Josh > Recent Status Updates

“The detective in charge of this case was a law graduate named Itosaki, and fortunately he was a member of Crime Hounds, a group composed of murder-mystery writers, doctors, and legal professionals.”

Done with Day 2. In spite of Boccaccio's awareness that both men and women enjoy sex, and allowing some happy endings for promiscuous women, it's an exception to the norm of constant maddening "as we all know" sexism. Boccaccio is increasingly grating on me, and knowing he wrote a misogynist screed (Corbaccio) after this doesn't help pin it as just being in character. Maybe the Day 2 theme just lent itself to these.

I'm going to have to take a rare defeat here and give up the audiobook. Susan Duerden sounds like a BBC narrator reading a long list, it's the strangest intonation I've ever heard a narrator do (and I've listened to 150+ audiobooks)

I’ve had too good of a book streak, time for my penance

I finished reading the highly recommended 140pg introduction of the Penguin copy, now the plan is to read this periodically over a year or two. Unless I get sucked in!

Part I finished

girlfriend tulpa

flung odors from the spicy shrub

I don't want to front-load all the good PKD so gotta eat my vegetables now

“We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.”

damn right

Opening chapters have the narrator calling his grandmother’s lifelong friend and pen pal “probably a dyke” and that he’ll choose to imagine his grandmother “more innocently” hardyhar. Why does every book more than 2 years old have something like this

did the book actually wait this long to reveal the main race is covered in fur

shit

This is the third time Salamon's used Trump's recent financial troubles and Ivana drama as an example of the end of 80's excess. Siiiigh

Excellent excellent essay on Randy Newman, Lester Maddox, and the culture wars, annoyingly persistent topics in American politics (including 2016's lovely little election). Unfortunately Steven Hart didn't seem aware of Bad Love and Harps and Angels (he talks about his albums stopping at Faust), which is too bad because I would've loved to hear his take on them.

"Japanese anime monsters"

"...Alveric met one morning, at the edge of the fields men tended, one filling his bucket at a well, whose thin high conical hat and mystical air proclaimed him surely a wizard."

I think this is the first straight-up fantasy I've read since middle school.

Temporarily shelving this so I have a shot of meeting my reading challenge…

"Our sex was joyless, graceless, and necessarily improvised, but it was an act of the living. Stars of sweat on Hae-Joo's back were his gift to me, and I harvested them on my tongue."

"March came fumbling in like the Wizard of Oz Lion,…"

If I pushed myself a little harder through the Wife of Bath's Prologue, I could've probably squeezed in two more books this year. Oh well.