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The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
Published 1997 340 pagesIt's not a bad book. I like the way that language gets recontextualised via the perspective of children, although I think it gets a little heavyhanded after 300 pages. I like the nonlinear structure: it gives the book a sort of fatalistic quality. Things don't happen; they've always been and always will be. This means that elements of the past and future are constantly insisting upon the present. The prose was a little flowery, but mostly vivid, extremely sensory.
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Dhalgren
by Samuel R. Delany
Published 1975 836 pagesPhoto by Tom Barrett on Unsplash Last year, I read 35 books. This made me very pleased with myself, and I set a goal of reading a further 35 this year. Underpromise, overdeliver. I will probably finish 40 books in 2024, but let's not tell anyone about it, I thought. That way, it will seem impressive when I do.
It is now nearly June and I have finished two (2) books. The first one was Trilogy by Jon Fosse. The second one, as of today, is Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany.
I didn't like Dhalgren one bit. Normally I'd have a list of complaints and I wouldn't know where to start, but Dhalgren is frustratingly empty for a thousand pages. Nothing much happens: a blank-ish protagonist made up almost entirely of flimsy signifiers (e.g. only ever wearing a single shoe, donning a mysterious chain made up of prisms, going only as "Kid") bounces back and forth between a handful of setpieces in a postapocalyptic city, has sex with minors, and then describes in intimate detail where everyone's hands are. He publishes a book of poetry (which poetry is, significantly, omitted from the novel—but what it signifies is purposely left unclear) and then goes to the launch party for that book of poetry; this is the climax of the novel. Then he bounces back and forth between those setpieces a bit more, has more sex with minors, and then continues to describe what everyone is doing with their hands. Then the book ends.
A lot of people really like this book. A lot of people, but fewer, I think, really dislike this book. I really disliked it. It took me about 20 hours to get through, but at no point did it compel me to pick it back up and turn pages. There are fun ideas here, even if they don't really go anywhere—but there are maybe 60 pages' worth, not a thousand.
If you are not into this book by the time Kid arrives at the commune in the park, then it's not likely that you will ever be into it. Please abandon the book and reclaim the next six months of your life.
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Trilogy
by Jon Fosse
Published 2014 147 pagesA trio of novellas following a man and woman called Asle and Alida as they try to find a corner of the world to live in. The book is rich in allusions but doesn't club you over the head with it; though I've never been to Norway, the writing feels typically Scandinavian to me: spare, naturalistic, levelheaded, a little bit poetic.
Fosse's formal approach leans heavily on long run-on sentences and minimal dialogue, giving a sort of rambling vocal style to the text. It didn't resonate with me at first but I got into it after a little while. I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy reading more than a couple hundred pages of it, however: page after page of run-on sentence obliterated any sense of pacing for me. Not a problem here, but if I were sitting down to, say, seven full-length novels of this I might give up.
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Like, Comment, Subscribe
by Mark Bergen
Published 2022 464 pagesInside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
I watch too much YouTube. I try to stay away from social networks but the stupid red squectangle drags me back again and again. I start with a cheeky 6-minute video over a coffee and then kick into a fugue state from which I awake, hours later, in the middle of a video called "Goat Math". I cannot figure out how I got here. I'm into YouTube, but I wish I wasn't. After reading a glowing review from The Verge, I figured my best option to get me off the site was to read about it instead.
The good stuff: the book is probably an accurate portrayal of the facts as they happened. It's pretty comprehensive. It's a straightforward history of the company, from its humble beginnings to its acquisition by Google (a lot earlier than I remember it), to the problems posed by massive scale. It's not riveting, but it isn't dull. But it reads like a tech insider's perspective of tech (which it is), and that means that it inherits a lot of the biases that Silicon Valley is rightly criticised for: optimising for engagement, optimising for financial return, optimising for sick perks at the office, often to the detriment of individual employees and users.
When problems arise—when YouTube gets sued for copyright infringement, or when ads are sold on hateful content, or when the algorithm is juiced to hook kids on videos of busty Disney princesses, or when perverts gather in the comments sections thereof, or when otherwise-sensible public health employees get sucked into Goat Math fugues—Bergen presents YouTube as the victim of its own success: they optimised too well! At the eleventh hour, the application of elbowgrease by clever dudes with compsci degrees saves the day. When things are good, shareholders and advertisers are happy and everyone gets fabulously wealthy. Bergen imports Silicon Valley's value system wholesale and doesn't elect to interrogate the problems that—to be clear—YouTube has created.
In short: YouTube is the hero of the story here—not the creators, nor the viewers, nor the moderators on the front-line, nor the content managers who try to stand up for minorities and get squeezed out of the company (oopsies!). At the turn of the decade, controversial content, shafted creators, and predatory dark patterns have all been left in the past. YouTube's algorithms have figured it out; no one is to blame; the machines are working as expected.
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Either/Or
by Elif Batuman
Published 2022 368 pagesContent warning for references to sexual assault below.
All of the things that made The Idiot great are here too. Batuman's curious, naïve, slightly sarcastic observational style is undiminished, and her ability to make comments that cut directly to the heart of a feeling, an issue, a motif from her (or your!) past, continue to be on full display, like on love in high school:
That whole time, six years, I had always been in love with someone. It was the only thing that made it feasible to live that way, getting up at six and remaining conscious until late at night. It was like religion had been, for medieval people. It gave you the energy to face a life of injustice, powerlessness, and drudgery.
Hey, I felt like that too!
However, I have some comments.
I don't remember whether Selin, the author's narrative stand-in, posed quite as many questions in The Idiot as she does here. (My copy of The Idiot has long been returned to the library, so I can't check.) In Either/Or, at any rate, Selin employs and re-employs a rhetorical formula that reoccurs every few pages: a) something happens, b) Selin makes a wry personal observation, for colour, c) Selin adds an extra paragraph of questions about how that things reflects on humanity or society or herself generally. Occasional question-spiralling makes sense: that's how young, engaged people think. Continuous question-spiralling might even make sense for someone as self-aware and -critical as Selin is. But taking the reader with her starts to get tiresome after a while.
The last portrait in the show was a crayon self-portrait: "a near-death mask, starting terrified and goggle-eyed into the abyss." The image of ninety-one year old Picasso goggling itno the abyss, which was reproduced on the exhibit brochure, reminded me both of Jerry, and of Philip Roth, whose books Jerry had caused my mother to buy, and which I, too, had therefore read. Did it mean you were anti-Semitic if you didn't feel sorry for Philip Roth because shiksas didn't want to have sex with him?
Selin also experiences her sexual awakening here, with a series of mostly-faceless, pushy guys who force into sexual encounters that she doesn't solicit—and in some cases explicitly refuses—but which happen anyway.1 These men force her into their lives and take ownership of her body in a way that, to me, seems harrowing and dehumanising, but which Selin takes surprisingly in stride. She reflects on these experiences with dim pride at living an aesthetic life. Maybe I'm reading it wrong?
Finally—I'm not sure whether this book justifies itself. I'm not sure that this book, along with The Idiot before it, make more sense as two books, rather than a single book at like 80% the length of the two combined. That is—is 20% of the existing duology just filler? The way that Either/Or ends implies that there'll be another sequel, maybe covering Selin's third year at university—which would imply a fourth sequel for her final year—and I think that that book, too, will be like three-quarters really good and one-quarter filler to justify the book as a book. I'll definitely still read it, though.
- I think that's as far as I want to take that sentence: whether or not Selin identifies this as assault or rape probably comes down to lacking the context to situate her experiences.↩︎
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