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Reach Out and Touch Wednesday
Apr. 14th, 2021 10:45 amWhat I'm Not Reading Anymore
Immediately after Luo Ji used his cop connections and ultra-top-security clearance to have the real woman who most closely resembles his imaginary fake girlfriend sent to his stylish mountaintop lair, The Dark Forest pulled a time jump five years into the future and now they're married with an adorable baby so we can all get back to the part of the plot I didn't care about. I decided that life was too short to read the rest of The Dark Forest. If you have read this book and it turns out that Luo Ji and his perfect wife have a falling out when she discovers he invented her on a dare, or anything like that, let me know and maybe I'll double back in a decade or so.
(There's a whole very sixth-grade Gary Stu secret global security reason why Luo Ji lives in a stylish mountaintop lair and can get whatever he wants; it has to do with aliens who are going to invade Earth in about four centuries and it's been explained at great length at several very important meetings but I still couldn't manage to care even a little bit, so it's for the best that I'm not reading The Dark Forest anymore).
What I've Finished Reading
Ring Shout is a hell of a book and there's not much of it, so give it a try if you like the premise of grossout parasitic demons using the Ku Klux Klan as a vehicle for world conquest (or trying anyway). It fell suddenly flat for me for just a second toward the very end, because there was a kind of Avengers: Endgame supporting character charge and I hadn't, as it turned out, developed any feeling for or interest in the characters involved. The rest of the time, it was a fantastically fast moving, confident and humane splatterfest. Hate and fear are bad, songs and love are good; be careful when fighting ravening fleshbeasts that you don't accidentally get fleshbeastified in turn: this isn't a complex moral universe, but it's a gorgeously and hideously illustrated one.
What I'm Reading Now
VOTING WORKS, or at least it did in this case; the sci-fi book club is NOT moving on to the next Three-Body book and even more exposition for the exposition gods, but will be discussing my own first choice, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's good so far! It diverges a little from my usual Ishiguro pattern of being very slightly bored for two hundred pages and then suddenly overwhelmed with feelings, because I'm already pretty verklempt about this sad robot friend getting bullied by her human friend's human peer group. Don't bully your robot friends, poor little rich kids of the future!
Also reading: Our Environment: How We Use and Control It, an innovative multi-science junior high school textbook from 1931, with a special focus on the mind-boggling complexity of modern life. As a textbook, I don't think it's as good as Harold Rugg's Introduction to Problems of American Culture from the same time period, but it is valuable if you want to contemplate, for example, the eternal problem of sewage, plus I like to imagine an irritable young LM Montgomery heroine having to read this paean to Industrial Man and just getting more and more upset. And at this point in the history of What The Heck Is Light Even, the existence of ether is still the going theory, which was a complete delight to stumble across.
What I Plan to Read Next
I've actually already started My Year Abroad and the latest Most Comfortable Man in London book, but I'm kicking the can down the road as far as saying anything about them goes, so I can post this now before I get distracted again.
Immediately after Luo Ji used his cop connections and ultra-top-security clearance to have the real woman who most closely resembles his imaginary fake girlfriend sent to his stylish mountaintop lair, The Dark Forest pulled a time jump five years into the future and now they're married with an adorable baby so we can all get back to the part of the plot I didn't care about. I decided that life was too short to read the rest of The Dark Forest. If you have read this book and it turns out that Luo Ji and his perfect wife have a falling out when she discovers he invented her on a dare, or anything like that, let me know and maybe I'll double back in a decade or so.
(There's a whole very sixth-grade Gary Stu secret global security reason why Luo Ji lives in a stylish mountaintop lair and can get whatever he wants; it has to do with aliens who are going to invade Earth in about four centuries and it's been explained at great length at several very important meetings but I still couldn't manage to care even a little bit, so it's for the best that I'm not reading The Dark Forest anymore).
What I've Finished Reading
Ring Shout is a hell of a book and there's not much of it, so give it a try if you like the premise of grossout parasitic demons using the Ku Klux Klan as a vehicle for world conquest (or trying anyway). It fell suddenly flat for me for just a second toward the very end, because there was a kind of Avengers: Endgame supporting character charge and I hadn't, as it turned out, developed any feeling for or interest in the characters involved. The rest of the time, it was a fantastically fast moving, confident and humane splatterfest. Hate and fear are bad, songs and love are good; be careful when fighting ravening fleshbeasts that you don't accidentally get fleshbeastified in turn: this isn't a complex moral universe, but it's a gorgeously and hideously illustrated one.
What I'm Reading Now
VOTING WORKS, or at least it did in this case; the sci-fi book club is NOT moving on to the next Three-Body book and even more exposition for the exposition gods, but will be discussing my own first choice, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's good so far! It diverges a little from my usual Ishiguro pattern of being very slightly bored for two hundred pages and then suddenly overwhelmed with feelings, because I'm already pretty verklempt about this sad robot friend getting bullied by her human friend's human peer group. Don't bully your robot friends, poor little rich kids of the future!
Also reading: Our Environment: How We Use and Control It, an innovative multi-science junior high school textbook from 1931, with a special focus on the mind-boggling complexity of modern life. As a textbook, I don't think it's as good as Harold Rugg's Introduction to Problems of American Culture from the same time period, but it is valuable if you want to contemplate, for example, the eternal problem of sewage, plus I like to imagine an irritable young LM Montgomery heroine having to read this paean to Industrial Man and just getting more and more upset. And at this point in the history of What The Heck Is Light Even, the existence of ether is still the going theory, which was a complete delight to stumble across.
What I Plan to Read Next
I've actually already started My Year Abroad and the latest Most Comfortable Man in London book, but I'm kicking the can down the road as far as saying anything about them goes, so I can post this now before I get distracted again.
