Ryan Berger > Recent Status Updates

I’ll be teaching 6th grade this year. Not my call. Not happy about it. Is what it is.

The plan is to start teaching this and see where we go from there.

IT’S IN THE AIR

Manna from heaven for people who reach critical Discourse Brain and need to scream for everyone to just shut the fuck up and be normal.

Among other things. It's quite good!

I am determined to get this but I am realizing that this is the kind of book that requires 50 minutes of solid, complete concentration to go ten pages. Hoo boy.

Giving the Booker one last chance to stop annoying me (I lied I’ll read the new M John Harrison no matter what)

Let’s fucking go

This got better, don’t think it sucks anymore but just wish this was written in a higher register of language. That + some inconsistent characterization but this is taking shape in a way I can respect.

Just like last time, the story of the mathematicians makes me so mad, and now it's even worse. Labatut just annoys the shit out of me in general lol.

Shocking and arresting premise. Through 30 pages: Not very good. In fact, it’s rubbing me the wrong way in a couple very acute and specific ways that makes this good teach-tape to tell young writers: “maybe do not write like this”

That first story is still so fucking good. It was downhill from here the first time around.

My book club has chosen to read this. Right now I would probably pick it (if I had to pick) as among the most overrated books of the last 25 years. Will see if I come away feeling the same a second time through.

Home stretch

It took Gass 30 years to write, and it's taking me 60 decades to read

Hard to think of another author more cruel to his characters than Nabokov. He is god with a magnifying glass, burning his ants

I could argue that this is the single most experimental thing I’ve ever read— in the truest spirit of the word.

Will talk more about this in my review but Aira unquestionably pushes the novel beyond its container and expands its horizons— and his talent is possibly undeniable. But by that same token, I don’t think anything in here qualifies as a “story” in the traditional sense. Just words.

This isn’t about the Ninja Turtles at ALL >:(

It is epic, but it is tedious. The most I have ever had to battle my concentration for something I enjoyed. I'm ready for this to be over.

Taking a brief detour from E.B. White for a different look at New York and WOW. This isn’t exactly what I was looking for when I went in but it’s compelling in its own right. Bring back subtext to essays!!!!!!!!

I thought the illustrations would be kind of whatever but they’re absolutely gorgeous and so charming.

New York is a beach town baby

I'm charmed! Enchanted! Oh what a delight. Multiple sentences already leaped right into my heart. "A man can be launched, or catapulted, into the Christmas tree business quite by surprise." I mean come ON

How much did I like Blue Moon? Turns out Lorenz Hart and E.B. White never even met in real life and I’m still running to read his essays. Though of course already I’m seeing that I think the choice of White, specifically, was far from arbitrary.

In any event, the White style of essay is extinct in any meaningful sense. Hard to say we suffer greatly from its lack, but once you notice— it’s hard to ignore.

Very funny (but also part of a genuinely very interesting dimension to Rollins’s practice) is how he keeps talking about how hugely important for jazz players to stop smoking and purify their bodies and then decides “well I guess if you don’t use your lungs to play then smoking is fine”. Rhythm section gets to have all the fun per usual.

'Twilight' by John W. Campbell - A fascinating thing you see with early Science Fiction, and I don't know if there's an existing term, but so often the stories are all framed as tall tales one person who experienced the events tells to an audience rather than actively placing us in the narrative as it unfolds. Here is an example. The Time Machine is another. The previous story is yet another.

Every time I read Calvino I'm filled with an overwhelming desire to teach him.

I’m like half joking but this is indistinguishable from the writings of some 13th century samurai

Fascinating entry into the "unrequited love toward a woman who does not care if you live or die" subcannon.

Yet another amazing book I can never talk about in public

This is a slightly older book, but it’s remarkable (and depressing) how many of these fake-reading strategies that kids use popped up in my own classroom. The problem is very well outlined. Very good at addressing objections the reader might have so far. Now let’s see if anything remotely workable as a solution comes up in a post-AI world.

Yes I’m doing PD on my second day of summer break.

Not done yet but might become my go-to rec for these types of books.

*honk*

My summer reading anthology. Trying to stay connected with SF because so much of my reading is moving away from it.

“A Martian Odyssey” by Stanley G Weinbaum - The (accepted) first appearance of an intelligent, anthropomorphized, non-human, true alien in Science Fiction. So in a way it is foundational, and establishes many First Contact concepts. Besides that, nearly unreadable as a SF adventure story.