Wesley Chien > Recent Status Updates

Aha! You (A) claim I (B) am subhuman, and yet your approach has provoked the intervention of a disinterested third party (C), dumbass

“What is a man if he satisfies the world but cannot greet himself in his own mirror? A shadow among shadows. So what does he do? He conjures up the past, which denies the present and makes of the future a stillborn babe.”

laughed out loud throughout the “The True Test of Friendship.” What a delightful, strange book

“You sure as hell got to invent a lot of other selves in order to get along in this world.”

I got hooked...
“What is the basis of ‘societal organization?’”
“Nonsense the works during the time you are waiting to go to bed.”
“Splendid..”

“The more classes (of which, in their various functions, he is representative) that you can make him become regularly conscious of, the more you can control him, the more of an automaton he becomes...the more inflexible each of these links is, the more powerful, naturally, is the chain.”

“All the liberal tricks are seen through and known now by heart. So, for better or for worse, parliamentary rule is finished.”

There’s plenty of “unsavory” content in Lewis’s nonfiction from this era, but, IMO, he had one of the sharpest minds of the era and it’s worth working through his critique of liberal democracy

A little over halfway done and still loving it!

Nobody writes prose like Theroux! Reading him is a constant delight. The Cat is somehow even more fun to read than Laura Warholic was.

Slow lying grinding forward... I’m finding myself less enchanted with the book as I approach the end

And so and and *snifffff*

Indebted to Nathan NR Gaddis’s Twitter profile pic for this rec— such a fun and bombastic romp through NYC. A quintessentially American book about a man with insatiable appetites

I’d recommend this book in a heartbeat to anybody interested in the nature of identity/ideology/worldview

Back to school, so the reading for pleasure is on hold until further notice! My only English course for the semester is “Dystopia, Utopia, and Apocalypse” and I’d love any recommendations for the genre

“My doppelgänger stops in a Knishioner Gordon, a superhero-themed Jewish deli...”

There’s some lines to draw between Ingo’s movie and This Is Water, especially w/r/t The Unseen. Reading this reminds me of how DFW used to emphasize the humor of Kafka, and Kaufman and Wallace both explore modernity’s hollowed-out subjectivity

“Weak-willed yet undetectable, I will make certain it is properly disseminated, appreciated, celebrated. It has become my life’s work; that much is clear.”
Antkind is a delight so far, the plot conceit (humorously) is so reminiscent of Krasznahorkai’s War & War but of course they’re absurdly different works

I was having so much fun and now I’m anxiously approaching the end, feeling dread when I think where Laura’s headed

The tale of Onan and the Parking Meter— “Laura, for it to count it has to go in the slot”
(This book is such a constant joy to read)

Theroux’s so skilled that I got physically pissed off each time Laura littered on the road trip

Mutrux’s Confession was one of my favorite chapters yet, a hideously comic revenge story

“Eyestones knew about this cagey, money-grubbing species and how cunningly they beat the bushes for rare, valuable books, often hoping to get them for free or signed or both...giving you nothing of course in return but a weak, damp handshake...”

“Travel writers are almost always unhappily married and are virtually always unfaithful.” Laughed out loud at this but, sorry Paul!

Cracking Volume 2, the last 200 pages have been largely unpleasant, i find myself desperate, like Vera, to get back to Miss Macintosh

Eager to have a break from Cousin Hannah...