These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

The Congress (2013) — 8/10

Robin Wright stars as herself, an actress in her forties whose best days are behind her. Her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) gets her an opportunity to be scanned and sampled and preserved and to be an actress for all time, playing roles that she had, until now, either refused or been too flaky to play. Producer Jeff Green (Danny Huston) makes a brutal offer: he needs her past, not her present or her future.

She tells him to fuck off. He is not dismayed and leaves the offer open for 30 days. She returns to her family: a perky, sassy daughter Sarah (Sami Gayle) and her chronically ill boy Aaron (Kodi Smit-McPhee). The boy’s addicted to flying kites and will not stop flying them over the airport.

So far, though, this movie has absolutely nothing to do with the The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem. That she will be scanned into a computer is perhaps a way that they will sidle crabwise into the virtualized (un-)reality in which the book mostly takes place, though, in the book’s case, it was layered hallucinogens in the water.

Al holds forth on how Robin never had a choice in her roles and, if she virtualizes herself, she’ll still have no choice, but it won’t be so much different than her whole life has already been. It’s a pretty brutal speech, especially considering he delivers it in front of her kids.

Paul Giamatti is Dr. Barker, the son’s physician, and he delivers a terrible verdict—that the boy has a degenerative disease that will rob him of his sight and hearing within decades, if not years.

Robin agrees to the scanning, agrees to doing sci-fi movies, but her lawyer gets her a clause that limits the studio’s use of her likeness to 20 years. They scan her immediately in a touching scene with Al, who tells stories to elicit all of the emotions from her that they need for the recording. This is the third big speech from Keitel, who is chewing up the scenery really well.

The story picks up 20 years later, as Wright drives to a party celebrating the release of her new film: a sci-fi movie called Rebel Robot Robin. She is at the party in an “animation-only” zone. The film is animated from 45 minutes onward, looking like an R. Crumb cartoon.

Wright passes out in her hotel room, in a hallucinogenic daze, dreaming that sings in a club and is arrested for working under her own name. She meets up with Jeff Green, the producer, in an office that looks like it came from the set of Brazil. He exhorts her to re-up for twenty more years, but this time not just selling her acting ability, but also licensing herself to be sold as food and drink so that you can become her. We do not see her sign. Nor do we see her refuse to do so.

Next, we see the keynote speech where the president of Miramount/Nagasaki studios announces these new formulas, to be other people. There is a shooter in the catwalks. He ices the president, escapes outside and signals an attack with a single flare. The rebel forces arrive to take over the Miramount Hotel. Is this real? Did the president really get killed? Was it a publicity stunt? Are the rebel forces real? All up in the air.

She meets animator Dylan Truliner (Jon Hamm), who was in charge of her career, post-contract. They get to know each other, but it’s mostly in the context of the hallucinatory animated world, which is beautiful, but largely meaningless (or meaningful to different people in different ways).

It’s fun to try to pick out the characters that people pose as, now that they can be whomever they want: Muhammed Ali, Clint Eastwood, Jesus, Venus on a Half Shell, Buddha, Jeanne d’Arc, the apple-faced guy from the Magritte painting, even Ron Jeremy.

The backdrops and details are lovely, organic and vaguely…female. That is, the world is filled with less recognizable but beautiful women and the backgrounds look like they’ve been designed by Georgia O’Keefe, but the main characters are male. Perhaps a fitting depiction of the world where the rich and powerful spend their time.

Time passes. Dylan is gone.

Jeff is back. He banishes her to icy wastes (for having dared to appear as herself on a stage, singing), where she meets her son, flying a kite. They escape to an ice shelf? She is diagnosed with being too far gone to save now and thus is cryofrozen. She is awakened 20 years later (rather than 70) and she meets first a Grace Jones–lookalike and then Dylan again. They saunter forth into the world to help her find her bearings and, maybe, Aaron. Instead, they find love in a completely fictitious world in her mind…their minds?

They discuss the “real” world, where their real bodies live, cared for by those who haven’t escaped into fantasy. This feels kind of like the Matrix. Dylan has a ampule that would take one of them there. It’s his compensation for 20 years of having animated her.

They are in love. She loves her son more. She wants the ampule. If she takes it, she has perhaps a hope of finding her son, although he will be nearly completely blind and deaf, if he’s even alive. If she takes it, she can never join Dylan again because their shared fantasy—guided by the pheromones that engender the animated world—would be forever out-of-sync. She wants it. She deserves it. A mother’s love trumps all. I thought Dylan had said that the animated world had erased all ego? She is the destroyer.

She takes the pheromone and slowly walks out of the animated world as it morphs back to squalid reality. It is a zombie world where no-one is really aware of their non-animated reality. The only remaining pockets of civilization are in airships. She quickly and easily ascends and then just as easily finds Dr. Barker (suggesting that she is still hallucinating). He says:

“Don’t be so impressed that I’m still here. Being here, on this side of the truth, is not so brave. […] Nothing has really changed, has it? Once we just masked the truth with anti-depressants and drugs, concealed and lied. Now, we reinvent the truth. Not so much of a difference. The drugs have just gotten much, much better. The only difference is between waiting for death, here, in this filth of truth and hallucinating the same, out there. Maybe it’s better out there, dreaming.”

Barker tells the ego-driven Robin that her son had crossed to the animated world six months before, after having waited for her for over 19 years. Devastation. She gave up her world with Dylan for her son, who had already given up on her. She cannot go back. She mourns for herself, though the world is in shambles around her—perhaps she does not think to rescue it because it is so seemingly completely irredeemable?

She takes an ampule from Barker and goes back, back to the animated world, back to fantasy, but a more realistic one, perhaps, where she imagines the continuation of her life now, where she imagines herself finding Aaron.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) — 8/10

This is an absolutely beautiful animated film. It looks like a graphic novel come to life, at times, with more than a bit of a Team Fortress aesthetic. This is the story of Miles Morales, a young man from an alternate continuum (although they keep calling it a “dimension” in the movie) where Peter Parker is blond and Wilson Fisk kills him. Miles’s mother is a latina nurse and his father is a black cop, so Marvel made sure to check all of the boxes with its foray into intersectionalism.

Morales acquires his power early in the movie—on a foray into a subway access tunnel with his cool uncle Aaron, who took him there to let him practice his graffiti chops—when a spider bites him just as they’re leaving. He discovers weird powers the next morning and returns to find the dead spider, but also to witness the original Spider-Man’s death in a nearby underground lab/reactor/accelerator.

The same experiment that Spider-Man (in that continuum) was trying to stop is the one that imported other spider-people from other continua: Spider-Woman (Gwen Stacey, voice by Hailee Stanfield), Spider-Man Noir (voiced by Nicholas Cage), Peni Parker (voiced by Kimiko Glenn and from the year 3189), and Spider-Ham (voiced by none other than John Mulaney).

Fisk has commissioned the multidimensional device in order to find his wife and son, who abandoned him during one of his violent fits of rage, in which he was trying to kill Spider-Man. Desperate to find them again, Fisk will fire up the machine again, threatening to swallow all of New York (in Miles’s continuum) in a black hole. The Spideys band together to thwart him and to help Miles train up his powers (which include some of Spidey’s traditional powers but also electro-shock hands and invisibility).

Miles’s Uncle Aaron—his hero—turns out to be the Prowler, the Kingpin’s #1 henchman, but he is killed by the Kingpin when he refuses to ice Miles (as Spider-Man). Miles eventually gets a handle on his powers, is able to send his Spidey friends back to their respective continua, defeat the Kingpin, reconcile with his father as both Miles and Spider-Man and also to get a bad-ass new costume and control of his powers and cement his reputation as the replacement Spider-Man.

The post-credits sequence shows the missing Spider-Man: Spider-Man 2099, who was the first alternate-universe Spider-Man in the comic books. He’ll probably show up in the inevitable sequel to this, the fourth reboot of the modern-era Spider-Man movies.

It’s a bit on the long side, with the final scene stretching a bit, spinning higher and higher into nigh-incomprehensible hallucinogenic animation—probably just because it was digital and they could afford it. It all looked lovely, but it wasn’t the kind of artistic film where you could sell a ten-minute hallucinogenic experience (as in, for example, 2001: A Space Odyssey). It didn’t detract, but it didn’t add, either.

It’s well-written, well-voiced, gloriously well-animated and has a kick-ass soundtrack and vibe. Seriously, I could watch it again just for animation. This is how they should have been making comic-book movies all along. It’s the kind of Spider-Man reboot I can really get behind.

The Hunted (2003) — 4/10

This movie jumps right into it with a nearly interminable slaughter and battle somewhere in the former Yugoslavia. The Serbians are depicted as mercilessly slaughtering Albanians while worshiping posters of Milosevic. Not exactly subtle; am I watching the Zero Dark Thirty of the NATO Balkan intervention/slaughter?

Benecio del Toro is a super-soldier who takes out the Milosevic-worshiping Serbian with a knife and with absolutely no trouble at all. To cement him as a basically good guy who’s been led down a dark path by his training, we see him awaken in a darkened room somewhere back on home soil, haunted by visions of his feats in battle.

Next we see a brief shot of a bald eagle soaring over a forest (the subtlety continues) that we are shown to be in Canada as we see Tommy Lee Jones running after a white wolf on foot. He rescues it from the snare that it is trapped in, using something he chews to gum up its paw to prevent infection. He is revealed to be even more of a naturalist frontier hero when he takes the snare back to its owner and uses it to bash his head into a table.

We rejoin del Toro (we still have no names at all and, at this point, I refuse to learn them) in the deep woods where he baits and toys with two hunters looking for him. He takes them on John Rambo-style: his knife against their guns. Also his booby traps. Also, he wins handily, murdering and dismembering them both.

In classic fashion, one of his old friends roots Tommy Lee Jones out of his deep-woods nature job and brings him back for “one more hunt” to find the killer who’s ritually killing people. He investigates the scene of the crime, finds out a whole bunch of stuff that the entire FBI was completely incapable of discovering for themselves, reluctantly takes a walkie-talkie offered by the gorgeous and capable crime-scene lead (Connie Nielsen) and heads off into the woods on his own, telling them to assume he’s dead if he’s not back in two days.

He tracks for an indeterminate time and meets up with (a very young-looking) del Toro and fights him almost to a standstill, distracting him enough until the FBI tranquilizes him. It is not clear whether Jones knew that the FBI were following but, given his amazing tracking powers, we can only assume that he was aware.

They know each other, with del Toro claiming that Lee Jones had trained him. Del Toro claims to be interested in the way humans treat nature, (in his police interview, he mentioned the number of chickens slaughtered per year, to Jones, he complains about inept hunters with magic scopes that let them kill above their pay grade) but he’s also interested in airing dirty laundry about covert operations he was on with Lee Jones. Jones shuts him up quickly once he starts talking with the FBI recording on.

Some of his former comrades (his black-ops group) show up to take him out of custody, but they want to kill him or silence him. They take him away, but he tips their transport truck, killing them all and escaping into the woods. He visits his ex and her daughter, exhorting them to leave the area before whoever is after him gets to them. The FBI shows up and is typically strong-arming, forcing their way into her house without a warrant. This is standard fare for American movies and TV these days: training people to kowtow to authority without asking any questions or making them adhere to procedure.

Del Toro is at the house, but can’t be captured, leading them all on a merry chase through the city and escaping into the tunnels of a building site. The FBI follows him down there and starts dropping like flies. Good old Tommy Lee is chasing del Toro (he’s obviously the only one who can track him, right?) but del Toro gets away, escaping back into the city, up through a manhole. Lee Jones can track him anywhere though: look! There’s a construction helmet on the ground! He went thataway! Look, there’s footsteps in the grass! It could only be one person out of millions! Tommy Lee is a superhuman tracker!

He tracks del Toro to a metro-rail, then chases him up a bridge structure while the FBI fires away, risking all of the bystanders with ricochets even though they have no chance of hitting anything. There is a sexy helicopter with a balaclavaed sniper riding Vietnam-style but even he can’t prevent del Toro from jumping into the river and (presumably) swimming away without trouble.

The FBI is super gung-ho but it’s OK because it’s a hot woman acting like a testosterone-crazed man this time. Tommy Lee Jones is pretty spry and has pretty good endurance for an older guy who hasn’t slept in days. Del Toro, too, doesn’t seem to be suffering any lingering injury or loss of mobility due to the horrific car wreck that he recently survived.

Del Toro is clearly more than capable of forging his own knife blade over a campfire that is somehow hot enough to smelt steel. Also, he builds a an Endor-like trap with giant logs all by himself. Tommy Lee Jones is also doing crafty things in the woods and still tracking like an all-seeing God while they both await the Hollywood showdown between “reluctant master who’s never had to kill before” and “renegade student driven mad by what he’s had to do for his country”.

Hollywood has trained me (as a viewer) so well that, despite Jones getting his artery punctured by a filthy wooden stake and then plummeting on a plain old (non-bungee) rope what looks like several hundred feet above a river, I don’t expect him to be injured in any debilitating way—or in any way that will affect his ability to fight the much younger and clearly more capable del Toro to a standstill and, eventually, to defeat him. Just the shock from dropping on a normal rope for 100 feet should have shattered Jones’s body, but I digress.

As expected, Jones manages to cut the rope and drops into a raging river with absolutely no ill effects and hitting no rocks. There is literally no sign of his previously expressed fear of heights. Del Toro finds him and, as expected, Lee Jones manages to somehow get an advantage despite all that’s happened to him and his advanced age. This is how these things are done. Now they are both injured animals and, WWE-like, Jones has turned the tables.

They’re both bleeding like stuck pigs from what seems like dozens of egregious wounds inflected by professional killers and they’re still as spry as two 20-year-old boxers. The FBI finds them just as Jones kills del Toro, proving… I don’t know what. This is ludicrous. Jones takes a minute at the death scene to mourn his former student and also, presumably, his reputation for having never taken a life.

The best thing about this is the credits music: Johnny Cash’s When a Man Comes Around. It is not at all clear why they chose it. I subtract two stars for not even trying to do something with del Toro. At least they didn’t make the hot FBI agent show up at Jones’s cabin, at the end.

Parasite (2019) — 10/10

This is the story of a poor family somewhere in Seoul. They have no wi-fi and the whole family folds pizza boxes for a living—but not even well, so that their young manager docks part of their pay. The son has a good friend Min who’s been tutoring a high-school sophomore girl. Min has to leave for a while, so he asks his friend Kim Ki-woo (Kevin) to take over English lessons for her. On his first day, he is quite successful and convincing and gets wind that the girl’s mother thinks that her younger son is an art genius who needs tutelage, as well. Kim Ki-woo’s sister Jessica fills the bill perfectly (it was her art skills that forged his tutor papers in the first place).

Jessica takes up her job, very convincing as a hard-ass and nigh-inscrutable tutor. The whole family is used to scamming for a living. Jessica bluffs out a much higher rate, guessing that the boy is damaged goods (or that his mother believes that he is) and arranging for many sessions per week. The mother is a typical upper-middle-class fool who believes that her children shit gold and that money and tutoring will make them successful. It’s the same all over the world.

The next stage is to replace the driver with their father, Kim Ki-Taek (played by the always brilliant Kang-ho Song). Replacing the housekeeper with their mother will be a bigger challenge. The scammer family is easily up to it, preparing their speeches and tuning their words at home. They frame the housekeeper as having TB and get the mother signed up as having come from an exclusive agency “for rich people”. The son (Park Da-song) almost outs them—because they all smell the same, living in the same apartment and being from a poorer neighborhood.

The Kims are pleased with their progress—and reveal a bit about how Korean society is afflicted with a surfeit of education unmatched by accompanying jobs.

“Anyway, aren’t we fortunate to be worrying about things like this? In an age like ours, when an opening for a security guard attracts 500 university graduates—our entire family got hired!”

The Parks go on a family camping trip, leaving their home to the Kim family, who enjoy themselves as if they live there. They are interrupted by the former housekeeper Moon-gwang, who asks entrance to “get something” from the basement. It turns out she’s been hiding her husband down there in the bunker where “you can hide in case North Korea attacks, or creditors break in”.

The Moons quickly cop that the Kims are a family and are scamming the Parks and try to turn the tables by threatening to send a video outing them. But the Kims are wily and they end up in a huge scuffle and retrieve the phone from Moon-gwang and her husbandj Geun-sae (played as a wonderfully mad man by Myeong-hoon Park).

However. The shitty weather has canceled the camping trip and the Parks are nearly home and want service from their staff. Their desperate preparation for the impending homecoming is genius. Moon-gwang refuses to go quietly—but Kim Chung-sook insists: with a foot to the chest and back down to the basement she goes.

The family scatters around the house while the mother comforts the wife (Park). They try to escape but Da-song (the boy) runs outside to set up his tepee and the parents end up sleeping in the living room while the Kims lie under the coffee table. Mr. and Mrs. Park are enflamed by the moment and start to fool around. They tucker themselves out and the Kims make their escape though not without incident. They escape into the rain, seemingly without having endangered their positions. The gutters are filling up. They are forced to walk all the way home to their half-basement, through a torrential, cold, uncaring and eerily warmly lit and beautiful Seoul.

The Kim’s half-basement apartment is flooding, a meter or more. The toilet is nearly exploding. Nearly nothing can be saved. The Moons are in the basement of the Parks—she has a concussion and her husband is tied up. Things have gone deeply south for all of them.

While half of Korea has seemingly drowned, Mrs. Park is refreshed and greets the new, sunny day ready to throw an impromptu birthday party for her little shitty kid. Jessica and Kevin are invited to join, of course. They have nothing better to do—that Mrs. Park could imagine, of course. Mrs. Park gives Mrs. Kim marching orders on how to arrange tables for the party—again, oblivious to everything except her needs. Bong Joon Ho is a master of irony here. He absolutely piles it on—it’s a wonder Mr. Kim doesn’t drive Mrs. Park and her insipid and tone-deaf nattering right off the road.

The desperation, mania and murderousness of the Kims and Moons contrasts with the oblivious ostentatiousness and narcissism of the Park’s stupid party. They live in different, parallel worlds. These worlds collide in spectacular fashion. Moon exacts revenge for his wife’s death on Kevin, Jessica and almost Mrs. Kim. Blood is everywhere. Park insults Kim for the last time. Stupid Da-Song passes out again because he thinks he saw a ghost. The poor boy was right, though: a ghost had been living with them the whole time.

The story picks up two months later, with Kevin and his mother on trial. Kevin is looking the worse for wear, with a traumatic brain injury. He can’t stop laughing. He heals and returns to spy on the house, seeing the lights blink in morse. His father is hiding in the basement, like Moon before him. Kevin resolves to make enough money to buy the house and rescue his father. The film ends on this … fantasy.

Director and writer Bong Joon Ho has really outdone himself—he’s one of my absolute favorite directors and writers (Memories of Murder, The Host, Snowpiercer, Okja and now Parasite).

The article Films From the Frontlines: Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite by Eric Mann (CounterPunch) writes,

“Parasite, in the brilliant web Bong weaves, shows capitalism as a system that implicates the members of every class and, in the absence of a revolutionary, counter-hegemonic movement, is loved or at least emulated by all. The poor are not angry at the rich. They are angry they are not rich and their only real anger is not at the system but those below them–what I call “upward mobility and downward hostility.””

They’re all parasites. The Kims, the Moons, the Parks. Capitalism engineers theirs behavior to be adversarial rather than supportive. There is no brotherhood or sisterhood, just alienation and cold calculation, with roles to play rather than people to be.

“Joon casts actors to play the part of working people who in turn are actors in their own play impersonating other working people to hustle the ruling classes. So maybe we can act our way out of class subordination or at least to aspire to the next rung on the class ladder.”

It makes us stupid parasites—those that don’t even realize the are killing the host.

Gone in Sixty Seconds (1974) — 5/10

This is the original movie about an organized gang of car thieves who somehow get an enormous contract from a foreign-sounding investor who has a hard deadline and a very specific list of 40 cars to steal. In this one, many of the targets are Rolls Royces instead of high-end sports cars (there weren’t that many of those at the time).

What they did have were giant hairdos (both men and women), mustaches, muttenchops, long leather coats and pimp hats. They had that shit in spades.

Unlike in the remake, they don’t bother giving a reason for why those cars are on that list or need to be delivered by that specific deadline. The stealing begins, with the first theft at night, which isn’t super cinema-friendly. The next few thefts are in daylight and go pretty easily.

One of the cars has a tiger in it. Another of the cars is being guarded by a cop. The thief poses as the tow-truck driver, but the cop and his dog are onto him. The thief drives the truck straight into the patrolman’s car…with nary a word from either of them. The cop is amazingly calm. He doesn’t pull his weapon. He just looks annoyed. He jumps in his car and gives chase. I can only imagine that this would all have seemed normal 45 years ago. The cop finally swears mildly when he crashes into a parked car and loses the truck.

Most of the rest of the thefts happen without incident, until they find dozens of kilos of heroin in one of the cars. The police show up just then and they try desperately to hide it. There’s a machine for destroying evidence that looks like a modified water-heater. One entire part of the garage wall was covered from top to bottom with soft-core pornography. The cop comes in and Jackson does his best to cover up the exploded bag of heroin on the floor of the garage.

The fleet of stolen cars looks magnificent: it must have been even more impressive in 1974, when those cars meant real money. Still, $400,000 for 48 stolen luxury cars still seems a bit light. It’s amazing how those numbers have changed—nowadays, they’d be talking about dozens of millions.

As in the remake: they get all but one of the cars with hours to spare. It’s only “Eleanor” left. Technically, they already have the cars they need, but “Eleanor” turns out to be uninsured—and they’re in the business of ripping insurance companies off, not people. They linger on this scene of Maindrian walking down a line of cars for what seems like ten minutes, switching back to hif fiancé Pumpkin Chase (that’s seriously her name) in her office, looking alternately bored, anxious and pensive. Maindrian jumps into Eleanor, returns it, and knows where to find another.

But this is all just a so-so movie with no-name actors that’s leading up to what is supposed to be one of the classic, all-time great car chases in cinema history. Maindrian steals Eleanor (a mustard-yellow Ford Mustang where the remake had a lovely Ford Shelby GT500), leaves the garage and triggers the alarm. He gets out, stops the alarm and squares off with a pair of cops in a patrol car who are onto him.

Maindrian is not nearly as worried about the paint job as Memphis Raines in the sequel was. Cars are getting destroyed right and left, but Maindrian is still going. This reminds me a bit of GTA, Driver or the finale of Blues Brothers. It’s not as varied, with a lot of driving out in the desert, as Maindrian shakes one cop after another. Maindrian hits a light pole at 85MPH and is none the worse for wear—and the car’s fine, too. Doubly amazing, considering seatbelts weren’t really a thing at the time (we did see him buckle up when he started, though).

We continue: windshield has gunshot holes in it, the front end is ruined, the whole side is scraped up. The hoods all wavy and folded up. Maindrian crashes into more cars, more roadblocks—glancing blows all—until he gets cornered in a parking lot/garage and must finally slow down. The cops have him surrounded and they’re still not shooting. He slips away. Again. His car is a shambles.

Unbeknownst to him, he’s headed for the scene of an unrelated accident. He ends up jumping off one of the cars like a ramp and the movie shows in gloriously detailed slow motion what really happens to a car when you jump it. He keeps going, somehow. He stops at a car wash, where he spots another mustard-yellow Mustang. He swipes that one, switches out the plates, and is on his way with a clean, non-destroyed ride.

The police are actually nice in this! One stops to help a woman get out of the road before she gets hit by the chase. The chase is a bit staid by today’s standards, but it’s real—instead of cars jumping from building to building in Dubai (I’m scowling at you, Vin Diesel). To be honest, I think the James Bond chases of the time were better, but they also had a lot more money to spend.

I don’t have to describe the soundtrack during the chase, do I? I didn’t think so.

None of the actors or actresses would go on to make a name for themselves, unsurprisingly. I’m sure they had fun making the movie, though. An extra point for all the really nice-looking vintage 70s cars pretty much all over this movie.

Yojimbo (1961) — 8/10

Toshirô Mifune is the Samurai Sanjuro who’s come to a town split into two factions, represented by rival gangs. The constable is useless. Sanjuro sees a way to enrich himself in this situation—and also to free the town.

He allies himself first with one side Seibê, but he overhears himself being double-crossed and abandons the fight that they start, giving their money back. He approaches the other side Ushitora and offers his services. He is refused.

The first big battle takes place without his sword; instead, he climbs to a high perch and observes from above, laughing, as the cowards all pretend to want to fight each other, but no-one makes the first move. It’s broad daylight.

The supposed fight (that was going nowhere) is interrupted by an inspector from Edo. Sanjuro schemes further as he observes the two gang leaders interacting with the inspector. Seibê and his wife squabble further over how to honor Sanjuro as he smirks. Sanjuro visits the casket-maker—the only one doing any business in town since the gangs started fighting. The silk business is dead; the brothel business, too.

It is raining. Torrentially. Just how Kurosawa likes it. It is very cold. You can see everyone’s breath.

The inspector leaves, taking the rain with him. The brother of Ushitora blows into town. He kind of looks like a samurai, but is actually a gunslinger and a poseur. The machinations continue. Each side takes hostages; they meet at 02:00 to trade. They are at a stalemate again.

They arrange another trade, again in full daylight. The son of one of the hostages is there to spoil the exchange. Her husband is there, too, and we learn later that he lost his wife and his house at cards and that the poor sap built a hut next to his former house and watches his wife be ravaged by the victor (Tokuemon) every night.

Sanjuro tells Ushitora that he will go with his other brother Ino (serious unibrow) to make sure that Tokuemon and the captured wife are safe. He tells Ino that all six guards have been killed and to get help. Then he slays all six of the guards himself and rescues the wife, returning her to her husband.

He throws the family the money he’d been paid thus far by Ushitora and urges them to flee. He tears apart Tokuemon’s house more, slashing the ceilings to let out the seeds used as insulation. He comes back out to find the foolish family still there—worshipping him and thanking him for saving them. He is angry with them—they should leave, lest it all be for naught.

Ushitura accepts Sanjuro’s story and takes revenge on Seibê by setting one of his silk shops on fire, demanding the woman back. Unosoke grins maniacally, his stupid gun poking from his robes.

The next morning, we see Ushitura stumbling through runnels of sake pouring from his slashed casks; Seibë has exacted revenge. It’s quite an incredible scene.

In the next scene, the town is in shambles, half burned, bodies in the street. Even the casketmaker’s business is in ruins. Uno and Ino confront Sanjuro about the escaped woman. They find proof, because the dipshits had to write a thank-you note. Sanjuro knew they were fools. Sanjuro is repaid for his kindness to them with a horrific beating by Ino and Uno and Kannuki the giant (who looks kind of a like a Japanese Jaws/Richard Kiehl).

He manages to escape, eventually sneaking out of town in a coffin (TIL old-timey Japanese coffins look more like barrels). On the way out of town, his friend Gonji (the tavern keeper) and the casket-maker stop and witness the slaughter as Ushitura’s men smoke out and kill Seibê’s men and his entire brothel. In the meantime, the casket-maker runs away and they must enlist stupid Ino’s help in carrying Sanjuro out of town, to a small temple to recover.

Gonji has been kidnapped and Sanjuro is ready to take on Ushitura’s gang, once and for all.

It’s wonderfully filmed, seeming to really have taken place in 1860s feudal Japan. Except there are no regular townspeople: the town has only sake and whores and gangs. It’s not ever clear where food comes from. Mifune has all sorts of mannerisms that are hard to tell (for me) if they are signs of that time or his own invention. He strokes a non-existent beard all the time. He is constantly pulling his arms in and out of his billowing sleeves.

The film is black and white and uses a lot of side-wipes to change scenes (George Lucas would use those a lot, as well). It’s always incredibly windy in that town. The Samurai look mixes very nicely with the classic Western aesthetic. I can see a thousand graphic novels being born from any one of these scenes.

You Were Never Really Here (2017) — 8/10

There is almost no dialogue in this film. What there is, is washed out and difficult to understand. Background noise like televisions or conversations from other booths and tables in restaurants tends to drown it out. It doesn’t matter because the story is told visually.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe, a haggard man with a medical problem of some sort, almost certainly PTSD. He was in one of America’s foreign wars. He was in customs or perhaps ICE. We see flashbacks of him discovering immigrants piled up in a container. He lives alone with his mother, who seems a bit off, either with natural age-related dementia or with the repercussions of beatings she’d gotten from his father, an obviously brutal man from whom Joe got certain mannerisms. He’s certainly inherited his weapon of choice from his father—the hammer.

He is brutal, efficient and violent in his job, rescuing girls from human trafficking. He is hired to discreetly rescue a Senator’s daughter from a high-end child brothel. He does so with neither pomp nor circumstance, taking her back to his motel room. Before he can return her to her father, she is re-abducted by police officers (or men dressed as such), one of whom absconds with her and the other who is killed by Joe.

Joe returns to his handler to find him dead, slaughtered, with his hands brutally mutilated. Fearing the worst, Joe rushes home to find his mother has been killed by two men still in his home. He kills one and gut-shoots the other, who reveals to him that State Governor Williams has had Nina re-abducted, as she was his favorite.

Joe buries his mother in a local lake, filling his pockets with stones to join her in her watery grave. An obligation to Nina changes his mind and he strides away, with a modicum of purpose. With the same lack of care to planning and strategy or tactics, Joe enters Williams’s palatial country home, dispatching a few henchmen only to find Williams in the girl’s room, with his throat slit. Joe is in bits. He finds Nina in the dining room, eating with bloody hands and a straight razor next to her plate.

He takes her to a diner, where they both recover somewhat. As she goes to the bathroom, he has a violent fantasy of ending his life. She wakes him from his reverie and tells him that “it’s a beautiful day”.

The film is lean, without extra bits, told mostly visually, with a fitting soundtrack and understated performances. Phoenix oozes angst. Interesting and unique.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) — 8/10

We meet Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) lying undressed in her upstairs room where she lives in West Dallas in Texas, obviously hating her life as a waitress. She hears a noise outside and catches Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) trying to steal her mother’s car—and then pretending not to. They talk and hit it off immediately; she’s not averse to his larcenous lifestyle and he sees something special in her.

They rob their first store and she’s all over him—but he demurs, telling her that it’s not his style. She is nonplussed, unsure of her role. Their minor crime spree continues with a car here, a car there, an empty bank, a general store where he was just trying to buy supplies with the two dollars they had.

They pick up a third wheel in the form of a clever mechanic C.W. Moss. In their next bank robbery, Clyde kills a man and they barely get away because the driver is too cautious—he parallel-parked the car. Clyde makes a final offer to Bonnie to let her get out scot-free, but she refuses. They try to make love, but Clyde is…not a loverboy.

They head to Clyde’s family home, where they meet his ludicrously enthusiastic and hillbilly brother Buck (Gene Hackman). His wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons) is less than thrilled with the three of them. They all move into a house in the country together. While Blanche is happier being more settled down, Bonnie is restless and unhappy with the domestic arrangements.

They’re discovered and forced to hit the road again. They hit more banks, with the police giving chase, and many being killed by what Buck terms the “Barrow Gang”. Tensions continue to rise as Blanche insists on a cut, even though she doesn’t do anything but sit in the car. They’re forced to steal another car, taking Eugene Grizzard’s car (Gene Wilder).

Grizzard and his fiancé Velma give chase, but give up. To their chagrin, the gang turns around and gives them chase, forcing them to a stop. They pick them up and now there are seven people in the car, driving God knows where, picking up takeout burgers and fries (was that a thing in 1931?). When he tells them he’s an undertaker, Bonnie insists they be dumped immediately, in a cornfield in Oklahoma in the middle of the night.

The Barrows have a family reunion of sorts, with Bonnie’s mother and a passel of children of, quite frankly, unknown origin. Soon after, the gang is attacked at night by many, many police and barely escape with their lives. Buck is shot in the face and severely incapacitated. The noose of law enforcement is closing. They are set upon again, with the law killing Buck and taking Blanche into custody.

In the shootout, Bonnie and Clyde are wounded and C.W. takes them to his father’s house. They get patched up a bit and get back on the road a few days later, where they finally manage to consummate their relationship. This reluctance is all the more humorous because Warren Beatty was such a Casanova in real life. Papa Moss is hell-bent on getting his son out of trouble—and makes a deal with local police to give up Bonnie and Clyde. He traps them when they stop to help him fix a flat tire; the police do the rest.

The movie is a bit more accurate than press accounts at the time (the movie mentions this), but still doesn’t address nearly the severity of Bonnie’s injuries, near the end (one of her legs was nearly destroyed, with visible bone sticking out of a wound that refused to heal). See Bonnie and Clyde (Wikipedia) for much more information.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988) — 8/10

The nearly unbearably guileless and adorable opening credits set the mood for this Studio Ghibli film. Everything is hand-drawn, hand-made, comfortable, warm, cozy. [1] The landscapes are beautiful. This is not a slick U.S. animated film.

It starts with a father driving to the countryside with his two daughters (Satsuki, who’s about ten, and Mei, who’s about four or five). They open up the semi-dilapidated house together, investigating the yard and the bathhouse and so on. The older girl enters the house on her inverted knees, shoes held up in the air so that they don’t touch the floor.

They finish cleaning up the house, with the help of caretaker Nanny and her grandson Kanta, who’s afraid of the “haunted” house. They’ve moved there to be near the girls’ mother, who’s in the hospital. They all visit the mother and hope for her rapid recovery and return. The next morning, Satsuki takes care of breakfast because their father overslept and isn’t ready to handle the household yet. They have sushi and rice for breakfast and Satsuki heads off to school. Mei dresses up to go “out” in the garden. Tatsuo gets to work in his office.

Mei plays in the garden and that’s when Totoro’s minions come chugging out of the deep grass, looking like someone crossed a rabbit with a penguin. They’re cute, but Mei is nearly unbearably adorable. She follows them down a rabbit hole to Totoro’s lair, falling asleep with him for the whole day.

Satsuki comes home from school and finds Mei asleep in the garden, but just under some bushes. There’s no sign of Totoro. They also can’t find the path to the big tree that Mei followed before. Tatsuo and Satsuki laugh at her silliness, but Tatsuo tells her that she was lucky to have met the “king of the forest”.

The movie deals with the small gods that accompany regular people throughout the day. The “dust bunnies” that make the house dirty, the gods of the forest, and so on. The girls stop at a shrine on the way home, during a rainstorm, asking for leave of the god who lives there to stay under the roof until the rain passes. Later, in the forest, near a bus stop, Mei discovers a shrine behind a tree, with a dog god of some kind.

As they wait for their father, Totoro shows up to the bus stop. Satsuki loans the creature [2] her father’s umbrella and it takes off with it. It gives her a gift of seeds in exchange. Its bus comes first and is different—it’s a Cheshire Cat with glowing eyes for headlights. Satsuki is over the moon because now she’s met Totoro, as well.

The girls plant the seeds and wait. A few nights later, Totoro shows up—with his umbrella—to make them sprout. And sprout they do—into a majestic tree. This is all in their dream, though. (Or is it?) The next morning, the seeds have sprouted, but much more modestly.

The same day, the girls get news that their mother isn’t well enough to come home, yet. Mei runs away to the hospital—the whole town is looking for her, fearing the worst. Satsuki runs all over the damned place; everyone communicates exclusively by shouting. The townspeople think they’ve found Mei’s shoe—but it’s not hers.

Satsuki calls on Totoro for help, who obliges by calling the cat-bus [3], which carries Satsuki first to Mei and then both of them to the hospital, where they see that their father is with their mother—and that she’s OK. They leave an ear of corn on the windowsill, proving that they were really there.

The end credits are possibly even cuter than the opening ones. The song’s terrible, though.

A Dangerous Method (2011) — 8/10

This is a David Cronenberg film starting in 1904 and dealing with the birth of psychoanalysis and its two main midwives Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. The opening scene sees Keira Knightley’s Sabina Spielrein being carted to the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital overlooking Zürich.

Sabina becomes a patient of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and is soon not just in therapy with him, but also working for him as his assistant. While she’s in therapy, Jung sits behind her. Cronenberg here chooses to focus Sabina so that half of her face is out-of-focus, suggesting her unsettledness.

In a therapy session, she admits that she becomes excited by the thought of her own beating or humiliation. She diagnoses herself as a vile creature who should never leave the hospital.

Two years later, Jung travels to Austria with his wife, to meet Freud (Viggo Mortenson). They dine together and Freud lightly admonishes Jung when he couches his professional talk too guardedly,

“And by the way, please don’t feel you have to restrain yourself here. My family are all veterans of the most unsuitable manner of mealtime conversation.”

The two men collaborate; we learn that Freud is absolutely fixated on a sexual interpretation of every facet of human behavior. We learn that he is poorer than Jung, whose wife is quite wealthy. They spar, but Freud is not to swayed on any point. Jung confides later in Sabina.

Next we meet Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), an unstable acolyte of Freud. He becomes Jung’s little devil on his shoulder, exhorting him to take Sabina, as she so clearly wants to be taken. Gross escapes from the institution, but not before ravishing a field worker. Jung goes through his soft-core pornographic effects and finds a letter addressed to himself. The advice is unchanged. Jung becomes more and more deeply conflicted about his personal vow of monogamy—and more and more swayed by Gross’s arguments.

He finally gives in and begins sleeping with Sabina. When he tries to end the affair, she psychoanalyzes him, asking how his lovemaking is with his wife—and then telling him how it will be different with her: “With me, I want you to be ferocious. I want you to punish me.” They agree to continue the affair.

Freud visits Jung in Zürich; he is still an arrogant egotist, but he’s not wrong when he admonishes Jung for wasting time with “telepathy” or “catalytic exteriorized phenomena” (which is where Jung said his gut starting burning the second before a bookcase cracked).

During this time, Jung is often shown in the sailboat his wife gave him, but never in any significant wind. He takes his wife’s gift regularly to visit his mistress. Matters come to a head and Jung shows himself to be the absolute king of terrible breakups. Sabina attacks him, then accepts his breakup because he’s a giant jackass. Sabina writes to Freud (all writing is in German), asking for his assistance.

Sabina confronts Jung again, begging him to confess to Freud all that’s done with her. She wants Freud to take her on as a patient. While Sabina will summer in Berlin with her parents, Jung and Freud plan to travel to America. They are on the same ocean-liner, but Jung is in first class, with his wife, whereas Freud mst travel in a lower class. That chaps his hide something fierce.

Sabina is in Küsnacht, visiting Jung at his new practice. He notes that he was worried about whether he’d be able to find enough patients at the new location, but it hasn’t been a problem. Obviously not: Küsnacht is at most 10km from his previous hospital (and probably closer). He agrees to take her on as her thesis advisor. The affair begins anew. This time she breaks it off, moving to Vienna, where she meets with Freud. She presents her idea, to which he responds,

“I fought against the idea for some time, but I suppose there must be indissoluble some link between sex and death. I don’t feel the relationship between the two is quite the way you’ve portrayed it, but I’m most grateful to you for animating the subject in such a stimulating way.”

The rift between Jung and Freud grows, eventually exploding in a flame war executed via post. It’s based on Freud’s insistence that therapists should not play god, that all a therapist can do is diagnose, but never cure. Whereas Jung wants to be able to help the patient work around the disease, to reinvent themselves. This is a difficult tightrope to walk: how to cure without shaping, without instilling structure from without? How to avoid playing God? It’s an interesting dispute and I’m not even sure I know where I land, to be honest.

Mortenson, Fassbender and Knightley are all quite excellent. Her accent is a bit odd, but I honestly can’t judge what it should sound like as a Russian emigré fluent in German, living in Switzerland in the early 1900s and being portrayed in English. I give the movie an extra point for nicely written dialogue, though I can’t help but think how much better it would have been in German.

The Book of Mormon is a musical created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of and writers for South Park. It is legitimately about the tenets and history of Mormonism and depicts the journey of a few young men as they go forth into the world on their “mission”, a rite that every Mormon [1] must pass.

Kath and I went to opening night in Zürich. The cast was excellent; several of the main characters had played in the same musical on Broadway. See the link for more information.

Synopsis

It’s a lot to unpack, but I’ll give it a shot.

It starts with a song called “Hello”, which shows a dozen Mormons ringing doorbells, speaking the word of Jesus Christ (of the Latter Day Saints). Soon after, the young men are sorted into missions and Elder Price and Elder Cunningham are teamed up to go to Uganda. Cunningham is excited to be matched with star pupil Price; Price is less than thrilled to be going to Uganda, as he’d had his heart set on Orlando instead.

They go to Uganda, meet the villagers and the warlords, sing a bunch, Price loses his faith and thinks he’s escaped to Orlando, but really he’s just having a Spooky Mormon Hell Dream, Cunningham converts them all by lying heavily about the Book of Mormon (they end up publishing a fourth installment called the Book of Arnold), the villagers put on a very special show for the visiting Mormon chieftains and Cunningham and Price decide to stick around longer to promulgate their good work.

The final song starts with the Ugandans reenacting the opening song: Hello.

An Earnest Satire

There is so much going on, at so many levels. Tongue in cheek doesn’t even begin to cover it. It’s less direct irony or satire or parody and much more like an earnest homage that goes just a little farther to reveal shadows that indicate that there are other interpretations possible. As with South Park, nearly every line can be taken literally or not, as a coarse joke or as a subtle dig at a power structure or commonly believed myth. The songs are very much like this, as well—earnest sabotage. [2]

Mormons just believe—which is, on the one hand, a wonderfully naive and beatific quality, but then they also believe the wildest horseshit. Parker and Stone make fun of Mormonism by just presenting it as it describes itself. It’s a ludicrous story.

The misinterpretation of the Ugandans is no more of less ridiculous than the original. It’s perhaps cruder, sure, but it’s also more appropriate to their situation, more likely to offer them guidance that makes a difference in their lives. Here Parker and Stone seem to be showing us that this is all that religion can really do for us: tell ridiculous but entertaining stories that keep us from killing each other or letting nature kill us.

Jews believe in one book, Christians in two and the Mormons in a Trilogy. They also happen to believe that Jesus was in upstate New York in the 1800s and that Joseph Smith wasn’t a con man.

Details and Impressions

The opening scenes of the two acts look very much like school plays and are voiced exactly like South Park. Jesus sounds kinda like Eric Cartman.

The backdrop for Salt Lake City has a Wendy’s and a McDonald’s in it. The one for Orlando has a bigger Mini Golf sign on it than the Epcot Center Dome. Why? Because it loomed larger in nine-year-old Elder Price’s memory. Orlando is, on the one hand, believable as a dream destination for a boy, but not for an adult male, for whom Orlando is a ridiculous dream destination, a playground in Florida—someplace that everyone knows is terrible. Are Mormon boys naive to believe that it’s not? Or are we jaded? Who knows? Parker and Stone leave it open, poking fun but also cutting their targets a break.

You have to already have known a bunch about Mormons to get some of the jokes—like that they’re not allowed to drink coffee, which isn’t exactly common knowledge. I never thought I’d hear a song about Upstate New York and Rochester (Joseph Smith’s origin story) or one in which the words clitoris and scrotum featured so much.

There’s another song called Hasa Diga Eebowai (Fuck You God), which featured enthusiastic gesticulation with middle fingers in the Lord’s direction, to the missionaries’ utter horror. The finale where the tribe re-enacted what they’d learned ended up in a simulated orgy with lots of positions and gigantic dildos. This almost topped the “Crazy Mormon Hell Dream”, which featured Jeffrey Dahmer buggering Elder Price’s father while Hitler was fellated by District 9's leader while Genghis Khan looked on.

Was that all? No, the musical also featured a warlord named “Butt Fucking Naked” who shoots a man directly in the head in a shocking scene that’s sandwiched between jokes—and whose juxtaposition was anything but an accident. AIDS is a fact of life that is so accepted by the Ugandans that they think nothing of threatening the Mormons with it or noting it like the weather. The first scene of Uganda features a woman dragging a half-eaten animal carcass across the stage. Slowly.

Clitoral mutilation is presented as a prevalent problem—enforced by the local warlord. But one of the villagers is depicted as believing that having sex with a virgin—even a baby—will cure his AIDS. These are just as ludicrous and overblown as anything else in the show, but are traps for dipshits at NPR and elite universities to try to call the show racist.

The point isn’t that Ugandans are stupid or primitive or backward. At least not only them. Everyone’s an idiot. Mormons believe ridiculous shit and travel the world trying to dunk people underwater and get them to believe it, too. Ugandans believe crazy shit to get through the day and deal with the horrific hand they’ve been dealt. But it’s always fun to see the prudes and stick-in-the-muds fault a comedy for failing to be unfunny about taking the piss.

In a way, the depiction of Uganda was exactly what a Mormon would expect, no? Otherwise, why send missionaries? I mean, Africa is the land of cell phones, but the girl doesn’t know what “text messaging” is. It’s a joke, guys. The Ugandans were exactly as most Americans—not just Mormons—would expect. It was a caricature of what Westerners think “Africa” is.

There are several bits shedding a very dubious light on the tales from the Book of Mormon and also a song called “Man Up” where Cunningham exhorts himself to be like Jesus—who showed balls when he climbed up on that cross and let himself be nailed there. There is a song called “Baptize Me” that just drips innuendo and double entendre, another song called “I Am Africa” sung exclusively by the whitest Mormons you’ve ever seen.

A Real-life Producers

I honestly spent the first half just smiling thinking of Stone and Parker just daring each other to make an even more ludicrously named character or write a more shocking line or make the characters say “fuck” more than any other Broadway musical (or “scrotum” or “clitoris”).

It’s hard to imagine that Parker and Stone didn’t just dare each other to come up with crazier and crazier stuff, with an eye on Mel Brooks, whose movie The Producers about a musical so deliberately bad that it would close on opening night—and featured a song with half-clad goose-stepping Nazis singing “Springtime for Hitler”—was subsequently made one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time, just as Book of Mormon has now done. In both cases, it’s utterly unclear who gets the joke and who doesn’t or who is getting which joke.

I can think of many people who would have seen this is a straight-up musical about Mormons in Africa that had a bit too much swearing in it (OK, they said “fuck” all the time).

Also, the uncircumcised girl’s name was Nabalungi, not Nefertiti or Necrophilia or Nintendo or any of the many other names Cunningham called her.

A couple of years ago, I wrote some documentation on How to browse pictures and albums on earthli. The article below extends those instructions to explain how to use a new mobile mode.

New Features

Mobile Mode

There is a new browsing mode on earthli that provides a read-only view of individual entries (like articles, pictures, journals, etc.) that is much more mobile-friendly. This mode is available for all applications (e.g. Recipes or News) but is most useful for the Albums where the mode is now the default for picture-browsing. Each application tracks mobile mode separately.

Better Photo-sizing

Full-size pictures are now sized to the browser window without artificial constraint. Instead of clicking a picture to see the full-size view, use “Open Image in New Tab” on a device with a mouse or trackpad or pinch-to-zoom on a mobile device.

Key Photo per Day

The calendar now includes thumbnails of the key picture for each day with pictures. An editor can set any photo to be the key photo for the day from the photo’s command menu.

Browsing thumbnails

The basic thumbnail browser is already mobile-friendly enough. [1] You can see the thumbnail browser in the screenshot below. In it, you can see that the calendar button is more prominent on each album home page.

Opening the Calendar

Calendar View

If you click that button, it takes you to the calendar view, shown below. The calendar now shows the key photo for each day. [2] As before, the calendar shows the number of journals and pictures on a given day, showing the full title of a picture or journal if it’s the sole entry of that type for that day.

Calendar View

• Click “# Pictures” at the bottom of a day to jump to the thumbnail browser for that day.
• Click a day’s key photo to jump directly to the full-size picture navigator.
• Click the title at the top of the day for the journal entry (you can get to the pictures for day from there, too)

Navigating in Mobile Mode

Once you get to a picture, you’re in the mobile-browsing mode, by default. This mode clears away the standard header, breadcrumbs and toolbar, replacing it with just the title of the item (e.g. a picture) and a small drop-down menu with navigation commands and a command to get back out of mobile mode.

Mobile-mode Menu

Since the navigation toolbar is hidden, you can’t use the mouse to navigate. Instead, swipe to move back and forth on a mobile device [3] or use the left and right keys on a device with a keyboard.

Click the little down-arrow button in the top-left corner to show a menu.

• The top button closes mobile-browsing mode and goes back to the “classic” browsing mode (shown below)
• The other links go back to

  • the thumbnail browser for that day
  • or the calendar
  • or the thumbnail browser for the main album
  • or other albums

Navigating in Classic Mode

Navigating in the Classic View

From here, you can use the regular breadcrumbs above the toolbar to navigate as you would with the menu in mobile mode. Click the “Show Mobile Mode” button in the toolbar buttons to get back to the mobile mode.

Don Quixote (1605)

by Miguel de Cervantes

I liked part two even better than part one. Part II of the book starts with a discussion of the first part of the book, which in this second part has appeared as a publication already famous throughout Spain. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza discuss this book with a bachelor who is very familiar with it, questioning and probing to determine that it reflects the truth…but not too much of the truth. This part is really very nicely written and the self-referential part as well as the oblique chastisement of Cervantes’s own detractors and critics is quite a master stroke.

Cervantes packs this long book full of wonderful prose, never missing an opportunity for a small joke or pithy phrase (much as Sancho never misses an opportunity to utter a proverb). So many paragraphs are like exquisite sculptures, standing nearly on their own, and the careful reader is constantly rewarded.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

A Feast for Crows (2005)

by George R.R. Martin

This is book four of the Song of Ice and Fire. Cersei descends into paranoid madness, reinstating a religious army, an act she would come to rue as it backfires spectacularly. Jaime and Brienne meet up again in the Riverlands, after Jaime had solved a few issues there. The Iron Islands feature much more prominently, with all of the Greyjoys—Euron, Victarion, Aeron and Asha—getting in on the action. In Dorne, intrigue abounds, with plot built on plot and the Red Viper’s brother machinating to maintain the power balance with King’s Landing and the upper South. Quentyn Martell has traveled East with his friends to try to join Dorne to the Targaryens through Daenerys. Arya arrives in Braavos and apprentices at the House of Black and White. Jon maintains a balance between Stannis’s demands—and those of Melisandre—as well as arming to fight the Others from the North. Samwell travels with Gilly and Aemon around the periphery of the Seven Kingdoms by boat, to get to Old Town and train at the Citadel.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

A Dance with Dragons (2011)

by George R.R. Martin

This is book five of the Song of Ice and Fire. Bran ends up in the lair of the Children of the Forest, far North of the Wall, with the three-eyed raven. Jon’s fate is unknown, but things don’t look too good. Arya’s training continues. Tyrion is captured by Mormont and both of them near Meerreen. Quentyn’s mission fails horribly, Victarion approaches Meereen, possessed of powers. Daenerys accepts her destiny and mounts Drogon. Stannis marches on the marshes first, rousts the Ironborn, captures Asha and then sinks into the snows before he can arrive at Winterfell, where he wants to roust the Boltons. Young Aegon Targaryen and John Connington land in Dorne and make their way north to attempt recapture of the Iron Throne. Cersei takes the walk of shame.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)

by Ken Kesey

This is the story of a the Big Chief and McMurphy and Nurse Ratched. The Big Chief is a long-time resident of the mental institution run by Head Nurse Ratched; McMurphy arrives as a transferee from a work camp who thinks he’s going to have an easier ride in the home. This is true, at least at first. He is a breath of fresh air for the other inmates there, a force of nature, as it were. he chafes and takes liberties and cracks wise and runs card games and generally doesn’t follow the rules. He tries to help free the others from their artificial, psychological fetters. He takes them on a fishing trip. He sneaks ladies and booze into the building late at night. He tries to help poor Billy. Ratched thwarts him every step of the way. The Big Chief narrates, grows and learns. McMurphy sacrifices the last of what he has in a futile act of revenge, though he is aware of what is happening. The Big Chief makes an actual escape. Really surprisingly well-written and deep. Recommended.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2013)

by Mark Blyth

This excellent book provides an approachable analysis of the recent history of the financial crisis that started in 2006, exploded in 2008 and is still being sorely felt by many in 2015. Blyth skewers the main idea for solving the crisis: austerity for the majority of the public. Why is austerity not the solution? He lists many reasons, but the main one is that it doesn’t work. It has never worked. Accurate histories show that it doesn’t work. Inaccurate studies claim that it might work.

Worse, the crisis was caused by private machinations and profit-taking and the price is paid by the public—who’ve already paid the price in the form of a severely impacted economy. The public pays twice for the mistakescrimes of the few, while the few take their profit, take no punishment and line themselves up for the next reaping.

How do they get away with it? By selling the idea of austerity of all: if our economy tanked, then it must be our collective fault and we must all shoulder the blame and tighten our belts. The private losses are bailed out by the state and instantly transformed into a story of state profligacy. It’s like a child who crashes his car, gets his father to buy him a new one, then mocks said father for not being able to pay the rent.

Never mind that it is exactly these jackasses who aren’t tightening their belts—we can’t police everyone, can we? Never mind that exactly those who aren’t tightening their belts are actually the ones who caused the problems in the first place. With their crimes. Some will argue that what happened was perfectly legal—but that is only because those who commit crimes at high levels are careful to ensure that the crimes they wish to commit are first made legal.

This is an important book. Blyth cover the minutiae of recent history, covers the history of austerity over the last century, examines the writings and recommendations of oft-cited and great economists of the past—Locke, Hume, Smith, Keynes, among others—and looks at recent academic studies that are clearly if not deliberately fraudulent. He is a bit cagey about coming right out and accusing world leaders of collusion and corruption to serve their rich buddies and financial partners, but we can excuse an academic a bit of hedging. See below for my less-generous analysis and Blyth’s possible solutions.

“When world leaders keen to legitimize the damage that they have already done to the lives of millions of their fellow citizens reach for examples such as these to vindicate their actions, applauding these countries for creating misery, it shows us one this above all. Austerity remains an ideology immune to facts and basic empirical refutation.”

Page 226

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale is the story of a possible future America in which society has taken a rather hard, right turn into a dystopian, quasi-religious patriarchy—more even that what exists today. In this world, women have no rights whatsoever. Some are used as drudges—Marthas—while others—Aunts—inculcate the new regime to the breeders—Handmaids—and, finally, there are the Wives. Among the men, the Commanders are at the top of the food chain—they are married to Wives—but also have a series of Handmaids. There are other men, high-ranking soldiers—Angels—as well as spies—Eyes.

The prose is poetic, evocative, metaphorical, at-times almost hallucinatory—as if the mists of recollection have twisted certain parts of the remembered past. The ideas and chilling visions are just as likely to happen as they were in the 80s, when the book was written. There are good portions of the American population who would happily view the book as a guide to revolution, to creating a better version of America. At times reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984. Highly recommended.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Lucky Jim (1953)

by Kingsley Amis

So far, it combines the stultifying mundanity of day-to-day drudgery of Confederacy of Dunces with the whining tone of Holden Caulfield from the Catcher in the Rye. The prose is a bit stiff for my tastes and Amis seems, to me, a bit overrated.

The middle bits, which involve Dixon’s quasi-dalliance with Christine, are more evocative. The book has that feeling of lifting slowly but seemingly inexorably from a quagmire of boredom, stretching, stretching, with what one feels might perhaps be interpreted as acceleration, a feeling that one would soon snap free of gummy strands that yet cling and tie one to the tedium. But alas this feeling is fleeting, as you knew in your heart of cynical hearts that it probably would be, as the gummy strands win more battles and eventually the war and you sink back into that tepid morass with nary a change for all that you saw when you briefly, if not soared, perhaps one could describe it generously as … flew.

It’s as if Dixon is trapped in the miasma of Welch, as a prehistoric fly when first it steps in amber and the honeyed fluid hasn’t quite seeped into every last receptor of its compound eye. This book documents the struggles of that fly. In fairness, the fly in this case doesn’t struggle so much as complain that the vitrification process isn’t going quickly enough and that the other flies should just go about their business and stop bothering it.

The style and subject matter is, at times, quite strongly reminiscent of The Idiot or The Brothers Karamazov, but perhaps that is only because those books also dealt with idiotic families in quasi-boring situations that never come to any strong conclusions. The ending is a bit of a surprise, tying things up in a far neater bow than I’d have expected. Was this done to because the author wanted his hero to semi-triumph? Or was it an ironic stab at books with happy endings? Is it a happy ending to see Dixon stumble further along the road to success? Was he the hero? Or was he just relatively less-insufferable, rising above the others by dint of their utter awfulness rather than an positive qualities of his own? All in all, it was an interesting read, but as for it being the finest comic novel of the 20th century: no. Not even among British authors. Just, no.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Joyland (2013)

by Stephen King

You can tell this is a Stephen King book from a mile away. It’s about a young man—Devin, a writer—who’s been jilted by the love of his life. She’s decided that it’s time to see other people and he’s not quite on board with that yet. So he takes a job several states away and spends a good deal of time mooning around over her. He makes a couple of good friends at this odd little amusement park called Joyland. They have a dog mascot that he’s especially good at playing. After learning of a ghost in the haunted-house ride, Devin becomes nearly obsessed with the case and is convinced that he can release the ghost if he just finds the real killer. Along the way, he befriends a standoffish woman, Annie, through her son Mike, who’s physically disabled but gifted in other ways. He is crucial to releasing the ghost because of his psychic powers. They finally discover the real killer hiding right under their noses. They all learn a lot about life, go their separate ways and nobody really lives happily ever after, but that’s OK too.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

And Another Thing… (2013)

by Eoin Colfer

This is the sixth in the increasingly inaccurately named trilogy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This installment picks up where Adams left off in Mostly Harmless and reads a bit like Pratchett’s Raising Steam in that absolutely everyone from the respective pantheon appears. The good news is that it’s a pretty good story and the characters are handled well and feel natural. The dialogue is clever and the writing is funny. Good old Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged features prominently as well as the always interesting Trillian and Tricia McMillan. A planet built by the Magrathean Slartibartfast has been populated by people far too rich for their own good and they’re petitioning for a God to rule their planet for them. Wowbagger and Thor both show up and lock horns. Even the Vogons, led by the implacable Prostetnic Jeltz and his son, who’s not as enthusiastic as his father about eliminating humanity forever (finally closing the chapter on every possible extrusion in every possible multiverse). A fun romp and an installment that can stand proudly next to the others.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy (1971)

by Stanislaw Lem

This is a surrealist romp by the master of speculative non-hard science fiction, Stanislaw Lem. In this one, we meet the narrator Ijon Tichy, who is so wonderfully written and who is so convincing, that one quickly wonders whether the eponymous congress actually exists. It doesn’t. The Congress takes place in Costa Rica, a convocation of the best and brightest minds that looks to tackle the problem of the future for the whole of planet Earth. In particular, they are to tackle the problem of population. Everything that follows may or may not have taken place, because of the copious amounts of mind-altering substances ingested both deliberately and accidentally by the author.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism (2012)

by Ha-Joon Chang

This is the second book I’ve read by Chang. The first was Kicking Away the Ladder, which discussed how the much-ballyhooed free-market practices forced on developing countries were not used by the first-world countries when they themselves were developing. This book kind of picks up where the other left off. Instead of viewing the obvious disparity between what the developed world says and what it does in a clinical manner, Chang uses a more class-based lens to examine how the rich manipulate the story to benefit themselves. A primary part of that story is the myth of capital-C Capitalism.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Factotum (1975)

by Charles Bukowski

Henry Chinaski is a variously employed, alcoholic drifter living in America in the 1940s. He’s been rejected from the draft, so he’s left in a country that doesn’t really want him for anything else, that was already suspicious of people who didn’t yearn for the two-kids/white-picket-fence/steady-job dream. He’s willing to work, but doesn’t like to do the same thing for long, doesn’t like authority, and likes to booze and whore and write. He continues to try to publish, but is continually rejected by the only publishing house he considers worthy. He gets involved with Laura and Jan at different times, who have varyingly detrimental effects on his life.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Cloud Atlas (2004)

by David Mitchell

This is a well-written and far-reaching book. All the more so considering the many narrators, voices and dialects used for the several distinct sections, each of which also took place at a different time in our past or future. It’s written in several parts: the first five parts are from different narrators and each subsequent one picks up the story by somehow mentioning the writings of the previous narrator, however obliquely. Each piece builds on the previous one, laddering up through the years into a future where humanity is reduced to tribes on islands visited by leftover vestiges of more advanced but increasingly desperate humanity. With the middle part of 11, we retreat back through the narrators, in reverse order, until we arrive where we started, having perhaps learned something of humanity’s reach and maybe something about souls.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey (2008)

by Chuck Palahniuk

The story is told through one-line to one-page–long biographical snippets. The story goes from Buster’s upbringing in a grindingly poor town, where his young mother teaches him to how to make Easter eggs with wax and boiled vegetable stock. He is an odd child, inuring himself to poison through repeated animal, insect and arachnid bits, collecting old paint cans from old folks, who don’t realize they might be full of extremely valuable coins dating back to the mid-1800s, and following the foretellings of an old man who he met once and claimed to be his real father.

He warps the local economy in a way that makes all the townspeople complicit in his scheme, he catches and beats rabies multiple times, all the while spreading it throughout the town, especially the girls who, oddly, can’t get enough of him. He takes his ill-gotten gains to the city, where more of the world he inhabits is revealed, in the form of a stark subdivision between night and day shifts for humanity as a way of solving traffic woes, as well as a whole subculture of people organizing crash parties, in which they crash their cars into each other to feel what it’s like to really live—something that almost no-one knows now that one can “boost peaks” from others.

That is, full-bore digital sensory capture is freely available and lulls the populace. And this is very much what it is intended to do, according to some of the later biographical participants—to keep people from discovering that, if you crash your car just right, and you’re in just the right theta-wave, meditative state, you will be transported to another place in time, where you can become your own progenitor and increase the power of your current self, until you reach a point where you can kill your own parents, terminate the loop by eliminating the beginning and live forever, suspended in a liminal state. Very much an Infinite-Jest vibe (even a bit of Pynchon at times).

Some wicked cool concepts and intriguing thoughts in this one. Recommended.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Mind of My Mind (1977)

by Octavia Butler

This is book two of the Patternist series. The main character of the first part of the book is Doro, a 5000-year–old superbeing with enhanced mental powers. His primary power is the ability to force his way in to another being’s mind, eradicating that mind and replacing it with his own. Doro is beyond human, and views most of humanity as herd animals, for use as he pleases. He started a breeding program many millennia ago with another powerful woman, a shapeshifter and their progeny tend toward superpowers of the psychic kind.
The star of this book is Mary, a distant descendant, who transitions successfully, but in so doing becomes almost more powerful than Doro himself, capable of contacting and leading a whole society of powerful minds. In effect, Doro has succeeded in his program, but his progeny is ready to leave him and his rapacious dog-eat-dog society behind.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Perdido Street Station (2001)

by China Miéville

This is the story of Isaac, a thaumaturge/scientist in New Crobuzon, a city described in incredible and sprawling detail by Miéville. He lives with girlfriend Lin, who’s an artist. She creates sculptures using special materials that she chews with her mandibles behind her head. You guessed it, she’s not human. She’s kind of a combination fly/super-sexy woman. You’re not allowed to talk about her like that, but that’s the most succinct description.

There’s also Yagharek, an outcast member of a strict flying species, who commissions Issac to help him fly again—his wings having been ripped from him by the expulsion ceremony. In his investigations, Issac discovers an iridescent caterpillar that turns into one of the most evil, multi-dimensional beings known to Crobuzon. He feeds it dreamshit, a drug made from the shit of the caterpillar’s captive full-grown compatriots. This is a bad move. The creature escapes and frees its comrades.

They all begin to prey on the populace of Crobuzon, sucking souls and psyches and just basically bringing the whole mood down. The creatures were deliberately kept by the military of New Crobuzon as a military weapon that is now out of control. Isaac discovers so-called “crisis energy”, which is kind of analogous to harnessing the power of quantum foam, I guess.

There’s also an extra-dimensional spider called Weaver as well as a secretive Council that machinates throughout the city. The book was more intricate than that, but it was also about 800 pages long. Well-written but a bit over-detailed in places.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe (2011)

by Charles Yu

Charles Yu digs through baggage from his past in the guise of a real-life time-machine mechanic. The universe in which he lives is kind of a mix of our own plus all sorts of fictive universes. So, for example, Luke Skywalker is a character because, well, he’s part of a popular science-fiction world. The novel addresses all sorts of interesting paradoxes, including loops and writing paradoxical warnings to oneself. He harks back to how his father invented the time machine, but failed to profit from it, instead trapping himself in a diorama/time-loop. It was a meandering, interesting and unique book that seemed to have a lot to do with Charles Yu personally, though that was perhaps just the auto-biographical feel.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Requiem for a Dream (1978)

by Hubert Selby Jr.

I’d already seen the movie and it was relatively faithful to the source material. The book is written in a rambling, near–stream-of-consciousness street patois with little punctuation and structure. The grammar is mostly OK, so you can get used to it, but it’s a bit of a challenge at first. Not as much so as the middle chapter in Cloud Atlas but it might still be off-putting for some.

tl;dr: Drugs are bad.

More precisely, addiction is bad. This film is the story of a mother, her son, his girlfriend and their best friend. Nice, huh?

Spoiler alert: the book ends with the mother strapped to a bed in a mental hospital, withdrawing from a severe amphetamine addiction, the son lies in a hospital, his left arm amputated because of a festering needle wound, the best friend is on a work gang in prison, suffering beatings and malnutrition and the girlfriend is curled up on her couch at home, cuddling her scag, earned by performing in a private sex show for her new pimp.

The mother never quite recovered from the death of her husband and the son isn’t around enough to take care of her. She spends her days watching a self-help guru’s infomercial. She gets an invitation to the show but can’t fit into her dress. She resolves to lose weight by the time she gets her actual invitation. After a day spent trying it the old-fashioned way, she makes an appointment with a diet doctor and starts her downward spiral.

The son and his friends are already well on their way, shucking and jiving for enough money to buy a stash for the night. They resolve to follow the junkie dream: they pool their cash and start selling instead of just using everything they have. This actually works OK for a while, but the friend is busted by the cops on a deal and the money they’ve saved is used for bail and nearly gone in one fell swoop. The son and his girlfriend predictably fight over the lack of drugs and he heads out with his friend to Florida to make a big score. She can’t wait that long and calls a dealer who wants women rather than money in exchange for drugs.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce (2009)

by Slavoj Žižek

This is a philosophical/economic discussion of the 2008 financial crash from a wider angle, one that acknowledges the possibility that some of our most seemingly axiomatic notions must be reëxamined. In particular, the notion that capitalism has won—Fukuyama’s end of history—and that humanity has found the final expression of itself. That the drive to consume is immanent, that the drive to amass long after one has more than enough is genetic.

This book is not afraid to discuss various expressions of capital and capitalism and to shine a harsh light on the really-existing version that has slipped in in sheep’s clothing.

Step one: convince everyone that capitalism is good; remain vague about the definition. Step two: convince everyone that the system that benefits you the most is capitalism. Step three: profit.

Criminalize that which you do not want to do; legalize that which you do, but only with tight strictures so that it applies to yourself. Privatize profit; socialize cost. This system is ridiculously short-lived. As the author says on page 90, “[…] even in the US, the bastion of economic liberalism, capitalism is having to re-invent socialism in order to save itself.”

Capitalism as practiced today is the greatest con game of all. It’s an absolute cruel joke that so many fervently believe in it, while all the time getting screwed by it. It’s feudalism dressed up with better marketing.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)

by Philip K. Dick

This is one of Dick’s trippiest works. He envisions a planet Earth in the future that is too hot to visit during daytime without special cooling gear. Humanity organizes itself to get off-planet. To combat the boring conditions in the colonies, there is a drug called CAN-D that, when taken by groups, allows a shared hallucination. The hallucination approaches reality when it can be anchored on real-life objects, so there is a thriving market for “layouts”, which are basically intricate dollhouses. The colonists take the drug and subsume themselves into a shared hallucinatory life in the layout.

The story centers on Palmer Eldritch, a heroic but exceedingly odd space traveler who’d been lost to a far-off solar system, but who has supposedly returned, Barney Mayerson, a precog who’s been drafted as a colonist, Leo Bolero, his boss and owner of the major layout company. Palmer starts peddling CHEW-Z, an even-more powerful alternative to CAN-D that is capable of making people travel inter-dimensionally or hyper-spatially or just condensing time to a dot, so that an entire live can be lived in a so-called real-world instant. Things get really, really trippy with nested layers of reality, non-real layers of reality due to hallucination—shared and individual, as well as complete overtaking of other people’s bodies and personae. The precog makes things lively with predictions of assassination, but the intended target is unsure how to prevent an event for which the time-stream isn’t even clear.

More details in the Wikipedia entry. If that sounds good to you, then this book is highly recommended. I loved it.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Ark (2009)

by Stephen Baxter

At the end of Flood, the planet Earth had been covered in water, right up to the very top of Mt. Everest. The only life left on Earth was floating around on top of the seas, in various states of civilization. This story overlaps the events of Flood, showing preparations for saving humanity in other ways. The primary focus is on an ambitious space program—Ark One—that will launch a spaceship that is destined for another solar system, a decade of traveling distance away. Arks Two and Three are only hinted at, but also exist.

The first part of the book follows the travails of the candidates for the Ark, until its final launch, which doesn’t go according to plan, but the technology holds up. Several candidates who were pre-selected don’t make it because they are replaced by children of rich and power people. Others are pushed off by members of the military who forced their way onboard at the last moment before launch.

The Earth drowns. The Ark heads for nine years toward Earth II, but it proves to be far less attractive than originally hoped. Factions onboard have gotten more stratified and there are three main paths proposed: settle the planet below, continue onward for 30 more years, to another system, or go back to Earth. They end up doing all three, splitting into three parties, splitting the bolo of two ship bodies that provided gravity.

The group that returns to Earth finds it completely flooded, but they make contact with survivors on the surface as well as in Ark Two, which is on the ocean floor. The group that went onward goes through many tribulations, finally arriving at the destination planet. It’s better than Earth II, but troubles along the way lost them a shuttle, so they have to colonize with children to maximize genetic diversity. The colonists settle in, while the survivors on the orbit further.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Despair (1934; en/1965)

by Vladimir Nabakov

This is the story of an unreasonably vain Russian man Hermann who meets a homeless man Felix, whom Hermann is convinced is his doppelgänger. Hermann lives with his wife Lydia. He thinks her lovely, pudgy, stupid, but loves her very much. Her cousin Ardalion is also quite close to the family—quite close to her, in ways luridly hinted at. Hermann is in despair with his life and wants to move on, so comes up with the plan to pay Felix to pretend to be him, but then he would kill Felix and allow the world to think Hermann dead. Hermann and Lydia would then abscond with the insurance money. Hermann, it turns out to no-one’s surprise is a good deal less clever than he thought. Felix is absolutely not a doppelgänger for him, his plan for the perfect murder is an absolute shambles and Hermann, who escapes to France, is captured soon after. In Hermann’s absence, Ardalion swoops in on Lydia.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Netherland: A Novel (2008)

by Joseph O’Neill

As with Despair by Nabakov, this is kind of a story of a sad man with delusions of grandeur. Because this is a modern novel, though, in Hans van den Broek’s case, he is an immensely successful financial analyst living in London with his wife and son. They haven’t a worry in the world as far as prosaic concerns, so we are free to focus on their ennui. Most of the novel is experienced as a series of flashbacks from narrator Hans, as he thinks about his life in New York City and about his relationship with the dynamic and mysterious Chuck Ramkissoon, an avid businessman with 1000 irons in the fire as well as the founder of the Staten Island cricket club.

Chuck and the Cricket Club were the only thing that kept Hans going after 9/11 triggered a separation from his wife, who moved back to England with their son. We follow Hans through his memories as he tries to figure out who Chuck was and why his body was discovered handcuffed in the Gowanus river. As to this, we receive no satisfaction, but Hans does end up getting back together with his wife. There is little joy in this because they are both vaguely dissatisfied upper–middle-class people with a seemingly stunted penchant for joy.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Gone Girl: A Novel (2012)

by Gillian Flynn

This is the story of Amy, a woman financially privileged from birth, whose parents established their fortune with children’s books about “Amazing Amy”. Amy lives off of a trust fund established by her parents from this fortune. This all has left a mark on Amy. They all live in New York City, where she meets Nick. The book alternates between Amy and Nick’s viewpoints, with Amy’s entries describing an earnest young lady trying her best to deal with a moody man. Nick, on the other hand, describes himself in the same exact way. Various details that become relevant later are mentioned.

They both lose their jobs in New York. Amy’s parents, it turns out, are terrible financial managers and come to Amy, asking for the remainder of her trust fund so that they can pay their bills. With no income and no trust fund, the couple retreats to Nick’s hometown, Missouri, where his sister and father still live. Nick opens a bar with his sister using the last of their money and they settle in, more or less, to life in the Midwest. On their tenth wedding anniversary, though, Amy is gone. There are signs of a struggle.

The first half of the book turns out to have been an exceedingly unreliable telling of their lives and in the second half, we learn what really happened. It’s quite a neat plot, so I’m not going to ruin it for anyone.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Mr. Mercedes (2008)

by Stephen King

This isn’t one of King’s best outings, but it was a fun read. It’s obviously a Stephen King book from a mile away. You can see his craft in the characters, the pacing and the conclusion. It’s the story of a retired police detective Hodges living a sad and lonely life in a small town. He receives a letter from Mr. Mercedes, taunting Hodges that he will never be able to catch him. Who is this Mr. Mercedes? He is the man who ran over several dozen people at a job fair. Hodges was in charge of the case, but wasn’t able to solve it before retirement.

Very soon in the novel, Mr. Mercedes is revealed to be a demented young man with delusions, who’s now following Hodges as well as planning another strike. He’s a typically psychotic mess of a King character. He lives with his alcoholic mother. Bits of his past are revealed throughout, forming a picture of a damaged person damaged further by life.

Olivia Trelawney is the older woman from whom Mercedes borrowed a … Mercedes. She kills herself soon after the attack, feeling guilty that she’d contributed, even unwittingly. In his investigation, Hodges meets her lovely sister Janey—another typically powerful female character, well-written—and they hit it off, investigating Mercedes together. Jerome, a young man who helps Hodges around the house, also forces his charming way into the investigation. Most of Janey and Olivia’s relatives are exceedingly unpleasant, but Holly, though odd, is also of immense help. Together, they manage to thwart Mr. Mercedes’s next attack.
 

The Martian (2014)

by Andy Weir

This is the story of a mission to Mars, the Ares 3. They are only days into their several-week–long mission before a freak windstorm forces them to abandon and escape by the skin of their teeth back to the Hermes, in orbit around Mars. Unfortunately, the wind tore a satellite antenna from its mooring and propelled it directly through Mark Watney, tearing him away into the howling, sandy darkness of the Martian night.

The crew is bereft, feeling survivor’s guilt. Watney, however, is not dead. He is left alone on the surface of Mars with a lot of technology at his disposal and food for a crew of six. Short-term survival is not a problem. It’s surviving long enough for a resupply mission that’s an issue. With the satellite antenna gone, he can’t even tell NASA that he survived. NASA notices that something is up when they see changes in the camp, so they know he’s alive. They keep this from the Hermes crew, at least at the beginning.

Mark does all sort of neat stuff to survive, described in at-times excruciating detail but very well-written and entertaining nonetheless. The writing started off quite stilted, with very short sentences and about a sixth-grade reading level—if that. About 1/3 of the way through, though, it picked up steam and became quite funny as more characters were introduced. Even Mark’s somewhat flat witticisms become sharper and funnier. I saw the movie before reading the book, but that didn’t ruin anything for me—as psychologists say, anticipation is just as enjoyable as surprise.

He locates and re-enables the Pathfinder in order to use it for communications. He farms potatoes. He re-enables the RTG as a heat source for long missions—like the one to the Area IV landing site on the other side of the planet. He makes it over there, the Hermes mission is extended to come pick him up, he takes the MAV from Ares IV to LMO (Low Mars Orbit) and they miraculously pick him up.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Blindness (1995)

by Jose Saramago (translated to English by Giovanni Pontiero)

The story is of a man who is suddenly struck blind, seeing only a wash of milky whiteness. Others soon follow, as it becomes clear that the blindness is caused by a communicable disease.

Soon enough, everyone has it and the city is filled only with the blind, All, save one lady—the doctor’s wife, played by Julianne Moore—who is unaffected by the blindness, but not by its horrific effects (she lives in a world of blind people). The effects are as you can imagine, if you were to think about it: a city filled only with the newly blind, fumbling about, looking for food, looking for shelter, for a place to urinate or defecate. Before everyone has succumbed, the government ruthlessly quarantines the initial afflicted in a mental asylum. Food is delivered sporadically but relatively regularly. The place becomes nearly unbearably filthy.

As more and more people arrive, an element finally arrives that understands that societal rules no longer apply. They take all the food for themselves, rationing it out to the others in exchange for the last of their worldly possessions. When those run out, they naturally demand that the other wards send their women. After several days, the women volunteer for this horrific duty, even the doctor’s wife. Afterwards, though, she’s had enough and takes a pair of scissors she found to kill the ringleader, threatening the remaining pirates that she will kill more if they don’t give up. Another woman, traumatized by the rapes, finds a lighter and sets the pirates’ den on fire, taking them all out.

At the same time, the doctor’s wife takes her small group outside to ask the soldiers for help. They are gone. There is no authority remaining. All is chaos and anarchy, with only the blind to fill the power vacuum. The small group escapes back to the city, the doctor’s wife the only witness to the utter horror of the place, overrun by people who can no longer take care of themselves. They survive better than most, with the doctor’s wife’s sight helping them find food that others have missed. They return to the doctor’s home and settle in for a somewhat better existence than they had in quarantine, but one still bereft of true hope. And then, just as quickly as it left, their sight returns. The end.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Wyrd Sisters (Discworld Book 6) (1988)

by Terry Pratchett

This story is the Discworld take on Hamlet, more or less. It features Nanny Ogg, Grannie Weatherwax and Magret as the witches three. Duke Felmet of Lancre kills his cousin the King in order to take over the throne. The kingdom is not happy about this. By the kingdom, I mean not necessarily the people—though they feel it too—but the actual kingdom, the ground, the trees, the sky. The kingdom as a being is dissatisfied. The King’s son Tomjon survives, to Felmet’s chagrin and he bends his considerable powers to finding him.

All to no avail, as the child is whisked off to Ankh Morpork with a troupe of traveling actors. He grows up to be a highly influential actor with an unparalleled power to mesmerize. His adoptive father owns the troupe, his best friend is the dwarf Hwel, an at-time very gifted playwright. Also in the mix is the suspiciously eloquent court Fool, who helps the witches wrest the kingdom from Felmet, which involves flying around the kingdom very quickly on a broom.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.

Wool Omnibus (2011)

by Hugh Howey

Howey originally self-published this work on Amazon but at least the first part suffers much less from a strong editorial hand than other self-published works I’ve seen. He spins a good yarn [1], plucking ideas and moods from other genres to weave [2] his own interesting and thrilling murder mystery in a silo that houses an entire society in its 144 floors.

The stratification becomes clear over the course of the stories, which were published serially over the course of more than year. The various power factions and policies are shown to create a working machine, but one that works for a very distinct and not-very-well-publicized purpose.

The story starts with the death of the Silo’s sheriff, as he is sent out for “cleaning”—as his wife before him—as punishment for heresy/thoughtcrime. Next we meet the Silo’s Mayor, Jahns, an older woman nearing the end of her career, and her deputy Marnes, also in his sunset years. They seek out and find a new sheriff in Juliette, a very clever Mechanic from the lowest levels of the silo. This brings them into direct contact with Bernard, the power-mad head of IT (level 31). Bernard’s “shadow” (apprentice) is Lukas, a young man with fewer scales on his eyes, who is smitten with Juliette and willing to help her find out more about what the Silo is really for, about how it was created. This, despite the trouble this causes him at work, where Bernard is grooming him for succession. Juliette is eventually banished to cleaning as well, but she uses her connections in Mechanical and Supply to ensure that the journey is not as fatal as usual.

There are some editorial oddities [3] but overall the book is well-written.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.