Bookreading Memories

Musing Outloud about memorable moments in reading

Two weeks ago I posted Moviegoing Memories, a roundup of personal experiences I’ve had at the cinema that I originally posted to Facebook about four years ago and decided to transfer to Substack.

After I finished the Moviegoing Memories, I proceeded to write some Bookreading Memories over the next couple of weeks. Like the Moviegoing Memories, they’re arranged roughly in chronological order, and are not necessarily the best books I’ve ever read so much as created indelible moments that have stuck with me over the years, for better or worse.

Wherever possible, I have tried to use the cover of the edition I read.

Here they are, with some updates and light editing. If you received this as an email, I recommend clicking through to the webpage or scrolling to the bottom and clicking “view entire message”:

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Bookreading Memory #1: Goosebumps

Befitting Facebook meme-culture '90s kids be like' type posting, Goosebumps intersects a lot of memories of what elementary school was like, from heading to the Scholastic Book Fair with a $10 bill and knowing you'll be able to walk away with the new Goosebumps and The Stinky Cheeseman and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, to teachers being big ol' bores and refusing to let Goosebumps be used in book reports.

But regardless the pop culture, there's still a lot of how Goosebumps really influenced me personally. For one thing, Curse of the Mummy's Tomb gave me a deep interest in Ancient Egypt and its mythology, and Night of the Living Dummy has permanently affixed ventriloquist dummies as the coolest, funniest, creepiest, most dangerous motherfucking toys on the planet.

Even the stupid ideas were wild. Vampiric sponges that lived off of people's hate and could only be killed by petting. Green goo that grew, and that was worth writing about three or four times. Kids turning back into the dogs they originally were for some reason.

But there's a lot of these stories that stuck with me in the weird and uncanny that makes horror pleasurable. The very first book was a creepy ghost tale of a strange community that lived in the shadows. One book told of a shapeshifting supervillain that stalked a comic book nerd. And then there's the featured book cover I chose.

Motherfucking A Shocker on Shock Street. Holy god this book. Ostensibly about two kids trial testing an amusement park, everything in this story felt dangerous, creepy, and deliriously surreal, and then the ending happened. I may be just post hoc rewriting my own memories, but considering that this book features unreliable narrators, uncanny valley, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, simulation and simulacra, body horror, and identity subversion, either my deep enjoyment of it foretold my later taste or created it. This book was my first real experience of 'mindbending.' Nothing felt real after I finished it, it’s like the book had reached in and squeezed the juice right out of my brain.

Alls I remember is that, whereas I'd often read a Goosebumps book in a sitting or two, this one I read in one sitting without ever being aware I was reading. Deeply immersive storytelling. That's what Goosebumps could do at its best.

Also, just from a design standpoint, these books gave you something for being books that made the object itself part of the experience. I can't be the only kid who would run my forefinger over the haptic bumps on the the extruded logo while I read, connecting the enjoyment of the story with the tactile quality of the experience. I'd get depressed when the books got old enough that those bumps wore down, so a crisp new Goosebumps book was also a joy.

The publishers were also super genius to put little numbers on the spine, guaranteeing the collectibility of the full series. As an adult I actually actively avoid stuff like that because I'm terribly completist. Stuff like Criterion Collection gives me a bad collector's itch that is great for companies that do it, but bad for my own shelf-space and bank account. Also why I avoid getting in too deep on comic books.

A part of me wants to read Goosebumps again for the lulz, but I know they were written for, like, eight year olds, so I can't expect them to live up to my memories.

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Bookreading Memories #2: Animorphs

Obviously.

Of course this follows Goosebumps, these were the one-two hit of 90s Scholastic book fairs, rolling us right from elementary school into middle school. But unlike Goosebumps, these weren't just fun stories enjoyable to read.

Fear. Anger. Grief. Death. Loss, abandonment, love, trauma, hope, trust. Holy shit this series put you through the feels.

And that's just emotionally: aliens, tech, animism, post-humanism, time travel, interstellar war, domestic resistance, interstellar religions, biology, history, ecology, sociology, evolutionary theory. These books sometimes had me stopping to REALLY IMAGINE what it must be like to experience taste for the first time, or be part of a hive mind, or be stuck in a hawk's body. These books had me researching RNA to figure out how morphing could actually work and deeply questioning the morality of the actions from the characters at others.

At the center of her work, K.A. Applegate has one major, remarkable skill -- the ability to put you in the mind and perspective of 'an other', and question your sense and relationship to reality. These books are about kids with the superpower to turn into animals to fight space slugs, but any time you felt you had a handle on what was what you'd learn the Hork Bajir were peaceful vegans, or Yeerks were capable of love, or maybe children aren't so innocent as we expect.

And how terrifying would it be to be consciously trapped in your own body with absolutely no control of your thoughts or actions? Or how bad does your life have to be to actually consent to that?! There's some terrifying shit in those books.

One time during Banned Books Week, the library hosted an 'open debate' kiosk with essays from various thinkers arguing for or against banning books. One writer on the for banning side derided the argument, "at least it gets kids reading" with the counter-argument, "Reading what? Reading Goosebumps leads to reading Animorphs. It doesn't lead to reading Shakespeare."

To that name-forgotten fuckwad, two things: a) I doubt you were pouring through sonnets at 10 years old, and b) Yes, Goosebumps led to Animorphs. Animorphs lead to Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings led to Shakespeare. Or, in my case, the reason I was at the library that day was to check out the third volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a fucking 3500-page globe-trotting historical epic that uncovers the Early Modern roots of global trade, finance, computer science, and cryptography. Goosebumps leads to Animorphs, Animorphs leads to researching the history of gold trade as it affected both Caribbean pirates and Japanese Samurai. YOU fucking read the Baroque Cycle and tell me what Animorphs leads to. Doubt you could finish the first of six volumes.

Fuck that guy. Animorphs is and will always be legit.

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Bookreading Memories #3: IT

Around when I was 11 or 12 I got I really into horror movies, the video store rental classics such as Poltergeist, Pumpkinhead, Village of the Damned, you know the ones. Unlike Goosebumps, this stuff actually scared me, challenged me to sit in my discomfort and try to breathe in and be calm as the rising violins portended something about to leap out and try to kill someone on screen.

I figured, being a reader, if horror movies were really doing it for me I gotta get in on horror literature, so I went to the bookstore and looked to acquire my very first Stephen King novel.

Why IT?

So here's the thing. I only had like 10 bucks to my name, being, you know, a kid, and IT cost the same amount as the other pocket paperback editions of Stephen King's work. But IT, in contrast to his other work, was over a thousand pages long. This "price per volume" approach to book buying has stuck with me and is part of the reason why my eyes are automatically drawn to chonky doorstopper literature whenever I browse. It's — not a smart or appropriate way of selecting literature, and in fact very recently I've started really building an appreciation for the brief and concise.

BUT, as a 12 year old, trying to read a 1000 page book was a super exciting challenge, and I was very pleased with myself when I completed it.

It's only in retrospect that I realize just how ambitious IT really is. Covering seven whole characters at two different stages of life, through folk history and its liminality, dealing with kids who discover an eldritch horror from outer space that seemingly holds evidence of the spiritual realm whilst also being the small town history of bigotry and oppression, the internalized abuses and hatreds that spread intergenerationly and are rooted in the peculiar history of New England colonialism, and how these kids carry all of that into adulthood and still have to face up to the consequences when they wake up to partners that carry on the legacy of abuse they inherited as children.

At this point people who've watched the movies (plural) and even a few who have read the book are like, "Dane, c'mon, really?"

Really. Most of what I remember about this book had little to do with the fucking clown and a lot to do with the folk history of Derry, Maine. A field where Indians were massacred. A black concert venue that got burned down once white people, and particularly white women, started visiting. A gay man attacked because another man felt threatened when "his pants were so tight I could see every wrinkle on his ballsack."

The main characters are a black kid, a hypochondriac with deep co-dependency, a Jewish kid, a girl suffering sexual and domestic abuse from her step-father, an obese kid, a kid with severe depression, and they're lead by a kid with a stutter and deeply held grief and a sense of guilt for the death of his brother. Each of them survive a Pennywise encounter, which brings them together, but the Losers Club could also have been brought together simply by being victims of bullying, victims of household neglect, or victims of the institutions that adults have left inadequate to face. As one character says to a police officer at one point, "The clown is Derry. It's the town itself."

There was definitely a lot in this book that went way over my 12-year-old head, including some stuff that I read where I was like, "This is really weird and I don't know how to feel about it." To be frank, the sex train the kids run near the end of the childhood section of the book as a way of committing themselves to each other after their first confrontation with It weirds me out to this day. Even as a 12-year-old with no knowledge of the writing or publishing world, I remember thinking, "This Stephen King guy is taking a big risk with this scene." And there's many similar moments in it, considering, again, that this book is OVER A THOUSAND PAGES LONG.

There was a lot this book taught me about observation. IT is so big, it often has moments that work like short stories unto itself — a blizzard scene, a bird-watching scene, a moment where a kid not of the main group uses gum on a stick and a pen-light to fish coins out of drainage, all of these moments and characters that, as an aspiring writer at the time, made me feel ill-fit to describe in such vivid detail the vast amount of things that people do and lives that they hold. IT overwhelmed me and made me feel like I really needed to be an adult to understand things better.

SO, in a lot of ways, I completely related to the characters! In fact I should probably reread this as an adult, just to return to Derry the same way the main characters do when they get older — and see the town altered, see a different experience, but also feel the similar underlying horror that resides below the surface as a constant to its history.

Anyway, this book left a lot, a LOT, of long-lasting impressions. Even things hard to describe out of context, like "He thrusts his fists against the post and still insists he sees the ghost." Or, "shooting Pez into his mouth like a suicide of sugar." Or a red balloon floating in a the middle of an ice storm while no one is around. Or the mid-novel gut-punch of Stan's suicide.

A note on the cover image: I explicitly went out of the way to find the cover of the copy I read back then. Looking through the various versions that've existed over time, this one is also clearly the best.

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Bookreading Memories #4: Dracula

So somewhere near the end of middle school, during one of the last Scholastic book fairs I attended, I decided if horror was gonna be my thing I should read the original Dracula.

It was a very interesting experience in a lot of ways. The opening material with Jonathan at the castle was definitely chilling and moody and kept my attention. But once the other journals, collected newsclippings, and letters started appearing, I definitely got interested in this idea that the horror story trope of "this is a true story, my friend once said" could have a documentation aspect that was interesting.

I was not knowledgable or critically refined enough to understand, as adult academic me would call it, the epistemology of epistolary novels at the time, I just noticed it. It turns out that that whole "I met a person who said..." story structure is a strong staple of 19th century horror, sci-fi, and adventure literature. The Invisible Man and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde are told to the narrator from a visitor. Frankenstein (see below) and Heart of Darkness are told to the narrator via a companion met on a boat ride. In Dracula, the story is told through a group of individuals tracking information and swapping their experiences with a strange monster in their midst.

Like how Anamorphs portended my interest in the post-human and Shocker in Shock Street portended my interest in the uncanny, Dracula sort of points toward my interest in the hyper-mediated and cross-referenced. The question of "is this real?" supported by documentation that nevertheless shows that the documentation itself is unreliable and could be fictionalized. Entire libraries built around things that don't exist.

The other thing that was so striking about reading the original Dracula book, is that it was unlike anything I was lead to expect from popular culture presentations of the character. Dracula was the first book that taught me that you have to read the original text itself, because people's familiarity with it might not actually be a good representation of what it contains. This has been rediscovered over and over and over again. You do not know anything about 1984, for instance, unless you've read it yourself.

Also: this entry is two memories in one.

My first reading I loved a lot, it was an enjoyable fable with a lot of chilling moments. I particularly liked Lucy's post-vampire voice "tinkling like glass." Mina and Jonathan's made a strong power-couple. Van Helsing's enthusiastic research and leadership.

I reread Dracula later, somewhere around college or shortly after, and it's one of the worst books I've ever read in my life.

Almost half of the page count is devoted to men simpering over women's 'purity' and 'virtue' and competing with each other over who can be the most simpering. The women spend their time admonishing the 'grace' and 'goodness' of such men, in a constant saccharine barrage of purple prose. Where Dracula and other vampires do appear, their features and horror are basic -- sexual predators, but without identity or drive for anything other than lust.

Literally the only good parts of Dracula the novel are Jonathan's initial entrance to the castle, which is still chilling and mysterious, and Renfield and his flies. I could stay inside those asylums and skip all the shit with Lucy.

It's not just bad writing, it's sickeningly bad writing. And yes, 'gothic' and all that: I've read the genre, and Dracula accounts of some of the worst of its tendencies without even the best. I do not recommend this book one bit.

In fact I'm fine with a steady and dedicated deprecation of Dracula as a character in general from his pop cultural immortality. I rank as one of the few movie nerds with a taste for horror who has near zero appreciation for the classic Universal Monster movies in general — they were all too bad to be classic movies, but not bad and whimsical and nutty enough to be good b-movies. Bela Lugosi's Dracula is a complete mess of which the most interesting aspect is Renfield's constant escapes -- more because they're funny and absurd. Bram Stoker's Dracula (the movie) is a great costume drama love letter to the overall gothic literature playbook but isn't really compelling or interesting narratively. Most of the rest of Dracula in pop-culture isn't really more meaningful than vampires in general.

I'd say the actual best Dracula adaptation that exists is Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary. This is because Maddin obviously read the book's actual story: some 'Eastern European' arrives on Western Europe's shore and starts seducing 'their' women. Get it? Maddin did. For a good five minutes at the top of the film a graphic flashes across the screen: "The Monster! From the EAST! FROM THE EAST! THE EAST!" Dracula himself is played by an Asian actor, which is better casting than Gary Oldman. Maddin's filmmaking is often about exaggerating the sexual politics of cinema and thus he ended up making the most honest production of Bram Stoker's sexist, xenophobic primal scream.

So the book deserves being listed as a memory both as a moment I realized that pop culture does not replicate well the actual experience of the original story, and also that sometimes you can look back on a 'classic' either by rereading one of your personal favorites or just visiting what society has deemed canon, and realize that some of that shit really doesn't need to be kept in currency anymore. I sure as hell have no more interest in the character.

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Bookreading Memories #5: Frankenstein

Similar to Dracula, reading this was definitely a major confrontation between expectations and the actual text. Unlike Dracula, this book pretty much in no manner resembles anything whatsoever that people would come to expect from Boris Karloff's lumbering flesh golem. A lot of people, being the ironic dolts they like to be, like to say "In some ways Young Frankenstein is more accurate to the original novel than Frankenstein!" Still nope — Young Frankenstein is a great rehash of the original Frankenstein series of movies, with a bit more soul and love for cinema, but it still in no way resembles the original text.

Raise your hands if you've ever imagined Frankenstein's monster sitting down next to a fireplace and debating with his creator the meaning of Milton's Paradise Lost. No? Then you don't know this story at all.

Two things put this on my memorable list:

This was my first experience reading a book that blends philosophy and still remains deeply engaging. The aforementioned Paradise Lost debate carries on as the monster slowly builds out his rational for killing his creator, and both Doctor Frankenstein and you are aware of the coming conclusion throughout the conversation. Furthermore, Frankenstein's internal wrestlings with guilt and confusion over his actions strike a far more interesting conflict than the mad scientist trope of the movies. And whereas the whole "humans shalt not ambition to create life, as that is the purview of God" stuff doesn't do it for me exactly, in context Shelley absolutely confronts the double-edged sword of the Age of Reason right on time to fortell the atomic bomb, and does so within Frankenstein's realization of the dangers of youthful, naive ambition (a lot of this book is simply a coming of age story, too, which is neat).

The second reason this is a memorable experience is because I used it as the essay portion of the AP exam I passed. My extra-curricular reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein ended up being worth two full college course credits in English.

I like this memory because leading up to the AP exams, so many of my peers in the AP English courses were on super-crunch time reviewing all, in some cases each and every, book they had read for English class since freshman year. Some of them had notes and essays they had written four years ago, binders full of Spark Notes and highlighters.

My thinking on the matter was that if I barely remembered the book, I wasn't going to do well addressing it in an essay. But also let's be clear: I was a super lazy student. I always got B+'s or A-'s because I'd never do that one extra thing to really push myself. This laziness absolutely bites me in the ass as an adult when it comes to trying to push myself to do more creative work, so I don't recommend it to other people or students. But one thing it did was allow me to learn things on my own initiative with far less stress than some of my more competitive classmates, and I am a big, big fan of stress reduction in all things.

So anyway, I really wish I remembered the exact question, but the essay part of the AP exam asked about 'untrustworthy narrators' and had a list of 'book you may want to use' which included the usual English class canon, y'know, Great Gatsby, all that. But I remember reading the question and realizing Frankenstein fit the question perfectly. The story is told from the perspective of a passenger on a boat in the Arctic, listening to another man talk through his fears, trauma, and existential quandaries while pursuing a creature that may or may not actually exist, but which the passenger narrator thinks he may 'hear the howls in the wind.' Perfect untrustworthy narrator material.

I enjoyed writing that essay quite a lot, and honestly I can't help but feel whomever graded the exam probably enjoyed reading it. I can't imagine how much it must suck to read those essays and get the usual "The Great Gatsby is a well-recognized example of an untrustworthy narrator. In The Great Gatsby, the narrator is ...." in exam after exam, then to get a breather reading about Frankenstein from someone who was clearly passionate about the work they were discussing.

I doubt I'm the only person who had fun with the question, but I still consider using my own interests in literature in the AP exam rather than the assigned books to be one of my more significant academic achievements.

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Bookreading Memories #6: The Divine Comedy

My senior AP English class assigned Inferno. At the time, my deepest familiarity of this text was simply how it was referenced in David Fincher's movie Se7en, which for me at the time was an incredibly smart movie. I had already read The Canterbury Tales (also for English class, but a previous year) so reading this and Paradise Lost was my hope in wrapping up the literary references of that movie.

My teacher, Mr. Nuzum, instructed us that the best way of making it through this edition of Inferno was to read a full Canto to get an idea of what it was about, read the full Canto again while looking up all the annotations to understand it's various references, and then read the full Canto again to appreciate its language. Then move on to the next Canto.

When we finished reading it, I decided to continue because I wanted to complete the entire thing. And I kept up Mr. Nuzum's process, slowly reading, one Canto at a time, for a period that ended up lasting well into college and I think ultimately into the first summer of my college years. The Divine Comedy took me two jobs and two summers, making it officially the most difficult and longest involved deep reading I've ever done.

I did finally grow impatient and start moving through the text faster by the time I was midway through Paradiso. That's because, at the time, Paradiso is absolute torture. Inferno and Purgatorio are full of detailed and sweeping visions of really neat shit happening to an eclectic spectrum of diverse characters. Paradiso is deeply symbolic and misses that vengeful biting humor of the previous poems.

Even little things change the feel of it. Virgil is simply a more interesting guide, for instance, than Beatrice, in how he interacts with and describes the machinations of the cycles, partly because he's a dude and Dante thinks he's this dude's equal, and partly because Beatrice is so apotheosic that Dante doesn't put any humanity into her words. Paradiso is more densely figurative. I couldn't stand it. (But hold that thought….)

For my essay on Inferno, I was asked to compare visions of the afterlife and how it deals with morality with other texts. I completely blank on what other texts were recommended for this comparative essay, but I wrote an A+ earning essay comparing Dante's seething vitriol to Jhonen Vasquez's far more vitriolic vision of heaven and hell in the sixth issue of the comic book series Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.

For the Nny uninitiated, I’m talking about comparing the classic, world-renowned, thinky person Classics literature The Divine Comedy with this:

I'm not as proud of that achievement as my Frankenstein essay, but I am grateful Mr. Nuzum had patience and a sense of humor.

After I finished The Divine Comedy, I definitely wanted to continue the epic canon and soon after read Paradise Lost. I had meant to get around to Ovid's Metamorphosis and Virgil's own Aeniad, but it wasn't long after Paradise Lost that I really understood my interests were more in modern and post-modern literature. I'm pretty much not into most things that happened before the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 to be honest (remember that date: it comes back in this list).

However, I did actually re-read The Divine Comedy when I turned 35. For all the work I put into it as a young adult, I wanted revisit it at Alighieri's age when he wrote it, and because much of my knowledge of it is faded to about the same as if I had just read the Wikipedia about it at this point.

Being 35 didn’t really make me relate better to a Medieval Catholic in political exile, to be honest. However, I did end up enjoying Paradiso far more the second time around, and love to use it as an example of how religion and science can sometimes approach the same conclusions. In Paradiso’s case, Dante describes the Rose of Paradise beyond the Primum Mobile as an area where all the blessed sit in equal proportion and scale regardless of perspective, and it’s indiscernible from the light of the Primum Mobile, which trickles down in its warps and wavelengths to shape reality, which means Dante described……. a black hole’s singularity beyond its event horizon. Pretty much perfectly, excepted with the elect rather than all matter. Super cool!

By the way, the cover I included in this section is the version I read, and I don’t recommend it. I don’t remember the specific translation issues I had when I was reading it the second time, but there were some really stupid choices.

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Bookreading Memories #7: The Grapes of Wrath / The Jungle

The key to this being a significant memory is that I read them at the same time.

The Grapes of Wrath was for English class, and The Jungle was for American History. The Jungle, I think, was more voluntary — like extra credit or something, that I didn't need, but I took because this was junior year when I decided to start taking 'literature' seriously and wanted to try to read 'all of the classics.'

But whatever the motive, I do not recommend reading these two books in close proximity to each other. Not one bit.

These two books punched me in the gut and made me feel like nothing would be okay ever. Together they actually cover a lot of territory: the agrarian and the industrial; the domestic laborer and the immigrant; surplus citrus melted by gasoline counterposed with poisoned pork; company fiat and bought votes; and between both a constant effort against a game whose rules have written the participants out of play.

I had already grown up in a household on the financial edge and had, for whatever reason, a deep-set miser mentality I still struggle to overcome. These books realized my fear of poverty beyond what I was used to thinking about before—struggling artists in bad apartments—and made me realized it's possible for people to not only be worked to death but abused and manipulated every step of the way to their graves.

These books made me feel like I was completely fucked.

Obviously I rebounded back to having hope. I'm a long-term optimistic person with short term pessimism. But yeah, these two books threw me in a funk I have never forgotten.

I could, from here, launch into no end of political assessments and statements. I think the only thing I want to say in the matter is that human beings have a ceaseless persistence not only to survive, but to find comfort and joy in doing it; thus poverty is as morally outrageous as massacre. Take from that what you will and call me any -ist you choose, I'm still on the side of improving the human condition for each and every participant and am not overly concerned about which ideology best does it, I'm only concerned as to the effectiveness of the systems and rules we build to do improve human life.

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Bookreading Memories #8: The Fountainhead

In the summer between high school and college I went to the library about every other week and ground through many books on a list I had acquired from my junior year English teacher of "books college English departments expect students to have read in high school." The Fountainhead was among them and I was super curious about it. The only thing I really knew about Ayn Rand was The Simpson's joke about a day care Maggie has to escape from.

Look. Right off the top, the major takeaway I had from this book was that Ayn Rand was clearly a very traumatized, abused person. I didn't even have to look into her biography or learn about her relationships to detect that this was a woman dealing with some shit, and to date it's sort of annoying that we debate her legacy so much without talking about how trauma survivors can sometimes turn their histories of abuse into an abusive mindset of their own. This book dripped in pain, and it's completely astounding to me that neither her acolytes nor detractors seem to address that much.

The most obvious example of that is Roark's rape of Dominique.

The other thing is, again, not knowing much about Rand and her Objectivist, uh, 'philosophy', I found myself often speed-reading through Ellsworth Tooey stuff in supreme impatience. People often criticize her work for setting up straw men, but straw men should be starting their arguments with an understandable, known premise, and Tooey's whole schtick doesn't make sense from get-go. He actually directly argues that his goal is purposefully make everybody poor-to-mediocre in quality, which no philosophy or political ideology, nor person, in the world even conceives as the point of whatever they're trying to do. Tooey's argument isn't even populist but spiritual. It's bizarre and I can't even call it cartoonish. Cartoon characters flaunt the rules of gravity until they look downward. Rand's villains turn to the camera and give you a lecture on how gravity should be banned from the world so that all may float so as to lose their grip on the ground.

But.

BUT.

I actually kind of liked this book, and drew some inspiration from it.

The key thing I liked is that Roark is an architect, in other words an artist craftsman, who refuses to compromise what he knows to be right in the face of popular/ist judgment and fashion. As a teenager who had only gotten the idea to become a filmmaker over the previous couple of years, knew nothing about how to make movies, but knew I was not in the least interested in making mainstream movies, it was actually compelling storytelling to see Roark not only hold his own on doing things right but even speak out against popular trends.

A far, far better 'villain' in the story is Peter Keating, the architect who constantly seeks the approval of everyone and, as a result, doesn't do approvable work. And behold, Keating never goes on page-long monologues, but fails in an active, human manner.

I also liked Rand's iconoclasm. Roark striking out all Greek pillars while explaining how their historical usage makes them useless for modernity except as a (literal and metaphorical) facade. The horizontal church — that was the whole book right there, it could have just been a short story. Rand is a lady who gives zero fucks to precedent and popular taste, though recognizes that standing your ground means limiting your audience to only the few people your work resonates with.

In fact therein lies the litmus test I pay attention to when someone says they agree with her philosophy: do they defend a movie because "Look, if it wasn't a good movie why did it make so much at the box office? Independent filmmakers are just jealous of success" or do they defend Shane Carruth, an artist craftsman filmmaker who refuses to dumb down for the audience, makes his own visual rules, and may not ever be able to make a third feature length film because he can't find a studio or production company that doesn't want to "try to make it more accessible to mainstream audiences?"

It doesn't have to be about film. It's just the mindset that widespread commercial and popular success represents Great Man Randian ideology seems to have missed the part where Roark wins the moral war but is never, not anywhere in the book, a popular and well-respected commercial architect. So what represents success to you, a good quality product, or the most available recognized one?

Ironically most Rand followers tend to bend over backward to defend the right of subpar producers to continue to produce shit that we don't need, just because they get wildly rich doing it. Pay attention to that. It may be important.

That benefit aside, I'm not really sure The Fountainhead is really necessary to introduce the idea of holding your own against popular appeal, not even in the narrow lens of art, as that pathway can be discovered through other texts of more concise messaging, more human characters, and far less abuse. It just happened that I got that message right when I was starting to think about what kind of artist I may want to be, so I can't ignore its influence in my way of thinking.

I don’t recommend this book even despite it inspiring me.

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Bookreading Memories #9: House of Leaves

House of Leaves is my favorite book discovery because I really did DISCOVER it, which those who've read this book know the impact that can have.

In college, a bunch of my friends moved into a party house a few blocks off of campus, and I'd go there to hang out / party occasionally. This was before I drank alcohol myself, so I often acted as designated driver, but this night for whatever reason I slept over. I don't even remember why, they just had a couch and I didn't want to go back to the dorm.

The next morning I woke up before everyone else, obviously, because everyone else was hungover. It's a classic scene: golden morning light with a cool autumnal breeze bringing in fresh and invigorating air, people bundled up in piles of pillows and blankets scattered amongst couches and/or any reasonably 'soft' surface an over-extended young adult body can pass out on, and there, on the kitchen table, is this book with a really lovely black cover with an a-mazing design.

Hey, while I wait for people to wake up so I can drive them to their hangover breakfast, might as well get some reading in?

The other context you need to know is that at the time I had developed a pleasure in reading critical and semiotic essays. I don't think people really understand that some of those essays have a real sense of humor. So here's the thing, I flip this book open, knowing I'm not gonna be able to read the whole thing, so I skip right past the introduction and go to what I thought was the main body of the text.

And there is this really interesting essay about what sounds like a really interesting movie. I've just started my film studies -- is this movie for real? Why is a book written about it? Vague references to a photograph of a starving child — I recognize that, I know that photo. Was that photographer really named Navidson?

I mean, definitely I knew something was off. For one thing, after a couple-three footnotes regarding other reference texts, one of the footnotes goes on this long digression about meeting up with some dude named 'Lude'. That's — that's definitely not fitting in. Then the Editors make their mark by correcting something by someone named Johnny. Every instance of the word house in any language is blue for some reason. Something crazy is going on here.

I didn't get far into it in that moment because people started to wake up. I think it was around when a couple of my friends shuffled in the kitchen and were like "You wann-go get cofffeee?" that I decided real quick to flip through the book just to see if later pages would indicate where this book is going, and—

I was taken. As soon as I could, I went to Hastings — this was before I worked there — not expecting the book would actually be there. I actually wondered if it was fucking real! It wasn't like I drank, but like considering the circumstances, right? Was this some vague party-contact high splitting my academic reading and my dream-brain into some feasible concrete PoMo poem?

Well the book did exist, and I bought it immediately. I found the rest of the book to be just as amazing as that initial contact.

I've read it three times now. The first time I tracked all the footnotes but left the Appendices for later. The second time I skipped all the Johnny stuff and just read the Navidson Record alone (honestly that only takes about an hour or two). The third time I did a deep, deep dive, tracing every reference and trick I could, even reading the protracted list footnotes for possible little Easter eggs, looking up every word I didn't understand, cross-referencing every page that refers back to any other page, and occasionally checking the MZD forums from the early 2000s for further insight.

I can't claim I caught every thing this book does but I did 'discover' Pelafina in a way I simply did not fully comprehend in the original two readings. And Pelafina makes Johnny's story far more palatable and far more tragic. You can't skip over Pelafina.

I've read enough MZD at this point to determine that he's probably not going to replicate the success of this quite so well with any other text, and there were certain things in his text that I thought were stylistic, like incredibly poor comma usage, that turns out to actually just be how he writes. But regardless of how good or bad his books are, they're worth owning as something to SHOW. They are a book designer’s dream — as in the sort of thing a book designer would dream of doing, but also bad dreams that come from the stress of designing. MZD makes very lovely Objects, of the sort in which you are meant to hold, and own.

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Bookreading Memories #10: Against the Day

Back in my heavy webcomics reading days, I was quite fond of Cat and Girl, a literature-obsessed existential primal scream comic that one day had a reference to a book with a gorgeous sounding name called Gravity's Rainbow. I looked it up and discovered the cult favorite writer Thomas Pynchon and, this being the days of the Internet where you could actually discover things (RIP to a grand era that shall never return), learned about his mysterious reclusiveness and interplay between historical marginalia and grand conspiracies, critical acclaim and dedicated cult following, pop-culture and deep, obscure literary references, and famously weird and ridiculous sex scenes. So of course I was gonna check that shit out.

I made the mistake of reading The Crying of Lot 49 first, which is his outright worst book, but I could still see there was a lot of promise there and continued through his entire ouevre, if for no other reason than he didn't really have that many books. It was at the end of the list, when I was reading Vineland, that his voice and style fully clicked.

I had determined at that point I would re-read one Pynchon book per year -- his work requires it. And then, just as I was planning to start over with V. and read his work chronologically, I was at work at Hastings one day, headed to the cafe for a break, and as I passed the new release wall did a double-take.

Did that book say 'Thomas Pynchon'? I looked again and what the hell? There's a new Pynchon book out?

... Dude was still alive?

I'll tell you it took me until I had purchased the book and opened the first few pages for me to believe it. As it turns out, since Against the Day he's released two others, making his late career far, far more prolific than the rest of his career where he averaged a book per decade or so.

Perhaps it's because of the Pynchon fluency I had attained, or perhaps it's because Pynchon's language has really smoothed into an immersive flow over the years, but Against the Day was great from start to finish, and an easier, lighter read than Pynchon's other big tomes. For the uninitiated, Pynchon goes back and forth between Big Idea geography-spanning historical epic door-stoppers like Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, to much more bite-sized and narrow gumshoe thrillers about specific local folk histories like Crying of Lot 49 and Bleeding Edge, tying them together mostly with dollops of weird sex and anarchist jokes. Against the Day is his latest and possibly his last (he is very old, after all) historical door-stopper, and technically his longest book by page-count.

It's over 1000 pages. But it reads so breezily it's far, far, indescribably easier to get through than much of his previous work. In fact his latest three novels all have that ease of access which makes them more recommendable to beginners than his early work. Start with Against the Day, then Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, then read his stuff chronologically, ending with Mason & Dixon. If you get to Mason & Dixon you're a confirmed Pynchonhead and deserve what's coming to you. I would never recommend Mason & Dixon to anyone who doesn't like Pynchon's other work.

Anywho,

that's all to say, what's Against the Day even about? And man, what isn't it about?

Starting with adventure serial writing involving the Chums of Chance in their floating (and increasingly expanding) pirate airship visiting the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 (see above) and leading up to this foreboding and unstoppable "general European war" we fondly call World War I, Against the Day follows the travels and travails of three brothers and a sister of the Traverse family from Colorado, whose father, Webb, had a few political opinions and an addictive/sexual fondness for dynamite that put the Traverses on the bad side of the corporations building the 20th century. Nikola Tesla, Franz Ferdinand, and Bela Lugosi all make an appearance and the book contains such memorable references as a parody of William Gaddis' The Recognitions involving a dog that leads to a Jane Eyre joke, "Reader, she bit him," that ended up winning 2005's Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction award.

True to Pynchon form, Against the Day is hilarious, thoughtful, depressing, bizarre, disturbing, even a little frightening, and then drops you right into the feels with moments of care and devotion. At some points you're really wanting everyone to turn out okay and are astounded at the variety of people and places in the world. At other points you're learning that the best way to assassinate a plutocrat is to shoot them in the gut, because rich guys only got doctors who know how to fluff up their bedding and will completely mess up a surgical extraction, leading to a long and painful death. And above all there's this constant feeling that if just one or two things had adjusted, the Great War would have been completely avoided and a far more peaceful and pleasant present tense attained.

Most Pynchon books are months-long endeavors that you plan to do because you'll need to pay attention. Against the Day I burned through in a week and a half, and then reread on a whim a couple months later. I wrote this Facebook post originally in 2020 but just finished rereading Against the Day again this summer. It's by far one of my favorite novels.

Pynchon is 87 years old and as my friend Jim pointed out, may have had a lot of projects on the slow burn in the decade break between releases that could result in a few more books showing up on shelves, but it's really hard to imagine he has another Grand Epic in the work. It's likely Against the Day is it, and if we're blessed with anything else, it'll be from his parallel gumshoe detective universe. It's too bad because I could really use another Against the Day in my life. But I may be just being greedy.

Whether another book comes or not, I’m not going to stumble on it in the new release shelves, wondering what cosmic historical rift opened up to place it in my branching path. That was a moment.

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Bookreading Memories #11: The Diamond Age, or: a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer

Another 'via webcomics' find. Questionable Content is a classic webcomic with a plethora of Neal Stephenson references. These Neal Stephenson references tied into recommendations quite a few friends of mine were making to check out Snow Crash and, occasionally, Cryptonomicon. I found both books to be quite good and enjoyable, but it wasn't until The Diamond Age, or: A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer that I really became a devoted Neal Stephenson fan.

Stephenson's 'Illustrated Primer' of the title is a quantum computing device designed to raise and instruct children using every tool of storytelling, gamification, puzzle solving, and interaction from learning to write their first letters through uncovering the fundamental science of a Turing machine. The Primer isn't relegated to academics, as it also trains the user in methods of leadership, strategy, and self-defense.

Flat out what makes Stephenson's futurology shine is his strange mix of technological optimism and human behavioral realism. The 'Diamond Age' of the title refers to a post-scarcity world where energy is so cheap it's easier to make windows out of diamonds than glass and anybody can have nutrient dense food by throwing garbage into a microwave-sized machine that rearranges the basic atoms. Warfare is almost non-existent and appears mostly as a dense city-covering dust cloud of dead nanobots that have been destroyed by rival country's nanobots.

But despite all this 'eutopic' premise, none of it is white city on a hill vision. Class systems are still enforced via relative disregard for the needy, and political dominance still concerns the upper classes. When the Primer mistakenly falls into the hands of an underclass girl named Nell and bonds to her, the aristocrats in charge of its rollout decide to take a 'wait and see' approach to it that ends up delivering a systematic shock as Nell grows to become a formidable opponent and resistance leader.

The other thing that Neal Stephenson consistently gets right in his work is the importance of actual human-to-human contact in even the most virtual, artificial intelligence, or augmented reality environment. Even the Primer needs a human actor on the other side to give it a voice that a child can respond to. Stephenson stands as one of the few futurists who is also always a humanist, and never attempts to displace human consciousness and behavior from the worlds he creates.

This is one of those books that makes you tingle with POSSIBILITY. As a deep researcher and systems thinker who also just has an astoundingly strong handle on accessible language, Stephenson doesn't only make you imagine a future world but guides you through how it could all actually, really, physically work. There's so many points reading his stuff where some things just make so much sense you're pretty certain you'll see it in development next year.

Coincidentally, shortly after I read The Diamond Age, the iPad was announced, and it really wasn't long after that that the articles describing its potential impact in the tech world turned to its possible use in educational settings.

Well, that remains to be seen. I'm sure some of the educators reading the above paragraph are already bristling at thought of their classes mindlessly button mashing some walled garden educational application instead of learning fundamentals of critical and creative thinking, and the rollout of devices in education hasn’t struck me as in any way developed usefully or technically toward the benefit of children. The only resemblance modern tablet computers have to Stephenson's Primer, really, is the form factor. The rest is incomparable and the Primer remains the techno-optimistic dream of a bearded Seattle geek with great writing chops.

And honestly as Stephenson's stories are aging they're starting to feel less futurist than retro-futurist, the nostalgic technodreams of a bygone history that assumed a turn in a different direction, like steampunk or the atomic age. The way things are currently going, we have a choice between Stephenson the prophet or Stephenson the Siliconpunk writer. That brushing up against the course-less bending of history away from directional intent is particularly apparent in his semi-recent book Fall; or: Dodge in Hell which finds itself unable to deal with modern issues in a clumsily apparent way.

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Bookreading Memories #12: Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges

In college I was working on a comparative analysis between how the movies L’Eclisse and Performance both have the protagonist disappear in the last act, but for modernist and post-modernist themes respectively. I was discussing the thesis with my professor during office hours, when she mentioned Borges. "Who?" sez I. She stared me right in the eye. "Read Borges."

So, I did.

This is an experience I can't really describe any differently than anyone else who has read it, and wouldn't know how to describe it to someone who hasn't. But particular to me was reading Borges in the midst of reading voluminous tombs such as those by Pynchon, House of Leaves, Infinite Jest, Ulysses, and any other book that you could build the foundation of a skyscraper on top of.

While I had the time and the academic resources I wanted to suck in as much 'impossible books' as I could, and regularly read over 1000 pages per week. Most of the books I read contended with the idea of infinity — every possibility, every aspect feasible of human experience, all of human history and each alternative parallel universe that branches off of it, the universe in the minutia.

And in the midst of all that frenzy here is this author whose stories frequently were shorter than a page long, and yet covered everything and more.

In fact this section is already longer than many of Borges’ works. Borges even schooled me in one section where he describes that 'No man can read 1000 books in his lifetime, and even then it's doubtful whether he can understand a single book in its entirety.' (Paraphrased from memory.) For reference, Borges was kind of playing off of 1001 Nights, his favorite ergodic literature, the idea being that only the Arabian nights has 1001 full books inside of it but also is a different book any time you read it. Anyway the quote schooled me because as I mentioned before, I was reading over 1000 pages per week, but if you asked me today what many of the books I read were about, I couldn't tell you. All that time spent and it was pretty much equivalent to not reading the books at all.

Borges taught me to slow down, and that infinity is in each book as well as in every book.

One fun aspect of reading the Collected Fictions is that my copy came with a train ticket. I had borrowed the volume from the school library, and tucked inside at the second story was an old Chunnel ticket bought from the French side. Could this book have been borrowed by some previous UNM student during a summer European trip? Or perhaps that ticket was the only close bookmark the student or faculty member had upon their return.

Or... perhaps the other reader was reading the same book, at the same pace, as I moved the ticket bookmark along the stories it was him saving my spot, only the other student was in Europe, and I was in New Mexico, but otherwise the other student was me, and I was he.

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Bookreading Memories #13: A Manual for Cleaning Women

I once read that a fun thing to do is to go to a bookstore with another person and each buy a book for the other. I've only been able to do it a handful of times but the last time, I ended up with one of the most important personal reads of my life so far.

My friend Natalie bought me A Manual for Cleaning Women, a collection of short stories by Lucia Berlin, off of good reviews and praise she had been hearing. I had never heard of Berlin. I also tend not to read a lot of short stories (see above section on Borges).

But man, was this pick perfect for me.

So here's the thing. I am from New Mexico. When 'New Mexican authors' are mentioned, they're usually Hispanic authors or genre authors. New Mexico has a big science fiction author community -- George R.R. Martin lives in Santa Fe, for instance, and Roswell speaks for itself, as well as White Sands National Monument and the federal labs. Probably the two best recognized 'New Mexican' authors are Tony Hillerman, who writes detective novels set on the Navajo nation, and Rudolfo Anaya¹, who is canon for Chicano literature. Great writers, but not my thing.

But what would be my thing? Is something like a structuralist PoMo novel like House of Leaves or a globetrotting alt history like Against the Day or Stephenson's Baroque Cycle necessarily imbued with the specifics of a local culture like New Mexico?

Lucia Berlin is my thing. A graduate of UNM like me, Berlin was also an alcoholic with a sick sense of humor like my father, a somewhat mid-brow reader and storyteller like most people I engage with, who has occasionally found herself living in unexpected places and circumstances, often just above the poverty rate. Unlike me she has an amazing sensibility for describing the people I KNOW. That's the part that really got me about her writing: I knew these people. I've had those conversations. I've been there.

A lot of her writing reminds me of the stories I would hear from the various hippies and burnouts who populate the area around Cedro Peak. American history told by forgetful alcoholics predominantly interested in remembering where their trailer was camped out around when they had their first child — or was it when the child was about to go to school? But man the sunsets that you could see, and in fall: the cranes crowded over the Bosque.

There was this term that I read once that I have had a very hard time finding since, but it's called the Spark of Recognition. It's when you're reading a book or watching a movie or whatever and say, "Holy shit, that's me!" Lucia Berlin's stories are like constant sparks of recognition. So many sparks they make fireworks.

So much so that I wrote my first feature script based predominantly off her short story "Strays" from this book. As it turns out, the entire book is optioned by some mysterious production company or studio out there — I believe Cate Blanchett’s — so I have no means of owning the rights to it currently. Since I have no means of owning the rights to it currently, I never wrote the second draft, as it needs a lot of mechanical work and under-the-hood development.

But the rough draft was so easy to write. So, so easy to write. Because "Strays" set a location and a framework and a few characters, and then I just threw in a few other people I know from New Mexico and voila, a feature length script was born. I'll keep it in my shelf but I haven't a lot of hope on that front. I can't imagine anyone other than the likes of Kelly Reichardt handling this content well.

I later inhaled the second selected stories collection by the same publisher, Evening in Paradise, and am eager to get my hands on her memoir, Welcome Home. Reader: I don't read memoirs. That's how devoted I am.

But what if you're not from New Mexico? Well, from a literary standpoint, these are stellar examples of short story form: economy of storytelling, immersive moments of passion and memory, sharp dialog used spectacularly sparsely, and a strangely smartly placed folksy wisdom. Each of her stories not only point out to a life richly lived, but makes it feel like there's so much more she could tell you.

(Also she lived in other states and countries so it's not exclusively New Mexican in affect or presentation. The title short story, for instance, is set in NYC.)

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Bookreading Memories #14: The Journal of Albion Moonlight

I don't even know where I heard about this book. It just sounded interesting so I wrote it on my to-read list and forgot about it, later to have received it as either a birthday or an Xmas gift (my to-read list becomes my wishlist twice a year, you see). I don't remember who gave it to me but it was most likely my mother. If she knew what was inside she'd roll her eyes and say, "Okkkaaayyy. I'M not reading THAT one."

So this book of mysterious origins turns out to be one of the darkest, sickest, abjectly horrifying pieces of gothic literature out there. Starting with a crew of characters standing over the eviscerated, limbless corpse of a raped angel, The Journal of Albion Moonlight quickly runs off on a cross-country Americana road trip that's essentially Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian laced with whatever Burroughs was taking while he pounded out Naked Lunch.

Now I mention those two because... they didn't viscerally upset me. They were interesting reads and I think they're good books, but when people talk about being upset or disturbed by them, I don't connect in the same way that movies upset or disturb me. Albion Moonlight, on the other hand, upsets and disturbs me.

And note that this was written before those works, in 1941. Meaningful that it involves scenes with Jesus and Hitler bickering at the back of cars while some characters die only to show up later, some demonic pursuer by the name of Roivas (“Savoir” reversed) is always nearby or just over the horizon, and the pacificism Patchen is arguing for is exemplified in a rapist and murderer. And theoretically the whole surrealist event is supposed to be some allegory for American history, but to be blunt, I'm not particularly concerned about matching up all the allegorical signifiers to their American historical referents.

BUT, what a ride. This book made me impatient to get back to it whenever I wasn't reading it. Since it's an experimental surrealist novel it could theoretically have just kept going on forever, I can't claim that it gives any closure. By the time I finished I strongly considered just flipping right back to page one and starting over again. Why not?

I don't even really know what to do with my knowledge this book exists now that I've read it. I can't recommend it to anyone. I don't really know what it's about beyond what the online reviews tell me. It's too dense for those who want Clive Barker style thrills. It's just this singular fiery pitball event in my reading history.

What I wasn’t sure of the first time through was whether it was any good, or I was just thrilled. These are two different things. So earlier this year I reread it, and it turned out to be one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Still can’t recommend it though. You gotta have a stomach for it.

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Bookreading Memories #15: Lucifer's Hammer

My lovely wife, before we got married, was kind enough to buy me a pile of classic science fiction books I had written down for my 33rd birthday. I got around to Lucifer's Hammer around November of 2019. I finished reading it around when newspapers started talking about 'a novel coronavirus originating in Wuhan.'

Lucifer's Hammer is a post-cataclysmic fiction describing the lead-up, impact, and outcome of a massive comet hitting the world. Like the best survivalist fiction, it doesn't give points for the prepared, but it doesn't let the unprepared go by luck. There's a strangely amazing, bald-faced realism to the story that makes it impossible to not take seriously.

In fact its politics are complicated because they're simple. Set in California, I'm not going to argue that Niven and Pournelle are representing human beings completely, but they nailed representation of American people when the lights go off, the roads are blasted away, and social trust and civic engagement are stripped away. In short, how does a group of people on the knife's edge of survival rebuild civilization when they can no longer afford liberal democracy?

There is no karmic moral statement in who lives and who dies. Some bad people have the necessary toolkit at the right time. Other good people manage to know or offer something other people need — at least for now. Some good people stand up for their values and are killed. Other bad people are killed for the exact same action. And good or bad, none of the characters are easily defined as such. Each individual character is a study in character development in and of itself.

With some of the best preppers and morally outstanding leaders suffering or dying anyway, and some of the best survivors sometimes not having the expected attributes, it's gripping reading simply trying to figure out what could possibly happen next. But it's also a fundamentally pragmatic, secular book that doesn't make Apocalypse into the Geek Rapture zombie movie buffs get off on. It's a world where guns are absolutely necessary, and also don't help one bit.

And some of the writing is almost survivalist manual unto itself. Some characters go out of their way to preserve necessary survivalist and re-build knowledge, others quickly pivot to new power dynamics, and the nature of coordination and self-interest changes. The book is so well researched at certain points it makes you feel like the comet actually hit and the world that exists today is just an afterlife dream of those taken out by the initial impact.

And, well, it learned me good on a few points. One being that there's no downside to taking risk seriously enough to at least have some common provisions. Less than three months after finishing the book, I was reading about two-week quarantines in The Economist and promptly go to the bathroom to count my toilet paper supply. I checked my cabinets: no dry food goods. I text my future wife: “Don’t judge me but I’m going to buy a bunch of extra supplies in case this coronavirus thing hits New York and we have to quarantine for two weeks.” She gives a thumbs up and asks what we need. I buy an embarrassing amount of toilet paper, bottled water, and rice and beans. We pack it in some shelves and joke that we’re preppers.

A month later there's no toilet paper on shelves anywhere, and four months after that my “embarrassing levels” of supply runs out. Food I originally bought under the premise that "If we don't need it for quarantine, we can at least eat it slowly" is now cycled with new dried goods and replaced in a slow rotation. I'm one of Those Guys now, who has a mental inventory of beans. Yes, this book literally amounted to a hill of beans.

Watching the COVID-19 pandemic unfold was EXACTLY like watching the comet approach. First there was the discovery, but it's not anywhere likely it'll hit us (scientists are still trying to figure out what it is). Then 1 in a billion became 1 in a million (seems to be a flu-like disease with higher-than-normal mortality rate, but that might be because we haven't treated it yet). Now Earth is in the cone of the comet's trajectory, but it's not like it's likely to hit (Okay Wuhan is bad but we'll contain it. It's the Chinese fault for not taking it seriously, but they are now). Okay, it'll come close but it'll mostly just be experienced as a spectacular nighttime atmospheric lightshow (okay it's spread beyond China but don't worry — seems to only kill old people and the immunocompromised, but it doesn't even seem to affect children). Okay now everyone needs to be prepared to go underground for night of impact (community spread is happening in multiple cities in the United States). Okay everyone's screwed — we're going to be hit directly (COVID-19 is now an endemic disease with community spread in every nation in the world).

What can I say? This book vibed with me most because of its purely disaffected rendering of cataclysmic events. I have no faith in necessarily karmic or meaningful outcomes to human civilization, it could transcend to the stars like Stross' Accelerando (which I read just before Lucifer’s Hammer) or a sideswipe of a comet could wipe us out and who would miss us? All you can do is take account of your needs and comforts, and do your best to survive in the most proactive eusocial environment possible. Don't let your beliefs in what should happen prevent you from preparing for what could.

And that also is why I've detached from any sort of political narrative of the meaning of this nation and have switched my focus exclusively to the support and protection of my communities. If you're reading this you're one of my own, regardless of our differences of opinion or whether you trust me or not. While we still have lights and roads, the best I can do is keep you out of barred rooms and make sure you have dry beans and the ability to cook them. If you are in need of anything to help you survive the coming years of social dysfunction, I'm your guy.

Because if it gets Lucifer's Hammer bad, each other is literally the only thing we'll have.

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Hope you enjoyed the trip down my weirdo House of Leaves text-based memory lane. What are some of your most memorable book discoveries or moments in reading?

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To read my previous Musing Outloud posts:

For more bookish material, read:

1. When first writing this in July 2020, I learned that Rudolfo Anaya had died in June. RIP