Status Updates From La scacchiera

What seperates a human from a chesspiece? Nothing!

Dunno why I've just zeroed out on reading this one. The South American city that has become a place of interest for several Western powers who've got a special unique citizenship for themselves seems to be falling apart.... who could have seen this coming....?

Getting the feeling that our main character is going to just watch the capital city burn down around him for the next 100 pages and then go "well. What did we learn here? I guess... not to do it again? WHATEVER it was."

Realizing a lot of this book is the main character finding out something and going to get mad about it, and then the person he's mad at explains themselves and he goes "oh. that makes sense." and it repeats back and forth between both sides of the political conflict.

One character punched the other so hard that he lifted off the ground and fell down some stairs and now i'm just like "...was this like...knight takes bishop????"

looked this book up on wikipedia out of curiosity and found out that the narrative structure is based on a famous 19th century chess match and i'm excited to not notice or understand any of that at all

This book feels like a pretty deft commentary so far on the like moneyed interests coming into South American countries and helping to manipulate the governments there - this one in part because the country is literally asking them to and then giving them special rights. Not a fan of the introduction of "there's subliminal images in the tv to control people!" but we'll see how it's utilized.

also.... there may be a chess metaphor somewhere in here.... much to think about.....

Aryel brought this home from New York because it's a great cover (it's a great cover!) and I started reading it because, well, great cover. Can't help but shake the idea of Israel as I'm reading this - a country that plops its capital city down and pushes all the indigenous people out and calls itself the Perfect City but there's unrest it's trying to ignore and squash out in secret. Interesting stuff so far.