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This one hits very close to home. Manguso conveys the slow-motion self-immolation of giving everything of yourself to trying to make a marriage - a family - work, while your partner is busy unveiling ever deeper layers of apathy, selfishness, entitlement, cruelty, and ultimately betrayal.

All the lies you tell yourself, because how. How could you let yourself get trapped in this situation?

The world would be a better place if more authors took an honest look at the premise they’ve cooked up for their next novel, and instead of stretching and padding and overwriting the thing in order to fill 400 pages, simply asked themselves: “would this work better as a short story?”

So many aspects of this book are ADJACENT to being good. It wouldn’t be such an aggravating reading experience if it wasn’t almost, ALMOST there. Maybe in the second half? It’ll get its shit together…?

100 pages in, and at least 90 of those pages should have been cut. The prose is repetitive and ugly, but the bigger problems are structural. I cannot STAND attempts to build tension based solely on: characters being stupid, the author being coy about revealing things the characters already know, and/or contrived plot delays that would never happen in real life. I am having PTSD flashbacks to reading Connie Willis.

Nothing makes me grumpier than an author who doesn’t trust her own readers. I picked up what you were putting down the first time, you do not need to keep restating it for me in increasingly simplistic terms.

Sebastian Flyte is the platonic ideal of a manic pixie dream boy.

”What do you suppose Lord Sebastian wanted? A hair brush for his teddy-bear; it had to have very stiff bristles, NOT, Lord Sebastian said, to brush him with, but to threaten him with a spanking when he was sulky. He bought a very nice one with an ivory back and he’s having ‘Aloysius’ engraved on it—that’s the bear’s name.”

In Europe, [psychoanalysis] tended to find its greatest support among intellectuals and elites, while in the United States it became a mass phenomenon, but one that lacked a critical dimension.

Not sure how this manages to move so quickly while having absolutely no momentum.

I’m trying to tell you that there are some people you will never see. They are too low in the hierarchy, they are the ones who are noticed last, or not at all. Ordinary people do not know how to see them. They are never noticed. They are naturally invisible… I am naturally invisible, Richard, and you only see me because you want to.

This book is so good! This book is so good! THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD!

Those who enjoy science fiction above all other kinds of writing must enjoy its vitalising bastardy, its immoral interdisciplinary habits, as it feathers its nest with scraps of knowledge seized from the limit of the expanding world.

Science fiction deliberately uses the terms and structures of scientific thought to create mythic patterns, and the belief that underlies these patterns is a belief not so much in supernatural beings as in the almost supernatural power of rationality itself.

Me, yesterday: I really want to read this one, it’s a classic and cited everywhere, but it’s wildly out of print, not sure how I’ll track it down.

Me today, browsing the library stacks: oh it’s right there.

This book: hey there, I’m a first edition from 1973, and I don’t look like I’ve ever been checked out. Been waiting for you all this time ^v^

God, I love libraries.

“Let’s go poke around in the Forbidden Zone” is one of my favorite SF subgenres.

The whole premise of this is that it’s 6 novellas that take place in the same creepy town. But there’s so little attention given to the setting that I legitimately can’t figure out what’s supposed to be creepy about this place. It rains a lot. Corpses are buried standing up. That’s pretty much all we’re ever told. Sure, some weirdos live there, but so what? There are weirdos everywhere.

Yikes, this writing is awful.

Impulse library grab. First time reading Malerman.

This is shocking, and horrifying, and heartbreaking, and SO stunningly well written.

This really paints the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics as less coherent science and more a cult of personality around Niels Bohr. Which, I mean, I’m not an expert, but Copenhagen makes no fucking sense, and Bohr’s acolytes tried to justify that by claiming truth is antithetical to clarity. The less sense it makes, the more truthful it must be! Obviously.

Halfway through and really struggling to determine what poor bridge design and geological anomalies have to do with anything. Also, not convinced that the book’s apparent main thesis - that serial killers were somehow created or shaped by industrial pollution - holds even the tiniest drop of water.

All that said, I am enthralled.

Three things to bear in mind when you’re drinking a lot: do not drink cheap wine; do not drink undiluted wine; do not eat snacks during a drinking session. When you’ve had enough to drink, do not go to bed without vomiting as much as you can. When you have vomited enough, have a quick bath and rest. [That’s five.]”

Wise(?) words from Mnesitheus.

There are two days on which a woman pleases most: the day when someone marries her and he carries her into his house, and the day when her husband carries out her dead body. -Hipponax

Har har. I’ve heard the same sentiment expressed in modern times, except it was about owning a boat.

This is a lot of fun, but it should have been edited down. For instance, there’s a section called “Rabies and Tetanus” which is one sentence long and just states that those diseases were common in Rome. Ok? Not sure how that’s a “weird and wonderful story”; it’s not even quoting an ancient author. This kind of non sequitur is all over the place in this book. Makes for a bumpy reading experience.

I remember buying a mass-market paperback of this at the drugstore in the mid-90s when I was around 13 or 14. I thought the cover looked cool and the title intrigued me (I had recently seen the Foucault Pendulum at the Smithsonian on a family trip to DC). I never got more than 50 pages into it, and reading it now, I’m surprised I got even that far. I’m adoring it this time, but… yeah. It’s dense.

Whoa whoa whoa, I was not expecting these stories to be so gorgeous. I haven’t read Liu before, just his translation of The Three-Body Problem, which I found (as the kids would say) very mid. (Do the kids still say that?)

The first two stories here reminded me of Ursula K Le Guin and Ted Chiang, with maybe a little dash of Calvino. That’s high praise.

The peony should be dug up at night, for, if a man does it in day-time and is observed by a woodpecker while he is gathering the fruit, he risks the loss of his eyesight; and, if he is cutting the root at the time, he gets a prolapsed anus.

The more you know.

False advertising. This has nothing to do with mythology, modern or otherwise. It’s just pop culture criticism of the type you might get from any YouTube video essay. And though the book is less than ten years old, this kind of thing ages fast. Does anyone need any more hot takes on Twilight, 50 Shades, superheroes, zombies? I know I didn’t.

Like a neon sign, our digestive system is a long, curvaceous tube full of gases that breathe fire, is not a sentence I needed to read this early in the morning. Or ever.

I always find it delightful when older books rave about new technologies we now take utterly for granted. Here, it’s word processors. How quickly they let you type! How thoroughly you can make your mistakes vanish! How find-replace allows you to magically alter names and places throughout the text! How you can password-protect your writing so nobody else can read it! The occult powers of the UNDO button!

A hundred pages in, and we’ve made it to 12 minutes post-launch of the initial ICBM. No bombs have hit yet. Human civilization is already doomed, and the only ones who know it are deep underground in military bunkers, shitting their pants while everyone else goes about their morning. The president has 6 minutes to decide if and how to counterattack. He has ultimate and unchecked authority.

Cool. Cool, cool, cool.