Tim Combes > Recent Status Updates

On the separation of animals and crops leading to an abundance of manure and a need for chemical fertilizers:

“The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems”

Immediately hooked

If you want to hear Nick Offerman drop five hard Rs in one paragraph, boy have I got the audiobook for you!

(I understand the point Berry is making, but perhaps it's a bit too indelicate of a metaphor?)

“If there is any law that has been consistently operative in American history it is that the members of any established people, or group, or community sooner or later become ‘redskins.’ That is, they become the designated victims of a an utterly ruthless, officially sanctioned, and subsidized exploitation”

Maybe it’s a coincidence but I can help noticing name connections to other prominent female authors. Ronda Lazarre reminds me of Marie Lazarre from Love Medicine. In Artie’s dad’s building there was a poor Italian family named the Grecos (Elena Greco from My Brilliant Friend). And if this is on purpose I’m sure there’s others I missed.

“‘Could consciousness simply be what it feels like to be in charge of constant self construction… driven to reinterpret all available data in the service of deciding what to do next’”

“So blind we humans are—so blind. To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone. And maybe we have. . . But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own. Thinking all the while that we can see.”

I think we’re gonna see a crazy religious revival in this century if for no other reason than it’s hard to hear the desires and worldviews of the people pushing to create conscious machines and come up with a better word for them than “demonic”

The bat ears being knives is badass

Not vibing with this one so far. I like the series too much to DNF but if this whole thing is gonna be Shallan and Kaladin being annoying insecure bitches then this is gonna be a slog

Going from Ferrante to Sanderson is a stark contrast. For all of his plotting and world building and magic systems, his prose leaves much to be desired.

“That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelessness is what most frightened Lila in the course of her life.”

“My life forces me to imagine what [Lila’s] would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I’ve uttered, in which there’s often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers”

I cannot describe why these books are so good but they must be because I’m incredibly invested in

“He felt a sharp envy toward the person he had been in those moments—why had time continued to unspool, why had his heart kept beating, stupidly and stubbornly, until now?”

“In the cold, white light Jakob clearly sees the tears running down Boris’s face. He realizes Boris will never forgive him for seeing him like this. At this moment their friendship is over.”

“the so-called War to End All Wars. . . Bagger understands with horror, is really the War to Begin All Wars, countries carved into furious parcels and technology matured to a stage of perpetual regeneration”

“We have to stop trying to make our children fit into the world they find themselves in, and start creating a world that fits them. Nature created such a world.”

Takes about 50 pages to get used to the tone and the prose (one run on sentence, every paragraph starting with “and”) but damn now I’m hooked

"Bagger, of course, inserts explicit content, Tarzan revised to be a randy sodomite and Lady Greystoke a nudist cannibal, to which Arno only nods along, suggesting there’s no atrocity Bagger can concoct the Great War hasn’t reduced to believability,"

"Bagger’s guts thicken like they do anytime he sees Arno, the kid’s fourteen, lied about his age to some Nebraska National Guardsfuck trying to make quota, and ever since has been a tick sucked to the 172nd’s underbelly, devoid of skills but too damn small for the Germans to hit,"

So far this feels like a more sardonic Catch-22, which I don't hate.

"Zac Brettler’s teenage years coincided with a period of history during which the texture of human existence subtly changed. . . Any momentary impulse he had, as expressed by his index finger on a touchscreen, could give rise to a kind of digital undertow, pulling him deeper into his own preoccupations. His interests—in supercars, rich people, luxury real estate—were compounded by the algorithm."

It's either coincidence or a very good writerly intuition on Radden Keefe's part that the very moment I thought to myself "how did he even hear about this story?" he answers that very question.

“London is the capital of pristine facades, often painted in wedding-cake shades of cream or ivory; the city’s dominant aesthetic is a literal whitewash.”

“'He called Dave Sharma a ‘Paki,’ even though he’s Indian, not Pakistani, and he called me a fat cunt,' Baker said, before adding, in a studiously neutral tone, 'He ended up getting attacked by a machete.'"

“Riverwalk’s interior was fitted out in the antiseptic fashion of today’s superrich, with gleaming surfaces, velvet sofas, and generic accent sculptures. Real wealth, this aesthetic seemed to imply, meant living full-time in the featureless splendor of a corporate hotel.”

Keefe’s prose oozes with barely concealed contempt for the rich.

If there's one thing Keefe does especially well it's find the threads that bind the personal and the political, deftly weaving between the micro and the macro. His books always feel personal and grand simultaneously.

"But if political instability can be great when you’re trying to make a fortune, it’s less attractive when you’re trying to hold on to one. So having acquired their riches in the hurly-burly of the former Soviet Union, the oligarchs started looking for safe havens abroad where law and order prevailed and they could securely park their money—and, if necessary, themselves."