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cyborgforty's reviews
214 reviews
Artificial: A Love Story by Amy Kurzweil
4.0
I loved the comic medium of documenting this archival project, and the panels as frames of film, and the inclusion of oral histories... scratching all of my archives nerd itches right here. Very motivating to work on my own archival project. I'm not the biggest fan of the "New Yorker" type art style but the story makes up for it.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
5.0
You know that writing advice that's like, "Don't write about the war, write about the little kid's shoes left by the side of the road." This book is a masterclass in that. I thought this would be a quick read---the dialogue is fast, and the scenes short. (Oh the dialogue. The syntax grated me at first but McCarthy's ability to convey such vivid voices without any dialog tags at all is phenomenal.) But actually I could only get through 20-30 pages at at a time. The prose is so simplistic yet so haunting.
(Also, I think this book would make a really good open-world game.)
(Also, I think this book would make a really good open-world game.)
Your Love Is Not Good by Johanna Hedva
5.0
ib english levels of motifery in here but the ones that stand out most to me are dogs and mothers. love me a good book about the wackery of the art world.
Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell
4.0
3.5 but rounding up. My favorite stories were "Orange World," "The Prospectors," "The Gondoliers," and "Bog Girl." I enjoyed the borderline-horror aspect; actually I picked up this book because I was looking for horror about female bodily functions as inspo for my own thing and I heard "Orange World" was about breastfeeding the devil.
Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
4.0
I came into this thinking it was going to be like 19th-century-male-author-using-vampires-as-a-precautionary-tale-againist-female-sexuality and honestly maybe that was the case but Laura and Carmilla are so hot for each other that I will gladly miss the point
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
5.0
read because i had just re-listened to the musical after many years. somehow the multiple-timelines thing in the musical confused me as a high schooler but i was able to follow along easily. but this is about the book, not the musical, and like all books-turned-musicals, the original tragicomic contains so much more depth and detail than the showtunes. i loved reading this, as i knew i would. i wish i was as well-read as alison bechdel as a college freshman haha! the literary references and metaphors as fictional characters - the examination of one's childhood through narrative tropes - wow. and especially the examination of childhood journaling/writing habits, the "i think" symbol, the ellipses... the way in which the developing mind articulates itself is something i feel like we forget about, once we have the words to describe the world as adults, so i just feel very fortunate as a reader that bechdel had all that preserved in writing and came back to analyze it through poignant cartoons.
one of the panels was familiar to me and i realized it was referenced in "gender queer"!
one of the panels was familiar to me and i realized it was referenced in "gender queer"!
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
5.0
I was going to rate this 4 stars because I did like "Stories of Your Life and Others" better---I still do---but the "twist" ending of "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" had me bump it up. My favorite story was "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom," though I started with "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" because that's the one I'd heard most about previously. I just love the frankness of Ted Chiang's writing style. These stories are so deeply conceptual while feeling so everyday. Also not that it matters but I did enjoy the leading women in these stories. Probably the best female sci-fi characters I've seen written by a man in a hot second---because they are written like normal human beings!
The Last Man by Mary Shelley
4.0
Technology aside, Mary Shelley got a lot of things right. That plague would befall the twenty-first century and the climate will show us her wrath, yet in the midst of it all we will still be clinging to our domesticity, we will still insist on conquest and war, we will indulge in science yet fail to apply it for the betterment of society, we will splinter into factions of religion, we will still be putting on productions of Shakespeare as the world comes to an end.
But the progression of technology was slower in Shelley's era and she could never have seen the electronic world that we inhabit today: this book is an idealistic, best-case-scenario vision of humanity that---sure, yes, fragments here or there, but for the most part---clings to community and society to endure plague, that still has appreciation for the beauty of nature and non-human beings. In some ways her world is more radical than ours---can we really do away with the English monarchy by the end of this century? For a world ravaged by plague of Eastern origin (hmmmm....), there is little xenophobia between the (mostly European) countries that Lionel & co. traverse; the English welcome immigrants (refugees!) fleeing the plague from all parts of Europe, and while the narrator does lament the fall of India, China, and the East to plague, I suspect they may not have been so hospitable to refugees from these regions.
The first half of this book was painfully slow. Mary Shelley loves to write in chronological order, and in the case of Frankenstein and Mathilda who did not live past their twenties, she doesn't have to do too much explaining in the first few chapters, but the bulk of this story happens after Lionel has married and started a family so... yeah. Something something about the influence of nostalgia in Mary Shelley's narrators, who write from their deathbeds or from the solitary desk of The Last Man On Earth. Chapter I of Volume II is really where it became a page-turner for me.
Last note: Mary Shelley's depictions of nature and astronomical phenomena are gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous.
But the progression of technology was slower in Shelley's era and she could never have seen the electronic world that we inhabit today: this book is an idealistic, best-case-scenario vision of humanity that---sure, yes, fragments here or there, but for the most part---clings to community and society to endure plague, that still has appreciation for the beauty of nature and non-human beings. In some ways her world is more radical than ours---can we really do away with the English monarchy by the end of this century? For a world ravaged by plague of Eastern origin (hmmmm....), there is little xenophobia between the (mostly European) countries that Lionel & co. traverse; the English welcome immigrants (refugees!) fleeing the plague from all parts of Europe, and while the narrator does lament the fall of India, China, and the East to plague, I suspect they may not have been so hospitable to refugees from these regions.
The first half of this book was painfully slow. Mary Shelley loves to write in chronological order, and in the case of Frankenstein and Mathilda who did not live past their twenties, she doesn't have to do too much explaining in the first few chapters, but the bulk of this story happens after Lionel has married and started a family so... yeah. Something something about the influence of nostalgia in Mary Shelley's narrators, who write from their deathbeds or from the solitary desk of The Last Man On Earth. Chapter I of Volume II is really where it became a page-turner for me.
Last note: Mary Shelley's depictions of nature and astronomical phenomena are gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous.
Monster by Neal Bell
4.0
i read this because tumblr said that victor and henry kiss... there is something about how the original novel doesn't explicitly write out all the weird subtext/implications about the characters' distorted ideas of their sexuality & desires thanks to arranged marriage & blurred boundaries between platonic, romantic, and familial love & in a way this play just. writes out the subtext and makes it WEIRD. it's as if queer readings of "frankenstein" in academia (i.e. the creature representing homoerotic desire & victor's "giving birth" of him as a "mother") had a baby with tumblr's "why did victor give the creature a functional penis" posts in the form of a 91-page play. though honestly? someone on tumblr made a post that made it out to be a lot more sexually explicit than it was so i went in expecting to be traumatized but i've read academic papers on "frankenstein" that are weirder.
all that being said it's actually decently accurate to the original in terms of overall plot points. there are a few funny "iykyk" references to lines in the original (i.e. the "get out of my sight" *covers eyes with hands* "now i am" moment.) i'd be curious to see this in production.
also, HOOO boy, there are no content warnings added yet... someone needs to do the work
all that being said it's actually decently accurate to the original in terms of overall plot points. there are a few funny "iykyk" references to lines in the original (i.e. the "get out of my sight" *covers eyes with hands* "now i am" moment.) i'd be curious to see this in production.
also, HOOO boy, there are no content warnings added yet... someone needs to do the work
Content Warnings
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child death, Death, Incest, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Blood, Grief, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, and Sexual harassment