FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
3hr ago
Less Than Zero by Ellis
I'm not sure if he ever surpassed the debut. Maybe his sophomore novel, The Rules of Attraction. Less Than Zero might be the only book of his which isn't way too long.
It was probably my third favorite fiction book this year, as evidenced by the fact I read the 600-page tome in 2 days.
Glad I wasn't the only one here who loved it.
FtttG
3hr ago
300, Frank Miller
I haven't read this one, but I have read The Dark Knight Returns and a few Sin City comics.
There's a stock narrative in comic books, that Alan Moore's Watchmen and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (gritty, confrontational deconstructions of American superhero comics) ushered in the dark age of superhero comics in the 90s and early 2000s, in which creators like Todd MacFarlane and Rob Liefeld were constantly pushing the boundaries of acceptability as far as sex, violence etc. go, but missing the subtlety and nuance that made Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns so effective.
I think this critique has merit when it comes to Watchmen, even though I no longer hold it in as high esteem as I once did (not because of its edgy content – in point of fact I think Moore's later From Hell is superior in spite of being even more violent and raunchy – but because of its "look how clever I am" qualities). But to be quite honest, I don't think it's applicable to Miller. All of his works that I've read have seemed exactly as crass, one-dimensional and grimdark-for-the-sake-of-grimdark as MacFarlane and co.'s are made out to be. I will concede that Miller is a better artist than Liefeld (but then, who isn't?), but that's not the form the critique generally takes: it specifically holds that Miller is superior because of his greater sophistication and nuance in storytelling than his imitators. And nothing in his oeuvre that I've read has come close to justifying that claim.
Like you, my new year's resolution was to read at least 26 books this year from start to finish*. It's not quite the end of the year and I'm fairly confident I'll add Cryptonomicon to the list before January 1st, but seeing as we're all doing it, here's my list. At the time of writing I've read 28 books from start to finish this year (16 by male writers, 12 by female), in chronological order:
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Rejection (#3 fiction) – in spite of certain reservations, I can't deny that this was one of the most entertaining books I read this year, primarily on the strength of its first three stories. It is a terminally online brainrot novel: it's also pretty good.
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Katalin Street – a solid novel which offered me some insight into the experiences of Hungarian Jews during and after the second world war, which I'll never read again.
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Boy Parts (#2 fiction) – wonderfully nasty. Wears its influences on its sleeve (it's basically "what if, instead of an American male stockbroker, Patrick Bateman was a female British fetish photographer?") but puts enough of a spin on it to carve out its own identity. Its protagonist (as a friend of mine put it, a "female fuckboy") is vicious and awful, but never to the point of feeling like a caricature, and it made me empathise with one of her victims a great deal. The only thing that will date this book to the early 2020s is the insincere woke window dressing: no one is fooled by the token trans man character. It doesn't matter what you "identify" as: there are men and there women, and sometimes men are awful to women but women can also be awful to men, and there's nothing remotely "empowering" about the latter.
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The Trial – Dull as dishwater and a chore to get through. I loved Metamorphosis, so I don't know what kind of off-day Kafka was having when he wrote this. Numerous artistic works have induced the "Kafkaesque" sensation far better than the work widely credited with introducing it.
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Montaillou – I read this extremely dry academic work for research, and it was extremely difficult to get through but occasionally interesting.
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Orbán: Europe's New Strongman (#2 non-fiction) – I read this for research, but found it eminently readable and informative. Highly recommended if you're interested in the modern far-right and democratic backsliding.
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Kiki de Montparnasse – a biography of some French woman who appeared in photos in the 1920s, in the form of a graphic novel. It was fine.
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The Garden of Forking Paths – a short collection of several of Borges's stories, including the one of the same name. Thought-provoking and prescient.
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The Door – also by Magda Szabo, author of Katalin Street above. Longer, slower-paced and not as good.
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The Disaster Artist (#3 non-fiction) – OH HAI MARK. The most purely entertaining work of non-fiction I've read all year. I imagine even someone who's never seen The Room would find it interesting, particularly in its examination of life at the bottom of the Hollywood ladder. Virtually all Hollywood memoirs are by people who've succeeded there and hence chock-full of survivorship bias-laden advice about the importance of working hard and never giving up on your dreams: it's still refreshing (and quite sad) to be reminded that you can be strikingly handsome, a decent actor, have the relevant contacts, be hard-working, determined – and still not make it. Also vastly superior to its workmanlike film adaptation.
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Mina's Matchbox – fine, but some of these modern Japanese novels feel a bit formulaic.
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Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – pretty cool, I love anything Lovecraft-adjacent.
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Spoilt Rotten (#5 non-fiction) – who doesn't like a phlegmatic, digressive rant about how England sucks because of woke?
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The Man in the High Castle – interesting and provocative, but doesn't really work as a novel (unlike my beloved A Scanner Darkly). Constantly jumps between a diverse collection of characters whose plotlines barely intersect and few of which have any kind of escalation or payoff. A "slice of life" alternate history novel, if such a thing exists.
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The Perfect Heresy – like Montaillou, I read this extremely dry academic work for research, and like Montaillou it was extremely difficult to get through but occasionally interesting.
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Unsong – technically my second read, although Scott edited it quite significantly from the web serial version. As I said a few months ago, a mixed bag. Scott is nowhere near as good at writing fiction as he is at writing blog posts – but his blog posts are among the best in the world, so he shouldn't feel too bad about that.
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It Starts with the Egg – I read (skimmed, really) this one for research. Very informative.
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The Secret of our Success (#1 non-fiction) – fascinating, one of those tremendous works of pop science that makes you go "ohhhhh that makes so much sense" every other page.
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The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (#4 fiction) – tore through it in three days. When Christie's on form, you can't beat her. Best if you go into it blind. Going to see The Mousetrap tomorrow night, can't wait.
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Free – comparisons with Elena Ferrante are apt. An interesting and informative eyewitness memoir of Albania's difficult transition from socialism to a market economy.
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Speaker for the Dead – I loved Ender's Game, but alas can't say the same thing about the sequel. Found it quite dull, honestly.
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Stories of Your Life – I loved it almost as much as Chiang's other collection, Exhalation. Highly recommended.
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The Year of Magical Thinking (#4 non-fiction) – the only work of non-fiction that made me tear up this year. Essential reading for anyone who's lost a spouse, and anyone who doesn't want to.
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The Remains of the Day (#5 fiction) – I didn't like it as much as Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, but it was still really good. [Further thoughts] (https://www.themotte.org/post/3275/smallscale-question-sunday-for-september-21/368903?context=8#context).
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Doxology (worst book of the year) – I hated this book so much I ranted about it for several hundred words here. The most consistently annoyed I've felt reading a book all year – indeed, perhaps for the last decade. I find it hard to imagine a person who would enjoy reading this book, even if (unlike me) they agreed with its politics or had a particular interest in the subject matter (New York's punk and indie rock scene in the 80s and 90s). Irredeemable trash. Please don't let Zink publish another book again. This isn't just a question of a plot development that didn't pass the smell test or a single unlikeable character: on a stylistic level, her writing is fundamentally, irretrievably bad.
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The Outsiders – the best book I've ever read that was written by a 16-year-old, not that that's saying much.
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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (#1 fiction) – I had a feeling halfway through that this would top my list for the year's fiction. Granted that I've only read one book from start to finish since, but nothing is yet to dethrone it, even after reflecting on the other books I read this year. A lot of you disagreed with my gushing, but misgivings about its politics aside, I simply cannot deny the emotional impact this book had on me. Any novel that can make me feel like I know its characters personally and desperately want them to get what's best for them is doing something right. Heartbreaking and moving.
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The Story of a New Name – as I said, I can really admire what Ferrante is doing on an intellectual level, and yet her novels for the most part leave me cold. The impact would have been heightened were her books not so frightfully slow.
*Thereby excluding The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I started reading last December and which probably would have made my top 5 for fiction had it been included.
Some time ago I posted about the absurd arrest of Graham Linehan upon his return to the UK from the states. One of the tweets which prompted his arrest was a photo of a trans activist protest accompanied by the caption "a photo you can smell".
FtttG
3d ago
I think there's an important distinction between "working hard, but also availing of public benefits (like healthcare etc.)" and "not working and availing of social welfare".
FtttG
3d ago
Anyone richer than you is likely to have higher nutritional value than someone poorer than you
Given the inverse correlation between socio-economic status and BMI, I'm not sure if this is true.
FtttG
3d ago
I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently well-acquainted with Q to know what beliefs of theirs would qualify as doublethink.
FtttG
3d ago
he’s actually fairly normal looking
The reason the Internet is simping over him and not over Tyler Robinson is precisely because he is not "fairly normal looking". Tyler Robinson is fairly normal looking — Mangione, by contrast, is ever so dreamy.
FtttG
3d ago
Liberals get the bullet, too! "I'm one of the good bourgeois" has never saved anyone, and they should perhaps consider the fact that they are much more like the CEO getting shot than they are to the usual suspects that get shot without too much news coverage.
Everyone calling to "kill the rich" or "eat the rich" conveniently defines "the rich" as everyone in the income percentile immediately above theirs, or higher.
FtttG
3d ago
Doublethink like this is endemic to conspiracy theorists of all stripes.
- The movie JFK alternates between claiming Oswald was an innocent patsy framed for two murders he didn't commit, and a skilled assassin betrayed by his co-conspirators and killed because he knew too much.
- Palestine sympathisers will swear up and down that Hamas and the broader Palestinian independence movement have the right to engage in violent resistance – but, conveniently, every single civilian killed on October 7th was killed by Israel under the Hannibal directive. Thank Christ for that!
- Immigrants are taking our jobs, except when they're mooching off welfare. (You can make this not-doublethink by phrasing it as "either immigrants are taking our jobs, or they're mooching off welfare". But at that point the fig leaf has wilted and you might as well just admit that you don't have principled economic reasons to oppose immigration.)
FtttG
5d ago
Immediately after he asked the woman the question, he left, and she tattled on him to the police. The police confronted him, and one of the officers was wearing a bodycam, which is where the still came from.
FtttG
5d ago
This is the same kind of transparent nonsense as that stupid "sealion" comic, isn't it.
FtttG
5d ago
What "viral moment"? He wasn't filming anything. He politely asked one of his fellow citizens a rhetorical, non-personal question in a public place.
Reminds me of the time the Independent compiled a list of Prince Philip's "most excruciating gaffes" – by which they meant, of course, a list of occasions on which Prince Philip was fucking hilarious. I dare say even the author probably had a chuckle at a few of them.
"How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?" Asked of a Scottish driving instructor in 1995.
"British women can't cook." Winning the hearts of the Scottish Women's Institute in 1961
"What do you gargle with – pebbles?" To Tom Jones, after the Royal Variety Performance, 1969. He added the following day: "It is very difficult at all to see how it is possible to become immensely valuable by singing what I think are the most hideous songs."
"If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it."
"People think there's a rigid class system here, but dukes have even been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans."
The fact that you think asking someone a question about Islamic attitudes to domestic violence — even as a "stunt" — warrants assault does not incline me to give much credence to your attitudes towards censorship. Frankly, the more I learn about your worldview, the more infuriating and alien I find it.
A doctor knowingly lying to the concerned parents of a trans-identifying child about the efficacy of "gender-affirming care" in preventing suicide? A-ok. Asking someone a question about Islamic attitudes to domestic violence? Grounds for assault.
- A man posts a video on Facebook expressing his opinion that immigration to the UK is out of control, and that those migrating to the UK include "scumbags" and "psychopaths". Arrested and charged with inciting racial hatred.
- Street preacher tried (and thankfully acquitted) for "religiously aggravated intentional harassment" after saying "We love the Jews" to a Muslim family.
- Former footballer posts a tweet arguing that a certain black female football commentator was a diversity hire. Convicted for malicious communications.
- Shopkeeper posts a sign in the window of his shop explaining that, owing to "scumbags" shoplifting, he has no choice but to keep valuable items in locked cabinets. The police instruct him to remove the "offensive" sign.
- Man posts a meme depicting Pakistani men armed with knives arriving to the UK in boats, with the caption "coming to a town near you". Jailed for eight weeks.
- A woman is volunteering at a street stall offering advice for ethnic-minority women trapped in abusive relationships. A street preacher approaches her and asks her her opinion on whether domestic violence is specifically encouraged by the Koran. Arrested.
- A Jewish man carries around a placard mocking the recently deceased leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Arrested.
- Retired police officer tweets about a rise in antisemitism since the October 7 attacks in Israel. Arrested. In a real mask-off moment, the bodycam footage of his arrest features one of the arresting officers expressing alarm about the "very Brexit-y" books on his bookshelf.
- The headteacher of a primary school retires, and the board of governors elect not to recruit a replacement, leaving the role vacant for several months. Parents of a pupil in the school (one of whom was on the board of governors last year) are exasperated by this, airing their grievances on a parents' WhatsApp group. The chair of governors objects to this and sends the parents a letter asking them to stop making disparaging comments on social media. Furious, the mother posts the letter on Facebook, venting her anger. Subsequently, the couple are arrested.
- A list of people who've been arrested (and, in some cases, convicted) for doing things like praying outside abortion clinics or holding up signs reading "here to talk, if you want".
Just to illustrate that accusations of two-tier policing are entirely warranted, a 25-year-old influencer posted a video in which she called for the deaths of all conservatives. After being questioned by the police, she was not arrested.
British man visits some friends in the states, during which trip they invite him to try his hand at firing a gun. They take some photos of him holding assorted various firearms, in a fashion which highlights his inexperience. When he gets home, he posts some of these photos on LinkedIn with self-deprecating captions.
I'm going to have to beg to differ on this one, I really did not understand the hype. Most of the book I just felt sorry for this fucking loser's poor mother.
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