glabnob

I burned through this in a day. Truly spectacular work. Gay, sci-fi, enemies-to-lovers, with such beautiful correspondence on loneliness and longing, and just enough spy novel cheekiness to keep things light, especially in the early portions. The difficulty of leaving what you know, what has made you, directed you, and protected you, leaving for that which you truly love is impossible to anticipate before you do it. I think it’s wonderfully easy, however, to feel the development of a connection which would warrant that leap over the course of their relationship of writing, dancing into danger with the echoes of each other, impressions and memories they must create outside of direct experience. In absence of their bodies they are still, to each other, ever present, and such is love.

Most of these are good, though I particularly enjoyed Inventory and The Resident. The SVU one was an interesting format/concept but it was a bit of a drag for me and I rushed through a decent bit of it. I don’t know that I would recommend this one that broadly, but certainly to the right folks.

A plodding read; I moved quite slowly through this one, at times because it required it of me, and at times just because I required a bit of a break from it. It’s easy to say that I enjoyed this book and then harder to explain to someone why it took me so long to finish it and why I probably couldn’t recommend it widely. Lispector uses her unconventional prose to circle and eventually touch upon so many experiences which come to us so naturally without the language to convey them neatly. Knowing this, she unmakes and recreates language in a way that allows us to recapture those, but this way is anything but neat. Similarly, we follow the tumultuous process of a man unmaking himself to others, then unmaking himself to himself, then reversing this process as he rebuilds a self for him and then painfully rebuilds it again to be consumable by others, one at a time, to understood coarsely, then more honestly and finely, then finally to become trapped in this experience of being understood and to prioritize it over being honest, losing himself then into the performance of a self rather than the experience of oneself. The way that Lispector writes out the direct experience of contact with the world, with our sense of self, and with other people is unmatched in my opinion. We are always hearing new examples of how someone expresses an idea, but reading hers feels at times like discovering entirely new ways to understand these experiences.

Our dear herman draws us along his own meandering path through New York as he shares his reading of the past, his work in the present, and his vision of the future, sparing no detail he deems worthwhile and including nothing else, writing to us (or, in his eye, no one) of finding and knowing another through their work, through attempting to experience life as they did, all as he instead shields himself from others, writing of connection and of the universal as he continues to remove himself from the world, and writing of direct understanding, describing his palace that would push all those many readers out into the world, away from mere information now permanently locked away, forcing them now to apprehend the world exactly as it is: in chaos, unordered, always leaving one without someone else to fetch that which we need from its depths, where we must now ourselves dive, risking failure, obscurity, and madness to find a life’s work we feel requires our hand upon the tools

When I started this book, I wasn’t super enticed by the author’s atomic prose (which others have joked about or imitated in their reviews enough for me to avoid it here) but it allowed for a couple notable things: consuming the book from a strictly functional perspective was incredibly easy, and anything beyond the very concise “Subject verbed object.” construction had increased contrast against that as their backdrop. I steadily read the first ~20% before slowing down for a while, then picked up the last ~70% and blazed through it.

After getting used to it, this writing style became a fine companion to the narrative, which was very engaging and challenging enough to follow with simple writing as it is. The bounce between a range of formats (dry reality, wet dreams, historical accounts, interpersonal correspondence, novel-within-novel…) adds to the feeling of building one’s world out of disparate sources and materials, even when these materials never arrive to the character whose world we are building.

The themes of knowing oneself (meaning one’s very reality, much less one’s “true self” that some might look for) and knowing others, the struggles of identifying the influences, experiences, and personal fabrications that shape our sense of identity and continuity in the world, and our (in)ability to extract truth from these or to understand the truth of another’s experience through typical means of communication, these all interest me, and the way this book approaches them (admittedly less-than-directly, aside from a few explicit mentions re: Kumiko) made this read a lot of fun.

A wonderful interplay between a lot of great themes: society's spectators and their objects of fascination, an artist and their art, an artist and their muse, naivete and cynicism, moralism and hedonism, the way we change through that which we consume and those with which we associate, one's pleasures and one's conscience, all that good stuff. The topics and their treatment were both engaging, and Wilde's writing was certainly lovely even if it did not pull me in the same way that others sometimes do. The half-star off of perfect is only for that. Some of my favorite moments would have to be our ever-quotable Lord Henry's "a saying for everything" manner of engaging with the world and Dorian's private moments of crisis. My least favorite would probably be some of the lengthy, indulgent descriptions of things (gems, flowers, etc.) found in the later portions; they may have illustrated well the extent to which Dorian was captured by these but did not capture me in the same way, and they were the only moments that I truly glazed over while reading.

I've been working through strategies to optimize my own work in this area, sparked on by recognizing the number of things I had seen, heard, read, or thought that had since left me entirely because they were not, in a sense, tied down to the rest of my knowledge by integrating them into a greater system or worldview. After reading about others using notes in the slip box style, I picked up an eBook copy of this and liked it quite a lot. I have been working in this fashion since, and though it is still early, I have found it very promising.

It's hard for me to assign a rating to this book because I feel that the information presented (the overview and explanation of the Zettelkasten method, the ideas for optimizing information storage for output, use, or retrieval rather than for ease of input, and the focus on the generation and output of new knowledge in the form of writing as the primary goal and measure of academic reading) this is all great, but the tone of the writing in some places and a bit of burdensome repetition of the same points made it a less enticing read. I would have rated it lower for the writing if I did not believe the ideas presented were of great value for those interested in leveraging slip box note taking for their own work.

Though they're quite straightforward, these four tales are written quite nicely, and I think they're unique enough takes on the typical stories for children to warrant the four stars. The Fisherman was probably my favorite for the fantastic tales of the Soul and the surprising turn it took toward the end. I would tell my kid this kind of story, though maybe after a few years of lighter material.