Tyson Vaughan > Recent Status Updates

My first Moore read. Her prose is the most striking feature. Really unique metaphors and clever descriptions. Lots of quirky non-sequiturs. Brilliant, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, but also sometimes also a bit too much, especially via audiobook. Some of these lines require time to steep in. Past halfway, plot has yet to appear, and the characters are strange objects of curiosity, difficult to feel for.

This is exactly what I expected from DFW: droll, hyper-clever satire about the absurdity and pointlessness of mediated and medicated life in late 20th century America (but set in the future). It’s quaint now, to imagine an era when our biggest cares were about trivial, consumeristic choices. How times have changed. But I think that’s DFW’s point: how naive we were, how we denied our humanity for the trivial.

Read the batshit crazy ending last night. DCC fans will love it. This is the weakest book of the series, but it ends with the kind of insane shit I didn’t expect to happen until at least the penultimate book and launches us like a rocket into the two-volume series finale, which Dinniman is tentatively calling Dungeon Crawler Carl: The Beautiful Place.

Cozy sci-fi about a found family of bots trying to make a noodle shop viable in a future postwar San Francisco. Charming

Andy Serkis's voice acting is among the best I've heard, arguably THE best. His ability to portray different voices and accents is almost on par with Jeff Hays, and his acting ability — emoting — is up there with Dion Graham. The only reason I say "ALMOST on par" is that there's only been one female character in the book so far, with very few lines to speak of, so I can't judge his female voices.

Reading the chapter drops on Patreon, so I don't know exactly how close we are to the end, but it feels like we've hit the climax. The second half of the book is far stronger than the first half, but I tentatively think this is the weakest volume in the series so far. But it's still just a draft, and I haven't read the end yet, so we'll see. Anyway, even the weakest volume of DCC is still entertaining as hell.

Somehow funny and interesting and boring all at the same time. Wallace inspects every angle of every moment. His characters are as hyper-self-aware and as excessively cerebral as he was himself. All of them are interesting but also rather repulsive. Wallace hated himself. Some of the prose is seriously brilliant. Definite DeLillo and Pynchon vibes. A satire of American life at a specific moment in time.

Unquestionably one of the best novels I’ve ever read.

Took about a fifth of the book, but now we've got some plot to go with the character and setting development. Still fantastic and full of amazing characters and rich details. Often laugh-out-loud funny. The world and the happenings feel somehow more realistic — or maybe a better term would be naturalistic — than in most other novels.

When I read an ebook, I like to highlight, in green, particularly memorable or beautiful passages. I'm not sure if the pages of any other book have this much green real estate on them.

I had no idea this book was so funny. I keep laughing my ass off. And the characters, OMG. So memorable. Not a whole lot of big-p Plot yet — this is all about the characters and their interactions.

Why did I wait so long to read this? The character work and descriptions of place are among the best and most memorable I've ever read, and I have been laughing out loud at the humor. And Will Patton's audiobook narration brings out the humor and characters even more.