Del

STATION ELEVEN is the first book I've read to ask the brave question, what if post-apocalyptic fiction were boring?

I feel like I missed the moment when Station Eleven would have felt realistic to me. I found most characters very samey in thought and speech patterns. For example, dialogue from a 15-year old boy who was born after the end of civilization makes the kid sound like a 35-year old philosophy graduate student. None of the characters came across as distressed as I feel now, February 2025, and I'm not even living in a post-apocalyptic society (yet).

Lately I've been struggling to figure out if the kinds of books I've usually been drawn to have gotten worse or if my taste or standards have changed significantly. Something about living through all of this makes me tired of books about the end of the world, whether realistic or allegorical. Now just want to read weird freak experimental shit. I understand Dadaism way more now.

I use the term “pretentious” very judiciously when describing a book. Some people call a book “pretentious” when what they mean is, “This book used a lot of multisyllabic words I didn't immediately recognize,” or, “The tension in this book is mostly derived from character development, but I prefer a plot-driven book.” I use “pretentious” to describe books that assume an aura of importance or novelty that is not justified by the writing.
HOW FAR THE LIGHT REACHES is pretentious.
This might be a good book for someone new to queerness, multi-racial Asian identity, or cool sea creatures, but if you know anything about those three topics, then this book does not offer many novel insights.
I did find the essay My Grandmother and the Sturgeon to be quite captivating, and I think it is worth reading if you can pick this up from the library.
However, Hybrids was the low point of this essay collection, because I do not care for essays that include meta-commentary on what you almost wrote that would have made the essay worse.
First, by including the thing you say you are not going to write about, you are by definition writing about it.
Second, I just want to read a good essay, not bits and bobs of a bad essay. The author somehow wants me to think highly of their writing ability by pointing out all the ways they thought about writing badly but didn't. Good writing will speak for itself.
Third, if you start the essay by saying you will not write the multi-racial Asian essay cliches, I would expect something more interesting than yet another examination of what it means to be asked, “What are you?”

p.s., If you are not writing about art, then you get one “chiaroscuro” per book.

With how people talk about A WRINKLE IN TIME, I was expecting something on the level with Narnia, The Hobbit, or The Golden Compass. Maybe I would have liked this better if I had read it as a child who felt left out and nerdy, but as an adult woman this book did nothing to recommend itself to me.

Also, apparently this book is about communism being bad because it makes everyone the same, and yet here I am an American 60+ years after this book's publication thinking “wow these themes of brutal suppression of individuality sure do speak to me today, the day Trump is inaugurated for his second term.” 

The Invisible Man is not quite as weird or captivating as The Time Machine, but I still enjoyed it. Like The Time Machine, this book's story is told to a narrator who is then relating what he can of the story to us. Some parts of the story the narrator could find no direct witnesses to, so it is interesting to watch him construct the narrative like a detective at times.

I wasn't familiar with the story and have not seen the movie adaptations, so I was not really aware of how titular character is the villain of the story. I appreciated how at first you believe the experiment has made him mad, and then gradually you realize he was a self-absorbed asshole from the beginning. Turning invisible only allowed him to become more of the asshole he already was.

Content warning: HG Wells was a racist and eugenicist, and it does come out a bit in the book - there is one instance of the n——— word as well.


There were quite a few clever turns of phrase that I enjoyed and reminded me of British author Terry Pratchett.

“Opinion was greatly divided about his occupation. Mrs. Hall was sensitive on the point. When questioned, she explained very carefully that he was an “experimental investigator,” going gingerly over the syllables as one who dreads pitfalls.”“The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.”“He was simply exasperating. You don't blame me, do you? You don't blame me?”“I never blame anyone,” said Kemp. “It's quite out of fashion. What did you do next?”

And yet more quotes that stuck out to me for simply being amusing or evocative:

“Can't a man look at you?—Ugly!”“What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah?”“He glanced away from the barrel of the revolver and saw the sea far off very blue and dark under the midday sun, the smooth green down, the white cliff on the Head, and the multitudinous town, and suddenly he knew that life was very sweet. His eyes came back to this little metal thing hanging between heaven and earth, six feet away.”

And still more quotes that reminded me how similar we are to the people of 1897:

“The infinite details! And the exasperation,—a professor, a provincial professor, always prying. ‘When are you going to publish this work of yours?' was his everlasting question. And the students, the cramped means! Three years I had of it—““Then I saw in one of those little miscellaneous shops-news, sweets, toys, stationery, belated Christmas tomfoolery, and so forth-an array of masks and noses.”

This book felt incredibly bleak, although I'm not sure if that was the author's intent or not. I think we are supposed to see Keiko's realization that she functions best as a convenience store worker as a happy development. I don't. I see it as an indictment of the society she lives in that she is unable to navigate unwritten social conventions and ostracized for it, so she is pushed to the point where she doesn't even see the point in sleeping or eating if she's not doing it in service to a corporation.

I also wish Shiraha had been more fleshed out as a character. I was rolling my eyes at his third lecture about the Stone Age. I know incels are hung up on that, but they do have more than one talking point, even if those talking points are bullshit.

Still, this is an incredibly fresh, straight-forward style of writing that I really appreciated. I liked getting inside the mind of someone very different from me, and I found Keiko's insights interesting if a little off the mark.