardians of technology and the old world. It's like The Course of Empire paintings: mankind recovers from barbarity, mankind enters a golden age of inquiry, and in the end they smash it all down again.
It's really the first and third act that made an impression, the second one didn't do much for me. The first act deals with a monk, a novice I think, stumbling across an electrical blueprint made by their patron saint. This is a culture that has lost pretty much all practical knowledge of pre-armageddon science; when he sees "FALLOUT SHELTER" he trembles in terror as his culture thinks of Fallouts as being like supernatural monsters of plague. But the book is incredibly respectful of the Medieval mindset, because these aren't dumb cargo cultists like a million hack IMITATORS of it are. The monk understands symbolic logic, he understands what he's looking at. And even as he's persecuted by a very corrupt and ignorant monastery leadership, he dedicates his entire life to the creation of something absolutely beautiful, an illuminated manuscript of the blueprint. The whole story captivated me.
In a much darker way, the third act deals with euthanasia. The nukes are falling once again and the government kill squads have rolled in. They want to take control of the monastery to use as a center for the hopelessly lost radiation victims. The abbot refuses, vehemently, and their conflict - battle of words, of wills - defines the whole act. When I first read it it struck me because, although I normally would come down hard on the euthanasia side, the abbot is so forceful in his conviction it chipped away at my own conviction. It came back to haunt me in a big way when this Canadian and Dutch euthanasia business began. I realized then how evil it is and moved a lot closer to the Catholic view on the sanctity of life.
All of the book is steeped in the miraculous Catholic worldview. Miracles happen. Visions happen. It is always ambiguous, but it is very real to the people who experience it. The author himself was deeply religious, and it comes through in his work. I was very glad to have read it; it's a meaningful book.
- THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS
- RASH
Rash is a favorite of mine, the most underrated dystopian novel of all time. Unfortunately, it was more timely in the past than it is now. Rash satirized (in a lazier form) many aspects of contemporary America, but it took aim at two main ideas and the conflict between them: we live in a nanny state, but we also live in a police state. We incarcerate a huge number of people, on victimless crimes, and throw them into a prison system (partially privatized) where we consider things like murder and anal rape acceptable and expected, and yet we also act as guardians of each other's safety to a degree that our ancestors would have found insane and in a way that raises kids to be pussies.
In Rash the state has gone far beyond just big soda bans. Football, illegal. Running, better put on your helmet. Hurting someone's feelings, that's a misdemeanor. But the laws are so harsh that most people can't live by them, and so the one third of the population that fucks up wind up in the fully corporate prison system working as slaves for the support of everyone else. They're not there permanently. They do get some pay for it. This isn't grimdark dystopia. It's everyday, this-is-the-world-right-now-but-slightly-exaggerated dystopia. And it's depressing. Rash was aimed at high schoolers, so it's short and simply-written, but to me that also makes it effective and sweet. Where I think it's become a little outdated is that, really just starting a few years ago, the government more or less gave up on the whole "enforcing laws" business, although the nanny state part is arguably more relevant than ever.
The Camp of the Saints is one of the most genuinely unsettling works I have ever read. Unsettling because of how relevant it is today - prophetic - and unsettling because of the attitude towards a person's fellow man that Raspail had. Raspail writes about people of the Third World like they are monsters. Deformed monsters. Ugly monsters. Inhuman. He clearly relishes in the idea of slaughtering them, and that actually works to make the book even better because it gives an element of horror (both at the author and at what he's describing). But pretty much everything that happens in the book comes true, and in a very rich prose. The Third World, dying in agony, sets off in a ship to Europe, daring them to blow them out of the water. When the Europeans, slaves to their pathological altruism, let them in, it unleashes a flood as imitators set off all around the world. They come as barbarians, savages, to rape and pillage. The churchmen hustle down there as fast as possible to offer them aid. The media hides their crimes for them. The Communists welcome them in as a destroying force. The death of the West is the goal. Kind of messed me up reading it. Very, very dark vision of humanity and it rings very, very true.
Lastly, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a brilliant three-act novel of... well, I suppose you could say of human nature. Mankind has nuked itself into oblivion (it was written back during the Cold War), and like the last time civilization collapsed, when Rome fell, it falls on the Catholic Church to preserve what is left. They become the guardians of technology and the old world. It's like The Course of Empire paintings: mankind recovers from barbarity, mankind enters a golden age of inquiry, and in the end they smash it all down again.
It's really the first and third act that made an impression, the second one didn't do much for me. The first act deals with a monk, a novice I think, stumbling across an electrical blueprint made by their patron saint. This is a culture that has lost pretty much all practical knowledge of pre-armageddon science; when he sees "FALLOUT SHELTER" he trembles in terror as his culture thinks of Fallouts as being like supernatural monsters of plague. But the book is incredibly respectful of the Medieval mindset, because these aren't dumb cargo cultists like a million hack IMITATORS of it are. The monk understands symbolic logic, he understands what he's looking at. And even as he's persecuted by a very corrupt and ignorant monastery leadership, he dedicates his entire life to the creation of something absolutely beautiful, an illuminated manuscript of the blueprint. The whole story captivated me.
In a much darker way, the third act deals with euthanasia. The nukes are falling once again and the government kill squads have rolled in. They want to take control of the monastery to use as a center for the hopelessly lost radiation victims. The abbot refuses, vehemently, and their conflict - battle of words, of wills - defines the whole act. When I first read it it struck me because, although I normally would come down hard on the euthanasia side, the abbot is so forceful in his conviction it chipped away at my own conviction. It came back to haunt me in a big way when this Canadian and Dutch euthanasia business began. I realized then how evil it is and moved a lot closer to the Catholic view on the sanctity of life.
All of the book is steeped in the miraculous Catholic worldview. Miracles happen. Visions happen. It is always ambiguous, but it is very real to the people who experience it. The author himself was deeply religious, and it comes through in his work. I was very glad to have read it; it's a meaningful book.
- A SHORT STAY IN HELL
- FLATLAND
Mathematical fiction was something I made up, then looked up, and apparently it's a real thing. Measuring the World (a novel of Gauss and Humboldt) didn't come anywhere close to making the list and Flatterland (a modernized Flatland for non-Euclidean geometry) is godawful. But Flatland and A Short Stay in Hell are top-tier by themselves.
Flatland is famous, and with good reason. It's brilliant as an introduction to Euclidean geometries in higher dimensions, something people with some math background can take for granted, but is REALLY difficult to pitch by itself to people who don't know any college math. How do you sell the idea of something other than up/down left/right forward/backward? He does it. But that's not what makes it so good. It's the satire that keeps you. It's an amazing satire of British Victorian society, but in part that's because it's an amazing satire of society in general. It's generic enough that you can kind of recognize and understand what's going on regardless of how deep it is. And it's so absurd that it's funny regardless of how invested you feel in the subject matter, and it's so interesting as a work of science fiction (how would 2D creatures work?) that it's genuinely fascinating. Just an incredibly thoughtful bit of didactic fiction that it can wear three crowns (excellent science fiction, excellent satire, excellent exposition of a math concept) at once.
A Short Stay in Hell has way less (no, frankly) cultural impact, but it's a personal favorite of mine for just that reason. It's a hidden gem that I learned about from a Kiwi Farmer. It lured me in because of the religious premise but kept me for the mathematical horror. A Mormon man, a geology professor, dies and awakens in Zoroastrian purgatory (the depiction of Zoroastrianism is completely inaccurate; I think the author picked it just for its alien character). Ahura Mazda explains to the man that he is a merciful god, and so the man's penance will just be to find the book that tells the story of his life. It's ironic, see, as he liked reading so much.
The problem? The library is a Library of Babel, like, this novella is an exploration of a concept from Borjas, or a "hyperwebster." It contains every book that COULD be written from a fixed set of characters and of a fixed length. Think, like, 500 page books. In doing so it technically contains all of the world's wisdom, as it contains every (even if broken up across multiple volumes) concept that could be expressed by human language. And yet that is buried, monkeys-at-typewriters-style, in a sea of isfhasdjflsdfjhuwer73rewufhef7sdhfsd7afhwheatbiscuits823712.
And the books are distributed randomly.
The author gets a lot of play out of taking the very specific rules of his settings (how these people eat, drink, how they cope with their setting; the man is not alone, everyone he encounters comes from a background like him with a specific punishment), typical science-fiction-like playing with rules and implications and the kind of society that forms around it (like an academic team winning a Nobel Prize for, after centuries, finding the first book with a coherent sentence fragment in it). But the driving idea is the horror of very large numbers. Not infinity. There is definitely a finite number of books to go through. But it is a number so vast it dwarves the number of atoms in the observable universe. It is a number that would take many times the universes' life to get through. And in a world where he cannot die - resurrected every day - that makes for some fascinatingly unique but disturbing horror. The man may live centuries with a lover, trip over a balcony and fall for a thousand years before he bangs into something.
It probably sounds really strange, really hard to pull off, but the most remarkable thing is that the author does so in something like 180 pages. The irony is baked into the title and the concept of the book.
I absolute love it. Thank you, whatever Kiwi told me about it.
- FLATLAND
Mathematical fiction was something I made up, then looked up, and apparently it's a real thing. Measuring the World (a novel of Gauss and Humboldt) didn't come anywhere close to making the list and Flatterland (a modernized Flatland for non-Euclidean geometry) is godawful. But Flatland and A Short Stay in Hell are top-tier by themselves.
Flatland is famous, and with good reason. It's brilliant as an introduction to Euclidean geometries in higher dimensions, something people with some math background can take for granted, but is REALLY difficult to pitch by itself to people who don't know any college math. How do you sell the idea of something other than up/down left/right forward/backward? He does it. But that's not what makes it so good. It's the satire that keeps you. It's an amazing satire of British Victorian society, but in part that's because it's an amazing satire of society in general. It's generic enough that you can kind of recognize and understand what's going on regardless of how deep it is. And it's so absurd that it's funny regardless of how invested you feel in the subject matter, and it's so interesting as a work of science fiction (how would 2D creatures work?) that it's genuinely fascinating. Just an incredibly thoughtful bit of didactic fiction that it can wear three crowns (excellent science fiction, excellent satire, excellent exposition of a math concept) at once.
A Short Stay in Hell has way less (no, frankly) cultural impact, but it's a personal favorite of mine for just that reason. It's a hidden gem that I learned about from a Kiwi Farmer. It lured me in because of the religious premise but kept me for the mathematical horror. A Mormon man, a geology professor, dies and awakens in Zoroastrian purgatory (the depiction of Zoroastrianism is completely inaccurate; I think the author picked it just for its alien character). Ahura Mazda explains to the man that he is a merciful god, and so the man's penance will just be to find the book that tells the story of his life. It's ironic, see, as he liked reading so much.
The problem? The library is a Library of Babel, like, this novella is an exploration of a concept from Borjas, or a "hyperwebster." It contains every book that COULD be written from a fixed set of characters and of a fixed length. Think, like, 500 page books. In doing so it technically contains all of the world's wisdom, as it contains every (even if broken up across multiple volumes) concept that could be expressed by human language. And yet that is buried, monkeys-at-typewriters-style, in a sea of isfhasdjflsdfjhuwer73rewufhef7sdhfsd7afhwheatbiscuits823712.
And the books are distributed randomly.
The author gets a lot of play out of taking the very specific rules of his settings (how these people eat, drink, how they cope with their setting; the man is not alone, everyone he encounters comes from a background like him with a specific punishment), typical science-fiction-like playing with rules and implications and the kind of society that forms around it (like an academic team winning a Nobel Prize for, after centuries, finding the first book with a coherent sentence fragment in it). But the driving idea is the horror of very large numbers. Not infinity. There is definitely a finite number of books to go through. But it is a number so vast it dwarves the number of atoms in the observable universe. It is a number that would take many times the universes' life to get through. And in a world where he cannot die - resurrected every day - that makes for some fascinatingly unique but disturbing horror. The man may live centuries with a lover, trip over a balcony and fall for a thousand years before he bangs into something.
It probably sounds really strange, really hard to pull off, but the most remarkable thing is that the author does so in something like 180 pages. The irony is baked into the title and the concept of the book.
I absolute love it. Thank you, whatever Kiwi told me about it.
- POMPEII
- AZTEC
- CORELLI'S MANDOLIN
- SHOGUN
- THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH
Four excellent epics of four different times and places in history. Three of them civilizations.
I love stuff that deals with exotic civilizations, really brings them to life like the real places that they were, but that also shine a light on how absolute fucked up they were. How deranged their inhabitants were, how messed up it is that it was once normal. You don't get that with Pillars of the Earth and Corelli's Mandolin, but you absolutely get that with Shogun, Pompeii and Aztec.
At the bottom of my list, The Pillars of the Earth is grand in scope (two generations). The name is fantastic, full of this gravitas fitting of both the subject matter (a Biblical allusion to imply cathedral construction) and the work itself. You get to look inside the life of a blended family in a cathedral town under construction, both the monastery itself and the family of a stonemason, later architect, who is working to get the project done. I may hate Catholicism, but there are aspects of it that fascinate me, aspects I respect, and cathedrals are one of the most remarkable endeavors humankind ever set out on. Some of the finest, most stunning works of both architecture and craftsmanship meant to create a physical work that would stand as a gift to God, or a sort of heaven built on the Earth. They took hundreds of years to build; they were works created, and as I understand largely voluntarily, by generations that knew that they were continuously laboring towards the improvement of their community, not just towards an immediate reward now. Always building towards something better. It's like the purest spirit of civilization.
You get a lot of architecture. I think what drew me in was partially how passionate the architect hero (I love those sorts of characters, the practical engineers/industrialists building the world by force of their will) is about what he's doing. The love that goes into that. Later on I was more interested in the conflict within the Church, the conflict between the prior and the boy. You see a wide range of perspectives on the Church, some the church at its worst, some better but occasionally misguided. You get to see the births of Gothic architecture from the boy's travels to and from Andalusia and Paris. The romantic plot in it is really well done. It's just a very well-written book.
Shogun is next up my list, and that's saying something about the quality of the other three that it comes in so low, because I love it to death. James Clavell takes you on this rollercoaster ride of a thriller through Sengoku Japan. Heavily drawn from the lives of real people, but with fictionalized names, an English pirate shipwrecks on an attempt to make contact and is captured by the Japanese. This thrusts him into a web of espionage and intrigue and political maneuvering as Japan is facing down the lead-up to the Battle of Sekigahara. It's a fascinating time in Japanese history, when the Western colonial world suddenly intruded on a medieval world. Muskets and katanas, ninjas and pirates, Jesuits and warrior-monks. The pace is relentless and the prose compelling. The Japanese (Clavell had hang-ups about Orientals from his time as a WW2 POW) are incredibly cruel and nihilistic people, no value for life, nothing in their spirit but cruelty, and it gives a feeling of unreality to the whole thing. The whole thing is very tense from beginning to end. Loved it. 10/10
At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, Corelli's Mandolin is a beautiful epic in the vein, I feel, of something like Lonesome Dove. Calmer and more gradually paced. A panorama novel of the island of Cephalonia under Italian occupation in World War II. The movie is good, but it could never have caught the spirit of the book because there is SO MUCH BOOK that you could only ever get the most narrow slice of it. The book isn't really about Captain Corelli (a beautiful personality; I loved his character as the reluctant, joyous/playful officer in both book and movie), it's about the island's people as a whole framed around Corelli and Penelope. There are so many different plots going on at once, all of them intersecting, all of them well-written, it's a whole world coming alive. I loved it to death and the ending was infuriating but perfect (the man and woman shoot their own relationship in the foot, miss out until the very twilight of their life, on a misunderstanding).
Aztec by Gary Jennings is god-tier. It is completely fucked up. Hopelessly, horribly depraved. I describe it as a picaresque, Forrest Gump (if Forrest was clever) meets The Aristocrats skit set in the fall of the Aztec Empire. You get a ton of real Aztec history, a travelogue like exploration of the Mesoamerican world, a view into all kinds of aspects of Aztec life (the commoners, the merchant-spies, the warriors, the court). The character fucks everyone. He fucks his own sister. He fucks a mother and her daughters. He fucks a princess. He fucks a retarded deformed tard-child. He fucks savage women in the North. He is heavily implied to want to fuck his daughter. His daughter gets skinned and sacrificed and he sees a priest wearing her bloody skin like a cape, which is no joke a real thing that happened in Aztec society. He survives the great aqueduct flood and meets Cortez and La Malinche and fucks her and survives the fall of Tenochtitlan and goes on to invent the Mexican flag. He wins the Aztec version of a Medal of Honor and eats a burrito made out of his slain enemy. The whole thing is the most batshit crazy (between all the degenerate fucking and the incredible psychotic violence) thing I've ever read, felt like someone took sandpaper to my brain, absolute insanity. The world feels 100% convincing and real and it's an endless nightmare world where everyone acts like it's the most normal thing in the world.
Pompeii. I just kind of threw this one in last. I read that one back before I was in the habit of reading much. But it was wonderful, so much so it got me into reading again. It's basically Chinatown set around the real events of the destruction-by-volcano of Pompeii. You get a very detailed yet mundane depiction of Roman life through the eyes of an aquarius, civil engineer in command of the aqueducts. The water isn't flowing. Why isn't it flowing? (Spoiler: geological reasons.) Along the way he gets inveigled in a missing person mystery, a tale of urban corruption centered around a senator's water theft and urban development plans, a romance with the senator's much-abused daughter, and lots of Pliny the Elder. I was very invested in it. Excellently told story that shows how much potential there is in historical fiction that doesn't aim to be epic but just to show these sort of regular, everyday stories we would tell, but set against the backdrop of much greater events.
- AZTEC
- CORELLI'S MANDOLIN
- SHOGUN
- THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH
Four excellent epics of four different times and places in history. Three of them civilizations.
I love stuff that deals with exotic civilizations, really brings them to life like the real places that they were, but that also shine a light on how absolute fucked up they were. How deranged their inhabitants were, how messed up it is that it was once normal. You don't get that with Pillars of the Earth and Corelli's Mandolin, but you absolutely get that with Shogun, Pompeii and Aztec.
At the bottom of my list, The Pillars of the Earth is grand in scope (two generations). The name is fantastic, full of this gravitas fitting of both the subject matter (a Biblical allusion to imply cathedral construction) and the work itself. You get to look inside the life of a blended family in a cathedral town under construction, both the monastery itself and the family of a stonemason, later architect, who is working to get the project done. I may hate Catholicism, but there are aspects of it that fascinate me, aspects I respect, and cathedrals are one of the most remarkable endeavors humankind ever set out on. Some of the finest, most stunning works of both architecture and craftsmanship meant to create a physical work that would stand as a gift to God, or a sort of heaven built on the Earth. They took hundreds of years to build; they were works created, and as I understand largely voluntarily, by generations that knew that they were continuously laboring towards the improvement of their community, not just towards an immediate reward now. Always building towards something better. It's like the purest spirit of civilization.
You get a lot of architecture. I think what drew me in was partially how passionate the architect hero (I love those sorts of characters, the practical engineers/industrialists building the world by force of their will) is about what he's doing. The love that goes into that. Later on I was more interested in the conflict within the Church, the conflict between the prior and the boy. You see a wide range of perspectives on the Church, some the church at its worst, some better but occasionally misguided. You get to see the births of Gothic architecture from the boy's travels to and from Andalusia and Paris. The romantic plot in it is really well done. It's just a very well-written book.
Shogun is next up my list, and that's saying something about the quality of the other three that it comes in so low, because I love it to death. James Clavell takes you on this rollercoaster ride of a thriller through Sengoku Japan. Heavily drawn from the lives of real people, but with fictionalized names, an English pirate shipwrecks on an attempt to make contact and is captured by the Japanese. This thrusts him into a web of espionage and intrigue and political maneuvering as Japan is facing down the lead-up to the Battle of Sekigahara. It's a fascinating time in Japanese history, when the Western colonial world suddenly intruded on a medieval world. Muskets and katanas, ninjas and pirates, Jesuits and warrior-monks. The pace is relentless and the prose compelling. The Japanese (Clavell had hang-ups about Orientals from his time as a WW2 POW) are incredibly cruel and nihilistic people, no value for life, nothing in their spirit but cruelty, and it gives a feeling of unreality to the whole thing. The whole thing is very tense from beginning to end. Loved it. 10/10
At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, Corelli's Mandolin is a beautiful epic in the vein, I feel, of something like Lonesome Dove. Calmer and more gradually paced. A panorama novel of the island of Cephalonia under Italian occupation in World War II. The movie is good, but it could never have caught the spirit of the book because there is SO MUCH BOOK that you could only ever get the most narrow slice of it. The book isn't really about Captain Corelli (a beautiful personality; I loved his character as the reluctant, joyous/playful officer in both book and movie), it's about the island's people as a whole framed around Corelli and Penelope. There are so many different plots going on at once, all of them intersecting, all of them well-written, it's a whole world coming alive. I loved it to death and the ending was infuriating but perfect (the man and woman shoot their own relationship in the foot, miss out until the very twilight of their life, on a misunderstanding).
Aztec by Gary Jennings is god-tier. It is completely fucked up. Hopelessly, horribly depraved. I describe it as a picaresque, Forrest Gump (if Forrest was clever) meets The Aristocrats skit set in the fall of the Aztec Empire. You get a ton of real Aztec history, a travelogue like exploration of the Mesoamerican world, a view into all kinds of aspects of Aztec life (the commoners, the merchant-spies, the warriors, the court). The character fucks everyone. He fucks his own sister. He fucks a mother and her daughters. He fucks a princess. He fucks a retarded deformed tard-child. He fucks savage women in the North. He is heavily implied to want to fuck his daughter. His daughter gets skinned and sacrificed and he sees a priest wearing her bloody skin like a cape, which is no joke a real thing that happened in Aztec society. He survives the great aqueduct flood and meets Cortez and La Malinche and fucks her and survives the fall of Tenochtitlan and goes on to invent the Mexican flag. He wins the Aztec version of a Medal of Honor and eats a burrito made out of his slain enemy. The whole thing is the most batshit crazy (between all the degenerate fucking and the incredible psychotic violence) thing I've ever read, felt like someone took sandpaper to my brain, absolute insanity. The world feels 100% convincing and real and it's an endless nightmare world where everyone acts like it's the most normal thing in the world.
Pompeii. I just kind of threw this one in last. I read that one back before I was in the habit of reading much. But it was wonderful, so much so it got me into reading again. It's basically Chinatown set around the real events of the destruction-by-volcano of Pompeii. You get a very detailed yet mundane depiction of Roman life through the eyes of an aquarius, civil engineer in command of the aqueducts. The water isn't flowing. Why isn't it flowing? (Spoiler: geological reasons.) Along the way he gets inveigled in a missing person mystery, a tale of urban corruption centered around a senator's water theft and urban development plans, a romance with the senator's much-abused daughter, and lots of Pliny the Elder. I was very invested in it. Excellently told story that shows how much potential there is in historical fiction that doesn't aim to be epic but just to show these sort of regular, everyday stories we would tell, but set against the backdrop of much greater events.
- LONESOME DOVE
- GONE WITH THE WIND
- THOMAS JEFFERSON DREAMS OF SALLY HEMMINGS
Three wonderful books, all tied in some fashion with the Old South.
Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemmings is the most recent I read, and it is a lot more meaningful, probably, if you think as often, feel as deeply and care as much about both American chattel slavery and Thomas Jefferson as I do. Through several years of study of the War and Southern society I came to realize that the Confederacy was, ultimately, a rejection of Jeffersonianism, not a consummation of it. So to face that contradiction in Jefferson's character shook me. The novel is a "romance novel" about Sally Hemmings' affair. There's still people (I saw one on here) that are revisionists on it, but nobody in his own day thought it was his brother or cousin or whatever that knocked her up, so... you know.
It's a "romance," but it's not a happy story. We know exceedingly little about this woman, so the author was mostly filling in based on a mixture of how he thought he would feel and think, honest attempts to appraise it, and creative liberty, and he actually goes into all that at the end. Sally is a glorified Sally. She's a very thoughtful person, like someone that could have potentially been an intellectual if life had allowed. As the illegitimate half-sister of Jefferson's wife, she was mostly (3/4) White and looked like an exotic teenage version of her. In the author's imagination Jefferson is also attracted to a willfulness and thoughtfulness in her. She's often sullen about her state as a slave. She sort of keeps a rich inner world that only Jefferson can tease out, but doing that is painful to her. Jefferson, for his part, is rarely depicted positively. He's interpreted as being someone who, through having a psychotic mother (real life, he never talked about her, so SOMETHING was wrong in the relationship) and death father and the plantation dumped on him as a child, and his own genius, is sort of an island to himself. He's brilliant and charming to people in his brilliance but is petrified of public speaking and fumbling with women. Boyish. He's the sort of guy who will fuck his teenage sex slave and feel bad if she doesn't cum. In the novel he approaches her in the manner of a predator that doesn't realize he's a predator, serving her some wine and sheepishly trying to test her feelings. Gets rejected. Gets extremely drunk. Goes to take her, realizes she's terrified, leaves without sticking it in. Is horrifically embarrassed and lets her basically live without duties away from him. But he can't help but plead like a boy with her and in time kind of brings her back around.
Sally lives a sad life. She was denied her rightful place in her biological father's home. She's denied her rightful place as Misses Jefferson, which is what she deserved. She lives in a state of low-level rage that I, at the time of reading, took as the author choosing to bag on Jefferson, but in hindsight I feel is almost more an exploration of her poisoning her own life. It's all framed around her reminiscences poisoned in the aftermath of Jefferson's post-death slave auction, but at the very end it tells how all along his finances were really out of his control, he'd tried a last ditch gamble to save the plantation and the heir fucked it up. Jefferson went to his grave thinking it was all being taken care of. Sally was isolated from the Jefferson family and isolated from the slaves and just generally lived a sad life as a pet. Jefferson can come across as being monstrously selfish and as self-loathing.
It's just sad.
The writing style is usually plain (utilitarian but rich in feeling) with these dreamy, surreal parts strewn throughout. The "dreams." Some of it (the Madisons watching a movie of his life, Sally as something like Gast's "American Progress" Columbia leading Americans, but into industrialization) is gold. Some of it is trash. I also felt like Sally was often too one-note, and Jefferson's richness as a person didn't come across enough. Nonetheless, I really valued it.
The next one I wanted to ramble about was Gone With the Wind. It is a masterpiece of history and psychology, and terribly, terribly misunderstood. Because it developed this reputation, early on, of being a Racist Movie for Old White People. The movie, maybe. The book, no. Not at all. Margaret Mitchell lived in a world where the War between the States' presence could be felt at all times. She grew up listening to old timers talk about the plantation society as they'd ride wagons by their dilapidated, Gothic mansions, and that's where she got the idea for her novel. And what a novel it is. You have an epic of the War and Reconstruction told from the perspective of the planter aristocracy. A spoiled sociopath bitch (Scarlett O'Hara) is living the life of being the most pampered person in the world, toying with the affections of men, screwing over her female rivals, generally being an absolute Stacey. She bathes in buttermilk to keep herself as creamy in skin tone as possible. Then along comes the War, and honestly I don't remember what exactly happens, it was a really long book. But the gist of it is that Scarlett manages to fuck herself over repeatedly by marrying men she doesn't love, until she can unintentionally get them killed off, while she navigates the love triangle of the handsome rogue cotton speculator Rhett Butler and the generic good guy Ashley (fag name for a fag character).
I fell in love with it almost immediately for its extremely detailed, authentic portrayal of the planters. I'd be reading and my mind would constantly tingle with pleasure at seeing facts about plantation life and their mentality confirmed. And then Rhett walked in and I jizzed myself. He IS NOT A CONFEDERATE. The whole point of it is that Rhett sees the planters for what they are - delusional Romantics who are so far out of time that they are going to get their whole civilization destroyed - and Scarlett, self-absorbed princess, doesn't really care for the War either since the War is an inconvenience to her. Rhett frequently mocks and teases and makes sport out of the Confederates and then his wife makes friends and cronies and followers out of the carpetbaggers. Scarlett is born aristocracy but is trash to her core; Rhett is born trash but develops and redeems himself into a real gentleman. While I was lured in by the Southern aristocracy stuff, I stayed for the psychological aspect. Scarlett genuinely suffers and you come to genuinely feel bad for this poor princess. In a way I think the War was cruelest on those kinds of people, that had no real role in causing it and had the farthest to fall. Imagine having to fend for yourself with no experience taking care of yourself. But the way she responds to that kind of trauma, that grim lifestyle, is to become bitter and even more mercenary and in doing so slowly alienate herself from everyone until she finally manages to completely destroy her reputation.
As far as racism goes, it doesn't get busted out until Reconstruction, but when it does it does in force. Margaret Mitchell hated the Confederacy not for slavery but for mucking up slavery for everyone. People bitch about the lack of horrors of slavery in it, but I don't think it needed it. Just because a book is about the Old South that does not mean the slaves have to be the focus. Sometimes I want to read about the yeomen (Cold Mountain is mostly about them). Sometimes I want to read about the planters.
I think Margaret Mitchell genuinely made a masterpiece. Unfortunately, I think the sorts of people who most took a shine to it were exactly those that shouldn't have. It was people, especially women (princess syndrome) that saw the "glamor" of plantation life and wanted to emulate it, rather than those who saw how rotten and foolish all that business had been.
Lastly, there's Lonesome Dove. I love that one. I read it so long ago, back when I first started reading again as an adult, that I don't recall a ton of specifics and it has sweetened in my mind. It's the story, loosely inspired by real people not enough so to call it a fictionalization, of two ex-Rangers making the first cattle drive to Montana. Epic in length but intimate in scope. Kind of hard to sell, but if you saw the miniseries (in which case you're probably an old-timer from back when people still liked Westerns), it's wonderful like the miniseries but with the added benefit of that you get tons of backstory and the detailed inner thoughts of all these characters. They're very human, which is something that unites a lot of the best things I've written. High concept is great and all, prose is great and all, but character is what really matters. And there is prose there too. The opening scene of the first chapter is, at least to my recollection, the most beautiful such passage in the English language. Gus is the main thing, of course, that sells it. A beautiful personality but kind of buried in this smartass, overly talkative character that plays off very well against his long-suffering, overly serious friend. And of course that overly serious friend ends up getting almost every one of them killed, Oregon Trail style, over something pointless as they deal with all the ghosts of their past (romantic, enemies, etc.).
I don't know how to describe it well, it having been a long time ago. I just thought it was majestic.
- GONE WITH THE WIND
- THOMAS JEFFERSON DREAMS OF SALLY HEMMINGS
Three wonderful books, all tied in some fashion with the Old South.
Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemmings is the most recent I read, and it is a lot more meaningful, probably, if you think as often, feel as deeply and care as much about both American chattel slavery and Thomas Jefferson as I do. Through several years of study of the War and Southern society I came to realize that the Confederacy was, ultimately, a rejection of Jeffersonianism, not a consummation of it. So to face that contradiction in Jefferson's character shook me. The novel is a "romance novel" about Sally Hemmings' affair. There's still people (I saw one on here) that are revisionists on it, but nobody in his own day thought it was his brother or cousin or whatever that knocked her up, so... you know.
It's a "romance," but it's not a happy story. We know exceedingly little about this woman, so the author was mostly filling in based on a mixture of how he thought he would feel and think, honest attempts to appraise it, and creative liberty, and he actually goes into all that at the end. Sally is a glorified Sally. She's a very thoughtful person, like someone that could have potentially been an intellectual if life had allowed. As the illegitimate half-sister of Jefferson's wife, she was mostly (3/4) White and looked like an exotic teenage version of her. In the author's imagination Jefferson is also attracted to a willfulness and thoughtfulness in her. She's often sullen about her state as a slave. She sort of keeps a rich inner world that only Jefferson can tease out, but doing that is painful to her. Jefferson, for his part, is rarely depicted positively. He's interpreted as being someone who, through having a psychotic mother (real life, he never talked about her, so SOMETHING was wrong in the relationship) and death father and the plantation dumped on him as a child, and his own genius, is sort of an island to himself. He's brilliant and charming to people in his brilliance but is petrified of public speaking and fumbling with women. Boyish. He's the sort of guy who will fuck his teenage sex slave and feel bad if she doesn't cum. In the novel he approaches her in the manner of a predator that doesn't realize he's a predator, serving her some wine and sheepishly trying to test her feelings. Gets rejected. Gets extremely drunk. Goes to take her, realizes she's terrified, leaves without sticking it in. Is horrifically embarrassed and lets her basically live without duties away from him. But he can't help but plead like a boy with her and in time kind of brings her back around.
Sally lives a sad life. She was denied her rightful place in her biological father's home. She's denied her rightful place as Misses Jefferson, which is what she deserved. She lives in a state of low-level rage that I, at the time of reading, took as the author choosing to bag on Jefferson, but in hindsight I feel is almost more an exploration of her poisoning her own life. It's all framed around her reminiscences poisoned in the aftermath of Jefferson's post-death slave auction, but at the very end it tells how all along his finances were really out of his control, he'd tried a last ditch gamble to save the plantation and the heir fucked it up. Jefferson went to his grave thinking it was all being taken care of. Sally was isolated from the Jefferson family and isolated from the slaves and just generally lived a sad life as a pet. Jefferson can come across as being monstrously selfish and as self-loathing.
It's just sad.
Ever notice how in the movies, when the bad guy is playing with his kid, he’s never just playing with his kid? It’s always ironic. Or he’s being sadistic, and the kid’s just too stupid to know. Or maybe there’s this one second where the kid gets this tiny confused look on his face. But then he’s laughing again, even when his dad bounces the rubber ball right off the top of his head. And they’ve got that scary music playing. You know, that music they always play in scary movies. Only in this scene, it’s very quiet.
And that’s how we know we’re not evil. You follow me? I mean, when we play with our kid, we’re really playing with our kid. And when we’re taking a shit or doing the dishes, same deal. We go up in the mountains and we’re like, “Wow! This is so beautiful! The air is so fresh! I feel so alive!” There’s no scary music playing. There’s nothing ironic. It just is what it is. You know, innocent. And that’s how we know we’re not evil. Because we have these innocent moments and the evil guy in the movie doesn’t. His life is monolithic. All-evil-all-the-time.
But, of course, that’s not how it is at all. A real evil guy’s life is practically nothing but innocent moments, just like anyone’s. When he’s taking a shit, he’s just taking a shit. He’s up in the mountains, and he can hardly believe the world could be so beautiful. When he’s playing with his kid, he thinks his kid is the cutest kid who ever walked the planet. And then he goes off and . . . I don’t know, pilots a drone over some country ten thousand miles away and blows the shit out of a wedding. Or he talks some old lady out of her life savings. Or he discovers that his wife is cheating on him, and he goes psycho for an hour. But even so, his life is made up almost entirely of ordinary moments: cutting his toenails, having drinks with his buddies out on the patio, ordering a bale of peat moss at the garden store.
You know how that is, right? You see where I’m headed with this? I mean, there you are, screwing your sixteen-year-old girlfriend, and you’re thinking, “Oh, my God! I just love this girl so much! She’s the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me!” And then you’re saying, “All men are created equal,” and you’re calling slavery an “abominable crime,” and you’re wholly sincere. You mean that one hundred percent. Every word. And you’re thinking, “I am the kind of person who thinks such things and who says them. That’s who I really am.” And you are. That’s true. But then you discover that you’re short of cash, so instead of selling a few acres of land, or some hogs, or just doing without a shipment or two of French wine, you sell a bunch of human beings. You tear them away from their homes, everyone they know, and you consign them to a future that could well include torture and rape, murder even—the sort of things you would never perpetrate yourself. Right? Because that’s not who you are. You don’t do that sort of thing. And after that you go back to work designing this gigantic clock, or you’re cutting open a kernel of wheat, thinking, “How wonderfully complex! How extraordinary that God should give us this miraculous vegetable.”
The problem is, there’s no scary music in life. And we don’t actually live irony. The irony gets added later. And nobody out there is monolithic, all-evil-(or whatever)-all-the-time. And since every instant that comes along overwhelms us with its presentness and its complexity, and since we’re always feeling, “This is really me being real in the real world; this is who I am,” and since almost every one of those instants we live through being who we really are is an innocent instant, all of that added together makes it easy for us to lose track of the fact that we also live through not-so-innocent instants, when the me-I-really-am is a not-so-innocent me—though we almost always lie to ourselves about that fact. And so it is easy for us to pretend to ourselves that we are nothing like the evil guy in the movie. And we can allow those instants in which we are not-so-innocent to be overwhelmed by all the completely innocent ones, until they become insignificant. Or they almost don’t exist.
That’s why no one ever thinks they belong here. Except the murderers, sometimes.
All of these recognitions came together in a mind too young to make sense of them, but I do believe that they were the origin of an unsettling feeling or vision with which I became afflicted not long afterward. Night after night throughout my childhood, as I lay upon the verge of sleep, the events of my day—conversations, squabbles, games and chores—would come back to me but seem to be surrounded by something that I came to think of as “the deadness.” I didn’t have a clear conception of the deadness, except that it was bleak, dark and profoundly frightening. And in its shadow all the events of my day, which had seemed so vital and real as they were happening, would become thin and pale—a pathetic charade. There were nights when the deadness was so all-encompassing that I would writhe in panic, feeling I could not take enough air into my lungs and wanting desperately to escape. . . .
(This one deeply disturbed me; I had a dream once where I was a slave and felt a hopelessness/despair, and it reminded me of that.)
And that’s how we know we’re not evil. You follow me? I mean, when we play with our kid, we’re really playing with our kid. And when we’re taking a shit or doing the dishes, same deal. We go up in the mountains and we’re like, “Wow! This is so beautiful! The air is so fresh! I feel so alive!” There’s no scary music playing. There’s nothing ironic. It just is what it is. You know, innocent. And that’s how we know we’re not evil. Because we have these innocent moments and the evil guy in the movie doesn’t. His life is monolithic. All-evil-all-the-time.
But, of course, that’s not how it is at all. A real evil guy’s life is practically nothing but innocent moments, just like anyone’s. When he’s taking a shit, he’s just taking a shit. He’s up in the mountains, and he can hardly believe the world could be so beautiful. When he’s playing with his kid, he thinks his kid is the cutest kid who ever walked the planet. And then he goes off and . . . I don’t know, pilots a drone over some country ten thousand miles away and blows the shit out of a wedding. Or he talks some old lady out of her life savings. Or he discovers that his wife is cheating on him, and he goes psycho for an hour. But even so, his life is made up almost entirely of ordinary moments: cutting his toenails, having drinks with his buddies out on the patio, ordering a bale of peat moss at the garden store.
You know how that is, right? You see where I’m headed with this? I mean, there you are, screwing your sixteen-year-old girlfriend, and you’re thinking, “Oh, my God! I just love this girl so much! She’s the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me!” And then you’re saying, “All men are created equal,” and you’re calling slavery an “abominable crime,” and you’re wholly sincere. You mean that one hundred percent. Every word. And you’re thinking, “I am the kind of person who thinks such things and who says them. That’s who I really am.” And you are. That’s true. But then you discover that you’re short of cash, so instead of selling a few acres of land, or some hogs, or just doing without a shipment or two of French wine, you sell a bunch of human beings. You tear them away from their homes, everyone they know, and you consign them to a future that could well include torture and rape, murder even—the sort of things you would never perpetrate yourself. Right? Because that’s not who you are. You don’t do that sort of thing. And after that you go back to work designing this gigantic clock, or you’re cutting open a kernel of wheat, thinking, “How wonderfully complex! How extraordinary that God should give us this miraculous vegetable.”
The problem is, there’s no scary music in life. And we don’t actually live irony. The irony gets added later. And nobody out there is monolithic, all-evil-(or whatever)-all-the-time. And since every instant that comes along overwhelms us with its presentness and its complexity, and since we’re always feeling, “This is really me being real in the real world; this is who I am,” and since almost every one of those instants we live through being who we really are is an innocent instant, all of that added together makes it easy for us to lose track of the fact that we also live through not-so-innocent instants, when the me-I-really-am is a not-so-innocent me—though we almost always lie to ourselves about that fact. And so it is easy for us to pretend to ourselves that we are nothing like the evil guy in the movie. And we can allow those instants in which we are not-so-innocent to be overwhelmed by all the completely innocent ones, until they become insignificant. Or they almost don’t exist.
That’s why no one ever thinks they belong here. Except the murderers, sometimes.
All of these recognitions came together in a mind too young to make sense of them, but I do believe that they were the origin of an unsettling feeling or vision with which I became afflicted not long afterward. Night after night throughout my childhood, as I lay upon the verge of sleep, the events of my day—conversations, squabbles, games and chores—would come back to me but seem to be surrounded by something that I came to think of as “the deadness.” I didn’t have a clear conception of the deadness, except that it was bleak, dark and profoundly frightening. And in its shadow all the events of my day, which had seemed so vital and real as they were happening, would become thin and pale—a pathetic charade. There were nights when the deadness was so all-encompassing that I would writhe in panic, feeling I could not take enough air into my lungs and wanting desperately to escape. . . .
(This one deeply disturbed me; I had a dream once where I was a slave and felt a hopelessness/despair, and it reminded me of that.)
The writing style is usually plain (utilitarian but rich in feeling) with these dreamy, surreal parts strewn throughout. The "dreams." Some of it (the Madisons watching a movie of his life, Sally as something like Gast's "American Progress" Columbia leading Americans, but into industrialization) is gold. Some of it is trash. I also felt like Sally was often too one-note, and Jefferson's richness as a person didn't come across enough. Nonetheless, I really valued it.
The next one I wanted to ramble about was Gone With the Wind. It is a masterpiece of history and psychology, and terribly, terribly misunderstood. Because it developed this reputation, early on, of being a Racist Movie for Old White People. The movie, maybe. The book, no. Not at all. Margaret Mitchell lived in a world where the War between the States' presence could be felt at all times. She grew up listening to old timers talk about the plantation society as they'd ride wagons by their dilapidated, Gothic mansions, and that's where she got the idea for her novel. And what a novel it is. You have an epic of the War and Reconstruction told from the perspective of the planter aristocracy. A spoiled sociopath bitch (Scarlett O'Hara) is living the life of being the most pampered person in the world, toying with the affections of men, screwing over her female rivals, generally being an absolute Stacey. She bathes in buttermilk to keep herself as creamy in skin tone as possible. Then along comes the War, and honestly I don't remember what exactly happens, it was a really long book. But the gist of it is that Scarlett manages to fuck herself over repeatedly by marrying men she doesn't love, until she can unintentionally get them killed off, while she navigates the love triangle of the handsome rogue cotton speculator Rhett Butler and the generic good guy Ashley (fag name for a fag character).
I fell in love with it almost immediately for its extremely detailed, authentic portrayal of the planters. I'd be reading and my mind would constantly tingle with pleasure at seeing facts about plantation life and their mentality confirmed. And then Rhett walked in and I jizzed myself. He IS NOT A CONFEDERATE. The whole point of it is that Rhett sees the planters for what they are - delusional Romantics who are so far out of time that they are going to get their whole civilization destroyed - and Scarlett, self-absorbed princess, doesn't really care for the War either since the War is an inconvenience to her. Rhett frequently mocks and teases and makes sport out of the Confederates and then his wife makes friends and cronies and followers out of the carpetbaggers. Scarlett is born aristocracy but is trash to her core; Rhett is born trash but develops and redeems himself into a real gentleman. While I was lured in by the Southern aristocracy stuff, I stayed for the psychological aspect. Scarlett genuinely suffers and you come to genuinely feel bad for this poor princess. In a way I think the War was cruelest on those kinds of people, that had no real role in causing it and had the farthest to fall. Imagine having to fend for yourself with no experience taking care of yourself. But the way she responds to that kind of trauma, that grim lifestyle, is to become bitter and even more mercenary and in doing so slowly alienate herself from everyone until she finally manages to completely destroy her reputation.
As far as racism goes, it doesn't get busted out until Reconstruction, but when it does it does in force. Margaret Mitchell hated the Confederacy not for slavery but for mucking up slavery for everyone. People bitch about the lack of horrors of slavery in it, but I don't think it needed it. Just because a book is about the Old South that does not mean the slaves have to be the focus. Sometimes I want to read about the yeomen (Cold Mountain is mostly about them). Sometimes I want to read about the planters.
I think Margaret Mitchell genuinely made a masterpiece. Unfortunately, I think the sorts of people who most took a shine to it were exactly those that shouldn't have. It was people, especially women (princess syndrome) that saw the "glamor" of plantation life and wanted to emulate it, rather than those who saw how rotten and foolish all that business had been.
Lastly, there's Lonesome Dove. I love that one. I read it so long ago, back when I first started reading again as an adult, that I don't recall a ton of specifics and it has sweetened in my mind. It's the story, loosely inspired by real people not enough so to call it a fictionalization, of two ex-Rangers making the first cattle drive to Montana. Epic in length but intimate in scope. Kind of hard to sell, but if you saw the miniseries (in which case you're probably an old-timer from back when people still liked Westerns), it's wonderful like the miniseries but with the added benefit of that you get tons of backstory and the detailed inner thoughts of all these characters. They're very human, which is something that unites a lot of the best things I've written. High concept is great and all, prose is great and all, but character is what really matters. And there is prose there too. The opening scene of the first chapter is, at least to my recollection, the most beautiful such passage in the English language. Gus is the main thing, of course, that sells it. A beautiful personality but kind of buried in this smartass, overly talkative character that plays off very well against his long-suffering, overly serious friend. And of course that overly serious friend ends up getting almost every one of them killed, Oregon Trail style, over something pointless as they deal with all the ghosts of their past (romantic, enemies, etc.).
I don't know how to describe it well, it having been a long time ago. I just thought it was majestic.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, for "Alternate History"
The Plague Dogs, for "Animal-Perspective Fiction"
A Confederacy of Dunces, for "Realistic Fiction"
Alien in a Small Town, for "Science Fiction"
A Canticle for Leibowitz, for "Dystopian Fiction"
A Short Stay in Hell, for "Mathematical Fiction"
Aztec, for "World Historical Fiction"
Lonesome Dove, for "American Historical Fiction"
And for GREATEST OF ALL TIME:
Lonesome Dove
The Plague Dogs, for "Animal-Perspective Fiction"
A Confederacy of Dunces, for "Realistic Fiction"
Alien in a Small Town, for "Science Fiction"
A Canticle for Leibowitz, for "Dystopian Fiction"
A Short Stay in Hell, for "Mathematical Fiction"
Aztec, for "World Historical Fiction"
Lonesome Dove, for "American Historical Fiction"
And for GREATEST OF ALL TIME:
Lonesome Dove
A Canticle for Leibowitz: For capturing the Catholic sanctity of life and the beauty of the Medieval mindset (mundane things having their own magic), the tragic, broken nature of mankind
Alien in a Small Town: For it's beautiful treatment of unrequited romantic love without sex, psychological portrait of conversion without being dismissive or condescending, wonderfully sympathetic portrayal of what the Amish/Mennonite worldview is about, grief and repentance
The Plague Dogs: While not a part of traditional Christianity, I think Adams' understanding of Man's rightful relationship to the natural world is divinely inspired. Beautiful portrayal of that.
Alien in a Small Town: For it's beautiful treatment of unrequited romantic love without sex, psychological portrait of conversion without being dismissive or condescending, wonderfully sympathetic portrayal of what the Amish/Mennonite worldview is about, grief and repentance
The Plague Dogs: While not a part of traditional Christianity, I think Adams' understanding of Man's rightful relationship to the natural world is divinely inspired. Beautiful portrayal of that.
Corelli's Mandolin
Alien in a Small Town
Gone With the Wind
Alien in a Small Town
Gone With the Wind
REALISTIC FICTION
Roadwork
SCIENCE FICTION
Starship Troopers
Stranger in a Strange Land
WORLD HISTRICAL FICTION
Ben-Hur
The Clan of the Cave Bear
AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION
Cold Mountain
Good Rebel Soil
The Shootist
If it's listed here I either liked it a lot but didn't feel like it was "important enough," I guess, or it felt important but I didn't actually enjoy it that intensely.
Roadwork
SCIENCE FICTION
Starship Troopers
Stranger in a Strange Land
WORLD HISTRICAL FICTION
Ben-Hur
The Clan of the Cave Bear
AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION
Cold Mountain
Good Rebel Soil
The Shootist
If it's listed here I either liked it a lot but didn't feel like it was "important enough," I guess, or it felt important but I didn't actually enjoy it that intensely.
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