Matt

If it's okay, I'm gonna pass out now.

Stranger Things

And here is what I do instead:I break the circle of children who kill their parents in order to be free, to become themselves. I don't kill my parents. I am giving birth to my mothers.

Blutbuch

Blutbuch

Gregor Samsa might have turned into a bug-like creature but his family has always been assholes... I mean parasites.

It was a long journey to the rehabilitation of this female rage, but it is slowly finding its place and sheds a centuries-old taboo: It is written about, its roots are being identified, it gets compared to the male rage, in short: It exists. We have to cherish this place and kindle this rage's flame inside of us. A rage that demands justice, that calls out for redemption, that keeps us from falling into resignation. It is our rage that holds men liable for their actions and gives wings to our revolutions.

I Hate Men

Wenn ich höchstbeschäftigt von Dir fortlief, war es meist, um mich in meinem Zimmer hinzulegen.When I walked away from you busily it was to lie down in my room most of the time.

I have wished innumerable times to meet with a violent death, but I have never once desired to kill anybody.

This definitely has some very cool elements. The art is often gorgeous and comes with some great visual ideas that really make the autumnal aesthetic pop out. The story is quite decent as well with some charming character.
But it is also a bit basic and ending in a rather obvious way. I think this could have needed a couple more chapters to flesh out the mystery and some of the characters a bit more, or go into a completely different direction altogether near the end. 

I still have a morning-after pill a manager gave me “just in case a good last-minute job comes in”.

The Japanese Porn Industry Unmasked

O I don't think that [...] I'm a word that anyone should put in his mouth. Would want to put in his mouth. That anyone ever put in his mouth. That anyone spit out in order to slip on it later.

I don't like the police much. They're so arrogant.

Sailor Moon

Sailor Moon

Codename: Sailor V

“It all began with you, dear. It all began with you.” Seiji burped loudly, but his expression remained the same. A moment later he raised his rear end and let out a loud fart. He looked oddly pleased with himself.

Ring

Edge

Ring

Ring

Edge

In the Book it is not considered plenty when insects eat well. It's called plague. But how could we be punished when we are the punishment?

This was a revisiting of a book I read for the first time as a teenager. I absolutely adored it back then and used to call it one of my favorite books for years. As a huge bug fan and cockroach enthusiast, a crass story from the point of view of a cockroach colony inhabiting an apartment was an incredibly fun experience for me.
I had a feeling though that going back to it this many years later I would not have the same reaction to the book and I was right.

Again, the concept of writing a story from the point of view of a colony of Blattella Germanica, a common kind of roaches, trying to survive in an apartment that is going through some changes due to the relationships of the human tenant, is an incredibly fun one to me. The roach interactions are written very well for the most part with a lot of detail to their actual anatomy and way of living. Things like having the roaches get their names from the first thing they read after being born, many of them growing up from the glue in books and therefore having a personality imprinted on them from those texts, is a great idea and makes for a lot of entertaining brief character moments.
I also enjoyed how graphic some moments can be as some of the roaches have to endure some terrible things under the hand of the human tenant. There is a serious gore element to this book as roach deaths are described in a lot of detail and the bugs are imbued with enough personality to make it even harder to read at points.
It makes sense for a book about the life of ordinary cockroaches to be so grimy at many points. And a lot of these have been memorable to me. Some of them are wild like a moment where the protagonist roach comes across an aborted fetus in the sewers and has a cathartic beatdown, fed by his frustrations with humans at the time.

The unique protagonists are also used for some interesting and rather entertaining social commentary or exploration of human life. The differences between the autonomous and survival-driven cockroach and the more spontaneous and shame-driven human are commented on very frequently by the protagonist roach and can be pretty clever. There are thoughts and discussions between roaches on shallow beauty standards, hypocritical morals, questionable mating behavior, religion, and other things while observing their human adversaries.
Unfortunately, there are also attempts at racially charged commentary, which comes across as very heavy-handed, and together with the author's already odd focus on the ethnicities of characters and stereotypes, it makes for some uncomfortable and unnecessary pages. This is the side of this novel's crass nature that I cannot appreciate. Reading a white author create a stereotypical Afro-American living in the “ghetto” for example felt misguided, and having characters very often be reduced and called by their ethnicity throughout the book just seemed a bit strange.
Some of the graphic moments also go into very daring sexual territories; I wouldn't blame anyone to put down the book after reading those. This book certainly goes places.

This re-read really has been a conflicting experience through and through. Weiss' The Roaches Have No King undoubtedly has a general story concept that I absolutely love, and as long as the focus lies on the survival of and interaction between the roaches, I did enjoy this book greatly for the most part. But I cannot deny that Weiss' character writing is questionable at many points and his attempts at social commentary come across as pretty tone-deaf in some chapters.
I probably can't deny that reading it as a teenager added a lot to my still persisting love and fascination for bugs, which I appreciate. But this is definitely a flawed book with some extended ill-advised tangents.

Most Israelis think these are ‘wild' figs or ‘wild' almonds, as they see them in full bloom, towards the end of the winter, heralding the beauty of spring. But these fruit trees were planted and nurtured by human hands. Wherever almond and fig trees, olive groves or clusters of cactuses are found, there once stood a Palestinian village: still blossoming afresh each year, these trees are all that remain.

grandmaa lucky refugee grew vines of roses around the house;this time the roses had thornsjust in case.

Rifqa

Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by technologies we use daily.

How to Do Nothing

Interesting ideas and conceptually cool collection, but I just haven't been in the mood for short stories.

Rob Fleming is an immature asshole who escapes from real life into his vinyl collection and if I was Laura I'd probably leave him too after all he's done but still... I kinda like him. At least parts of him.

To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it.

 
Levé's Autoportrait is a unique sort-off memoir. It's not a chronological retelling of the author's life or an assortment of memories guided by a coherent thread. This book is a string of random individual thoughts from the person about the person. Little glimpses into a personality.
Between mundane observations and trivial opinions is the occasional heavier facet of his life, but all of it is presented in a neutral way. It's funny at times, thought-provoking at others, and knowing some of Levé's other works and his ultimate fate makes certain parts stand out even more.

At one point, Levé writes “My death will change nothing.” But I'm certain that his death changed how people read this book.
Coming to this after having read Levé's Suicide (twice) made the stream-of-consciousness writing seem very familiar. Reading Levé's candid thoughts about his own struggles with depression and experiences with suicide attempts buried between a hundred different mundane statements felt intimate. While Suicide always brought with it the question of whether the text might have been Levé's own musings about suicide or maybe a premature suicide note for himself, hidden in fiction, here with Autoportrait there is no game to play anymore. He's looking you right into the face and telling you, nonchalantly and seemingly unbothered, his casual feelings about his own struggles. Fiction and reality kind of connect here.
It's even more interesting when he proposes ideas for his future or offers assumptions about his later life which, as we as the reader now know, will never happen. He writes that he expects to die at 85, but his life ended at 42. He also claims that he will not lose his eyesight or hearing because he will die before that happens. That has become true. He writes that he would like to visit Japan before he dies but has a feeling that won't happen. Seeing that he died three years after writing this text, he was probably right.
He also thanks his parents for giving him the gift of life.
But he also writes that the hole is his “favorite part of a sock” and that he thinks “the big toe is doomed to disappear”.

Near the end, during one of the longer tangents, he describes how he spent some of his favorite moments with a friend who he had many drunken conversations with in the past. He then continues to say that this friend, one day, told his wife he forgot something in the house when they were about to leave to play Tennis, went back into the house and shot himself with a gun placed in the basement.
It came out of nowhere, but I immediately recognized it as the setup for Levé's other book, the aforementioned Suicide, probably his internationally best-known work. I remember reading a lot of theories in the past about who people think that book might have been about. Seeing it here, described in this context, three years before he wrote that Suicide, ultimately linked the personal autobiography of sorts with his fictional text.

Autoportait makes for a brisk and at many moments entertaining read, but also gives a very candid and intimate look into a man's personality.
Édouard Levé was an interesting man. Not because he was special or glamorous, but because he was an ordinary person, with his own unique experiences and thoughts, which he decided to put to paper in such a straightforward way. His life ended way too soon, but parts of his mind are forever left behind for curious people to read.
Autoportrait is like a randomly shuffled deck of personal experiences which makes it a more intimate and human experience than some written-out, elaborate autobiographies that I have read.

We must reject nihilism because that way lies fascism.

transform systems that centre getting even into systems that prioritize getting better

Nervous, edgy, extremely emotive in daily life, I have a tremendous reserve of calmness and aptness as soon as it's a question of carrying off a dead body. I become another person. I'm suddenly a stranger to myself, all the while being more myself than ever. I stop being vulnerable. I stop being unhappy. I reach a sort of quintessence of myself; I fill the task that fate has destined for me.

The Necrophiliac

Alone in the stretching night. He'd wipe his eyes and climb the stairs back to his bedroom, and collapse amidst the crusted up sweats atop the mattress. He'd sleep, again. It didn't matter so much anymore whether the computer was turned off all the way, and he barely touched his dick at all.

As someone who spent quite a lot of time on 4chan in his younger years, I'm a bit impressed with how authentic the imageboard posts that fill a lot of these pages are. The hateful, edgy lingo is perfect. The homophobia, the misogyny, the nihilism, the racism, the aggression, the lack of empathy and stunted reactions to suffering... It's all there as this book really doesn't pull any punches. And it makes for a fascinating digital setting for this story about an American hikikomori, barely existing in this world while the glow of a computer screen and the gore videos on it fill his already deformed mind as he swings between his bed and desk all day and night.

This is a disgusting book that can be hard to get through at points, but it's also very clever in its presentation and really engaging in its character study.
The author manages to capture this sort of hypnagogic state where the reader is confronted with the different layers of the protagonist's existence simultaneously, similar to how one might keep tabs on different threads on a message board at the same time. The chaotic digital conversations, the depressing real life, and the protagonist's dreams and memories all fill the pages at the same time, structured with some different formatting for easier distinction.
Aside from the general atmosphere, it also makes for some effective clashing of subjects. Like, for example, when the reader follows the users on the fictional 4chan-equivalent gather to organize a really cruel harassment campaign against a random person while also reading the chatlog of a camgirl stream where an overzealous viewer tries to clumsily express empathy towards the camgirl who shows signs of self-harm.
There is a lot in here about the two-faced, twisted moralities and values of (predominantly) men who lost their sense of reality and compassion after escaping into the unfiltered depths of the internet for too long, wasting away while celebrating the suffering of others.

The main character is an interesting extreme for that and while he is just as despicable as the other anonymous imageboard users, it is compelling to read how his life had developed to end in this dark place, how his world-view formed because of that, and how he deals with inevitable change when he is confronted with it.
This is a quick read but not necessarily an easy one given many of the fringe and transgressive subject matters that take part throughout this in one way or another. But I think if you are in the right headspace to take these things on and are interested in an exploration of this sort of lost soul, then this is a surefire recommendation. This specific online subculture has probably rarely been displayed this authentically and raw in fiction.
 

“Remember,” she said.This was their story. This was where they began. Drowning.

clipping.

The Deep

clipping.

Violence is never a solution — condemnation excludes understanding, and without understanding, we will not learn.

South of Forgiveness

Latisha may have thought magically about her own gender, but the myths of gender under which the adults in her life operated are much more pernicious and less attuned to the realities of gender than Latisha's fantasies. Those myths: that gender is binary, and that any deviation from that binary is wrong, and bad, and dangerous. And that it was Latisha who represented the danger and not those who sought to stop her, fully and finally.

This certainly wasn't an easy book to read. Both because of the heinous hate crime at the center of it as well as the philosophical concept that can be a bit challenging for someone like me who isn't very well-read in those things. It makes for a thorough and interesting analysis of human behavior though.

Gayle Salamon extensively analyzes a transphobic hate crime to recognize how the situation got to that point by following the philosophical thread of phenomenology which focuses on the structures of people's individual experiences and how our consciousness processes our world.
It might sound a bit abstract, as philosophy often does, but it basically looks at how something like unquestioned “common sense” can dictate destructive behavior, how the way we automatically project subjective meaning to neutral objects changes how we interact with them, and how the way we talk about things puts the blame on a victim faster than one might think.

The whole court case is pretty vile. Plenty of the quoted words from the court proceedings are shocking and makes you wonder how these teachers can even still hold a job at a school afterwards. There is unabashed victim shaming all around, sometimes under a thin veil of care. Gayle Salamon does a good job at taking their behavior apart, dissecting the biased contradictions, and showcasing how a non-existent threat can develop through biased interpreting of someone's neutral surroundings leading to a skewed attempt at “protecting” one party from another.

Rest in Power, Latisha King.

Some of the most remarkable things about Latisha King's short life was her resilience, the way that she persevered in her self-expression in the face of normative regulation and prohibition. She emerged, and persisted, in defiance of all the different forms of violence directed at her, with the aim of extinguishing her very being. She was not crushed into submission by the insistence, by family and teachers and peers, that she was impossible, that she did not exist - though all these forms of violence did exact their price.

Strangled by her own bra in the moonlight.

Gone but not forgotten. Rest in peace, Carrie!