Laith

I’m typically loath to review sequels deep into a series, particularly when they are continuations of one story — sequels tend to be overly dependent on prior material, making it nearly impossible to judge them on their own merits. That’s never been the case with Wayfarers. Every entry has been distinct in both style and subject from what precedes it, each being tangentially related at most. Record of a Spaceborn Few is equally unique: it returns to the Galactic Commons to explore the lives of everyday humans living as part of the Exodan Fleet. Where the previous entries were more alien-focused, action-packed romps, Record is a slow-rolling exploration of the mundane — a slice-of-life carried along split narratives, and an exceptionally pure exercise in world building.

After destroying the earth (either through war or indifference), humanity pools its remaining resources to build a fleet of generation ships. Vowing never to repeat the mistakes that led to earth’s destruction, the Exodus Fleet sets out to seek a new home world, bound by a pledge that no member would ever go hungry or unhoused. Centuries of travel forge a way of life firmly communal, if not outright socialist. The Fleet ceases its wandering once it encounters a member species of the Galactic Commons, whose donated technology allows humanity to settle and join the galactic community. Now orbiting an alien sun and living under artificial gravity, it seems humanity has reached its destination — and yet the Fleet persists. When a disaster destroys an entire ship, it throws the central question of the book into sharp relief: what is the purpose of the Fleet once it has reached its destination?

Rather than telling, Chambers shows us what life is like for this future human race. Record is told from the viewpoints of five characters: Tessa, a mother of two dealing with the aftermath of the disaster; Kip, a wayward teen coming of age aboard the Fleet; Eyas, a caretaker who administers Exodan funeral rites; Isabel, an elderly archivist hosting a visiting alien scholar studying Exodan culture; and Sawyer, a planet-born Exodan newly immigrated to the Fleet. Events slowly unfold as we jump between perspectives and inhabit the Fleet alongside these characters, coming to understand their way of life, how it is changing, and why it must continue to do so. The perspectives of Sawyer and the alien scholar are particularly brilliant devices, grounding newcomers with organic explanations for the most mundane aspects of Fleet life — and it’s in exactly these quiet details that Chambers is at her best, able to paint a vivid and complex world through character and setting alone, never stopping to announce what she’s doing.

The core strength of the book is its portrayal of a powerless humanity. It’s a decidedly anti-sci-fi concept to have us be the charity case of the galaxy, and it perfectly complements Chambers’ quiet style while tying neatly into the dynamics of the prior entries. The character work, as throughout the series, is superb — Chambers has always been able to tell deeply human stories through non-human characters, and with the focus now squarely on human territory the emotional resonance is at its highest. This is a book that is genuinely touching and surprisingly relatable despite its setting, and one that any reader could pick up without having touched the prior entries.

The main weakness is structural. Five perspectives is a lot to carry, and for a significant stretch of the first half your attention is scattered across threads at very different stages of development — you find yourself waiting on the narratives you care about most while others catch up. It’s a common hazard of this kind of ensemble storytelling, and Chambers navigates it better than most, but the imbalance between a slow first half and a more assured second is noticeable. That said, Record of a Spaceborn Few is not quite my favourite of the series — but it may be Chambers’ most accomplished piece of world building, and that alone makes it essential reading for anyone who has spent time in the Galactic Commons.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Batman: The Long Halloween thrusts the very best of Batman right in your face: grounded detective noir, a Godfather-esque crime plot, iconic art — all with the tragic origin story well in the rear-view. For the whole class of Batman fans who have never picked up a comic, this is the perfect place to start. Sure, there’s Batman: Year One, which Long Halloween continues, but I can’t bear to watch Martha Wayne’s pearl necklace clatter across Crime Alley for the millionth time, and I’m sure fans of the films and TV shows feel the same.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Long Halloween features a grounded detective-noir plot that blends Batman’s traditional rogues gallery with a Godfather-esque Italian mafia crime story. We join Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and DA Harvey Dent in their quest to capture “Holiday”, a mysterious serial killer whose crimes fall on major holidays and target the Falcone crime family. If you’ve seen Nolan’s The Dark Knight, or particularly the newer Reeves/Pattinson The Batman, you will find the root of so many of their story beats here. The origins of Harvey Dent/Two-Face, the complex relationship between the Falcones and the Waynes, Batman’s identity as a detective — it’s all coming from Long Halloween.

Something I particularly appreciated, as a devoted fan of the animated series, is the art of Tim Sale. Long Halloween is a perfect blend of the iconic gothic/art deco style of the animated series and the high-contrast visuals of classic cinematic noir. Sale’s character designs are nothing short of iconic: the bulky, over-masculine, intimidating silhouette of Batman; the uncomfortable level of detail given to Harvey’s scarred half; the grotesque, disturbing proportions of the Joker’s smile. There are also seemingly endless visual nods to classic Hollywood crime and noir, from The Maltese Falcon to The Godfather; something that tickled the film nerd in me and evokes a distinct 1940s silver-screen atmosphere.

The story continues in Batman: Dark Victory and later Batman: The Long Halloween: The Last Halloween (a complete mouthful); the latter a little too rogues-gallery-focused for my taste, but the former an absolutely fantastic sequel. If you want to read a few Batman comics but aren’t sure where to start, this is the perfect entry point to bridge the gap from the films.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Spook Who Sat by the Door slides right into my sweet spot, it’s got three of my favorite things: spies, satire, and strong writing. Equal parts spy thriller and critical reflection on racism and violence directed at Black people in America, this is so much more fun to read than the description on the tin would lead you to believe.

The title alone tells you everything about the book’s sensibility — it’s a triple entendre: a play on the common practice of using Black people as window dressing; “spook” as both spy and a slur for a Black person; and, when you consider that the spectre of Black insurrection has haunted American politics since the country was thirteen colonies, a ghost story. That layered, sardonic intelligence runs through every page.

Spook tells the fictional story of Dan Freeman, the first Black agent hired by the CIA; an opportunity engineered not by the success of the civil rights movement but by the political machinations of a Senator seeking to retain the Black vote. Freeman plays the role of someone subservient and simple-minded to get through the selection process, and finds himself installed as a literal display piece: Section Chief of the Top Secret Reproduction Center, a glorified copy boy in a glass office next to the director. His superiors believe him sidelined. They’ve made the fatal mistake of giving him the entire CIA playbook.

Freeman spends five years memorizing everything he can about guerrilla warfare, weaponry, and CIA tactics before resigning and returning to Chicago — ostensibly as a social worker, in reality to recruit and train a local street gang, the Cobras, into a disciplined guerrilla army with cells across the country. The spark comes when riots erupt following the police murder of a Black child on Chicago’s South Side. What follows escalates from urban insurgency to open confrontation with the National Guard and airborne troops, punctuated by some genuinely gleeful set pieces, including the kidnapping of a Guard colonel who is dosed with acid, painted in blackface, and released to be found by his own men, giggling in a fountain.

The book’s moral and emotional weight, however, rests on Freeman’s relationship with Dawson, his oldest friend, a Black police officer and committed integrationist who believes change must come from within the system. Their ideological divide eventually becomes a tragic personal one, and the confrontation between them is where Spook earns its depth. The ending gnaws at you long after the final page, elevating the novel above an anti-white daydream. It asks a question it refuses to answer cleanly: can you dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools without losing yourself?

The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a manual in revolution and a reminder that underestimation is a poison. It’s also, remarkably, a joy to read. I loved it, and I’ll be buying a copy as soon as I can find one.

A note on the book’s history: many people assume Spook was banned, but the reality is more insidious. It was iced out of the American publishing scene entirely, finding its initial success only in the UK before becoming an underground classic stateside. The 1973 film adaptation, made with Greenlee’s direct collaboration, fared worse: it was quickly pulled from theaters by authorities who deemed it a risk for inciting riots. The book’s suppression is, in its own way, proof of its power.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

My god does this book sneak up on you. I’ve heard people describe it as a thriller, or a tragedy, but I think they’ve got it wrong — this is horror, plain and simple. Not cheap horror either; this is slow-burn dread buried in technological distrust, the mechanics and foreshadowing ingeniously concealed in all too mundane complaints about modern life: corrosive internet culture, billionaires, mass surveillance. It all builds to a sudden moment that flips your perception of every character on its head and furnishes one of the blackest endings I have ever read.

The real star of this show is Robert Lemoine. He’s so inconspicuous, so little of his interior life revealed to the reader compared to the others, that he just slips under your radar. Sure, he’s a little creepy from the start — the drones, the surveillance — but we are so accustomed to the impression of the ineffective, undeserving billionaire that we write him and his cartoon villainy off as just another obnoxious caricature. Somewhere along the line, though, you begin to realize that he is not an obnoxious caricature, that he did not stumble into money, and that he is instead cut from a more sinister cloth: the high-functioning sociopath. Once you realize he’s the only character actually playing the game, his every prior action becomes laced with sinister intention, and you begin frantically recontextualising everything — characters you’ve spent the whole book rooting against you are now desperately hoping will succeed.

The book follows Mira and Shelley, two leaders of the titular Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that grows crops on vacant land, scrounging and sometimes stealing what they need. Mira identifies an opportunity to bring the group into solvency: a landslide in southern New Zealand has cut off the town of Thorndike, leaving a large farm abandoned. But Lemoine has his eyes on the property too, hoping to buy it for an apocalypse bunker, and when he catches Mira scoping the farm he offers her funding and use of the land.

A significant portion of the book is spent familiarising us with the Birnam Wood cadre: Mira, the charismatic but unappreciative leader; Shelley, a disgruntled functionary who wants to leave but won’t confront Mira about it; and Tony, the self-righteous founder who returns from abroad to find himself alienated from the group. Each is a purposely grating caricature of a self-absorbed, liberal-minded eco-warrior. You’d be forgiven for putting the book down at the midway point — by then you’ll be thoroughly fed up with these unpleasant characters and the heavy-handed social commentary they spew. But that irritation is precisely the point. They are the cover.

The last quarter of the book is blindingly incandescent and impossible to put down, in the vein of Fargo + The Beast in Me — a slow, dreadful burn culminating in an absolutely unhinged finale. My only caveat (and it's a fairly major one) is that it takes a long time to get there; I really had to slog through the first 50–60% of the novel. If you choose to read Birnam Wood, please do not put it down halfway. That’s all I can say.

Heat 2 is unique in that it's usually books that are turned into movies, and here is something that should have been a movie presented as a book. A common adage is that books are movies in your head, but I find myself unable to review this as a book because I didn't really read this so much as watch it. As a massive fan of Heat (1995), this was so visual for me, it felt like I was watching Val Kilmer, Pacino, and De Niro doing their thing. I think that might be the highest praise I can give this book.

It is structured a lot like a movie: it has three acts, there is conflict in every "scene," and it felt closer to a screenplay than your typical book. I did listen to a good chunk of the book and the sensation of "watching" was probably egged on by Peter Giles' raspy narration and purposeful impressions. I can't tell whether or not the "watching sensation" is because of the quality of the prose considering how much attachment I had towards these characters before I ever cracked the cover.

That said, as a piece of writing I'd call this quality, and I think someone who hasn't seen Heat would be sucked right in. As the story builds, particularly the prelude portions, there is palpable tension that sinks right into your gut. There were moments where I had to take a break because of how anxious it was making me.

I cannot wait for the film adaptation. I generally recommend this to fans of the film. It gets a de facto 5 stars.

Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change is a bit of mixed bag, a piece of journalism that was better received by its contemporaries than it has a right to be by the modern reader. This is a not-quite comprehensive overview of US interventionist actions that resulted in regime change starting with Hawaii (1893) and concluding with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (2003). While still a critical piece this trades away a lot of the nuance and depth surrounding these subjects for the sake of accessibility.

Overthrow is more of an introductory text than anything else: the prose is exceptionally clear, well paced and easy to understand. Read this for the names, the dates, and a basic understanding of the motivations behind why our country raises its sword. I'll give Kinzer credit because he's generally evenhanded and calls the play correctly when it comes to the "why", naming the big 2 motivations clearly: capitalist interest and missionary/paternalist racism. For nearly 150 years the US opinion of much of the rest world has been that it is uncivilized and in desperate need of democracy and high yield explosives; that is the main take away here. He correctly points out that in most cases of US intervention we have overthrown governments that had principals similar to ours and replaced them with autocratic regimes that made us less safe in the long run, those changes made to serve the purposes of capital and not the people.

However, the closer he gets to contemporary events, the less reliable the commentary. Generally this is true of most things as they are divorced from hindsight and the facts get obscured by the fog of war. In the case of Overthrow, it means Kinzer is unwilling to totally criticize US overreach in Iraq and does not contemplate theoretical alternatives to the status quo (going as far as to suggest military rule of Afghanistan). This text is deeply guilty of oversimplifying geopolitics, (which is admittedly a grossly complex subject) leading the reader to make many systemic assumptions about the way the world works which go largely unchallenged. In the interest of tying up each chapter with a bow, Kinzer provides summaries and counterfactuals that I'll generously describe as shallow and un-nuanced. A common thread across the whole book is that some interventions were worth it, taking sides without really explaining why or how he arrived at his conclusions.

There is one major sticking point that needs to be addressed: the complicity of American press and media conglomerates in all of these events. A true ironic chord is struck as Kinzer takes time to highlight the role of propagandist journalism in much of the Latin American coups of the 20th century while personally participating in that same system in his professional journalistic career. It's plain that Kinzer wants to support some of the interventions mentioned in this book, and that carries over to his more modern reporting on current imperialist interventions (Syria, Ukraine) for the NYT. He has written extensive pieces that defend practices/abuses perpetrated by all manner of autocrats- at a minimum he is guilty of lacking skepticism in his coverage. Whether he sides with Washington, or Moscow, or Damascus he does take sides in the press, and he does it at the behest of a media conglomerate which profits from upholding the status quo. As in the case of the US occupation of Nicaragua the media's choices of topics and issues, the unquestioned premises on which that coverage rests remains in the hands of corporate interests and are constrained to reinforce the state's ideology.

If you don't know why Hawaii is a state, or that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens then this is a book you should read, but I don't recommend that anyone stop here, particularly if they are interested in the subject of imperialism or US covert actions.

A group of interstellar travelers, ordinary people, find themselves stranded after their starship suffers a warp-drive malfunction and disintegrates way off course. The scant survivors are stranded on a barren planet with no hope of rescue; equipped with dwindling resources and no sure method of obtaining more, the survivors band together to overcome the odds and tame the vast wilderness for future generations. All but one survivor, that is. The narrator has done the math: if thirst doesn't kill them, hunger will, and if hunger doesn't kill them, then in a few generations, inbreeding will; they are doomed. The narrator decides she'd rather die with dignity, opting to flee from the others as it becomes increasingly clear that they intend for her to carry out the mission of populating the planet whether she wants to or not.

There's no way to get around it, this is an unpleasant book to read. I'll be upfront, whether you find some enjoyment in this will hinge entirely on how much you buy into the premise and the prose because it's unlike most other books I've read. We Who Are About To is delivered as a transcript of an audio diary, with all the weird punctuation, ramblings, and cut off thoughts that go along with such an idea. It's not comfortable to be locked into the perspective of a suicidal pessimist who by the end of the novel is/is going insane. Opinions are generally split, some people hate it and others think it's a work of genius that plays by its own rules- I'm not sure which camp I personally fall into because I while didn't hate the prose I do agree that it's a bit boring and difficult to read. But I give it a pass because so much of what's "wrong" with the book is clearly by design.

We're going to get into spoiler territory now. Because I buried the lede, while our narrator flees the group seeking to survive on rations and eventually transition to death in her own time she is not left unmolested. The surviving men of the group track her down, aiming to impregnate her on their return so they can begin their colonization attempt. She resists, brutally murdering her pursuers and returning to the camp where she kills the remaining survivors, her fellow women and a 12 year old child. Left alone she begins to lose her grasp on sanity, suffering hallucinations she is haunted by her victims and specters of her past. Weak from hunger she kills herself, the final line "well it's time".

It's odd to characterize a Novella as a slow burn, but that's what this is. It's a slow, cold, burn- and a lot of that has to do with the narration, how seemingly detached her perspective is from the present moment. Given the narrative device (the transcription of an audio diary) at nearly all times it is a story told from hindsight- it lends a reflective element and psychological edge to even the most horrifically violent moments. Initially told with only a slight delay between event and transcription there is a significant shift towards the midpoint where most of the story is being back-filled, given color by the time that has passed since the narrator committed herself to the project of dying.

So much of the second half of the book is devoted to the ennui the Narrator experiences, to her and to the reader it is torturous to get through. This is of course by design, while this is not the first book to explore boredom as torture it is one of the few (if not the only) that turns into a slog to prove its own point. It's really quite bleak by the end and as we're increasingly left alone with the narrator and her thoughts you can't help but to ruminate on the hopeless realities at play. Whether it's the narrator philosophizing with her past self or reflecting on the morals of her actions, you get a visceral sense of their absolute desolation by the time you reach the final page.

This is hailed as "Feminist Science Fiction" and I get that label, but I more so saw this as a reflection on this genre and these types of stranded/colony stories writ large. I think it's totally a matter of time and progress that I don't find this all that feminist, to me the narrator's desire for bodily autonomy and outright refusal to be raped/impregnated is more of a cut and dry "you shouldn't do that to people AND of course she gets to make that decision" sort of thing; that probably wasn't the prevailing sensibility in 1975- particularly within the conventions of Sci Fi. More-so I saw this as commentary on the types of books in this genre that would largely forgive the delusion of the group, the manifest destiny impulse that causes them to shed their civilized clothes and rush in beastly and feudalistic directions. If you asked me what I found most feminist about the book id say it's Russ' outlook on the point of living and reproducing, the break from the mainstream view that the reason we exist is to reproduce, because that's patently not the point of living to the narrator. She views reproduction as a means to perpetuate and mend our present mode of civilization, that to reproduce means choosing to continue life as it is it; if that life is not worth living, neither is reproduction.

I think this is a worthy if difficult read, difficult because of the style but also because of the content. It will leave you grappling with quite a bit or it may put you off entirely. It came highly recommended to me, so despite rather liking it, I thought I would love it and I didn't.

I won't actually be reviewing this book suffice to say it reads like an Andrew Tate fueled fever dream. Our main character, Adam, finds a magic book and turns his friend into a fish. Instead of immediately trying to turn him back he gets blackout drunk- his friend swims away and he loses the book in a home invasion. The majority of the book is about him stealing back the book and covering up the disappearance of his friend while having sex with literally every female character that is ever mentioned. It's atrocious, and not in a so bad it's good kind of way either. It's like reading a book about a Harry Enfield character, I only finished it because it was a literary car crash I couldn't turn my eyes away from.

Rather, I want to just take a moment to bask in how totally ignored this title is here on Hardcover. I'm pretty sure this made it onto my TBR because of the Goodreads algorithm and honestly take one look at the reviews on there (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48581248-get-rich-or-get-lucky), what a bot ridden shit show.

Terrible. 0/10.

What a weird short story, I mean even for Le Guin this is strange, but I oddly wish there was more. Nine Lives is about a clone who has to bear the pain of becoming an individual, originally one of ten, an accident happens on a far flung planet that leaves him the sole survivor.

This is really off beat from Le Guin's other work SF work, this might be the hardest SF i've read by this author. It's also thematically distinct, more an exploration of man and individuality than it is an observation of an alien species or culture.

It's excellently written to boot, some fantastic imagery and character work in such a short piece.

Pedro Páramo is exactly the type of book I love to stumble across, it's a trip and a half with some serious literary chops to boot. It begins with the story of Juan Preciado's visit to Comala in search of Pedro Paramo, his father, a trip he promised his mother he would make on her death bed. Things start to dissolve from there as Comala is a literal ghost town, Juan finds it occupied by the spirits of the former townspeople. Juan and his story are swallowed up by Pedro and Comala's story as Juan searches amid the ghosts for anything still living. All the while the stories of the townspeople are delivered in non-linear hallucinatory segments, these stories are told by ghosts and seemingly the stones of the town itself, the dialogue purposely disintegrating along with Juan's mental state. The details of what's happened/happening resolve towards the midway point as enough of the story is told, but it definitely required backtracking to make sense of the whole.

The story of Pedro Páramo is really about the town of Comala- Juan, Pedro, the town, their stories wrap around each other in a dreamy vortex. There is an overwhelming sensation that life and death are interconnected in Comala, that time doesn't move quite as it should. That's largely thanks to the prose- in the middle when you realize that much of the first half of the book is delivering flashbacks you realize that Rulfos disintegrating prose is emulating this subversion of time. You cannot help but to admire how Rulfo's use of voice is used to communicate Juan Preciados devolving grasp on reality, you even begin to appreciate those confusing moments where a speaker cannot be identified as it reminds us that the story is told from Juan's perspective despite the narrative's increasing distance from him.

I'll be honest, I didn't love this book on my first read, it took a lot of back and forth to get a handle on the story, and as much as I adore the craft of the book now, I was put out with it taking like 60 pages to realize I was in a flashback. A lot of my appreciation of this book came in hindsight, particularly when I started to do research for this review. For a novel published in 1955 is it astoundingly modern in its fragmentary structure and mimetic style, it's a stylistic precursor to so much of postmodernist lit, not to mention its place in the genesis of the magical realism sub-genre. This book was so far ahead of its time and I think that's part of why it was received so poorly upon its release, there's a direct line from Kafka and Surrealism to Borges to this work and on and it was very much not in keeping with the literary trends of the 50s- only beginning to gain ground in the 60s (largely thanks to Gabriel Marquez).

The other reason for its cool reception had to be the early Kemp translation, which made significant cuts to the narrative and disregarded localized or linguistically complex details (which interestingly enough was done at the behest of the CIA and their the Congress for Cultural Freedom- a front which aimed to push western ideals and the American plain style on South America). I read the Peden translation, and I am sure the newer Weatherford is also a marked improvement to that 60's Kemp edition- that said- all translations seem to struggle with Rulfo's unconventional and hard to make sense of writing style. No matter which translation you opt to read just know you will have to backtrack and reread this book a few times before you get a complete sense of what's happening (but it's not too much of a chore at just 144 pages).

Overall this is a masterpiece, and I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge- but I will admit that it is nearly incomprehensible the first time through, if you're a native Spanish speaker that still may be the case.

Published in 1943 and structured as 3 lectures (Men Without Chests, The Way, The Abolition of Man) that focus on a concept of natural laws and a defense of objectivism, Lewis sought to warn of the dangers of modern attempts to do away with parts of traditional morality. Not at all a novel, this is a collection of essays about the trend of reduction and definition that he was noticing as we became entrenched in the scientific age. Lewis was concerned with how we were to live our lives as we came to consider ourselves in an increasingly quantifiable sense, nothing more than collections of cells and molecules, mere creatures of needs and nature. He frets about the future of a humanity that has lost its moral compass, devoid of the traditions that in his eyes are what make us human.

The central conceit of these lectures is the concept of the Tao. In The Way, Lewis posits that there's something greater than the quantifiable about Man; that there's an order to everything- a purpose, a natural law, which exists outside of the finite. Our purpose as men bound to this natural law is to seek happiness and live lives of virtue- not lives of value as defined by whichever society we live in. In seeking to master nature, to quantify and understand all, we rob ourselves of the capacity to imagine and ponder life's mysteries. As society further focuses on efficiency and quantifying nature we in turn become a part of that quantified nature, another thing to be mastered- another system to be exploited. To Lewis the ultimate consequence of conquering nature leads us to be conquered by nature as we reduce ourselves in kind.

Another central tenet of all three lectures is a firm rejection of moral subjectivism; the concept that there is no external or objective truth and that our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience. Lewis claims the opposite; leaning on the arguments of the ancients he proposes that the purpose of education is to ingrain in children what is good and should be loved and what is bad and should be hated. These teachings generally subscribe to a shared set of objective values that exist across the moralities of the East, West, and all major religious groups, these values he later coins as the Tao. In Men Without Chests he claims that to stray from the Tao is to rob men of their "Chests", their emotional and moral instincts; without their chests men are detached from their moral compass- the thing that makes them human.

In The Abolition of Man, the final lecture in the series, Lewis keys in on the consequence of this reduction in moral instinct. It's really about as sci-fi as a lecture can get as he envisages an dystopian future where a minority with a perfect understanding of human psychology rule over the rest, a world where masters define the morals and values of the many as they see fit. These rulers are in turn so advanced as to see through any system of morality which could seek to influence their actions, they are ruled by their base instincts, their whims- as they have surrendered their mechanisms for reflection. Divorced from the ability to reflect on their motivation these controllers cease to be human in the recognizable sense, the rest of humanity robot-like in our systemic obedience.

Lewis actually published a sci-fi novel that expands on the dystopian ideas put forth in these essays called That Hideous Strength (part of The Space Trilogy), and these ideas certainly influenced Orwell's conceptualization of Big Brother in 1984.

While I don't personally agree with all the points that Lewis made, particularly his disdain of subjectivism and his conceptualization of the Tao, I found this thought provoking and generally right in its premise and intent. If you're seeking a little philosophy to pair with your notions of sci-fi, seeking to challenge your own conceptions of morality, or if you're just generally unimpressed with the modern school curriculum I'd recommend this highly.

Book Club For Jan - I am behind on both the book club and on these reviews, life's just been very busy since the holidays

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No looking inside the box.

No asking what is inside of it

No telling anyone where they are going.

Black Box is really just one massive red haring, a wild goose chase of a novel. Abbott (our male protagonist and Lyft driver) meets Ether (our female protagonist) for what he believes is a typical Lyft fare that's anything but. Ether offers him a life changing sum of money to transport her and her mysterious black box across the country, from California to DC. Abbott is not Ether's first choice, she's been hired to transport the box under condition of secrecy but she's out of options to meet her deadline and her mission is further complicated by dodging the pursuit of a mysterious biker. Unfortunately for Ether she couldn't have picked a worse driver, as Abbott is a sort of minor Twitch celebrity- his chat so alerted by his change in schedule and the involvement of a woman so as to kick off a Reddit manhunt in search of him. The hunt for Abbott quickly evolves into a rabid conspiracy revolving around Ether, a retired FBI agent, and what exactly is in the black box of doom.

I'd describe Black Box as a true 21st century novel, laden heavy with references to the current day- Reddit, Bitcoin, even commissioned furry art, it runs the referential gamut and opines broadly on the impact of the internet and social media on society. The premise is great: equal parts the hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers and a classic American road trip comedy, the story serves as vehicle for Pargin's opinions on the toxic influence of the internet on the human species. It's a bizarre tonal mix, on the one hand you've got some fairly heartfelt and broadly accurate critiques on modern society and on the other hand you've got Abbott chasing down rabbits down the side of Route 66. When you consider that road tripping across the US is a boring and desolate drive broken up by occasional moments of danger and entertainment the structure of the book makes sense, unfortunately that means the book winds up being more social commentary than actual plot. It's very fun whenever the plot is progressing, but mainly it's Ether lecturing for 300 out of 400 pages.

I really found myself powering through the middle of the book, that's largely because the more I learned about Abbott and Ether, the more I started to hate them. Abbott, the modern anxious every-man happens to have some problematic opinions about women- and he's extremely vocal about it. Conversely Ether has had something like a modern spiritual awakening and cannot help but to lecture Abbott about the wonders of the modern age and the importance of believing in the inherent good of your fellow man. These two are locked in a car for 2,310 miles and so are you the reader, so you get to read and reread Abbott's one dimensional take on the powers of femininity, Ether's constant lectures, and the extremely awkward interactions that result as these two verbally spar. It wouldn't be so bad either if Abbott could articulate his points to the same degree as Ether, maybe there'd be something to glean from a discourse like that, but his character is constantly vacillating between "everyman" and "strawman" alternating between playing the determined hero and the petulant child as the plot demands from moment to moment. It's exhausting, and honestly despite Ether's point being generally correct, the message is cheapened when it's bounced off such an obvious sock puppet, the whole debate reads like epistemic theater.

While not quite a doomer book, the image it paints is not a flattering one- Pargin is laying bare his issues with everything, from crowdsourced conspiracy and misinformation to the toxic effect of social media and the internet on interpersonal relationships. We're addicted to our screens, addicted to outrage, and it feels like some shadowy cabal of billionaires is trying to erode our faith in humanity and transform us from people into subscribers. I can't say I disagree with any of the talking points conceptually but I personally hate it when books preach at me through character dialogue, and that's how 90% of the commentary is delivered. What makes it particularly offensive here is that the plot is effectively delivering the same message! The double dose of rhetoric really beats you over the head with the messaging, choking what would otherwise be a very entertaining and thought provoking thriller narrative.

Generally this is a fun read with some interesting information about how online conspiracies are built and perpetuated, but this is absolutely dating itself. You may or may not get turned off by the overtly rhetorical style, and while the characters are flawed and unlikable they do grow along their arc, no matter how manufactured that growth may feel at times. Honestly the last fifth of the book is worth the slog, it's wacky and wild, and while you do eventually find out what's in the box that's not the only reveal in store by the end.

Beyond Apollo is the starting point for most people when it comes to Malzberg, it's probably his most widely read novel. Told from the perspective of Harry Evans, the sole survivor of a failed two man mission to Venus, Beyond Apollo is a recounting of those events. The heart of the story is about the death of the Captain of the mission, the How and the Why- Was he insane? Was it an accident? Was it self defense? The story is re-told endlessly, the details differing with each re-telling. What results is something fragmentary, the story-telling kaleidoscopic and generally not plot driven, the narrator is possibly (probably) insane and we are strapped along for the ride.

Like most of the Malzberg I've read there is no real resolution. It's never made clear if Harry is the killer, in fact nothing is ever made obvious other than the fact that he is the sole returning member of the mission. Whether it was aliens or murder or self defense, or even if the captain never really existed at all (or if Harry is himself the captain) remain as possibilities by the end. Many of these re-tellings come in the form of interrogations by Forrest (a psychiatrist) about the “truth” of the trip, but also in the form of dream conversations. Harry is obviously scarred by his experience, and is either unwilling or unable to tell us the truth of the experience. The truth itself a subject of meta-textual gamesmanship as Harry and the Captain play a game while on the voyage in which only the telling of absolute truth will make one a winner.

There's also the Malzbergian hallmark of sexual neurosis and ineptitude. A lot of the story seemingly focuses itself on Harry's perceived lack of sexual prowess, and his obsession with the Captain's sex life and virility. There's a distinctly gay undercurrent/slant to everything, Harry's sexual dysfunction is painstakingly detailed as chapters vacillate between moments of sexual disappointment with his wife, his impotence as a result of his training, and his hypersexual observations of the Captain. It's a little much- but I can't say that it doesn't serve the story, as it's used to flesh out Harry's character and psychosis and underpins the satire.

That's right, on-top of all of that this novel is a satire critiquing the space program- something fairly unique in the bounds of SF, where mankind's grasping of the stars is typically glorified. If there's one real continuous narrative thread in this book it's the distinct anti-space stance that the developments take. To borrow the words of the novel the space program is painted as a hyper-masculine system that makes machines out of men, explicitly stated during sex with his wife: "We have been geared for efficiency. I begin to fuck her like a proper astronaut." The message seeming that the American obsession with space is ultimately pointless and masturbatory. I cannot fail to note that this was published in 1972, the year which marked the cancellation of the Apollo program, and one of two books about astronauts that Malzberg published after being asked to resign as the editor of the Science Fiction Writers of America Bulletin in 1969 because of a critical editorial he wrote about the NASA space program.

I think the primary appeal of the novel is coming in its form and prose. I've never read anything formulated quite like this, it's a stand out among the other new-wave giants. This novel is fragmentary and experimental, with a plot that never resolves- something heavily postmodern and inventive in its approach. This book can be a disconcerting and tedious exercise to read, it's definitely not for everyone, and while I typically like inventive structures the lack of resolution is something I didn't much care for. I'm also decidedly in the NASA-good camp so I didn't much relish him shitting all over the space program. That said, I can see genius at work here, and I can appreciate the immense talent on display even if the book didn't cater to my particular tastes.

This is an extension to the Library of Babel short story by Borges. Where Borges sketches out the concept this is a story told from the perspective of someone living in his imagined hell. It's a mundane, ruthlessly boring hell, one where you could spend lightyears just falling down to the very first floor, your eventual exit a guaranteed inevitability. The torment is mathematical, hope is made infinite and therefore unusable- suffering born not from ignorance but from the unbearable proximity of an inaccessible truth. Hope survives, but only as torment.

It's a short read that adds a little levity, drama, and needed characterization to Borges' sketch. It's a creative twist on a fantastic concept, and it sticks with you just like its inspiration.

The Gamesman imagines a society organized around “The Game,” a system that promises transcendence to its victor while withholding any clear account of how victory is achieved. This dystopia is tightly controlled and resource-scarce, its comforts hoarded by a social elite. The majority live dull, constrained lives, their only sanctioned diversions being participation in the Game and state-regulated teleportational travel.

The novel follows a man who is both competitor and administrator, enforcing rules he does not fully understand while striving for rewards he cannot verify. Though the mechanics remain opaque, the Game appears as a series of tests, intellectual, physical, procedural, administered by players who have themselves opted in. Above them stands the elusive Game Master, the final arbiter of rules that are never fully disclosed.

What little the reader gleans of the Game’s structure, and the reverence with which it is discussed, echoes religious liturgy. The protagonist’s faith in the Game is absolute; he believes not only that it is just, but that he will ultimately win. Yet during play he encounters a secret that destabilizes this faith and exposes the fragility of the system’s promises.

The Game is less a competition than a total structure. It defines social mobility, aspiration, and meaning itself, even as no one can clearly articulate what victory entails. Replacing both divine judgment and bureaucratic authority, it is equal parts Kafka’s The Trial and Borges’ The Lottery in Babylon. It is not something one plays; it is the condition of existence.

I have to talk about the sexual ineptitude that recurs throughout Malzberg’s work here. It is, in fact, his most recognizable signature, and in The Gamesman it fuses seamlessly with his critique of systems. He threads sexual anxiety through the novel with deliberate discomfort. Yet here it is not provocation for its own sake. The protagonist’s ineptitude mirrors his spiritual condition. He is adept at navigating procedures but incapable of unmediated connection. Where the Game promises transcendence through evaluation, sex exposes him to judgment without rubric or appeal. Relationships are first treated as leverage within advancement, and only when he relinquishes that calculus does genuine contact emerge. The final sexual encounter reads not as conquest but as fragile recognition, an encounter momentarily outside the Game. Whether this marks progress within the Game or exists outside it remains unresolved, and that ambiguity is precisely the point.

In this sense, The Gamesman exemplifies what I've coined as Malzberg’s anti–science fiction. Where the genre often celebrates expansion and spectacle, he offers contraction and recursion. His futures are bureaucratic rather than visionary. Advancement is paperwork. Transcendence is a rumor. He writes anxiety with forensic clarity, the dread of scrutiny, the suspicion that the rules are arbitrary, the fear that aspiration itself has been proceduralized.

For readers weary of recycled galactic empires and reheated mythologies of expansion, Malzberg’s work functions as a bracing palate cleanser. He offers no spectacle to hide behind, no sentimental reassurance disguised as futurism. His work strips away the genre’s pageantry and leaves the skeleton exposed. The result is not comforting, but it is clarifying.

Such work has never been commercially successful. Malzberg offers no heroic arc, no redemptive overthrow, no unveiling that restores coherence. His protagonists do not break the system; they absorb it. The rewards are intellectual rather than escapist, and the emotional register is deliberately uneasy. It should track, then, that Malzberg remains a largely underground figure, and that The Gamesman is unlikely to appear on lists of essential dystopias. Yet its refusal of catharsis is precisely what gives it staying power.

The Gamesman does not resolve so much as persist. The promise of transcendence remains intact, even as its substance dissolves. The Game endures because belief endures. And that endurance is what lingers with the reader. Malzberg leaves us with a finely tuned anxiety that continues to reverberate, a quiet suspicion that the systems we trust may require nothing more than our participation to sustain themselves.

The Library of Babel is one of those short story collections you absolutely must read. Borges is your favorite author's favorite author and so many of his ideas have seeped their way into contemporary lit. Whether it's his inventive narratives or his remarkable use of language every story in this collection, no matter how short, will stick out in your mind and leave you thinking well after the pages are completed. You never really "finish" Borges.

The Duration of Hell

What really drew me on this reading was the introductory essay- The Duration of Hell in which Borges detonates a theological hand grenade. I vividly recall Sunday school lessons where the concept of eternal damnation was introduced to me. I never really gave it all that much thought, it was as if the concept tracked along with the other religious tenets (Charity, Prayer, Pilgrimage, etc). But as Borges points out the crime and the punishment are not proportional, sin is finite, but the punishment is infinite. He presents the logical problem, god is just and justice is proportional; and then he walks away resolving nothing. You can't stop thinking about it once you've read this piece.

The Library of Babel

The titular Library of Babel is of course the main draw here, it's a variation on the idea that a room full of monkeys and typewriters will eventually produce a work of Shakespeare on a long enough timeline. It's incredible, and it has gone on to inspire and influence every generation of authors that followed its publishing- if you had a good professor you've probably already read it or at least some other Borges.

The Babylonian Lottery

Following along the themes present in The Duration of Hell, the last piece that's an absolute must read is the Babylonian Lottery. It's another Borges masterpiece and it really highlights his talent for building elegant but labyrinthine logical puzzles. This is a deceptively simple piece about a lottery in Babylon that introduces punishments, secret drawings, and then invisible administration. Eventually the lottery governs everything and nobody knows what's chance and what's by design. There are so many wild interpretations that this story invites, and the one that I personally continue to ruminate on is whether or not randomness is different from destiny, whether chaos is just another form of order. From the outset chance is presented as liberating, but as randomness comes to govern over all it really becomes indistinguishable from fate.

I loved this collection, and I read it right after the disappointment that was Shadows Upon Time. I wonder how much better that series could have been had Roucchio been a Borges fan (and if he is a Borges fan, I guess that's even more of a let down).

I'm at risk of over reviewing here. These are 109 fantastic, tight, well crafted pages and what I want to talk about is delivered so effectively by the story that discussing them feels like spoiling. There's so much inside of such a short story, and when told by Zweig's incredibly direct prose it means that not a sentence is wasted, it is a story that captivates for its entire length while building an atmosphere that's distinctly 1930/40s. Chess Story leaves the reader with so much to contemplate- chess, torture and isolation, focus and deliverance.

While chess is the subject of this piece, it reads as more of a character study and exploration of trauma. The story is narrated by an observer- The main character, Dr. B, is a former lawyer to the Austrian Nobility and is imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis. Rather than pulling teeth and nails, they leave him in total isolation- waiting for his eventual mental collapse. Dr. B is rescued from his torture when he steals a book of chess games, and despite having never played he quickly learns the game. At first chess delivers him from his isolation and boredom, he finally has something to do, but he begins to obsess and eventually fractures his psyche from playing games against himself. After escaping the Nazis we meet Dr. B aboard a freighter to Buenos Aires, where Dr. B interrupts a group of men playing a consultation game against Czentovic- a Yugoslav chess savant and world master. He prevents a disastrous blunder and the group persuades Dr. B to play against Czentovic.

I'll leave what happens next for other reviews to further spoil. What I will do is tell you more about Zweig because knowing his story frames so much of the atmosphere and better contextualizes the suffering of Dr. B. Zweig was like the Stephen King or J.K. Rowling of 1930s Europe, one of- if not the most translated authors of his time. He's a character out of time, part of the last generation of affluent and prominent German-Jewish intellectuals before Hitler came to power and the persecution of Jews became a priority of the state. He escaped to England in 1934 and later to the US and then Brazil in the early 1940s. Zweig watched the world crumble around him, marked for death by the SS he found himself pushed further and further into exile, torn from the European identity that he had embraced so totally in his youth. It's in this spiral that he published Chess Story and his memoir The World of Yesterday before he and his wife committed suicide in their Brazilian home.

This is a wonderful story and time capsule, and I recommend it to basically anyone.

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said: “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone— while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?"

It's not Gene Wolfe, it's Job, the whole damn thing is Job. But Job had his fortunes returned twofold, and Hadrian's story ends in a significant reversal of the old parable. It's tough to complain or criticize this ending, largely because the events of this last entry have been foreshadowed across the entire series, but it still managed to leave a nasty aftertaste in my mouth.

I think maybe I pinned my hopes a little too high, I really thought this final arc would mirror Gene Wolfe's influence, one where salvation is not guaranteed but earned-instead we get a repetition of classic Dogma. I hate to say it, but all this series amounts to is bible stories in space, half a retelling of the resurrection and half a surface level examination of Theological Determinism vs. Free Will- particularly the interpretation of Aquinas. At least the battles across hyperspace were cool.

Notably absent from this christian hotpot is any discussion of Hell and eternity. I thought we'd get there, but we didn't. This really put me in mind of Borges, who wrote of the four cycles, the four archetypes of story: The siege, The return, The quest and The sacrifice and that all versions amount to just one story- a destiny fulfilled through repetition and variation.

I'll still buy the box set.

This popped on my radar after I finished The Secret History, with Lethem being a onetime classmate of Donna Tartt and one of the many Bennington-related authors that became the white-hot stars of ’90s and ’00s lit. The Fortress of Solitude is his semi-autobiographical opus, a loud and racially charged exploration of his childhood in ’60s/’70s Brooklyn. It tells the story of Dylan and Mingus, two friends who grew up in the shadows cast by their evolving neighborhood and their absent mothers. Dylan, the lone white face in a sea of Black, recounts his youth in pre-gentrified/gentrifying Brooklyn; Mingus is his oasis and conduit, his childhood friend and the focal point of the book. This book is huge, and I’m not just talking page count; it’s simultaneously a bildungsroman, time capsule, and social justice essay wrapped around a comic book plot.

Split into two halves—childhood and later adulthood—Dylan recounts his life after the abandonment by his mother and the arrival of Mingus and his father, Barrett Rude Jr. Mingus’s arrival heralds Dylan’s debut into adolescence as they become fast friends. Exploring music, comics, graffiti art, and their sexual identities, the boys grow incredibly close. Things change when Dylan meets the flying homeless man, Aaron X. Doily (who I can only assume is the impetus for the character of Hancock (2008)), who gives Dylan his magic ring, which he in turn gives to Mingus. Mingus learns to fly with the power of the ring, gradually becoming separate from Dylan as his cohort expands to include the neighborhood ne’er-do-wells Arthur and Robert Woolfolk, his interests diverge from comics to cocaine, and Dylan grows increasingly alienated from him.

Their separation becomes more concrete when Mingus is arrested for the murder of his grandfather, the novel transitioning to Dylan’s aimless years bouncing from the NYC punk scene to college and ultimately to Berkeley, and his eventual career writing the liner notes for Barrett Rude Jr.’s compilation album.

Dylan cannot find peace; he finds himself trapped in an existential loop that can only be resolved by breaking Mingus out of prison. So that’s exactly what he does. Armed with Doily’s magic ring, its powers having changed to grant invisibility, Dylan sets out to free his friend.

I read this and Motherless Brooklyn in advance of my first trip to New York earlier this year; ironically, I did not have the time to cross the East River, much less the Gowanus Canal. I mention this because whether you’ll like this book is make-or-break on whether you like Lethem’s highly detailed prose. As I still remain a Brooklyn virgin, I found his descriptive style captivating and illustrative—this is some of the best English written. Likewise, I could see that same attention to detail overwhelming or choking, depending on the reader. Particularly if you’re from Brooklyn, I doubt you need the four pages he seems to devote to each minor setting.

That said, this book is sprawling. Whether it’s the not-quite coming-of-age story it tells, the comic book subplot, the devotion to set and setting, or the secondary focus on music, there seems to be something for everyone. I will echo other reviews in saying the last third is underwhelming. As I hinted before, the only real complaint I have is that the characters never truly mature; Dylan’s motivations are less relatable, and it leads the final act into nonsense territory.

This is a detective novel, but the detective, Lionel, has Tourette's Syndrome. It's as insane to read as it is to describe, and I mean that in the best possible way. He's ticcing in the middle of interrogations, in the middle of moments where he needs to be discrete, even in his own internal monologue, it's pure chaos.

When I frame it like that, it sounds like some sort of sophomoric writing challenge: first to write a book with a character with Tourette's and have it make any sense linguistically, and second to have that character then skulk though the shadows like he's Philip Marlowe. But it's not like that at all, it's a solid read, astoundingly so; I was skeptical at first, but as I read on it became less and less about the Tourette's and entirely about Lionel's compulsion to solve the mystery of his Boss's murder. Rather than detracting from the experience, Lionel's tics, compulsions, and general paranoia come to shape the increasingly manic and spiraling narrative.

In fact, Lionel steals the whole show; I'd say the book is less a tale of mystery and intrigue (which it certainly is chock-full of) and more an incredibly sympathetic and thoughtful character study of an orphan finding his family. As much as I love a good ol' fashion mystery-thriller, there's so much more to Motherless Brooklyn than its mystery subplot, it's truly a work of literary and linguistic genius, human in all the right places and utterly captivating.

I think I'll play this review close to the chest, if you're not interested in this book by now, feel free to skip it, but I can safely say that I've never read anything like this before and I doubt I ever will again. I'll have to find a copy for my shelf.

I'll keep this short. I don't think you're supposed to like this book, and if you find yourself relating to any of its characters, especially if you're in your 30s, that should be a wake-up call. Time to move to Alaska and start a new life.

Reading this book is like anesthetizing yourself, like peering into Nietzsche's abyss, it erodes you. I'd say that I hated it completely, but I deeply appreciate the craft and quality. It takes real skill to make something so souless, the fact that I couldn't put it down until its pointless conclusion is another point in its favor.

Apparently, this resonated with 80s kids- it was a bestseller and the beach read of 1985, its cover peeking out from the BOGG bag of the chicest of the chic (maybe they didn't have BOGG bags back then). I find that illustration to be a perfect encapsulation of what the book is, it's a time capsule - something from the malformed youth for the malformed youth.

It does exactly what it was intended to do- a total commitment to concept, and I like the book for that artistic commitment, I just didn't like its actual substance.

This is my second reading, and I really never thought I'd open this book again. When I first cracked this in college my feelings were typical of the general reception to the book: I found it excessive in its violence and sadism, nihilistic to a fault; the only apparent goal seemed to be to shock the reader. In fact I don't think I made it past chapter 42 (Girl) in my first reading, I know I put it down thinking that what I was reading was truly appalling and that 41 chapters and the movie had driven the point home well enough. This book is just as appalling the second time through, but- and maybe because my sense for this stuff has been dulled by I Was Dora Suarez or maybe it's my increased exposure to rich white assholes- I found myself looking past the smokescreen of insanity and violence and realizing just how prophetically reflective this book is.

Given the popularity and fidelity of the film adaptation I doubt that I need to tell anyone what American Psycho is about; Patrick Bateman is a part of the zeitgeist, for better or worse. That said it's not difficult to summarize the book, it's the diary of a crazed yuppie serial murder; a sensory experience rather than a traditional story-a manic episode of a novel. In fact, based on interviews with Ellis that's precisely the intention with which he sat down to write what was initially conceptualized as a continuation of his prior works (Less than Zero and Rules of Attraction).

I won't quote directly but Ellis held firm to a belief that the only remaining frontier in literature was sensationalism for the sake of sensationalism. So he sought to craft a story which evoked in the reader extreme feelings, sought to provide otherwise inaccessible experiences that would addict and alienate. This is lost on anyone who wasn't 20ish in the early 80's but Ellis was a rock star, authors could be rock stars- back then you see, people used to read. His two prior books were supremely popular with the MTV generation- his first an instant bestseller and quickly adapted for film, his second getting the same treatment. Since Ellis was eighteen he'd been thrust into the limelight, his name on NYC guest-lists second only to Andy Warhol, his evenings out recounted to him secondhand by the tabloids. It's from the isolating, surreal, and indulgent cocaine-fueled lifestyle of success and celebrity that Ellis was living where we get the seeds of Patrick Bateman.

If I were to judge this book based solely off of intention and execution then I would have to give it full marks. It was one of the most banned books of all time, sold shrink wrapped in Australia- from a perspective of shock and awe this book is a tour de force. But obviously that's not the sole criteria on which anyone would judge a book; a novel is judged on the quality of its world and narrative not just its sensory effects. This kind of judgement based on sensation was/is typically reserved exclusively for pieces in a visual medium, which begs the obvious question, are we to take this plainly repulsive and horrifying thing that Ellis made and treat it as a piece of art? This is the lens through which most people digest this book, as piece of concept art, a discourse of aesthetics.

That discourse is a surface level one, one that could be had with any other piece of transgressive lit. But, American Psycho captured the public's attention like nothing that came before. Unlike Crash or Naked Lunch, books which garnered immense critical praise and eventual cult popularity, Psycho ascended past cult status and into the mainstream almost immediately and its popularity has endured since- Why? Why is it that this specific piece of literature has shifted into mainstream awareness when all the other equally good-equally sensationalist pieces are just cult obscura in the modern day?

The simplest answer is that AP is shallow and accessible on its surface- this is a book about a consumerist serial killer in the 80s. Consumerism bad, Bateman bad, 80s bad, world is bad. It's not just a reflection on and of the culture of the time, it's also made for that self same culture- a kind of cultural Ouroboros. You don't even have to read through the whole thing to get yourself there, the themes may as well be printed on the dust jacket they're so loud. The magic of American Pyscho isn't in the portrayal of white collar douche-bags, for me it's what's subtly buried beneath the noise.

In many ways, despite its immediate popularity, this is a book that's waited for the current moment to unfold itself. What is Patrick Bateman if not the archetype of the modern conservative operator? It was lost on me in the initial reading, partly because the culture and political gap between left and right wasn't as wide at the time. But take a look at the the exchange on politics in the first chapter, it is eerily close to what you'd hear at CPAC today, and the orators not all too dissimilar from Bateman:

But we can’t ignore our social needs either. We have to stop people from abusing the welfare system. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women but change the abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women’s freedom of choice. We also have to control the influx of illegal immigrants. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values and curb graphic sex and violence on TV, in movies, in popular music, everywhere. Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.

Bateman is plainly echoing the classic circular talking points that had already worn themselves out at the time of AP's publishing. The reader knows Bateman doesn't give a single care about anything he's talking about, he's saying what he says because he believes it to be the "correct" answer. Deep down at the core of Patrick Bateman is an all consuming void, he's an automaton in the thrall of his cyrenaic pursuits. His politics like his person are the mask by which he disguises his contempt for humanity and lust for power/control/violence.

There's also his incredibly coincidental obsession with Donald Trump, the man he views as paragon and benchmark. Is it coincidence? Ellis was likely in the first wave of NY socialites put off by Don's gaudy mien and rapacity, who better to symbolize the kind of person Bateman is than the Barron and his golden toilet. The fact that Ellis's icon of social rot became the President and pseudo-deity of the corrupt and malformed can't be coincidence. Ellis knew where we were going, I think he saw what American society valued and sought to paint its portrait. Like a modern day Stańczyk sat in his chair, Ellis presents us with truth dressed as the absurd, animals in clean and pressed Armani suits- something for us to ogle and gasp at, to mock and reference and laugh at- though he's the only person not laughing, the ever ironic Jester.

This is a completely different book from what I first read, though I think the point remains the same. American Psycho is a looking glass into a part of reality that is just not accessible from the normal vantage- it's nihilistic and insane, but that's the rub, the world is the same way, and just like Bateman the very worst of it hides in plain sight. This is fascinating and horrible, if you make it past the blood and gore you'll walk away with plenty to think about.

*Disclaimer: This book was written by a good friend of mine. I purchased my own copy at full price and while I was asked to read the book, this review was not solicited in any way. That said, my star rating is going to be pinned at a 5 regardless of quality- not because I can't bear to be critical of a friend's work but because of the nature of Amazon's recommendation algorithm, so feel free to disregard it. Excepting the rating this review will contain my honest and unfiltered opinion of the book.

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Every year thousands of would-be lawyers across the country face a rude awakening- they enter law school dreaming of Atticus Finch/Mike Ross and dramatic legal battles only to realize that the overwhelming majority of lawyers will never see the inside of a court room. Something you learn on the first night of law school is that the case books suck to read. Shocking I know, but those massive tomes are crammed with case law and commentary that you are expected to internalize. They're textbooks, and they're just a taster of how minutiae obsessed the legal field can be. Mercifully this is NOT a legal textbook, Matt walks us through the variety of cases and courts that he worked during his time at the State and Federal prosecutors table. Unlike the casebooks, American Justice is in the vein of those much cherished legal dramas; cataloging his time pursuing carjackers, delinquent fathers, and violent fraud rings Matt paints a picture of what it's like to actually fight in court.

Don't get the impression that you need some type of legal training to appreciate this book, this should be broadly understood by most of its readers. In typical litigator fashion the author has boiled away the jargon and left only the most necessary legal terms. Matt clearly subscribes to the economy of words, as he takes great pains to explain any potentially foreign concept in plain English. What remains are a series of very interesting anecdotes of various criminal prosecutions pared down to the juiciest details. If you've ever wondered how a prosecution actually goes down, what a prosecutor actually thinks beyond just legal theory, then this is the candid peek behind the curtain you were looking for.

There is a point buried behind the anecdotes, a consistent criticism of the often-times nonsensical nature of courtroom politics. Matt describes his cases as not only as adversarial between prosecutor and defendant but as a battle between the lawyers and the law itself, highlighting issues he's observed that undercut the pursuit of justice. These are systemic issues that no one lawyer can address on their own ranging from gaps in sentencing guidelines to full blown legal loopholes that can derail an otherwise air-tight case.

It's not without flaws. The prose though coherent and concise reads in the style of a legal brief, without embellishment or characterization. I think that each case anecdote would have benefited had they been presented in a more narrative forward style. My main criticism with the book follows along similar lines, the whole thing is just a bit too brief- the cases themselves, but also the connective tissue that joins them. I felt that this was building towards a point, possibly about legal reform, but I can't say definitively because we never truly get there.

If the worst thing I can say about a book is that it's too short- it must be pretty good. That's the case for American Justice, it's interesting and easy to understand, and brevity isn't all bad because you can read this in 3-4 hours.

PS: Wasn't sure where in the review to include this, but there's humor and personal anecdotes in here. Knowing the author's sense of humor I definitely got a few laughs from the dry wit and occasional interjection. Great Job Matt!

*This book has nothing to do with the Severance TV show on Apple TV. Everyone I mentioned this book to assumed it was the basis for the show, as did I when I originally added it to my list; it's not.

This Severance is about the apocalypse, and who doesn't love a good apocalypse book? I know I can always make time to contemplate the end of the species. Severance subscribes to the Last of Us hypothesis that it'll be a fungal pandemic that zombifies the planet. Where this differs from every other zombie apocalypse is that these zombies are horribly mundane-typified not by the rage filled rushes of 28 Days Later, but rather the mechanical repetitions of a saleswoman folding and unfolding the same tattered sweaters inside a crumbling Juicy Couture, of a housewife endlessly setting and clearing a rotted meal from the dinner table. There's a very odd blurring of the lines between the survivors and the fetid automatons that populate the deserted suburbia the survivors ritualistically and methodically lurk through.

Candace Chen, our protagonist and pre-Apocalypse worker bee, narrates her life and the collapse of civilization from the proverbial front row. So absorbed in the anesthesia of routine, Candice manages to work her pointless office job through a pandemic and the collapse of social order, commuting (and eventually blogging) her way through an ever bleaker and decaying New York City.

The narrative unfolds in jumps across time from the pre- to the post apocalyptic present, in which Candice and a small group of survivors work their way west to Chicago. All the while, Candice's narration manages to focus on the inane details of her job as a bible production assistant, her relationships, and her mother's insistence on proper skin care. Buried in these innocuous details lurk incredibly foreboding visuals and a bleak reflection on the horror of the mundane. I might not be selling it quite right, but all of these innocuous details and humdrum narration unsuspectingly build towards an absolute anxiety-attack-inducing climax. I won't say more, suffice to say I don't think this would have hit as hard having not lived through the COVID pandemic.

What really struck me was just how terribly mundane (there i've said it three times) this vision of the end of the world is; it's horribly depressing to think that about a ruined world that's a hollow and meaningless echo of our normal one. It really begs the question of whether or not we aren't living in our own small apocolypses as we work through the daily routine of our regular lives. The line that separates the zombies cylicng through in the worn in grooves of their former lives and our own life's routine and rituals is razor-thin. The dread existential. Thankfully, the novel manages to end on a somewhat hopeful note.

I thought this was brilliant; a complete sleeper in its construction and terrific in execution. That does mean that it puts you out a little far on the limb, there are necessarily some boring chapters to wade through (but who knows ymmv, it's all pretty relatable)

I nearly abandoned The Secret History after its opening pages. This isn't my genre, but the pacing felt glacial, the setup endless, and I found myself questioning whether Donna Tartt’s literary darling deserved the praise it has continued to receive. Had I truly dropped this book where I wanted to, it would have been entirely my loss. What emerges after the first 1/4 is a novel that envelops you so completely that the fictional world becomes more vivid than your actual surroundings.

The story follows Richard Papen, a working-class California transplant who becomes obsessed with an elite group of classics students at the prestigious Hampden College in Vermont. Under the exclusive tutelage of the charismatic Professor Julian Morrow, students Henry Winter, Bunny Corcoran, Francis Abernathy, and twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay have formed their own insular circle which Richard seeks desperately to join. But these students aren't all that they appear to be, and the story opens on their murder of Bunny. The novel unfolds backwards from this revelation.

The atmosphere is what everyone comments on, and for good reason, it’s so complete that Hampden College functions as its own character, brought to life through Tartt’s masterful voice. This isn’t accidental. The Hampden of the novel is the Bennington of reality, where Tartt attended college, and it’s astounding how much of that real place saturates these pages. From the campus rendering to the characters themselves, Tartt has created a time capsule. Through interviews with Tartt’s classmates and contemporaries, we learn that many of her central characters—Bunny, Henry, and especially the enigmatic Julian—are based on real people who dressed, talked, and embodied the very personas that populate her fiction.

(I didn't know any of this off the top of my head either, I have to plug the "Once upon a time... at Bennington" podcast, it's over 15 hours of interviews and discussion of Donna Tartt and the rest of the literary brat pack who attended Bennington during the 80s. If you loved the book I highly recommend this podcast)

This preservation extends beyond simple character work into something more profound. Tartt was documenting a campus that was genuinely atypical: Bennington had no tests or grades, and their professors weren’t just teachers but actual practitioners of their arts. The mythical culture of collegiate excess, of cafe-culture elites rubbing shoulders with the working class, it's a lived experience that Tartt brings completely to life, one that echoes in other works of the era, ironically best observed in "Animal House" - one that doesn’t exist anymore, nor in the specific case of Hampden did it ever exist outside of Bennington. It's into this novel atmosphere that Tartt injects an Oxfordian air into her classics students (one the originals truly did possess) that had already ceased to exist by the time she was writing, creating a vision of intellectual campus life that has fundamentally changed our cultural perception of what college should be and look like.

This cultural impact became especially pronounced during the COVID lock-down, when The Secret History experienced a remarkable resurgence in popularity. An entire generation of incoming freshmen, forced to remain indoors and learn online, absorbed Tartt’s mythological Hampden into their psyche. Her scholarly atmosphere tinged with youthful excess became the imagery of their college daydream, possibly reinforcing the educational priority and purpose of higher education. Whether this influence proves positive or negative remains to be seen, if the Hampden vibe is what students now crave it's up to them to cultivate it. The expectations Hampden sets are certainly unrealistic, colleges are not the free-wheeling intellectual cradles we all wished them to be, but a few disappointed freshmen doesn’t constitute a educational crisis. Honestly, knowing as much as I do about the real Bennington of the 1980s makes me long for such a place — a college designed for people whom the standard scholastic mold simply didn’t fit.

The Secret History continues to have its moment in the sun, inspiring hordes of imitators in what we now call “dark academia.” Recent works like M.L. Rio’s "If We Were Villains", R.F. Kuang’s "Babel", and Olivie Blake’s "The Atlas Six" all bear Tartt’s influence to some degree, a testament to the enduring power of her vision.

The book’s literary merit is also undeniable. Say what you will about Donna Tartt, but you must admit she’s a gifted writer. Her prose is simply untouchable. Consider lines like “Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it,” or her luminous descriptions of Vermont: “The mountains looked lavender in the setting sun, and the snow looked lavender, too, piled up in great soft slopes and drifts.” She demonstrates remarkable skill in blending registers, classical allusions flowing seamlessly into contemporary dialogue and observation.

More sophisticated still is her adoption of the tragic structure of The Bacchae, modernizing it by adapting its themes not just as part of the narrative but mirrored right down to the anachronism of her characters. These Oxfordian students ensconced within a facsimile of the most non-traditional college of its time create multiple layers of temporal displacement that mirror the classical tragic form.

Does this book break one of my biggest rules with its terribly slow opening? Yes, in fact it loses a whole star for it. But here’s my final advice: stopping before page 170 would be doing all the hard labor for none of the reward. Take that slow opening in bits and chunks, don’t try to power through it in marathon sessions. I’ve come to realize that the job of those deliberate early pages is to lure you into the universe, to have you inhabit Hampden alongside these characters. Once that world has you in its grip, you’ll understand why this book has shaped a generation’s vision of what collegiate life can be, even if such a place exists now only in our collective imagination.