John O'Neill > Recent Status Updates

I hate Tom Clancy so much

impossible to overstate how bad this is but i’ve committed to this path

completed one run through of this and i think it’s brilliant

there’s something grimly fascinating about how reactionary and racist clancy was — among the hard right popular propagandists i think this stuff gets closer to the core of the thing than all the infinite ripoff artists doing his schtick in a contemporary context. no novelist has ever even approached his level of cultural ubiquity while being this vile

clarke is a sick freak for writing novels that are annoying for the first hundred pages and then just when you’re certain nothing she could do could recontextualize what you’ve been reading to make it interesting she steps on the gas. at a hundred pages i was mad my love for strange had gotten me to read this book; at 170 pages i’m disappointed it isn’t 500 pages long.

hope she sticks the landing

potentially the most boring book i’ve ever read. certainly the most boring book i feel for some reason compelled to finish reading

basically hate-reading at this point

at last, a handful of interesting ideas and images about space, dimensionality, intelligence — mired in the dullness, bland misogyny, incompetent melodrama, and (ironically) myopia of the ideas about people

really upping the magnification on what didn’t work in the previous book — if he doesn’t find an interesting idea to explore soon i’m afraid it’ll start to erode my already qualified admiration of the first two in the series

this has maybe the worst opening of any book i’ve ever read not written by mark greaney.

celina asked if i was OK from the other room because i half-shouted both “jesus christ” and “fuck you” in rapid succession.

I think this is the first time in these books that the balance of tension and release has felt off, and instead of being pulled inexorably forward until I can’t keep my eyes open I’m too stressed to read further.

so far this prose is extremely sweaty and not in a “materializing in style the climate of its setting” way but in a “frail man pushing an unwieldy sentence up a hill” way

good book

terrible—abandoning it