Humorous novel with high WTF-factor. The title is correct, without taking into account other meanings; the book is mostly joke, & can be read infinitely. Infinite Jest seems to mostly be about drugs, being on drugs, & getting off drugs, not in that order. It's also about Boston, which is depicted as a very shitty place (to be fair, this aligns with pretty much everything else I've heard about Boston). An interesting side-theme of Infinite Jest is it's more or less correct depiction of netflix, from back in the early to mid 90s, without predicting any other aspect of the 21st Century (or even late 20th century) internet. This book keeps the reader guessing to the very end, and beyond! In a little bit I'll start looking up reviews & author interviews to try to make sense of this book, & eventually I'll just re-read it to get some more clues & maybe form a working theory of what exactly is going on here. I tried to read Infinite Jest twice before managing to finish it this time. The previous 2 times reading it were enjoyable, but felt impossibly daunting, and like I had to make a determined commitment to only read in very long uninterrupted blocks, but this time, I mostly read while eating dinner, which is strange considering how disgusting & repulsive some of the images in Infinite Jest are. I think the real issue is that I needed to get used to the style (which I feel like I'm semi-consciously imitating right now), & get used to flipping to the back to read the endnotes, some of which constitute their own chapters. The style kind of forms a mystery in itself. What is it indicating about the narrator? Is it supposed to be a clue to who the narrator is or are? Might recommend to friends in the hopes that I can get their takes on this book a few years down the line. In the meantime, I'll try to read Naked Lunch there's any obvious influences there (i'm guessing there are).

Solid collection of futuristic short stories. There are no clunkers here; all of the stories are at least pretty good; I rate none of them as utterly mind-blowing. Favorites are the Madeline Ashby, Emily St John Mandel, Mark Stasenko, Lee Konstantinou, Paolo Bacigalupi, & Charlie Jane Anders stories. Some of the stories in this collection I consider generally upbeat, such as the ones by Okorafor, Newitz, Elison, Rajaniemi, & McHugh. The Machado, Oshiro & St John Mandel stories are mostly sad. I would class the Ashby, Anders, Stasenko, & Bacigalupi stories as mostly darkly satirical. The Newitz story manages to be both upbeat & darkly satirical, envisioning a bright future for the crows and feral robot drones of North America. The Olukotun story is the most curious, revolving around the frustrations of an AI that has to work with human sports referees. There are no super disturbing stories in this collection, though the Bacigalupi & Ashby ones may come the closest.

Reading Dust Tracks on a Road feels like what a hitchhiker might hear after being picked up by Zora Neale Hurston in her Cadillac (making dust tracks on the road). Maybe you take it with a grain of salt, maybe not; does it matter how much of the life she's telling you is the truth? She's a great storyteller, she's full of interesting observations, and she's giving you a ride. She's irreverent & full of contrary & iconoclastic opinions. Of course, Zora N H collected stories, so she'd probably ask any hitchhiker she picked up what their story is, & try to get their thoughts about religion, love, & creation before she let them off. She'd probably try to find out if you know any songs, or where to find the people who do. The reviews & analyses & bibliography & chronology after the end of the book are also interesting, in their way. Of note is the 1942 review of Dust Tracks on a Road that seems to be saying that the book gave him permission to use the N*word. Some shit never changes!

Incredible memoir & history of nuclear war planning. I haven't checked out the website with supplemental info, but I feel like this could have been a much longer book. Does a great job of exploding the commonly held rationale for the U.S.'s obscenely bloated nuclear arsenal. The biggest revelation to me was how resistant the military is to civilian control of the nuclear arsenal, and how early that resistance manifested. For all of Eisenhower's rhetoric about the military-industrial complex, this book also makes it clear that he couldn't have taken the threat of the militarization of society all that seriously. The logic of nuclear war planning has always struck me as so illogical as to read like science fiction, but the Doomsday Machine does a good job of showing how nuclear weapons relate to our everyday reality, and what the real effects of them ever being used would be.

Great noir detective novel. Our hero Easy walks the mean streets of postwar LA trying to hold onto what's his while pressed from all sides by crooks, goons, capitalists, cops, politicians, and systemic racism itself. I can tell that Mosley was even then a Nation reader. Aspects reminded me of the Man in my Basement, also by Mosley. I was struck by how amounts of liquor and beer were indicated in quarts (e.g. "I called the bartender to bring over a quart of bourbon & a pail of chipped ice... Dupree passed out before we finished the second quart.", "I've got a quart of beer in the icebox", etc.). I want to read the next one in the series too.

Various graphic reports from Dene country. Starts out with stuff about the oil & gas boom and its impact on the Dene communities, but then goes into how their way of life changed under the influences of the Canadian Government, missionaries, and resource prospectors/extractors. The biggest and most malevolently destructive influence Sacco writes/draws about is the residential schools. He doesn't explicitly make the connection himself, but Paying the Land shows how the residential schools were kiddie concentration camps designed to destroy the Dene as a people. The residential schools didn't actually try to kill all the Dene, but they did try to break the connections between the parents and children so that the culture could be killed. Towards the end of the book, Sacco covers the efforts of a new generation of Dene trying to reclaim their heritage and revitalize their culture for the 21st century.

Memoir of the Tiananmen square movement. The Zhang was a leader in the movement and shares what he witnessed during the days of protest. Also provides context discussing the lead-up to, and aftermath of the protests (including the author's own escape to France via Hong Kong. Zhang suggests that the Tiananmen Spring represented a missed opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party to enact political reforms while they enacted economic reforms, but also that it may have inspired the later collapse of Communism in Europe. Tiananmen 1989 mentioned related protests and actions taking place elsewhere in Beijing, and also elsewhere in China, and I wished the book had said more about them, but I guess I should be looking for a more comprehensive history source. Tiananment 1989 is still a gripping memoir & a good intro to the events of Spring 1989.

Second time reading Bechdel's second graphic memoir. Definitely not just a follow up to Fun Home, and not just about her Mother. To simplify, Are You my Mother is about Alison Bechdel's relationships; with her partners, her therapists, and her one & only Mom (real & imagined). Goes into psychoanalytic Freudian & post-Freudian ideas about the idea of the mother, and how the mother figure relates to psychotherapy theory. Writes a fair amount about Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott. It's not that difficult to see how someone would adapt Fun Home into a musical, but it's pretty impossible for me to see how Are You my Mother could be adapted. Maybe it someone could make a Tristram Shandy style movie out of it, but I digress. The biggest thing I think I missed on my first reading of Are you my Mother is how terrifying psychoanalysis sounds.

Great graphic memoir of growing up behind barbed wire in WW2. Had many details about the internment experience that I didn't know before. For instance, I didn't know the extent that the Japanese internees were homeless upon being released from the camps. I also didn't know how militarized the Tule Lake camp was compared to the others. And I didn't know that Takei had relatives who perished in the Hiroshima bombing.

Page-turning horror graphic novel about race and gentrification (note the candyman poster on the apartment wall). Has lots of unheeded horror warnings, "don't go in there! moments", evil places, creepy spaces, & of course, a duo of hapless cold-open characters. Also seems to be about the narcotic seductiveness of power & surveillance?