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I like that this constantly goes in new and crazy directions showing off almost every single audacious idea the author could think of while being fairly concise and easy to read, tied together by political satire directed towards self-important opaque public sector bureaucracy

This is one of the weirdest SF novels I have read in a long while. Simultaneously feels like a parody of "Dune" and the Australian soap opera "McLeod's Daughters", written in a similar style and tone as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" but predates all 3 works.

pure tripped out 1970's fantasy bliss!

Most of the action scenes in this novel play like something from a particularly whacked out Hong Kong wuxia film from the same era the novel was written (mid/late 1960's), which I find absolutely awesome.

This has a similar vibe as Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" in that it appears at first to take place in a fantasy setting but is slowly revealed to take place in a science-fiction universe, that only looks fantastic to most of its inhabitants because they only have a pre-modern frame of reference for understanding the world. Really enjoying it so far, for most of the same reasons I liked "Book of the New Sun".

I will say this much that finding out about J. Allen Hynek's role in the disinformation campaign against Bennewitz has made me significantly more critical of him, even if he's done useful work within ufology.

Also interesting how many of the disinformation tactics that AFOSI used against the UFO community in the 1980's are those used today by CIA, MI6 and FSB against various activist milieux and alternative media.

this covers much of the same territory as Mark Pilkington's "Mirage Men" but focuses more specifically about the Paul Bennewitz case and the Dulce Base mythology - learned a lot of new information about Kirtland Air Force Base's history as well as that of New Mexico in general in the process

Reading this because I can understand that "The Rhinegold", a volume of the comic book series "Yoko Tsuno", is a whole plot reference to it. So far it really does feel like the perfect detective novel, and a classic for a reason.

Vandt den her som mandelgave til en julefest sidste år, kan mærke at det er en meget anderledes type poesi end det jeg plejer at læse. Kræver helt sikkert lang tid at fordøje og forstå.

This is nominally a detective novel that strikes me as mostly an excuse for infodumps on various unrelated topics the author has an encyclopaedic knowledge of, from the insides of the circus industry to the history of various Eastern Orthodox Christian monastic orders. The fact that he gets something coherent out of that is still impressive in its own right.

one of the weirdest novels I have read in a long while since at least Brendan Connell's "The Galaxy Club" (also a nominal crime novel with fantastic elements) not sure I understand it yet but I do enjoy its atmosphere

read this on recommendation from my mother, argues that human ancestors lost their body hair by adapting to an aquatic lifestyle where hair got in the way of swimming, and this explains many other quirks of human evolution (like upright stance and fewer sweat glands for instance)

completely mindbending experience to read about the theory that Lewis Carroll (of all people) was the true identity of Jack the Ripper, and that someone sunk so much time and energy into arguing for exactly that thesis

this is one of those novels where every single character (and there are quite a few from many different cultural/social backgrounds) has each their complex hidden agenda which is slowly and meticulously revealed as the labyrinthine plot unfurls... REALLY curious where this goes

So far it feels like a streak of genius - it STARTS with a scene that is basically the ending of "Ghost in the Shell" or "Neuromancer" where the heroine sets free a superhuman AI (which ends up changing her into something not quite human) only to end in jail as a result, with the rest of the plot examining the large scale political and social consequences of all this in fine detail.

bought this at a science-fiction convention after hearing the author speak at a panel on how to write nonhuman intelligent characters - so far it seems VERY William GIbson inspired but goes in more depth with superhuman artificial intelligences and how they would realistically interact with people than Gibson did in his Sprawl Trilogy

interesting to learn that Mercedes Benz mass produced a rear engine car just before WW2 (the 170H) but it sold so poorly that the model was quickly discontinued, unfortunately there is no photographs of it in this book so I had to look the 170H up on Wikipedia instead

coffee table book about the history of Mercedes Benz as a company and their cars - makes a point of belabouring that the Daimler-Benz company were the first company anywhere to massproduce motorised carriages (which weren't allowed to drive on public roads in most of Germany at the time)

interesting that people in different parts of ancient Egypt had different creation myths each centring the main deity worshipped in their particular city, but people had no problem with any of that

Really liking volumes 4-6 of Natacha collected here: Complex and fastpaced crime/espionage thrillers with unpredictable twisty plots and enough elements of humour (including quite a bit of Cold War political satire) to keep things lighthearted

Done with "Adventures in Wonderland", paying significantly more attention to the poems which are quite good on their own right. I also find the chapters with the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle one of the funniest things I've ever read, especially when the Mock Turtle goes on about having learned in school about arithmetic categories like "derision", "distraction" and "uglification".

Lots of stuff I don't remember from the first reading, like all the birds and the loris and the mouse who welcome Alice when she first gets to Wonderland, as well as the foot race between them where Alice has to hand out candies in her pocket as rewards afterwards. Or the pigeon who flies past Alice after she grows in size when eating from the caterpillar's mushroom, and mistakes her for a snake.

forgot about this so resumed reading it front to back, interesting learning about the mythologies of less well known ancient cultures like Ugaritic and Hurrian

been wanting to reread this for the first time in years after watching Jan Svankmajer's 1988 film version (where Alice is played by a human but Wonderland's inhabitants by puppets)

I don't think this is quite on the level of "The Lady in the Lake" or "The Long Goodbye" but still enjoying it - I like getting the insight into all the different social layers of a glamourous 1940's Hollywood that no longer exists and its atmosphere (even if it's just to show the rotten underside of it all)

The last of Chandler's classic novels I have yet to read - I also have "Playback" and "Poodle Springs" but they aren't as highly regarded as the previous ones. This one again follows the "2 seemingly unrelated crimes that turn out to be connected" plot structure, this time the disappearance of a man named Orrin Quest and the murder of the landlord in the clubhouse where he last lived.

the protagonist Nick Corey is the type of surrealistically corrupt Southern sheriff that used to be pop all the time as villains in 1970's action movies (a la "Smokey and the Bandit") but he is somehow one of the LEAST horrible people here (for example he is the one white character in the entire book who isn't a raging racist)

this book is many things but never boring

between the "funhouse caricature of small town Southern US" setting and all the main characters' being engaged in marital infidelity of some sort, this scratches a similar itch as some of Russ Meyer's movies to the point I wonder if it was an influence on him

Gene Kranz goes into exhausting detail about the technical side of NASA operations, not just the infamous accidents like Apollo 1 and 13 but also all the errors and defects that were detected in test flights and simulations, as well as the ones that COULD have derailed otherwise successful missions if they hadn't acted on. (in contrast to the more sociological angle Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" took)

also watched the film about Lee's life starring Kate Winslet, focusing on her WW2 war correspondent career which Lee considered most important of all work she did, but was clearly just the tip of the iceberg

Lee Miller strikes me as an amazing person who accomplished so much in multiple different fields of life, despite also being a difficult personality in many ways, whom I've ended up with so much admiration for