Hilarious & insightful memoir of growing up in South Africa during its transition out of Apartheid. Some of the stories Noah tells in here are almost too wild to be believed! (& if they're fake, I don't care). He brings to life all of the places he lived in such as Soweto & Alexandra. I can't recommend this book enough!

Cute rhyming graphical salute to reading, writing, and book hoarding. Sometimes reminded me of Tom Gauld's Baking With Kafka. Doesn't make me want to write. I think I'm more driven to raid people's bookshelves than to judge them.

Medieval/early-renaissance (/"early modern"?)-set Sherlock Holmes mystery, or maybe an anti-mystery. I found Name of the Rose to be a surprisingly easy read; I probably benefitted from being a little bit familiar with the time period, though I probably should have read Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" first. Most of the Latin that pops up in Name of the Rose consists of sayings & formulae, so it's either still familiar to modern readers, or at least easy to look up. That said the more you know about medieval history & literature, or about Medieval Latin, the more you'll probably get out of this book, so if you're a medieval manuscript expert who likes mysteries, this is the codex for you. The introduction by David Lodge is worth reading. According to the intro, Eco has said that Name of the Rose is not meant to be analogous to modern Italy, but I do wonder how the references to Italy being "the land of intrigue" are supposed to be read. I liked also how Eco said he set the book in the time period he did because he didn't believe Sherlock Holmes could have existed before Roger Bacon. I became interested in Name of the Rose because of a line from the movie adaptation sampled at the beginning of a promo for KDVS's 1000 Points of Fright (or was it Raise the Dead?) metal show. The line doesn't pop up in the book, but the part it must be in is still pretty good.

What a book to finish on Valentine's day! Not really sure what I just read... My best description of Gravity's Rainbow would be: a less-fun combination of Catch-22 & Infinite Jest (although infinite jest is most certainly descended from Gravity's Rainbow).

I may have missed a lot, but the book seems to be about the fetishization of high technology (specifically high-tech weaponry), & the continuity of corporate power across time, ideology, politics, etc, & also weird sex stuff.

While I enjoyed many parts of Gravity's Rainbow, overall, I did not enjoy reading it. It was more interesting to read wikipedia articles about the topics covered by Gravity's Rainbow (e.g. the Herero genocide, the V-2 program, the Mendoza machine gun...). Most of the parts I liked, such as the Kirghizstan part, the Polker & Leni part, the Zwolfskinder part, the Dodo Hunter part, the Herero war part, &c, were flashbacks or background stories about various characters. I think my favourite episode featuring Slothrop was the part with Plechazunga, but the part where he's eating British candy was pretty good too.

By the end, I was still reading Gravity's Rainbow because I wanted to figure out why I didn't like reading Gravity's Rainbow. Part of it was that overall, I didn't find Gravity's Rainbow to be very funny. There were funny parts (some of which I mentioned above), but for the most part, I found the humor to be trying too hard, & stupid. Maybe if I'd read Gravity's Rainbow as a middle schooler, I would have laughed more, but then again, back then I would definitely have hated the musical numbers, which I in fact mostly hated (one exception being the part with Jessica's niece at the children's theatre). I think the biggest reason Gravity's Rainbow was such a slog for me was that I didn't feel a lot of emotional connection with the characters. As much of the book was about the psychic & psychological connections of all things in the world, I usually had a hard time discerning the psycho/psychic/emotional reasons that any of the characters did anything they did. The humor would probably have been funnier if I'd cared about more of the characters.

Story of a young urban downwardly mobile black woman who falls into a strange relationship with a weird affluent White couple (& their adopted daughter). All characters are weird. I liked & related to Edie, especially with her struggle to be an artist. Didn't tie everything up & left some mysteries at the end (such as what was the deal with Rebecca? was Rebecca named to reference Du Maurier?). I could see Luster being made into an independent movie sometime back in 1997-2005 (nowadays it would be an HBO series).

Collection of Walter Mosley short stories that feels like it could be the author imagining many different lives he could have lived if he had been an insurance agent, or a hobo, or an orphan, or a retired professor having a heart attack, or the ghost of Kilgore Trout. Most of these stories are about the main characters finding themselves & coming of age, either early or late in life; in a few of the stories, the main characters decide to be someone else entirely. Mosley’s work makes me think he would either be the worst or the best person on Earth to get dating advice from.

The Dispossessed imagines what a stateless communist society might look like, making it kind of a mirror image of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Both novels portray anti-statist societies existing in inhospitable environments, but while Moon is a Harsh Mistress portrayed an anarcho-capitalist society where lack of money & property is literally grounds to be killed, The Dispossessed portrays a society which has no money or property. The Dispossessed is thus much more ambitious than Moon is a Harsh Mistress, because at this point in history, it is easier to imagine capitalism colonizing the Moon than it is to imagine what creating & maintaining a completely anarchist communal society would look like. I also feel like The Dispossessed has a more mature view of social & family relationships than Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I first read Moon is a Harsh Mistress & the Left Hand of Darkness when my girlfriend (now wife) took a sci fi literature class, which asked students to compare & contrast the two novels; as you can see from my review, the teacher totally should have assigned The Dispossessed instead.

Classic of the Haunted House genre. Clear influences on, or parallels with, The Shining, the Beginning Place, 2001, Star Trek episodes (DS9 “Dramatis Personae” & “Civil Defense”), etc. The house "watching" the inhabitants couldn't but remind me of Alexa & other "smart house" technology, & of the pervasive surveillance we now take for granted. Would fit well on the reading list for a fantastic & phantasmagorical literature class.

A history of the 14th Century, which follows the life of French lord Enguerrand de Coucy as a kind of "main character". Full of quotable quotes & notable details. Definitely worth reading before you read Name of the Rose, or Game of Thrones. Mostly focuses on France & chivalry & war, but touches on events throughout Western Europe, and has many digressions about the daily life of regular people in towns and farms. Emphasizes that while the fighting of the Hundred Years War was sporadic, the destruction wrought by the armies that fought the war was continuous, even during the times that were supposedly peaceful. I could have read hundreds more pages of this.

The end notes contain some interesting info about sources, but they are mostly skippable. Contradictions in sources are often discussed in the text.

I like how Tuchman constantly asks "what the fuck was wrong with these people?!??" In the chapter on "Youth & Chivalry", Tuchman wonders if 14th century parents neglected their children, citing everything from a seeming dearth of literary references to motherhood & parenting to depictions of the Christ Child in art, lying "alone on the ground, swaddled or sometimes quite naked and uncovered, while an unsmiling mother gazes at him abstractedly". At another point, she speculates that most of the historical figures were actually quite young, so maybe that's why they acted so rashly. Reading in 2021, the obvious answer to what was wrong with them is head injuries, but I think we must also allow for the possibility that there wasn't anything wrong with the people of the 1300s, but Tuchman was too much of a nerd to comprehend a society of cool kids.

I got the feeling that Tuchman really came to like Enguerrand de Coucy. Relating his many accomplishments, she seemed kind of proud of him. The fact that his efforts usually failed (except for his efforts to accumulate wealth) is usually explained by the fact that they were in the service of idiotic or pointless schemes that were bound to fail no matter who was handling the diplomacy, fighting, or both.

Fascinating & dated book from the Reagan Era about the US Government’s and (to a lesser extent) corporate America’s plans for nuclear war. The bibliography & lists of interviewees for each chapter speak to the incredible amount of research that must have gone into this tome. None of the sources interviewed used the term "mineshaft gap" but a great many of them were talking about it! While much of the material about the development of the A-bomb & the military’s planning for World War III is covered in many other sources, I have not come by many similar accounts of Government & Corporate Cold War era Civil Defense planning. Part of what makes this book special is Zuckerman’s use of materials such as the pre-prepared forms for post-nuclear war Postal or Federal Reserve officials, or official FEMA manuals for fallout shelter leaders to characterize the body of (emergency) Law, Regulation, and Civil Defense literature that make up the USA’s Civil Defense program.
I first encountered this book probably 20 years ago, in my High School library, of all places. The question that this book has always made me ask is how real & serious the overall program of preparations for Civil Defense, continuity of government, economic recovery, etc. was (even accepting FEMA’s rosy survivability assumptions). In the aftermath of 9/11, the national security establishment instituted as much of the emergency procedures as they could, sending the president & vice-president aloft in the airborne command posts, & conducting a limited dispersal of the federal government pretty much as described in the Day After World War III. At the time I remember thinking that in the circumstances that such measures were ridiculous. Why should I or my fellow Americans take comfort from the entire national security establishment treating a scary series of terrorist attacks the same way it would a nuclear attack? I see now that the military probably wanted to send a message to the world that all of our cold-war preparations were still in place, and they wanted to send a message to the population that the military was the tool to respond to these attacks.
Re-reading this book after the US’s disastrous responses to disasters like hurricanes Katrina & Maria, & especially to the Covid-19 Pandemic, during which the administration eschewed any sort of emergency preparations in favor of free-market “disaster capitalism”, makes me question if even in the middle of a nuclear holocaust, the quest for free-market solutions would overtake any pre-war preparations (if they weren't already overtaken by blast, heat, or radiation). In the year 2021, the answer is quite clearly “yes”. But was the answer different back in 1983, when there was a theoretical military enemy, with a theoretical alternative to capitalism?