Reading list

Things I am reading/want to read/have read. It's also fine to include articles, research papers, and videos.

Not all of the works listed here are present because I agree with or endorse their contents. Many are, but several are here in a “know your enemy” capacity, so to speak. Where applicable, I have assigned such entries an estimated “spiciness” rating.

My all-time favorite novel, House of Leaves almost never leaves my head. If you hang around me long enough, I'll eventually pull out my copy and talk at length about the text.

I take away something different each time I reread it. On my first read, I wondered about the nature of the monster stalking Johnny; after the second, I questioned its existence as something separate from his own mind. With my latest read, I am confident that the “monster” is nothing more than Johnny's (and Navidson's) self-destructive habits.

An examination of the Weimar Republic's final years. Accounts of this period I've previously heard (i.e. high school history) didn't even mention Weimar. It's especially important, given today's political climate, to study how fascist movements have consumed nations in the past. A running theme of Hett's account are the ways establishment conservatives sought to use Hitler to strengthen their own positions and ended up handing him the reins of the nation. It's a painful lesson that when you cooperate with fascists, you are helping them win.

Summary and notes coming soon.

A highly accessible and frankly enjoyable introduction to authoritarianism, written by someone who has studied the topic for decades. Perhaps the most important takeaway is that authoritarian followers are driven by one major desire: to appear “normal”. This feature of their psychology is highly exploitable, both by reactionary leaders and progressive movements. If we want to make the world a more equitable place, we need to stop asking for their permission. Make the world better around them, and they will adapt even faster than we will.

Altemeyer is, however, something of a centrist. He argues toward the end that the main problem with the American Right is not its conservative ideology but its high concentration of authoritarians. I obviously disagree with that point, but I find the rest of his observations highly illuminating. In particular, it has helped me to see that many apparent contradictions in conservative belief are not in fact contradictions. To put it most succinctly, “don't try to examine it through the lens of facts. It's all about loyalty.”

I would describe this novel as a beautiful painting. I have never longed for space the way I did while reading it. The asteroid terraria in particular captured my imagination — imagine a landscape sloping upward away from you in both directions to meet overhead. It must be dizzying to look up and see the tops of trees. How about Terminator, a city on rails constantly skirting Mercury's gray line to stay ahead of the deadly sunlight? What if gender and sexuality were widely accepted as continuous spectra rather than discrete, disjoint categories?

The primary protagonist, Swan Er Hong, is petulant, uncooperative, self-destructive, a tad feral — surprisingly juvenile for someone over 100 years old. Yet somehow I still found it easy to sympathize with her, even as I was constantly exasperated by her antics. Equally frustrating, but likely prophetic, is the intense fragmentation of humanity's off-world colonies, the so-called Balkanization of the solar system. Nothing could be more human than senseless tribal feuds.

The primary plot is an investigation into what can only be described as an attempted mass murder: the track carrying Terminator is destroyed by a coordinated attack of tiny projectiles flung from different parts of space. The story climaxes with a similarly coordinated cross-solar-system sting that happens almost entirely off-page, which is extremely lackluster given the stakes. The perpetrators (a collection of quantum computers in humanoid bodies) are given a brief trial and ultimately flung into deep space. Swan and Wahram are wed, and the book ends.

This is why I call the book a beautiful painting. The concepts at play are fascinating but often seem like stage props in search of a script. Some oddities of formatting in my copy lead me to wonder whether it was missing a key chunk (such is the peril of bootleg ebooks…), so I may revisit this book in print at some future date.

A fun ride undercut by its infuriating ending. A mother, newly widowed and desperate to save her daughter, ends a centuries-long battle by sacrificing herself in a gasoline explosion. It is a painful but satisfying (dare I say badass) endpoint for her story. And then, out of nowhere, one of the side characters declares that she can be revived on a technicality — and so she is, at the comparatively minimal cost of her eyesight and the life of a character the reader barely knows. It's a very fanficcy ass-pull of a plot point. I have no idea how this man knew her heritage, why he withheld that information for the entire plot, or how this magical revival improves the story.

There is a sequel focusing on the daughter, and I have purposely ignored it due to the bad taste this book left. I have, however, considered rereading The String Diaries to see whether the ending's stupidity was properly foreshadowed by earlier stupidity.

I read this whole book in a single afternoon, and even though I finished it no more than an hour ago, I'm struggling for the words to describe it. Most of all, I wonder how it could sustain two sequels. It's not that I think the concept is exhausted by the end; far from it. But Annihilation is such a personal story and its content so dreamlike that I worry a follow-up, especially one focused on the Southern Reach itself, would cheapen it. That's not going to stop me from reading the other two—if this one could take me on such a ride, then I look forward to the ones to come.