I set two goals for myself this year. The first was to generate gobs of business value by providing liquidity to the U.S. index options market and the second was to read more books. I made some great strides in my reading life in 2024, but I locked in too hard at work in 2025 and backslid. Determined to turn the franchise around, I brought a copy of *2666* with me to Japan in December. I was the sickest I've been in years on that trip, but all of my time on trains and buses plus the magic of Japanese cough medicine[^cough_syrup] got me in the right headspace to focus on the most ambitious book I've read in years. By the time I finished "The Part About Archimboldi", I knew I was (so) back. [^cough_syrup]: I know the meme of "Thing vs Thing In Japan", but they'll sell you caffeinated pseudoephedrine over the counter in Japan which absolutely rules. Don't buy phenylephrine, it's literally a scam. Foolishly, I set an ambitious New Year's Resolution to read 50 pages a day, which I immediately failed to do. I've still managed to get a decent amount of reading done over past year, but I'm hoping that I can step it up by the end of 2026. Some meta notes about reading: - I mostly try to read on physical books and I underline passages with a mechanical pencil, but that's difficult to do on the subway. Still working on my technique - I have a bunch of awesome used book stores by me, so I accumulate more cheap classic books than I am able to read. - When I'm on vacation, I read on my Kindle, which is zippier for easier books, since I don't have to fiddle with a pencil whenever I want to highlight something, but the problem there is that there's a ceiling of book difficulty that I can read on a Kindle. For example, something like *Gravity's Rainbow* will probably always have to be a physical reading experience so that I can flip back and forth easily. - If you're buying physical books, try to show some love to your local bookstores. Think of the premium over the the Amazon price as a donation you're paying to keep the lights on. - Alternately, you can go on Anna's Archive to download epubs. LibGen used to be good for this as well, but it looks like that site is gone for good. Once you have epubs, I recommend organizing them via Calibre and sideloading them onto your e-reader. - There's a Kindle bug that causes sideloaded content to disappear from your device if you leave it in airplane mode for too long. This almost bit me, but I fixed it by hard resetting my device, renaming the `documents` folder to `documents_bak`, syncing my Kindle, and then renaming `documents_bak` back to `documents` in order to force a full reindexing of my documents. This bullet point is entirely here in case this happens to me again and I forget how I fixed it the first time. I'm not explicitly scoring these books, because I found that I would spend way too much time trying to rate movies while watching them when I used Letterboxd during Covid, which took something away from my ability to enjoy and process art. I have some super loosy goosey categories for how much I enjoyed the books at the end of this page if my thoughts don't come through clearly enough in the individual reviews. My apologies if any of this reads poorly, or feels drawn out. My writing skills have completely atrophied outside of machine-gunning slack messages at work and yelling at the little golem in my terminal to do my job for me, so this is a very low-stakes way for me to churn out some sentences and attempt to get my mojo back. I assure you, this is artisanal, hand-crafted text. ## December ### _2666_ _Roberto Bolaño. Picador, 2009. 912 pg_ ![[2666.jpg|center|300]] > No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them. There's so much to talk about here, but I don't have the space or writing skills to express all of my thoughts on this book right now. If you haven't read any Roberto Bolaño before, he was a Chilean poet-in-exile that drifted through Mexico City and ended up settling down in a beach town near Barcelona, where he passed away of liver cancer in 2003 at the age of 50. He managed to mostly finish *2666* before he died, judging from the afterward in the epub I read; there might have been a small amount of edits, but for the most part, we can assume that the *2666* we got was basically the one we would have gotten had he lived for another 6-12 months. The novel takes the form of 5 interlinked sections that orbit around mass killings of women in the fictional Santa Teresa, which serves as a stand-in for Ciudad Juarez and the real life femicides that occurred there. The first section, "The Part About the Critics", concerns a group of European academics that share a common research interest in the reclusive German author Benno von Archimboldi. They become embroiled in love triangles and quadrilaterals and eventually hear a tip that Archimboldi was seen in Santa Teresa and attempt to find him. They come up empty-handed, but this section brings us closer to the killings. A professor at the University of Santa Teresa that helps orient the academics returns in "The Part About Amalfitano", where he begins to lose his mind as he's confronted with the bleak reality of Santa Teresa and wonders how he's going to keep his daughter Rosa safe when it seems like being a woman is cause enough to be murdered. He starts hearing voices, whether its a ghost or not is left unclear[^ghost] , and leaves a mysterious geometry textbook hanging on a clothesline outside of his home to see what exposure to Santa Teresa brings with it. [^ghost]: I'm inclined to think it was legitimately a ghost, given his ghost story, "The Return". Bolaño loved referencing and commenting on his own work, so I chalked this up as another instance of the Bolaño Cinematic Universe. The next one, "The Part About Fate", focuses on an American journalist that goes to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match and comes face to face with the violence in the city, which leads us straight to the physical center of the novel, "The Part About the Crimes", a 300-page police procedural that takes place in between brutal descriptions of the bodies of the women killed in the city. If you've heard anything about *2666* before, it's probably about how brutal and drawn-out "The Part About the Crimes" is. It's over 300 pages of unrelenting descriptions of the bodies of 122 female murder victims in Santa Teresa and its outskirts, and Bolaño does not make any attempt to sanitize the violence. Bolaño writes like he's a mortician or a reporter, fastidiously focused on every detail while maintaining distance from the emotional subject he's covering. In between the murders, is an incredibly gripping police procedural, that like the rest of the book, is full of different intersecting characters, plot threads, and anecdotes that paint a fuller picture of Santa Teresa's reaction to the killings. There's stuff here about a serial church defiler that pisses all over the altars while smashing statues, Epstein parties, snuff films, and in a particularly high point, a medium on public access television is possessed and cries out for the dead women and demands answers. Throughout all of it, Bolaño alludes to potential answers for the reasons for the killings, but masterfully evades blaming it on any single factor in particular. The maquiladoras, factories in Mexico that assemble parts made in China before shipping into America, create a class of itinerant workers with no support network in Santa Teresa to protect them, but not all of the victims worked at maquiladoras. Some of the killers are clearly not Mexican, but then the cops try to pin all of the killings on a single (extremely suspicious) German man. Misogyny is obviously a factor, but one of the killings happened when a woman who loved to box told her roommates that she wanted to fight for fun, and then the hit her head and died (I think we are meant to take the story at face value). It's all of these reasons and none of them. Finally, we return to starting position in "The Part About Archimboldi", where we meet the author we were hunting for at the beginning of the novel, and we learn about his childhood in Weimar Germany, his exploits during WWII, and how he ends up in Santa Teresa. Some episodes here that are stunning include: free diving, Archimboldi's time on the Eastern Front, a visit to Dracula's castle, the journal he finds in a fireplace about a Soviet sci-fi author, a crucifixion, a Polish civil administrator confessing his sins, a reunion with a lost love, a reunion with a lost object of lust, a confession from a Swiss man, a trip to an artists' home that ends up being an asylum, a reunion with a lost sister, and finally, the origin of a German ice cream. Somehow it all works, and this might very well be the best part of the book. I'm usually a seller on these fragmentary plots with tenuous connections between stories because too often an author will have Character A from story 1 show up in story 4 and expect you to point at the page, slack-jawed, and yell "omg i remember character A from story 1" like it's an Avengers movie. I'm no longer a big fat baby, and I resent it when people try to jingle keys in front of my face like I am one (Jennifer Egan, I'm coming for your ass). Bolaño avoids this by using repeated motifs instead of frequent character crossovers, and so many of these motifs further the book's core themes of violence and literature. An incomplete list of connections between parts that stuck out in my mind six months after the fact: - Men exploding into violence: taxi driver hate crime_I, weird freak that goes to gay bars to start fights_II, Fate's confrontation_III, Lalo Cura's first day on the job_IV, Haas showing the other prisoners what he really is_IV, Archimboldi's exploits during the war_V, Archimboldi's actions in the POW camp after the war_V - Insane asylums: painter who cut his hand off[^hand]_I, poet that Amalfitano's wife was infatuated with_II, the madhouse the detective's love interest worked at_IV - Benito Juarez: La Santa understanding what Benito Juarez felt on those nights as a shepherd_IV, Archimboldi taking the name Benno_V - Global violence: Femicides in Santa Teresa_I-IV, Eastern Front of WWII_V, the Holocaust in Poland_V, human sacrifice in the Aztec Empire_V - Mirrors: The two mirrors forming an infinite labyrinth Liz Norton's hotel room in Santa Teresa_I, the congresswoman having a vision of said hotel room chronologically before Liz Norton stays in it_IV, Archimboldi hiding behind a mirror in Dracula's castle_V - Readers acting as investigators: the critics_I, Amalfitano_II, Fate_III, Lalo Cura_IV, Archimboldi_V - Speeches by older readers emphasizing the importance of a balanced diet: Barry Seaman_III, La Santa_IV [^hand]: Do we believe that the artist was telling the truth to Morini when he said he cut his hand off for money? Do we believe that *Morini* was telling the truth to the other critics? Who can say? Who can say? So, what's it all about? Before he died, Bolaño wrote in a note that there > \[existed] in the work of a “hidden center,” concealed beneath what might be considered the novel’s “physical center.” The "physical center" is obviously Santa Teresa, but what is the "hidden center"? I think it's this locus of violence that ties everything together. Santa Teresa is this current site of hyperviolence, but before that there was Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and before that were the human sacrifices committed by the Aztecs in order to perpetuate the world. He offers no real solutions to this fundamental problem of violence in human nature, which from the Baudelaire epigraph, might be motivated in part by the desire to replace "a desert of boredom" with "an oasis of horror", but he does offer a balm. In each part, there are radical acts of love and connection that cut through the miasma of evil and offer escape to characters that are trapped by the pull of Santa Teresa. "The Part About the Crimes" ends with this paragraph which hit me incredibly hard when I finished it, and I think also serves as a reasonable ending for this review: >Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost. ## January ### *American Psycho* _Bret Easton Ellis. Vintage, 1991. 399 pg_ ![[american_psycho.jpg|center|300]] ### _The Sellout_ by Paul Beatty _Paul Beatty. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. 305 pg_ ![[the_sellout.jpg|center|300]] I hated this one. The Sellout is about a man, the titular Sellout, who devotes his energies towards getting his disincorporated hometown Dickens back on the map after his heterodox social scientist father is shot dead by cops. In the course of trying to restore his hometown to the good ol' days, he reinstitutes segregation and slavery, but only half-heartedly. The _in media res_ opening in the Supreme Court was great, and having Clarence Thomas be the one to excoriate the Sellout for bringing back slavery got a chuckle out of me, but the book quickly fell off for me. What started out as a funny, wacky story just got incredibly grating. Every paragraph needed to be packed with so many one liners, jokes, references, etc that I felt like there was no space for character development, or any real thematic exploration other than pointing at a thing and going "hmmm... makes one think". Beatty goes for some shock value by making The Sellout a slaveholder, but there are enough exigent circumstances that it’s almost reasonable in the context of the book. While on his worst behavior, he finds that adding “whites only seats” signs to buses improves behavior on public transit and faking the construction of a white magnet school causes reading scores to shoot up. It’s not really my place to weigh in on the merits of black cynicism, but gesturing towards the argument that black people need to live in the panopticon is nuts. It would be one thing if Beatty stuck his neck out and said “this is what I believe”, but all the shitty jokes make it so the ideas are underbaked, and he gets to hide behind a cloak of irony. The conclusion of the book is a flashback to a black comedy night at the donut shop, where a black comedian berates a white couple for laughing too hard, because this is “our thing”, and they’re not in on it. He ends the book with a question: “what is our thing?” XXX actual quote. *Ugh*. The heavy rhetorical question is the domain of the coward, because when (weak) authors ask these questions, they have no intention of even having a discussion about them, let alone moving towards an answer. Anne DeMarcken’s *It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over* was overstuffed with this pablum and by the end I felt like the title described the experience of reading the damn book better than any review could. You cannot end your book with “geez, wouldn’t this be an interesting topic to discuss? FIN.” Not for me! ### *Human Acts* by Han Kang XXX: how to cite translations? ![[human_acts.jpg|center|300]] ## February This was a productive month of reading, but all of these were pretty slim volumes. My thought is that I should tackle my immense backlog of books Dave Ramsay-style, meaning I pay off my smallest debts first to get a motivational psychic boost. At the least, it’s been a good way for me to hear from more voices than if I was mostly reading 300-500 page novels. ### *Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark* by Alvin Schwartz ![[scary_stories_to_tell_in_the_dark.jpg|center|300]] *Goosebumps* **kneels** before *Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark*. I don't know what possessed me to read this again all of a sudden, but it definitely holds up. Stephen Gammell's illustrations are still haunting (the corpse with the empty eye sockets still gets me), but what I didn't remember was how folksy a lot of these stories are. For some reason I thought that more of these were straight horror stories, like the haunted scarecrow story from the second volume, "Harold", but there's a decent amount of variety in this collection. There are songs, comedic stories, romances, indigenous folklore, etc., etc. I'm looking forward to reading the other two volumes at some point this year. ### *Jesus' Son* by Denis Johnson ![[jesus_son.jpg|center|300]] Easily one of the best books I’ve read this year. ### *Amusing Ourselves to Death* by Neil Postman ![[amusing_ourselves_to_death.jpg|center|300]] Screeching into the void about how _Meet the Press_ and TVs in the classroom will destroy American minds. Sort of quaint given that we were at least two generations from the iPad babies bursting onto the scene, but I xxx His refrain of "the medium is the metaphor" is an absolute butchering of "the medium is the message" xxx Chris cox it’s a platform and a medium One interesting later section discusses how politicians will respond to the decreased level of Discourse by attempting to mirror voters' tendencies back to them in order to win their votes. I think he was getting close to something here. My main criticism of this is that Postman thinks that politicians will essentially be aping the voters like this classic Dril tweet, but one of the most interesting things about Trump is that he's lumpen-bourgeois in an inimitable way. > turning a big dial taht \[sic] says "Racism" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right > > @dril, March 15, 2017 Obviously, Trump's been lobotomized through a combination of 24/7 news, Twitter, and memes physically printed out for him by one of his female praetorians. I doubt that Postman would have accepted the idea that the "elites" of American society would allow themselves to be debased by television and other forms of mass media. A woman I was dating in 2019 broke up with me to become a nun, but I'm not going to elaborate on that here. Right after that, an actual nun at my church asked if I'd teach CCD, which is basically Catholic Sunday School, and I agreed to do it because I craved the approval of a woman in a habit. The whole thing was kind of a mess because I had no notion of classroom management, but the scary part was how many kids clearly had undiagnosed reading disabilities (almost all boys). I was teaching the Confirmation kids, so my students ranged from 8th to 10th grade, and you'd be shocked at what percentage were nowhere near reading on grade level. One of my Realest Ass Dude Moments was when one of my problem students, Iverson, was talking when a girl was reading, so I picked him to read next. He hits me back with "Nah man, I can't read", but Iverson was a Habitual Line Stepper, so I figured he was just busting my balls and I made him read a paragraph from the NT. He could not read. No corporate DEI training could have ever prepared me to navigate a scenario like this. Do I stop him, and let him save some face? But that would make it clear that I don't think he can read. Or do I let him fumble through this paragraph for another three minutes? I ended up letting it ride since I was kind of annoyed with him and I hoped it would teach him a lesson about how to behave in the classroom. It clearly didn't work because he stole the priest's phone a few weeks later. I mostly wanted to work this story in because it amuses me, but one of the main things that made me stop teaching CCD was that I could not imagine these kids CCC ### *Amulet* by Roberto Bolaño ![[amulet.avif|center|300]] Another fantastic novella from Bolaño. Even if you only looked at his novellas and excluIed the rest of his oeuvre, I think he'd still be one of the greatest authors of the last 30 years. One of the most interesting parts of Bolaño's writing is how he would return to his earlier works and refashion them to create something new. A favorite of my mine, *Nazi Literature in the Americas* is a fictional reference book that compiles various right wing LatAm freaks and their attempts (successful or not) to write poetry and prose. The last entry in there is a fantastic 40 page story concerning a fascist skywriter, which got expanded into the novella-length *Distant Star* later that year. I have not read the *Woes of the True Policeman*, but that's supposed to be a prototype for The Part About the Crimes in *2666*, and while it was published after *2666*, I would not be shocked if "Police Rat" in *The Insufferable Gaucho* was also a study for *2666*. *Amulet* is another Bolaño remix, this time from an episode in the second part of *The Savage Detectives*, where the mother of Mexican Poetry, Auxilio xxxx Another fantastic novella from Bolaño. Bit in 2666 about tightly written exercises vs messy masterpieces xxx warmth of auxilio xxx connection to savage detectives xxx repeat of amalfitano wife obsessed with poet xxx spectre of death: rent boy, orestia shut in, saved on the street xxx song ending xxx life centers around small number of major events? ### *The King in Yellow* by Robert W. Chambers ![[the_king_in_yellow.jpg|center]] This collection probably invented the Weird Fiction genre, but I think it's mostly interesting as a historical curio rather than a book you'd want to go out of the way to read. The first four stories in the collection are linked by a play, also named *The King in Yellow*, that inspires madness in whoever reads it and makes them swear fealty to supernatural The King in Yellow, who reigns over a distant land named Carcosa. The opening story, ["The Repairer of Reputations"](https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/RepaRepu.shtml) is a fun read, but mostly for its presentation of an alternate, fascist 1920's United States. The only "horrific" elements of the story concern the narrator's mental collapse, which is so obvious to the reader that the usual tension in these kinds of stories, _"Who should I believe?"_, is completely absent. ["The Yellow Sign"](https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/YellSign.shtml) was also solid, but once you finish the horror stories, it's all sappy romances and I couldn't force myself to continue reading. I'm sure that these stories had a ton of punch in 1895, but they feel quotidian now. I've been reading a decent amount of weird fiction this year, so this is probably a good place to attempt to explain what it is. In my own words: Weird fiction is a genre of speculative fiction that takes cues from horror, fantasy, and sci-fi and aims to provoke a sense of discomfort or awe in the reader by attempting to describe the indescribable. Some common themes that Weird stories touch upon are: madness, the Outside, the boundaries of language and expression, the boundaries of the human subject, metamorphoses, cosmic horror, existential dread, egregores, consciousness, and holes. In general, think of these as stories that creep up on you, or if you're going to be juvenile, are "total mindfucks". I took a quick look at my bookshelf and here are some Weird fiction authors that I'd happily recommend to anyone that's trying to read something a little freaky: JG Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Michael Cisco, Mark Z. Danielewski, Philip K. Dick, Brian Evenson, Franz Kafka, Nick Land, Thomas Ligotti, China Mieville, Reza Negarestani, and Jeff VanderMeer. ### *Being There* by Jerry Kosinski ![[being_there.jpg|center|300]] I picked this one up off of a stoop in Park Slope, and while I thought it was _fine_, it felt like the perfect stoop book. Not good enough to want to keep in your library, but not bad enough that you'd want to pulp it. This one concerns a man named Chance that grew up in total isolation in a wealthy man's estate and spends his days experiencing the world through the medium of television. Once the wealthy man (his father) dies, Chance is thrown out on his ass into the cruel, cruel world, but he manages to overcome adversity by behaving like the people he saw on TV. He adopts a posture of saying as little as possible, and when he has to do so, speaks about the only thing he knows how to do: gardening. Despite being a certified dum-dum, he wows everyone he speaks with who thinks he's this wise, reserved man, and he rockets through Washington High Society to the point where he might get tapped to run as Vice-President. There's an amusing subplot where the KGB and CIA are trying to figure out who the hell this guy is, but it doesn't overstay its welcome. My experience of reading *Being There* was elevated by having just read *Amusing Ourselves to Death*. Postman predicted that in the future, politicians would spend more time on TV trying to pretend to be just like their dunderheaded electorate. In essence, they'd need to play dumb to get their job. Chance is the perfect Postman subject, a man that has _only_ experienced the outside world through a screen, but he performs the inverse; he's an utter moron that punches up and convinces high society, not the Median Voter, that he's Just Like Them. It's an interesting contra, but neither book really predicts Trump's lumpenbourgeosie innovation. ### *The Future of Truth* by Werner Herzog ![[the_future_of_truth.jpg|center|300]] Werner rules, dude. I don’t think he made much of a coherent argument here about the future of truth, but his riffing on historical and artistic topics is electric. The Nero episode is superb. Another street find, but in one of those Little Libraries, so it felt a little more upscale than grabbing it off the street. It was also an uncorrected galley, so I could pretend that I was some overworked publishing agent when I read it. ## March ### *The Insufferable Gaucho* by Roberto Bolaño ![[the_insufferable_gaucho.jpg|center|300]] This is a collection of loosies (five stories and two essays) that didn’t make it into the two main Bolaño short story collections we got in America: *Last Evenings on Earth* and *The Return*. I loved *The Return* when I read it last year, and I think the highlights of this collection, “Police Rat” and “Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey”, are as good as anything in *The Return*. “Police Rat” serves as a prototype for *2666’s* Part About The Crimes, where a rat detective investigates murders in the sewer system. The rat cop, Pepe, is met with indifference and outright hostility when he concludes that the killer he’s looking for is a rat, which is a case without precedent in his stinky little world. Pepe manages to find some resolution in his investigation, unlike the Santa Teresa police, but is left adrift in a disenchanted world that’s newly open to evil. A rat getting killed by a snake is just the way things go. A rat getting killed by another rat… it sends chills down my tail. Bolano is a master of suspense, and [“Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey”](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/26/alvaro-rousselots-journey) has him apply his talents towards comedy instead of horror. Alvaro Rousselot is a middling Argentine author who happens across an unauthorized adaptation of one of his novels. But curiously, the filmmaker didn’t plagiarize the book beat for beat: > Morini’s new film, “The Shape of the Day,” opened in Buenos Aires. It was exactly like “Life of a Newlywed” but better; that is, revised and considerably extended in much the same way that “Lost Voices” had been, compressing Rousselot’s plot into the central part of the film, while the beginning and the end served as commentaries on the main story (or ways into and out of it, or dead ends, or simply—and herein lay the charm of this method—delicately filmed scenes from the lives of the minor characters). This keeps going on until Rousselot resolves to confront Morini in France. In true Bolaño fashion, Alvaro becomes a total fuckup on his trip, blows through his cash, and has to ask the prostitute he’s seeing to float him. Finally, in the climax of the story, Rousselot tracks the director down and... I don't want to spoil it, but it got a belly laugh out of me even on a reread. The rest of the collection was fine, but I agree with the critical consensus that this is a collection for established Bolaño readers, not for newcomers. ### *Fathers and Sons* by Ivan Turgenev ![[fathers_and_sons.jpeg|center|300]] There were some interesting character studies, but I can’t get past the feeling that nothing much happened here. ## April ### “The Pedersen Kid” by William Gass ![[william_gass_reader.jpg|center|300]] Killer short story (heh). This is the first Gass I've ever read, and it’s going to be difficult to top it. Killer short story xxx stream of consciousness xxx somewhat unclear if the intruder exists at all or if the son kills everyone xxx chomo farmhand xxx brutal to see that the dad wasn’t always this abusive xxx sequence at farmhouse is incredibly stressful ### *We Have Always Lived in the Castle* by Shirley Jackson ![[we_have_always_lived_in_the_castle.jpeg|center|300]] ### *Morning and Evening* by Jon Fosse ![[morning_and_evening.jpeg|center|300]] The big reveal, if you can call it that, is that Johannes is not dying, because he is already dead. This had me bawling on the Q train, but I wasn’t sure why it had such a strong effect on me, and I had no interest in ruining the moment by self-analyzing it in real time. The synopsis on the book jacket and the foreshadowing throughout the book makes it very clear that Johannes is not going to be alive by the end of the novel, so what does it matter if he died before I even cracked the cover open? The good thing about writing these reviews well after the fact is that my subconscious has done some processing in the background, and here's what it came up with: if Johannes is already dead, yet is still able to *experience*, he's undeniably in the afterlife, whereas if he was actively dying and having these visions, you could dismiss it as a final rush of neurotransmitters in a dying brain. XXX God is in silence, mundanity Nun sought transcendence in every moment I think God’s nature is contradictory, and we find him by going high and low ### *A Visit from the Goon Squad* _Jennifer Egan. Vintage, 2011. 368 pg_ ![[a_visit_from_the_goon_squad.jpg|center|300]] It’s like if you made *Crash* (the one about racism, not the one about being horny) into a book. This one is a collection of interconnected short stories, but I found the connections to be superficial. Thematically the stories touch on aging and the compromises we have to make in our lives, but that's just it – they _touch_ on them. There's not much here about getting older that was new or insightful. It might just be that I'm Irish Catholic and think a _lot_ about dying, but I'm not that interesting in people wallowing in pity about being washed up. Just pull a James Murphy and embrace [losing your edge](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xG4oFny2Pk). I think the main draw for this book is the whole interconnected short story conceit. I love structural experiments, but this is not pushing the novel forward as an art form. If the most interesting thing people are debating about your "experiment" is whether you wrote a short story collection or a novel, you didn't do anything particularly innovative. Like what I mentioned in my *2666* review, I'm an inveterate hater of "everything's connected" plots because I think it's emotional manipulation targeted at dim-to-mid wits, and most storytellers take a similar, boring tack when developing the theme. First, let me explain what I mean by the emotional manipulation bit. One of the classic techniques in stand-up comedy is the callback joke, which is a joke, usually at the end of the set, that harkens back to an earlier joke that got a big reaction. Its purpose is both to double dip on a successful joke, and to also reward the audience for paying attention. They get to think of themselves as savvy viewers that are able to connect the callback joke to what it's calling-back-to, and get to pat themselves on the back for the extremely mentally taxing work they just did, and they appreciate the comedian for giving them the opportunity to feel smart. The connections Egan makes between the stories rarely offer any additional depth or insight to a character other than Sasha, who's probably the single character that shows up the most in the book. Let me give an example of this from the last story of the book: "Pure Language". Without context, this is just going to sound like a pileup of random names and connections, but I assure you, it doesn't feel much more meaningful if you've read the book. "Pure Language" is supposed to be a speculative fiction from the near future at the time of publication (2011), where an audio tech named Alex has to promote a show for Bennie, a record producer that shows up in several stories. Bennie's assistant _used_ to be a woman named Sasha that Alex went on a single date with in the first story. His current assistant is Lulu, whose mom Dolly was once a big PR agent, but had to fix the image of a dictator in the eighth story. Lulu's husband is briefly mentioned to be the son of the safari guide in the fourth story. The show is the debut of one of Bennie's old teenage bandmates, Scotty, who gets back in touch with him and gives him a fish that he caught in the East River (gross) in the sixth story. After the show is a success, Alex and Bennie realize that they both knew Sasha, and go to her old East Village apartment and buzz it to try to see if she's there, but she's not there, which you'd know if you read the twelfth story, _duh!_ Does that sound exciting to you? That this book was building up to a story that's 80% pointing at characters and being excited because you recognize them for the two seconds they're on the page? It wasn't to me! It was like a series finale for a long running TV show where they have to jam in as many cameos and as much fan service as possible in 44 minutes as a thank you to the dedicated viewers. The difference though is that if you've watched a show for multiple seasons, you've seen each of these characters for hours or more, but we only get to see Lulu for like 15 pages. Why the fuck should I care about most of these people? Am I supposed to feel smart for recognizing these names? Should I thank Jennifer Egan for giving me the opportunity to play a round of "Remember These Guys"? What if Bennie's assistant was just some random person? What if Lulu's husband was just some guy? What if she was single? What changes at all in the story? I would say nothing at all, but my hunch is that Egan thinks that the connections themselves matter, so removing these tenuous connections would ruin the whole book. This exchange from "Out of Body" felt like Egan's clearest statement of intent in *Goon Squad*: >“Oh, we’ll know each other forever,” Bix says. “The days of losing touch are almost gone.” > "What does that mean?" Drew asks. > "We're going to meet again in a different place," Bix says. "Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us." > > "Where? How?" Drew asks. > > Bix hesitates, like he's held this secret so long he's afraid of what will happen when he releases it into the air. "I picture it like Judgment Day," he says finally, his eyes on the water. "We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.” Imagine equating the Apocalypse, the climax of all creation, to a meetup for a group chat from your junior year internship that you barely post in. Who cares about finding "everyone we've lost" when most of the connections we make in our life are weak ties by their very nature? Sure maybe we're all connected in _some capacity_, but the whole "everything's connected" thing is a thought-terminating cliche. Okay, everything's connected - what about it? It's a spiritual "insight" that could have come from a TED Talk and demands nothing from you. *The Sopranos* had "Everything is everything" as arc words in Season 6, but the point there was that Tony had one minor spiritual insight, thought it made him a better person, and immediately forgot it. *Serial Experiments Lain* takes the whole "everything's connected" idea and makes it a paranoid schizophrenic's nightmare. *Goon Squad* says that everything's connected and expects me to congratulate it for saying nothing at all. Damn... I didn't know that I had this much hate in my heart. Just watch *Serial Experiments Lain* instead. ![[lain_connected.jpg|center]] ## May I managed to get a ton of reading done on my big Eurotrip. I’ve been trying to mostly read physical books so I can mark them up and reduce my crippling dependence on screens, but I always read on my Kindle when I’m on vacation. Enough time has passed that I think it's safe to say that Libgen is dead and buried, so I've moved on to Anna's Archive when I need to illicitly download ebooks. ### *A Song for the Unraveling of the World* by Brian Evenson _Coffee House Press, 2019. 240 pg_ ![[song_for_the_unraveling_of_the_world.jpg|center|300]] Evenson is one of the reigning kings of "weird fiction", which is a genre I've been reading a lot of recently. See my review of *The King in Yellow* for more about what weird fiction consists of, xxx ### *The Vegetarian* by Han Kang ![[the_vegetarian.jpg|center|300]] Similar story to *Human Acts*. I can’t tell if it’s Han Kang, or her translator, Deborah Smith, but there are some arresting images here that are held back by the quality of the prose. I remember there being a fair amount of Discourse about this one, and for some reason I thought the story was about cannibalism. This one follows Yeong-hye, who decides to become a vegetarian after she has a recurring dream xx Mongolian mark best part xxx tragedy that she thought the gooner BIL could fix her problem xxx he never truly “saw” her xxx tbh is it important to be “seen”? Xxx ever ethical to let someone starve to death ### *The White Book* by Han Kang ![[the_white_book.jpg|center|300]] I think I’m too stupid for poetry. Yet another Han Kang where I can't tell if it's her, me, or the translator. ### *Labyrinths* by Jorge Luis Borges ![[labyrinths.avif|center|300]] One of the undisputed GOATs. Love seeing some ideas develop esp the inevitability of being certain ppl - see Don Quixote, the one where the guy hangs with Homer, the essay on time Loved the circular ruins, just superb Weaknesses are the detective shit Honestly not that into the garden of forking paths ### *The Divinity Student* by Michael Cisco ![[the_divinity_student.jpg|center|300]] Absolutely stellar. Prior to this, I had only read one other book by Cisco, *Antisocities*, which was a short story collection that I enjoyed, but didn't love, so I didn't expect how good this one was going to be. Cisco's prose and storytelling lean towards the surreal, and I've never read an author that was this good at describing transcendent, uncanny events at that approach the boundary of what is expressible. TDS follows the titular Divinity Student's search for the words underpinning all of creation. The story starts with his death by lightning strike, and his revival by stuffing his corpse full of words. He recovers and is sent to the Spanish desert city of San Veneficio to become a "word finder" and is told to wait for further instructions. The first half of the plot is a series of strange episodes as he pokes and prods at anything uncanny to attempt to discern what his ultimate task will be. Eventually, he is taught the secret of how to recover the memories of the dead through a ritual involving formaldehyde, and his mission becomes clear: a group of enterprising word finders had created a catalog of the Eclogue, the words that the gods speak amongst themselves in order to maintain the existence of the world. The back half of TDS is a genuinely gruesome tale of grave robbery and butchery as the Divinity Student digs up the word finders and ventures into their brains to rediscover the Eclogue. He constructs increasingly byzantine apparatuses to venture deeper into the minds of the dead and his lair is besieged by demons driving black cars. Things keep escalating until author and protagonist reach their apexes simultaneously. The Divinity Student completes the Eclogue, achieving some form of apotheosis, while Cisco's prose reaches its acme in his attempt to describe a truly transcendent event – how apt. There's a lot to dig into here, and I'm working on a longer post about this book and its sequel, *The Golem*, so I'm not going to try to jam everything in here. However, I would be remiss to not discuss some of the thematic elements that made me love this book so much. The book is extremely concerned with language and its uncanny position in between the realms of the living and the dead. The Divinity Student is stuffed full of words (though it does not matter which words). He's busy digging up corpses to eat or smoke their brains in order to pick up some new vocab words. The world would presumably decay or disappear if the sacred language wasn't spoken. My abridged summary of what I *think* Cisco is attempting to convey here is that while language is this animating force behind the world as we understand it, there are certain strata of language that are inaccessible to us or simply don't exist. We can attempt to mine the preserved thoughts and words of past writers, but the further we go back, the harder it is to divine any great meaning from them, and reading ravenously like this can weaken one's ties to the "normal" world. I'm also not sure how much this is intended to have a didactic _point_ or if _The Divinity Student_ should be read just as a riff on language and speech. However lacking my analysis might be, the point of this review is clear: run, don't walk to your nearest freakazoid bookseller to pick up a copy. ### *Piranesi* by Susanna Clarke _Susanna Clarke. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 272 pg_ ![[piranesi.jpg|center|300]] My coworker, Big T recommended this one to me, and I should have been a little skeptical considering that he was pounding the table to try to get me to read *Goon Squad*. However, *House of Leaves* is one of my favorite books, so I was willing to give it a chance, since _Piranesi_ also centers around an investigation into an infinitely large eldritch house. The book is presented as the journal of Piranesi, who documents his explorations of The House and its infinite Rooms. There's a little bit of Victorian gentleman scientist to him, and he's got this unimpeachably positive attitude that makes reading about his studies an absolute joy. Unfortunately, Clarke clearly has not attended the J.J. Abrams Masterclass, because she opens the Mystery Box way too early and the promising early segments devolve into a pretty perfunctory thriller once you know exactly what's going on. There's some gesturing towards Plato's Allegory of the Cave throughout the book, but it felt more like window dressing than a deep inquiry into the nature of Forms and Images. So much wasted potential here. ## June ### *Rejection* by Tony Tulathimutte _William Morrow Paperbacks, 2025. 288 pg_ ![[rejection.jpg|center|300]] Far be it from me to give it to Jia Tolentino, but her cover blurb is precisely on the money. *Rejection* is a book for sickos, freaks, losers, neets, incels, femcels, gooners, and miserable sacks of shit. This is another interlinked short story collection, but the links between stories aren't belabored and they provide genuine insights into characters from different perspectives, and the stories themselves are of a much higher quality than the ones in _Goon Squad_, so my screeching about how much I hate "we're all connected" stuff doesn't apply here. The stories are all fixated on incredibly neurotic characters that, blow their lives up in different ways while dealing with some form of rejection. "The Feminist" features a narrow-shouldered male feminist incel that is too freakish about trying to dissect and consume the pain and suffering of others to make genuine intimate connections. "Pics" is about a woman (who takes The Feminist's virginity) that hooks up with a friend of hers, gets swerved, and then sublimates her rage about her rejection and her boring life into buying a raven (she is also confused by this) and then hosting one of the worst dinner parties of all time. Brutal depictions of girls' groupchat drama abound. I won't attempt to describe much of the plot of my favorite story, "Ahegao", because it ends in an extended gross-out aristocrats-style breakdown that is so shocking that describing it in mixed company could turn me into a subject for a story in *Rejection II*. The second half of the collection gets increasingly strange. "Our Dope Future" is an r/relationship_advice post made by a techbro seeking advice for how to fix his worsening relationship with the woman from "Pics", but his San Francisco dialect is so absurd that he sounds like Michelangelo from *TMNT* more than a crypto bro. It feels under researched when compared to the earlier stories, where Tulathimutte clearly did his homework on incel and gooner terms of art. My guess is that this story is in there to have a perfectly smooth brained narrator interrupt the succession of otherwise horrifically over-socialized neurotic messes that drive the rest of the stories. "Main Character" is probably the XXX *Rejection* is mean, lewd, cringeworthy, incisive, hilarious, and could be the most successful piece of Extremely Online art I’ve seen. It's such a banger that I'm thinking of rereading it in a book club – please let me know if you would be interested. ### *The Golem* by Michael Cisco ![[san_venficio_canon.jpg|center|300]] Overly reductive summary: The Divinity Student goes to Hell to get a girlfriend. The sole example of a sequel in Michael Cisco's bibliography, _The Golem_ is a follow-up to _The Divinity Student_ where the semi-dead Divinity Student is dug up and has to quickly set some schemes into motion before he dies again. He constructs a golem in a process that resembles his own rebirth, and then sets it loose in San Veneficio. The Golem is forced to descend into the underworld to find his betrothed, the magician Christine Dalman, who was promised to the Divinity Student years ago. Similar to *The Divinity Student*, *The Golem’s* second half is a surreal phantasmagoria where Cisco’s prose shines brightest. The journey to the underworld (a katabasis, some might say), is mostly a magical chase sequence between the Golem and Christine. The Golem can clearly catch her at any moment, but there’s an element of foreplay to the chase; he has to catch her fair and square, and only then will she be able to love him. However, fair and square in the Golem’s mind is quite different from what you or I might consider equitable. He grows spider-like appendages, can trap Christine in warped pocket realities, and knows where she is at all times if she is not wearing a particular Egyptian mask. The chase escalates until the Golem, the Divinity Student, and Christine meet in a chapel and xxx ## July ### Worst Boyfriend Ever ![[worst_boyfriend_ever.jpg|center|300]] Diary of a Wimpy Kid for sensitive young men with yellow fever. ### Harassment Architecture by Mike Ma ![[harassment_architecture.jpg|center|300]] Now, *this* is some incel lit. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's good, because it isn't, but I enjoyed *Harassment Architecture*. I would describe it as a low-quality rip of *American Psycho* written by an alt right lolcow. The book is almost entirely unlinked vignettes and rants where the narrator, who is clearly Mike Ma, trie ### The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick ![[puttermesser_papers.jpg|center|300]] ### The World of Odysseus ![[the_world_of_odysseus.webp|center|300]] ### The Oresteia ![[oresteia.avif|center|300]] ## Recommendations, in Brief Big T asked me for a tier list, which felt a bit gauche, but I’ll categorize what I would and wouldn’t recommend. I know that this is a tier list in all but name, but it feels less gamer coded to me. **I’m grabbing you by the lapels and demanding you read**: 2666, American Psycho, Jesus’ Son, The Divinity Student, Rejection **I’m recommending in a much less dramatic fashion**: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Amulet, Morning and Evening A Song for the Unraveling of the World, Labyrinths, The Golem, The World of Odysseus, The Oresteia **I enjoyed it, but I’m not going to stick my neck out to recommend**: Human Acts, We Have Always Lived in the Castle **I’m split on:** Being There, The Future of Truth, Fathers and Sons, The Vegetarian, The White Book, Piranesi, Harassment Architecture **I did not care for:** The Sellout, The King in Yellow, A Visit From the Goon Squad, Worst Boyfriend Ever