second-thoughts

My takeaways from Chapter 1 (the intro).

A case of good writing with bad (reanimated dog) bones.

Brb choking my uncouth self to try to pygmalion into a well-spoken and intelligent being from the future.

A hybrid of Gene Wolfe’s “wtf is going on here” style and William Gibson’s “wtf is going on here” style: a pre-internet cyberpunk with incredibly futuristic social organization.

If you want a low-stakes book with a slight bit of hanky-panky and a lot of descriptions of shoulders and curves (and smells) go ahead.

This book introduced me to a whole different kind of anarchism, one that (I have since come to learn) is more similar to the academic perception of anarchism, and less similar to Kentucky Mad Max.

A Home Assistant integration that takes pictures of your cat(s) and forecast data, and then uses Gemini’s Nano Banana image generation model to create weather-themed pictures of your cats

I dream of one day being able to see the small ironies that make up human existence with the clarity with which CS Lewis does.

I am working on this theory that if you can genuinely understand and empathize with both perspectives in It’s not about the nail then you probably don’t need to read this book.

It’s like saying “I’m tired of everyone talking about American food, there is more to food than that!

I’ve recently discovered that progression fantasy books are crack to me

Yet here you are, stringing together days like flowers in your crown.

The scrappy go-gettem bildungsroman in the first half was enjoyable, the absurd Antarctic interlude scratched my itch for melancholy whimsy, but the last portion of the book was a slog.

I want to paint flowers all over my body now (but that’s it, I swear)

What a pleasure, to get to read this book as I drifted off to sleep each night, my eyes slowly closing, my mind wandering off, carried by the turbulent eddies of this story into my own fantastical dreams.

It’s like The Road except instead of dying everyone ends up in The Handmaids Tale.

Yes, it was too long, but I have read longer books and enjoyed them.

12 research papers—one per chapter—explained in layman’s terms.

A Hex upon the Indigo employee that convinced me to buy not just this long-ass book, but its two long-ass sequels as well (which I’ve since returned).

Yes, it was too long, but I have read longer books and enjoyed them.

There is scorn at the bottom of DFW’s writing.

The Victorian equivalent of the tumblr page of a 16 year old emo kid.

After being beaten, robbed, conscripted, lost, convicted, etc., Candide begins to understand the world in a different light.

"Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.

It was like reading an annotated, pared-down anthology of the top cancer papers of the past 100 years.

Drivel.

I have an insane level of respect for Tamsyn Muir for being able to do this in a fantasy/sci-fi without making anything feel tokenized.

One of the worlds most well-known love stories, set in a painstakingly rendered 15th century Paris

This book ripped the door right off my temple and has brought into full view the grinding paradox that I have been blithely skipping around on my way through the rat race.

And here, next to the cage of internet trolls, we have a group of people who actually believe they sleep with Severus Snape sometimes!

This was not a good book.

A clever juxtaposition that highlights how excellently humans are able to normalize things that are anything but

A candid peek into a side of America that I had only ever seen in YouTube videos - mostly those involving people with too-small shirts screaming in Walmarts, waving 2L bottles of soda over their heads as their waist-high children look on in terror.

Was ‘Normal People’ a misnomer?

The only saving grace of this book was that it was so short that it made counting the pages until the end easy…

I have always treated your ethnicity as something novel about you, and nothing more.

This was a highly relevant book for me, but not because it is about a global pandemic…