nathalie

A compulsive and brutally nihalistic romance novel. This is my first Sally Rooney and not at all what I expected, but it's very easy to see why she has become so highly regarded. She writes her characters with such tenderness and empathy, in spite of their confounding decisions and cycles of self alienation. At the same time they possess an acute, almost meticulous physical awareness that nevertheless only makes their pain more acute.

This book is predominantly about an inability to connect to others, of superficial interactions insufficiently standing in for a deeper connection the two protagonists crave. The conclusions they arrive at are frustrating, but so deeply articulated that they make a sort of sense. Nobody is capable of unpacking their adolescent (and ongoing) trauma because it requires a vulnerability that frankly terrifies them. So they dissociate, attempt to mirror each other, cling to the closest approximation of happiness they can find. It is unrelentingly bleak and I admire the willingness to refuse an easy resolution.

The degree to which this articulates an actual worldview of impossible codependency is murkier for me, with a lot of baggage of outdated psychology being inserted as an inherent cause of the isolation everyone feels (rather than, say, the class disparity that is crudely gestured at but far outside the novel's interests). I cannot begrudge it too much as it is well in line with characters who themselves have very little awareness of the reasons they are so unhappy, but I am skeptical about the ways that viewpoint inevitably gets expanded to be some sort of social truth.

Mostly I am surprised by the book's coldness. I devoured it in a few days and came away feeling profoundly empty. I do mean this as a compliment of sorts.

There are some valuable historical and sociological observations in here, but Buck's political imagination is frustratingly narrow when it comes to a post-fossil fuel future. A significant amount of the book is devoted to outlining (but not doing) the planning work still needing to be done regarding forces of labor, capital, and government if we are to fully divest from the fossil fuel industry, which while all true is also plainly obvious to anyone already invested in addressing climate change (the audience for this book seems somewhere between center-left MSNBC libs and soft-leftists).

Ideas like degrowth and energy quotas are brought up and discarded in the span of a few paragraphs, while whole chapters are given to outlining accelerationist technologies like carbon capture and nuclear energy which hinge on somehow converting up-to-now destructive capitalist enterprises into public utilities (while also somehow preventing the government corruption that has allowed oil companies to mark the planet off as a tax break). It's a very convenient narrative for the global north, where the work is almost entirely political and rhetorical, costing us little in the form of convenience or wealth or global authority.

Buck tries to balance a very clear US-centrism by occasionally bringing up the ways the global north has pillaged the global south and why it will be harder for many countries there to end fossil fuels, but this doesn't extend to an analysis of how the US can only exist as it currently does due to the exploitation of the global south. Doing so would undermine the already vague solutions presented in the book as incompatible with a globally equitable future, which will require the north to surrender certain lifestyle aspects both for the future well being of our planet but also to remediate the centuries of harm done to the south who will feel the effects of climate change hardest.

Yes, net zero is not enough, but neither are the solutions presented here. Political pessimism makes it easy and appealing to choose the path of minimal resistance (which, to be clear, would still be significant), but we will have to become much more utopian if we're ever to build a society that actually escapes the death sentence we've constructed.

Perhaps I took the title too literally, but it was disappointing to discover how little of this book is concerned with articulating actual tactics for violent climate resistance. It is predominantly an argument for the necessity of violence, a position I agree with having bought a book called “How To Blow Up A Pipeline,” but which ends up feeling as late and ineffectual as the doomerism that spurred writing it.

The last chapter dedicated to rebuking climate defeatism is the most engaging (if shockingly bleak). It seems an altogether more difficult challenge to pull people back from the ledge of accepted annihilation, which Malm does a commendable (if brief) job of. I just can't help feeling like I am no closer to actualizing any of the goals that have been hazely waved before me. The anger and restlessness is already here, what's left is the difficult task of directing it.

A defiant scream into the universe; a refusal to become only pain, bodies without self; poetry born of love and death and comic spite. Hope is so hard to find in this bloodied, fragile existence, but it's there, beating at the bruises and concrete that could never bury us. Whispers turning to cries in defiance of anyone arrogant enough to think they get to choose when we die.

A charming and reserved collection of vignettes wherein very little happens but everyone comes out a bit wiser. I have been a huge fan of Jansson's Moomin series for years and didn't realize until the introduction that this was also written by her (was looking for summer books and, well...). Her voice is very similar to her comics and still a delight, though I feel like something is lost without her illustrations. She has a way of describing the world like a depressed and cerebral child, whichs works amazing when paired with the silly Moomin designs but here just creates a sense of absence. In a way it's fitting for the themes of death, growing old, bodies wearing down, but feels more an accident of form than an intentional tone.

Was not quite the carefree summer getaway I was looking for, but I'm beginning to notice that most media centered around summer is almost by necessity a meditation on the passage of time and the implacable sadness that follows.

A curious magical realism novel about the anxiety of temp work that gets too caught up in its fiction to construct a coherent theme. There’s definitely something here about how living under capitalism puts you in a constant state of precariousness you are then left to try and outrun, but it’s muddied with this strange romantic notion of being middle class and eventually a girlboss at the end of the world. I like the whimsical prose but there’s only so many homophone jokes I can take before I’m dying for real character development.

Like sledding down a hill on a piece of cardboard, hurtling towards a cliff, bailing too late and tumbling, limbs snapping like twigs as you become another piece of debris to careen over the edge. The chaos at the center of Stephen Florida is unrelenting, his drive to wrestle both pitifully insignificant and the only thing that has and will ever matter. To what degree any of what's happening is real or true is irrelevant to the kinetic energy that starts fully built on page one and refuses to decelerate until crashing headfirst into the acknowledgements.

The only comparison I can reach for are Johnny's chapters from House of Leaves, both painting images of isolated, angry men rapidly detaching themselves from reality until all that's left is their own paranoia. If you found Johnny's depraved ramblings hard to stomach I would recommend leaving Stephen Florida off your list (or at least heeding the content warnings because there is a lot of shit sprinkled between lines through these brief 289 pages). I have discovered that few books are more engaging to me than those concerning masculinity's proclivity towards antisocial self destruction. I'm not yet sure what to make of this information.

Took me a bit to come around to this. The early chapters are saddled with a lot of overcomplicated scifi world building and inexplicable pop-culture references, but once it shifts into being an earnest villains-to-lovers romance I was all in. I do not read enough violent and vulnerable love poetry so perhaps I am just starved for intimacy, but the way Red and Blue's brovado gets shelled as they realize they are falling for each other made me yearn for a similar connection the way all great romances do.

I am not particularly interested in picking apart the time travel for inconsistencies as the emotional impact works regardless of if I can make sense of the strands and ripples. The impression I get from talking with others is the stylistic moves and flowery ambiguity are fully love/hate, but I'm glad to fall in the former. Irrelevant in some ways, but the cover is one of my favorites of the last decade so I'm glad the book lived up to it (if not in ways I expected).

Have been wanting to read this since falling in love with Tarkovsky' “Stalker” and found it just as gripping as the movie (though the similarities are less pronounced than you may expect). Everything that comes out of Roadside Picnic has such a singular mood (run down, labor oriented, darkly humorous, pessimistic about if technology is improving society), and the book does a great job sketching its world just sharply enough to ground the reader while rarely adding uneeded specificity. Everyone is screwed and scrappy and only seeing half of how they fit into the industrial machine they power.

I don't know enough about Soviet fiction to speak to what histories this book is in conversation with. The analogies that spring to mind feel both too obvious to be interesting and too flat for how ambiguous so much about The Zone and it's impact remain. Will be interested to see what interpretations have sprouted up over the last several decades, but even as just a sensory experience Roadside Picnic is riveting.

Exceptionally bleak capital realism. It makes a lot of sense reading about Kobo Abé's love of Kafka, as both are similarly preoccupied with the hopelessness of living under capitalism, how it alienates us from people who ought to be allies, and the seeming inexscapability of it's control. They also both utterly fail to perceive women as human beings, describing them as anywhere between silly, beautiful nothings to stupid animals.

I don't know enough about Japanese literature to fully lump this in with the dry, thematically interesting but socially upsetting western canon, but if you dislike that mode of writing this isn't going to change that. It might just be my translation, but this is written (somewhat appropriately) with the flare of an exhausted biologist recording the movement of moss.

I imagine I'd have a lot more fun discussing this in a class than actually reading it. If anyone wants to commiserate about it's highs and lows (lol, cause he's in a hole) let me know.

Intellectually, I find this a meandering, at times beautiful, frequently frustrating read. But emotionally I am a little fish who likes all the weird gay angry men.

Adapting Moby Dick always seems to reveal a lot about the secondary author, in this case a dire lack of interest in queer relationships, dark comedy, and the nightmarish expanse that is the ocean. Ironically, given it opens with a screed against Cliffnotes, this is Moby Dick by way of strict plot synopsis. All the messy idiosyncrasies are sanded off so the plot can sail smoothly to the known end.

Obviously, you're going to have to clear cut a lot of Melville's passion for whale facts to fit Moby Dick into a comic book. But stripped of its character, it makes me wonder if the attempt is even worthwhile. Certainly not in such rigidly heteronormativity hands.

I picked this up out of morbid curiosity, and unsurprisingly it was quite dull. A beat-for-beat retelling of the movie partially sanitized for a middle school demographic. 13 Going on 30 is probably one of the least adaptable rom coms a publisher could pick (is it even the same story without that soundtrack?), but it made more sense when I realized this was aiming at the preteen novella market rather than grocery store moms.

The biggest change is they got rid of Andy Serkis' ball vice joke (boo), and made Wendy less of a last minute villain (good). The ending confession is still weird and awkward and the conservative nostalgia even more explicit, but this time it reads less as pining for the 80s and more a loose dislike of techno and feminine sexuality (a lateral move if anything). The one change I quite like is leaving Jenna 13 rather than flash cutting to her wedding. It takes some of the bitterness away from Jenna breaking up a couple on their wedding day and feels more optimistic as Jenna actually gets to live her life.

Missed Judy Greer on every page.

A really challenging read. The prose is astounding and some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read, but the narrative it's in service of is troubling. Broadly about how trauma becomes a constant lens through which you view relationships, and the difficulty of ever coming out of it, mediated through a 20 year age gap relationship. The degree to which the dynamics are addressed was never particularly satisfying to me, and becomes very explicitly romanticized as if the problems were purely historical.

There is so much I love about this book - its tenderness, intimacy, and willingness to engage bluntly with challenging topics - but by the end it becomes too infatuated with its characters to commit to the end that's coming. Will be thinking about it for a long time all the same, please do read the content warnings if you are considering picking this up.

Found the way the book deified Jeff Mangum while describing Neutral Milk Hotel and The Aeroplane Over the Sea as almost supernatural happenings just the most tired Pitchfork-esq aggrandizement. Maybe I should have expected it for this particular album, but the constant “it was like he wasn't even writing lyrics but channeling a spiritual voice” embellishment feels so silly and precluded any actual criticism or analysis of the album beyond a short, haphazard section attempting to interpret the lyrics. Hollow criticism aside, comparing Mangum leaving the band to the death of Anne Frank (which happens multiple times!) is just a wildly gross extension of the already icky allusions to her made in the lyrics. Two stars for the legitimately very interesting section discussing how they achieved the analog fuzz sound on the album (it's as convoluted as you would expect). Would love to know if there are any good 33 1⁄3 books or if they're all just masturbatory touring profiles.

A frustratingly vague but often haunting epistolary short story. I wasn't anticipating it to hew so closely to videogame emails and SCP entries, but I'll give it credit for being thematically richer than most of the shockbait horror it structurally parallels.

Ideas about the bodies of dehumanized (in more ways than one) workers in a future capitalist state are woven in without the didactic brutality so much contemporary scifi relies on. Characters cannot see outside the demands of the company anymore than readers can materialize the absent interviewer. Both are invisible absolutes, acknowledged but dismissed because who has time when you're working 12 hour shifts (to say nothing or the cosmic horror leaking from this cargo...).

I felt rather listless by the end of this. Even with the introduction of an honest to god plot in the third act it retains the abstract, nonlinear structure (it was not surprising to learn the author is primarily a poet). Certain passages were striking enough to overcome the otherwise formless collage of interviews, but I am glad it was only a scarce 125 pages.

Every volume feels like a step down from the last. Amazed there are still two more volumes to go. Equally amazed that this series may truly have zero themes, just lots of facts that I cannot begin to care about. So disappointing how little focus is given to the outrageous monster designs or fight scenes. Why would you draw a face that gross and only show it once???

Vital utopian optimism in the face of apocalyptic climate disaster. Half-earth socialism is both an attempt to map a way out of the inequity and instability capital has wraught, and an invitation to imagine beyond the bandaid solutions currently being proposed to push annihilation onto a future generation. A better world is possible. Believing anything less is a death sentence to us and everyone who'll follow.

It is not a perfect theory, being just a brisk 200 pages (about 30 are notes and citations), and the speculative fiction bookends frequently read with the didactic clunkiness of an edutainment cartoon. But its authors are quick to draw attention to the work still to be done and the long history of supporting texts both modern and ancient (yeah, Pluto gets a feature). Half-earth socialism succeeds as a foundation out of hopelessness towards an indefinite but possible future.

It's accessible enough to reach beyond academic circles while not lacking in research depth, which is an achievement in itself. I highly recommend the companion game at play.half.earth even if you don't read the book. It's a surprisingly robust global planning simulation that helped me understand some of the book's more technical theories, while also showing socialism can be fun (and only mildly terrifying when things go wrong).

The art is still immaculate and looks phenomenal on the heavy stock paper (can't imagine how expensive this was to print). The writing is...fine? Characters are painted in broad strokes and heavy emotions without actually getting to do anything significant. There's a reliance on “humans are the real monsters” mic drops that I find tiring (especially in relationship to the films which are both more specific in their targets and empathetic towards their characters).

Fun if you are as obsessed with Alien/s as me but not much to chew on as a book itself.

Wasn't allowed to read these growing up so now doing my own belated book club. Blown away at how good this is right out of the gate. Has a great campy sentai-show setup but pulls no punches with how gruesome this intergalactic war actually is. All of the morph descriptions are straight body horror, and the violence only gets away with being this gory because of Halo rules (it's not blood, it's yellow goo).

Our first POV, Jake, is fully the likeable leader boy archetype, but the character voice is so strong it hardly matters. Particular highlight is dog brain, which is exactly what you'd expect but even more charming. Under the YA nonchalance is a surprisingly affecting tragedy, particularly Jake's distant relationship with his brother (I imagine we'll see even more devastating scenes from the other POVs whose family life seems even more complicated).

Great start to this series. I am sure it goes off the rails over the next 50 (!!) books, but I'm fully bought in right now.

It's retroactively very impressive Ethan Coen's scripts are not solely preoccupied with shit and dicks.

Read this while trying to work through my thoughts on Arrest of a Stone Buddha (a game that blends French nihilism with Hong Kong action... definitely an interesting combination). It's a very compelling and enraging book, I think if I'd read this as a depressed teen alongside Myth of Sisyphus it would have been an instant favorite.

A decade later I don't have much use for nihilism and find the exercise here cloying and unmoving. I will give it props for being the type of philosophy I so strongly disagree with that reading it does prompt me to think a hell of a lot about why I am so put off, which I suppose is the purpose of philosophy in a way.

What a weird nothing of an ending. Expected more from this series from how highly it's talked about, but while I can clearly see its influence (especially in The Matrix) there's so little of substance here. Each volume got progressively less interesting as it became clear all the scifi bullshit had no destination and themes were off the table.

This last volume is still one of the more enjoyable ones just due to having a higher sick art to dialogue ratio, but having it all wrap around to a birth allegory is...disappointing, to say the least. If you've been sitting on BLAME!, read the first master edition and pretend that's all there is. Can't wait to watch the Netflix adaptation, I can't begin to imagine how you adapt this.

Among the most influential pieces of theory I have read in a very long time. Wark bluntly challenges the established forms by which we address the upper class, arguing that in order to imagine and work towards a better future we must first discard the old forms of conceptualizing it. I would hesitate to call it inspiring (existential terror remains such even with the language to know it), but Wark's ability to blend technical, theoretical, and cultural forces into a unified theory has the effect of finally emerging from a deep sleep.

The last few chapters get a bit in the weeds dismissing Marxist theorists directly, serving as a preemptive defense against their arguments but moving away from the tangible rhetoric of the earlier chapters. It makes the book somewhat less accessible as a whole, but is a minor blemish on what is still a very readable academic text. Essential reading for modern Marxist's, particularly the more obnoxious and online among them (heh, wonder who that's for).

Continuing to work my way through Ishiguro's bibliography in a completely arbitrary order. This touches on a lot of similar themes as Never Let Me Go - systemic caretaking, human costs of technology, being beholden to a world you barely understand - but with less clarity and emotional sophistication than made that book so exceptional.

It's quite interesting to see how in the 15 or so years, Ishiguro is now working through new concerns around AI and climate change as opposed to more allegorical technology. I think this one may end up aging better than I feel about it today, but I was left feeling like it never quite arrived at the ideas it was toying with. This is partially by design as it's told effectively from the perspective of a child, but even taken in perspective with the premise it's quite detached. In particular wish there was a bit more of an idea what this near future society is like. We hear about it in incongruous whispers but it ends up feeling like hypotheticals than anything coherent with the rest of the text.

An enjoyable read despite its frustrating inconclusions. Shockingly breezy for an Ishiguro book, I tore through this much faster than anticipated which may also speak to the reservations above.