Eddie's Monthly

Did I forget about writing my report again? No, I didn't, I'm just late. See, I was gonna rush to release it on the usual date, the 5th of the month, but then Elisa released hers, so I thought I could delay mine and prevent rushing it, as the hungry gods of the printhouse had been satiated. That was 16 days ago, and in the meantime I just go busy with other things, and the more I would wait, the more I would forget about what I read, and the more daunting the task of writing my report became. But here we are, and here are my half-recollections of what I read last month:

what if? – Randall Munroe

Reading another book from the backlog, what an accomplishment. I had started and DNF'ed Randall Munroe's previous book, How To, because ultimately, the punchline for every scenario was like “how to open a jar? use nukes lol”. It got very annoying very fast. This one however, I read until the end, and the humour was better done, as it was jokes about specific scenarios, instead of the whole scenarios being jokes. It was fine, the little drawings are endearing — one less book in the booklog.

Paradise Rot – Jenny Hval

This book is not part of the booklog, it was recommended by a book youtuber I watch from time to time, The Book Leo, and despite it not belonging to the booklog, it happened to fall in my cart when I went to indigo — oops.

Simple synopsis: A norwegian student goes on a foreign exchange in a coastal town in england, and ends up rooming with a strange girl in a repurposed beer brewery. This new home appears to have a life of its own...

I will admit, there was a bit more piss than I expected. I did really enjoy the book however, and the author's writing is very endearing, whimsical and visceral at the same time. If you've seen my “little kidney” post on the cafe, that excerpt was from this book. Reading the main character's experiences through her eyes, and seeing her navigating them in an “idk if it's normal, but as I am completely inexperienced and have no solid frame of reference in this culture, I guess I'll just roll with the punches” way reminded me a lot of my own experience coming to Canada to study. I didn't witness a mushroom growing out of my bathtub day after day though, so I feel like I've missed out on something.

Métal Hurlant: La ménagère de plus de 500ans – Many

I took a while to read all this, started in January, paused for a while, started up again, paused again and finally finished. This one was also in the booklog. You know the drill with those, they're anthology, and thus there's nothing I can really say that's not global. So I'll just share my favourite panels below:

Hyperion – Dan Simmons

Major influential title of SF, literary heavy-weight, adored by the masses and critics alike, cult-classic, and my second DNF of the booklog project. At about 61%, or 270 pages out of 440, I couldn't stand it

Quick summary of the story: Pilgrims are chosen to visit a sacred site right before the end of the world. Each have their story, which we hear one after another, while and overarching narrative takes place.

I think this narrative device was very well chosen for SF, as you can slowly introduce the lore without doing info dumps, and build upon it with different stories to then reach your conclusion where you are fully immersed in the world. I just thought it was not done well here. I feel like it was a bit lazy with it's SF elements, they don't seem super well developed. It's more like futuristic parallels to stuff we have than coherent stuff.

Time is done very well I thought, with space travel actually having an impact on you and having that being explored in the book.

The writing is very annoying at times — and I found the prose too full of itself — and extremely dated at others. The Soldier's story was just militaro-fantastico-fanfic([here:] derogatory) slop, full of description of the body and attributes of the woman he bangs on the regular. We barely have a description of the soldiers body for god's sake, would it kill authors to describe the shape and colour of a throbbing cock for once, instead of writing whole paragraphs about women's erect yet supple nipples for the n^th time? The Poet's story is way too pretentious and obnoxious, but not in a clever and immersive way like in Remains of the Days, here it's just 'see how many literary references I can make, I'm so smart as an author (pretentious chuckle)' and super annoying to read. I stopped there, and then skipped ahead to read the more interesting stories. I had already read the Priest's, which was the first, so all I was left with was the Scholar's. Typical of old SF, women are relegated to background objects, and for all that I've read are *only* mothers, daughters or sexual conquests. Out of the seven pilgrims, only one is a woman. Reading summaries of the book, legitimised instances of grooming are common, and actually the 'daughter' is a sexual conquest in the end. We're deep into Madonna-Whore complex, Freud would be proud. It's not that this book is hurting my performative male sensibilities, I can enjoy books where women are not written well or absent from the story, like Dune, but here the treatment of women is just egregious and it completely took me out of the story.

I realised that I had not downloaded an epub that I thought I had, so there is now 60 books in the booklog again. Making progress without even readings, lovely. I'm currently at 31/60 books read in the booklog, and at 10103/19773 pages — or 52% and 51% done respectively. Still far from done, but as a famous singer-songwriter and record producer once said “I'm not giving up yet”.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author