Fun twist on time travel, but also I think this might have worked better as a novella in some places, a play in others, a few short stories, an X-Files episode or something like that, etc. I don’t remember why I picked this up, used (in retired-library-book plastic sheathing even) or when. It’s been on my “to read” pile for a year or so. I’m probably going to drop my copy in a little free library rather than keep it.
“there’s a Cheers story in it” set me up to expect lighter stuff but these are pretty damned serious stories. I particularly liked “Exit Zero”, “Can Only Houses Be Haunted”, “The Ecstasy of Sam Malone”, “Flowers and Their Meanings”, and “Viola in Midwinter”, which is nearly half the stuff here.
gravely finished reading Strange Monsters of the Recent Past
Read along with Hubert Dreyfus’s “Philosophy 6” Berkeley lectures (archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_461120619) from 2007, which helped motivate me. Before I started, I wasn’t sure I would continue through and finish the comedy. Having read this Inferno, I’m pretty sure I will.
Fun page turner alt-history of an American dropped into a world without the west. Almost YA, and much of it’s time, and I’m unsure how it would survive critical analysis today, but I liked it.
My third Waldrop collection, and as a completionist confonting a best-of, I ended up skipping a few stories I’ve already read in “Howard Who?” and “Going Home Again.” Still a must for Waldrop readers. I particularly enjoyed “Night of the Cooters” and “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll.”
My first exposure to Waldrop, via a Kelly Link interview and small beer press opens with a bang, “The Ugly Chickens,” but I think my favorite was “Man-Mountain Gentian” about the Waldrop-invented world of profeesional zen-sumo wrestling. I immediately started to seek out the rest of his work.
I particularly enjoyed “The Sawing Boys” and “El Castillo de la Perseverancia.” Waldrop’s unique voice has me working through all of his (often overlapping) story collections, and makes me wonder if I should start going to SF cons to hear the current generation’s readings of their own works.
Lovely mix of music and art history, theory, biography, and music business insight.
gravely started reading The Inferno
Delightful, ridiculous companion to Pnin,. I’m confident I missed a lot (I only occasionally referred back to the lines of the poem referenced in the commentary) and still enjoyed it.
Shirley Jackson with theater kids. Mostly stuck the landing but idk.
One of the author quotes on Folk’s website (www.katefolk.com/home) blurbs these as “if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of Black Mirror” and yeah, pretty much. I’m too much of a ninny to watch Black Mirror, and if someone made this book of stories into a show I would be too much of a ninny to watch it, but I enjoyed each of these little tales of mostly single women, mostly in SF, dealing with some pretty strange things. Body horror, as promised.
Franklin’s lectures are no less relevant in 2025 than they were when she added the final three chapters in 1999 to texts delivered as lectures in 1989 conceived as early as in the 1970s with respect to a a gem of fascinating sets of dialectics regarding what she calls the real world of technology. Holistic and prescriptive work, planners and planees, environment and nature, liberation and exploitation, time and space.
““How weary one gets of this constant pounding,” Theodora said ridiculously. “Next summer, I must really go somewhere else.”
“There are disadvantages everywhere,” Luke told her. “In the lake regions you get mosquitoes.””
— Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House, p. 147
A fun break, finished in a day, deserving of it’s reputation.
as the women arrive at the house I put on Portishead’s self titled, this one needs spooky music.
Runyon’s gangsters have more in common with Benya Krik than Hammett’s, who gets a cover blurb, to me, but those characters are only in the first few stories—the rest are about a jewish boy’s (the authors?) childhood in Odessa. I enjoyed them, but I’m going to put off starting the second Babel collection I’ve got for now.
Covering 2010-2020ish, this caught me up on a lot of the struggle I had been oblivious to before 2016 and been distrusting of various sources since. Pretty remarkable work. Bevin succeeds, to me, at detailing the process and outcomes of what seem to have been predominantly anarchist movements he’s sympathetic to.
What a strange little book. Kinda a rehash and very abridged version of Levy’s Hackers that begins in WW1 and ends post-snowden. Especially strange to finish on hackers fighting back against the government and corporate attempts to run “the internet” as I was descending to land at DCA to attend the last ShmooCon in DC.
I’m still team Evgeny Morozov re: “what’s the Internet?”
Starting the year with the slimmest book on the pile, and a memoir to boot, worked well the past two years. I forget why I wishlisted this one — I thought I’d read another Adolph Reed Jr. book but I see shelving this now that it was his son, Touré, whose “Toward Freedom” I’d enjoyed (and just added to Bookwyrm.)
gravely started reading The Wrestler’s Cruel Study
Christmas gift