ray

very informative. even if we want to say that copyright laws are designed to promote more creativity, this isn't the case in practice... this book argues that big tech uses copyright laws as a part of “chokepoints” to hold monopolies in creative distribution spaces, such as [company that rhymes with spindle]'s enforcement of DRMs in its audiobook and ebooks to destabilize traditional publishing companies and simultaneously lock in independent publishers into their platforms.

i'd recommend this book to people who are more musically oriented and interested in ongoing music streaming discussions as the authors are well versed in it. cool to find out about local initiatives like Rabble in chapel hill that seek to connect local audiences to local artists. librarians do not get enough love...

im gonna look into how to switch over from goodreads to storygraph. i love the reviews on here and finding tastemakers to introduce me to new books but i also wanna break free.... corporations will make it harder to switch on purpose but i feel a new determination after reading this...

mind blown. it's nearly 2am. my first read on my new xteink x4 tucked into my olive travelers notebook..

poverty and violence are intertwined. who really is the brilliant friend? the entire time i thought it was spoken from the perspective of our main character lenuccia but it becomes ambiguous... in any case both lenu and lilas fates feel intertwined with each other, in ways that im thirsting to find out more about, but i need to decompress after that. breaking the cycle is easier said than done... i felt like my own cycles have caught up with me, especially my desires from teenagehood to be taken seriously, to be liked, to be attractive... to prove to myself through others that im of value in some way in order to escape ones current circumstances. im delirious at this point and i love the symbol and imagery of copper material throughout.. as a conductor with even temperature spread withstanding high heat.... its association with moments of violence that seem inescapable ..... copper vessels meant to hold liquid..... i'm going bananas

my hitslist:
tlon uqbar orbis tertius
the circular ruins
the library of babel
the garden of forking paths
the secret miracle
the south

borges: simon says confront the limitations of language..
me: SIR YES SIR!
borges: simon says consider the relentless march of time..
me: SIR YES SIR!
borges: and also approach the infinitesimal circularity of history...
me: (genuinely speechless)
borges: simon says moondle...
me:

i think the narrative style (in descriptions of food etc) works really well with the characterization of aoyama– the exotic and sensual element creates the distance that forms the major hurdle she has to overcome. the food descriptions sounded soooooo tasty though. i want to imagine a world where the characters are happy ;.;

i think we are blind, blind but seeing, blind people who can see, but do not see... #true
the grammatical choices and lack of paragraph breaks/quotation marks is so fitting to me... the way that these structures are used to anticipate dialogue in the same way that an intake of breath or an opening of the mouth is used in sight. all of that is gone and everything becomes one. i started picturing bodies rather than individuals at some point in the first half of the book. it's insane. i like how none of the commonplace expressions were really common at all to me, but maybe that's because i'm missing the place, and i couldn't tell if it's really a portuguese saying or related to the unnamed city the book takes place in. what a brilliant and witty writer...

by organising itself, to organise oneself is, in a way, to begin to have eyes.

i understand now why han kang deserves the nobel peace prize.
it's one thing to say that in korea there's a dominant patriarchical society, that people don't discuss “mental health” or “generational trauma”, that there are stringent societal pressures to conform/perform to satisfy images and expectations, that there's a relentless pressure to work. i don't think these phenomena are specific to korean culture, but the way it impacts each character's point of view is well done... i think han kang is trying to say that the root of the problem is that these phenomena obscures how people relate to each other, and how mental health is “othered” without really confronted:
- in chapter 1, there's a social othering (disgust, contempt, seen as a desire to distance and run away when confronted with non-conformation (the forced lipstick, the behavioral expectations that go unmet));
- in chapter 2, there's a personal othering (admiration, engulfment, seen as a desire to portray and conquer, stripping the person away from their condition to be disseminated for view (capture on camcorder, infatuation with a physical mark– how the mark signifies childhood is its own point really));
- in chapter 3, there's a physical othering (incarceration of the mentally ill, traveling between boundaries, the justification of psychiatric hospitals out of love and a desire to preserve life but in situations that can't promote it)

idk. i feel like there's a relation to the korean war, too (the rapid industrialization of south korea, pervasive alcoholism, ...) the scars show up in some sense but i don't think i've had my head wrapped fully around it, other than noticing how the parents would have been kids in the 1940s or so. maybe the lack of mention of the korean war is a part of the issue (how does one reconcile.. how does a society reconcile with the past? i see it in my own family through demonizing oppressive forces, but where does that really lead?) id love to see han kang's take on religion #tbh

oh my word. i have 68 pages of highlights from tbis book (each “page” is only 3 entries). i am pnin and i am the narrator. the world wants a machine, not a timofey.... i know pnin will make it. i laughed. i gasped. it rounds out all very nabakovian and it still delights me in every way. i'll cheers to that with a flute of pnin punch..

i want life to mow me down, to feel its hand on the nape of my neck.

there's a darkness and heaviness to baltasar's writing (along with julia sanches's translation). baltasar's main character escapes the demands of society by living in an abandoned farmhouse. she watches the shepherd watch his flock, feeds baby lambs, and takes in a dog who can knock on doors. that's the main event that separates the book into before and after... and i liked the before a lot more than the after. i don't think the story has fully sunk in for me yet. the before is reminiscent of the main character from notes of a crocodile. the main imagery i have from this book is of the main character driving her tiny peugeot “the size of an egg carton” which i imagined to be robin eggshell blue. and the cat attack. if i had a nickel for every book where there are dead cats in involved with lesbians id have two nickels which isn't a lot but is kind of surprising

i lovee you alison bechdel. in imagery and in prose and in both at the same time. i love catching a glimpse into how others experience books, especially with authors that i've encountered, like virginia woolf. i also adore how she openly depicts the process of creating the graphic novel in her own graphic novel, of hanging onto her mom's every word, of drawing herself drawing her own dreams. I LOVE YOU ALISON BECHDEL! now im off to make dumplings

YES!!!!!!!!! an absolute blast. it's thorough and revealing of how randomized controlled trials are so important to understanding whether a treatment works or not, and the various roadblocks in getting ineffective treatments reversed. it's only been what, 30 years(????) since the use of RCTs in medicine became the norm– from my courses it feels like it's been this way forever... it makes compelling arguments for reforms in med school education. i really really like how they emphasize that RCTs can still be manipulated. what stood out to me was the use of surrogate end points that don't matter in impacting the things we actually care about (e.g. drug decreases the size of tumors but doesn't actually impact mortality). it shows how logic from a reductionist perspective/understanding of illness can lead us astray (e.g. tumors are bad so decreasing tumors should help patients, but it doesn't). so fascinating that as humans we strive for improvement and action and things we can do– at the same time the book is conscious of how it's mostly written from a US perspective, so i wonder what the financial incentives for trials etc look like outside of the country. i really like this book... this book is a good model for how one can be critical of their research field in a constructive way.

baby's first flaubert.... mme bovary has an idealistic image of love in her mind, one that she will always be chasing, and maybe one that will allow others to take advantage of her. i feel so sad for her... i don't think it would be difficult to imagine that she will continue to be striving for a type of passion or love promised by images but not necessarily attainable in reality, “gaping after love like a carp after water on a kitchen-table. mme bovary continues to carp around and she finds out. i've written “STAY AWAY FROM HER” in all caps before the last third of the book...

flaubert writes mme bovary with remarkable interiority, even if she's an instrument to agitate against romanticism. i do like how he portrays feelings with nature metaphors. love as a hurricane of the skies, feeling weak like the down of a bird whirled by the tempest, sorrow engulfed with soft shrieks such as the winter wind makes in ruined castles, etc. mme bovary lives in the tension reaching for something else. she dreams of “the days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves; and it swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonized, azure, and bathed in sunshine”, and i think they'll remain as faraway and impermanent as the horizon. but who can blame her? i think the greatest joy of reading has been to observe how similar human sentiments are, even over centuries in the past, and to witness how deeply people have searched for meaning in the past as they do now.

words that could be a beautiful name for a child:
[[paroxysm]] -> sudden burst of emotion
[[syncope]] -> fainting due to low blood pressure
[[scrofula]] -> tuberculosis (any word with the scro- prefix immediately makes me recall a certain other word.. ahem...)
[[fichu]] -> triangular scarf to be draped over the shoulders or head (i like how it looks like pichu even if the ch is a sh sound)
[[crinoline]] -> shaping stiff kinda petticoat (like a modern “carolina” maybe??)
[[nankeen]] -> yellowish cotton

i started the book at alyosha's age and i finished it at ivan's age.

an onion, nothing but a tiny little onion. i could use that right now

a few paragraphs of based cannot make up for too many pages of mid

i do think there are some really cute moments throughout the book. i like the part about the typewriters and the thought process behind that. i like the general idea that we should and can be more thoughtful about the things that we interact with. i like that these examples are so physical and concrete. but i want to hear his reflections beyond “huh, that's weird” and leaving it at that. it feels very unfulfilling and incomplete

and i think it's important that these design principles came about through failure, and it's reminiscent of the conversation analysis movement in sociolinguistics (occurring roughly a few decades earlier), where it's through the unexpected and unanticipated and “fails” that these more general principles are revealed. i think the intuitiveness of these concepts are so obvious to us now that it speaks to how important the concepts are. but at the same time, there are so many things missing, such as the discussion of power and uneven relationships between a designer and the users. who are you designing for?? and another discussion that i feel is missing is a serious discussion about planned obsolescence because it warrants more than a few brief sentences. maybe about the role of design in generating revenue for big companies...... how marketing and designing might not be so far apart, after all.

from poetry:
> Beauty waits in ambush for us. If we are sensitive, we will feel it in the poetry of all languages.

from blindness:
> I too, if I may mention myself, have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny– that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted to words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.

i love you borges. let's all have a borges fall

reading lolita in tehran in vancouver and also in charlotte NC. made me want to reread lolita. shivers up my spine. the way literature connects people from the past to the present and will continue to do so in the future. so inspiring. it's a book that made me want to read more and simultaneously look up into the world that we live in, especially as political tensions are emerging in the US (obviously not comparable to iran, but fascism is fascism)... what can we learn from stories and characters? who are we empathetic to, and who do we draw strength from? one of the main draws of this book to me is to know that there is resistance everywhere; people are fighting for freedom and education, which often come hand in hand.

i think what was beautiful was the depiction of loneliness and the rawness of it which cyrus experiences as a person caught between two worlds, through american/persian culture and also the present/past and also maybe dis/reality (or waking-life/afterlife?). also it's very pleasant to find queer people in all sorts of places. i was genuinely surprised when it was revealed that cyrus was TALKING TO HIS MOM! i had expected it to be his mom's friend for real. a pleasant experience... recommended for those who root for the underdog and also enjoy modern poetry

AHHH! i too would hold his feet to wake him up. im going crazy. fishing as a love language. i nearly threw up reading this in the car i was so nauseous being next to this poor wrecked man on a skiff out in the open water bleeding into the sea. ren gave me a bottle of ink with the same name, and it has the prettiest aquamarine blue with red glitter. that's how i pictured the waves as the giant fish bled out into the sea. when he started to fight himself i very much thought it was over for him. the mentions of the shark factory and in the end the sharks get him. i wonder how the sea smelled then.

i like how hemingway likes the verb to shiver, and i like his descriptions of the creatures in the sea that the old man is so familiar with, the “formalized iridescent gelatinous bladder” that's a portuguese man-of-war and the way the sea turtles eat them and popping them on the beach with the “horny soles” of his feet. he's a man whose body and mind has been battered it seems. there's a stiffness and melancholy that old people carry around with them in their bodies and words. the sliminess of the creatures of the sea and the softness and shininess compared to the rigidness that is man.. and an old man in particular... that made me so sad......

compelling character histories but the character presents(?) had much more to be desired.... its mostly a story told about the past, which makes sense, but i didn't find the ongoing interactions engaging at all. i think it would've been better had we been placed in the side characters perspectives rather than told a summary of their pasts condensed into a chapter. like other litfic i have the same criticisms about telling vs showing but it's mostly a difference in writing taste. i skimmed most of it.

i read this book on my plane ride to türkiye and throughout my stay in istanbul. the story is set in istanbul, and i do appreciate its explorations of its fluidity as a city and the struggle between eastern and western cultures (which ive observed myself) but i kinda wish i read another book instead. if only i had my ereader with me.... i regret buying the physical copy from the bookstore in london but at least it was 50% off???

the parts where they depict childhood sexual abuse is sooooooo gutwrenching. made me feel so nauseous. in terms of the murder mystery payoff and the entierity of part 2 i felt a bit let down by.. but i really like the setup and the segway from each minute to the next combined with the sensory experiences sights smells etc associated with the different memories

dostoevsky likes a certain type of character that's for certain. a type of underground character... lovely monologues as always, exploring the friction between two individuals who are not fated to be together. i don't know why my expectations were so high going into this-- maybe it's due to how, for the 3 days that i had tiktok on my phone, my "for you" page was inundated with recommendations of this book. of course there's that bittersweet tension of a few white nights on the bridge, with the anticipation building up with the will-they-won't-they relationship, culminating in the author's confession, but i wish there was more of the drawn out sorrow and heartbreak following that realization that could've been explored some more. but it's also hard to because once hope is snatched away the obsessive feeling usually ends, which is not typically conductive to a suspenseful story.

anyway i started reading this book because i was nursing a giant huge crush on someone and now the feelings have levelled out slightly after meeting them and spending a week with them.

> but how fine joy and happiness make a person! how the heart seethes with love! it seems that you want to pour out all your heart into another's heart, you want everything to be gay, laughter everywhere. and how infections is this joy! yesterday in her words there was such tenderness, so much heartfelt kindness towards me...

just read pale fire instead

contemporary writers want to be lorrie moore so bad. i'm not naming names but you know who

they told me it was yearning like yearnings never been seen before well maybe for straight yearning. it's real good. i like the madonna very much

reading this in the plane is a crazy experience. felt like i was experiencing a solenoid somewhat, with the vibrations around me. the prose itself has a nauseating quality to it that was perfect for the situation of being on a plane. very evocative use of imagery and metaphors– the literary canon as doors on the wall, the discarded braids as hopes unfulfilled. lice and mites which depend on us flipped into us depending on another. i really love how rooted in bucharest the book is, despite the vague city locations and qualities. i wish it were more like ulysses in that regard, where you can trace the events directly on a map. but it may have to be a different book at that point. i really love the higher dimensionality parts– they're a really neat concept that i love seeing explored in fiction, where math crosses over into pop culture (e.g. three body problem). i also love the whole alternate timelines situation, especially how they handled parallel universes. in some ways i've also had this experience of imagining a different life that branched off from one event, and in grieving that path i'm able to come to terms with what hasn't come to pass. i'm knocking a message on the wall for the other. and i want to believe and be receptive to the other paths which might be knocking a message for me. i wish the ending was resolved in a more abstract manner, but i see where everything needed to be taken in. it's a very haunting and engaging read that's very suspenseful.

sunburn was promoted as “if normal people were about lesbians.” i didn't like normal people, but i gravitated to this anyway. in the past year i've been reading more contemporary fiction, searching for voices that resonate with mine. sunburn was a delightful surprise to read. it filled up what i was craving for and searching for, maybe at this moment in my life in particular. lucy asks a lot of questions to herself in the book, and her actions speak for their answers.

is a dishonest life worth living? no, it isn't. through lucy's actions i feel as if i had a glimpse into how life might turn out to be in a possible trajectory of mine, one that i've been turning around in my head. i wouldn't hate being in a relationship with a man. they don't disgust me. a part of me craves that social validation, the social status that comes as a part of it. but lucy lives that life, and reveals to me the mundane realities that could have slowly suffocated me too. but i felt, deeply, the same sorrow that lucy struggled with, in her relationship with her mom. i think it's a very relatable feeling to want to hold onto the love from others, to flee from the fear of abandonment. but when the love from others comes with expectations that you must fulfill, you start to abandon yourself in the process to meet their image of you. and i think at the end of the day, a life worth living is one that you choose yourself.

sunburn is like normal people only in the way that the main character believes in the message that “true” love rests on a strong romantic bond, sexual chemistry, and infatuation. basically they're only similar in that the main character is a teenager becoming a young adult. but i like sunburn because the main character is selfish, manipulative, and also deeply repentant. i can't blame lucy because i've been in her position, torn at the crossroads, unable to decide which direction to take. and in some ways i still am. i am a coward in the face of many things, and i'm trying to become more courageous. living one's truth is a privilege, often coming from a place of independence and financial security. and so rarely do i see this dynamic in fiction, this one of a lesbian's perspective re: societal forces, that this is a very welcome breath of fresh air. my heart broke at so many points throughout the book. i want to believe that lucy and susannah can still carve out a place for themselves in the world. i know the world will change, but i hope the change is for the better, where we do not need to live and love in secret.

> Right now it seems as though I only have two options: I can be who Mother expects me to be, or I can be whoever I want to be. Each seems as treacherous as the other. I will find myself, son, I just need to stop acting my age and grow up. Mother only wants the best for me. We are old and new versions of each other. I see pieces of her in me, and pieces of myself in her, and still it's like we speak two different languages; I in my funny rural blabber, and she in whatever tongue grown women speak.