“Three o'clock. Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. An odd moment in the afternoon. Today it is intolerable.”
This one has been sitting on my bookshelf since I bought it last year. As a seminal piece of existentialist literature, I’ve been cautious of the warnings before going into this book, as it is supposed to make you question not just your own existence, but the existence of everyone and everything around you.
"...my God how strongly things exist today…”
Nausea is Sartre’s character-study-slash-philosophical-text written in the form of diary entries from Antoine Roquentin, a French historian who takes up residence in the fictional city Bouville after travelling abroad for many years. He starts this diary to try and understand this feeling of ‘nausea’ that overwhelms him, in order to figure out why he feels like he does. In doing this, Roquentin painfully details every single thought he has: the physicality of objects, the illusion of time, and his own existence.
There aren’t many characters in this book, but the ones that Roquentin does interact with (a local waitress, an autodidact aptly named the Self-Taught Man, and his ex-girlfriend, Anny) allow for Sartre to present his arguments for existentialism as dialogues. These were interesting to read, but I found that the most interesting sections of the book were the passages where Roquentin is on his own, such as the museum visit or chestnut tree. These scenes were well-written and beautifully described the thoughts of someone going through an existential crisis.
Nausea is a heavy book, in both text and emotion, but it lays out the early ideas of Sartre’s philosophy very well. It was also great to compare Sartre’s existentialism with Camus’ absurdism, and see those differences expressed via Roquentin. I won’t deny that the novel can get bit dry at times, but I think it’s accessible enough for anyone wanting to get into Sartre's works or existentialist philosophy.
“I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.”
Since I’ve been trying to break into reading more science fiction, I decided to pick up this book, which was recommended to me as a great entry point. I wanted something high-quality, but not dense like Dune. This book checked those boxes, as it’s cozy, with a simple plot (a new clerk, Rosemary, joins a spaceship that tunnels through spacetime) that is usually set on the back burner in favor of character development.
To me, it was almost like reading a sitcom, each chapter acting as an ‘episode’ where some new situation presents itself to the characters (exploring a new planet, dealing with character relationships, warding off enemies, etc.). The dialogue could be a bit camp at times, which isn’t necessarily my cup of tea, but it was on par for the book, so I didn’t really mind it. The worldbuilding was the strongest part of the novel, and I believe Chambers has other books that take place in this universe, though not necessarily with the same characters.
I think this book works great as an introduction to the sci-fi genre, but can also be enjoyed by veterans alike, or really anyone that wants a feel-good read.
“No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief.”
“Questions arose. Like, what in the fuck was going on here, basically.”
This novel was an absolute pleasure to not just read, but immerse myself in. Like a few novels I’ve read this year, Inherent Vice takes place in 1970s SoCal, and follows private eye ‘Doc’ Sportello as he tries to help out an ex who discovered a murder plot against her real-estate mogul boyfriend. The novel follows Doc as he meets many zany characters, such as ultra-conservative police lieutenant “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, on-the-run sax-player Coy Harlingen, and maritime lawyer Sauncho Smilax.
The novel follows Doc and these characters in the context of the tension between counterculture (mainly symbolized by Doc) and anti-counterculture (mainly symbolized by Bigfoot) in the wake of the Manson murders. Those who ran in Doc’s circles usually had friction with those who ran in Bigfoot’s circles.
“[The police station] creeped him out, the way it just sat there looking so plastic and harmless among the old-time good intentions of all that downtown architecture, no more sinister than a chain motel by the freeway, and yet behind its neutral drapes and far away down its fluorescent corridors it was swarming with all this strange alternate cop history and cop politics—cop dynasties, cop heroes and evildoers, saintly cops and psycho cops, cops too stupid to live and cops too smart for their own good—insulated by secret loyalties and codes of silence from the world they'd all been given to control, or, as they liked to put it, protect and serve.”
I’ve heard this work described as Pynchon’s most accessible work (Pynchon-lite, if you will), and I may not be on best authority to throw my two cents in (the only other book of his I’ve read was The Crying of Lot 49), but I still think this is very much his style. While the plot in this one is a bit more sensible than TCoL49, there are still those delightful tangents that Pynchon takes in his writing. That being said, the novel can get complex pretty quickly, solely because of the number of characters, so I recommend this wonderful resource which diagrams the character relations for each chapter.
“Offshore winds had been too strong to be doing the surf much good, but surfers found themselves getting up early anyway to watch the dawn weirdness, which seemed like a visible counterpart to the feeling in everybody's skin of desert winds and heat and relentlessness, with the exhaust from millions of motor vehicles mixing with microfine Mojave sand to refract the light toward the bloody end of the spectrum, everything dim, lurid and biblical, sailor-take-warning skies.”
Originally, I was going to read this via an email subscription service which sends you the letters/journals/newspaper clippings that make up this epistolary novel on the date they were written; but honestly the book was too enticing to wait until the next email, so I ended up just going ahead with it.
Vampires have become such a popular genre since this was published in 1897 (Twilight, Blade, American Horror Story, What We Do In The Shadows, the list goes on…), so we have all become somewhat unfazed by them, even obsessing over them. So going into this, I tried to imagine someone reading about vampires for the first time, especially in the late 1800s, where vampires threatened the Christian and puritan ideals so prevalent at the time. In this novel, submitting to someone like Dracula presents an eternally damned fate worse than death.
"To us for ever are the gates of heaven shut; for who shall open them to us again? We go on for all time abhorred by all; a blot on the face of God's sunshine; an arrow in the side of Him who died for man. But we are face to face with duty; and in such case must we shrink?"
Regarding plot, I’d say the first four chapters are probably my favorite. There are only two main characters, Jonathan Harker and Count Dracula, and all you can do is read as the horror slowly unfolds upon itself; it’s honestly such a strong beginning. But after these chapters, the plot and pacing start to slow down.
And to me, the pacing from this point onward presents kind of a Catch-22 situation. By that, I mean there were a lot of dry parts between the letters and journal entries, especially as we get to know all the new characters introduced after Jonathan’s visit. However, the presence of these dry parts amplified the shock when horror scenes did occur, and for that reason, passages such as the recollection of sailors on the boat had such a profound effect. I don’t know if these scenes would be as gruesome had the book just been filled with Dracula’s misadventures and wrongdoings. So, I can’t necessarily blame Stoker for wanting to build up story and mystery in the scenes between the horror.
“He can, within limitations, appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements: the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat—the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and come unknown. How then are we to begin our strife to destroy him?”
This semi-autobiographical novel follows Raoul Duke (Hunter S. Thompson) and Dr. Gonzo (Oscar Acosta), journalist and attorney respectively, as they attempt to cover two events happening in Las Vegas for Rolling Stone magazine. What resulted instead, however, was this book; a recount of their insane-yet-hilarious drug-addled journey to Vegas.
However, hidden between the hallucinatory imaginings of Duke and Gonzo (tirades of bats, reptiles, and trying to buy a gorilla) are grounded and real-world fragments of happenings occurring at the time in American history. Newspaper clippings, references to famous events, and commentary from other characters and their experiences, are all interspersed in this absurd recollection of events.
“A very painful experience in every way, a proper end to the Sixties: Tim Leary a prisoner of Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, Bob Dylan clipping coupons in Greenwich Village, both Kennedys murdered by mutants, Owsley folding napkins on Terminal Island, and finally Cassius/Ali belted incredibly off his pedestal by a human hamburger, a man on the verge of death. Joe Frazier, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand – at least not out loud.”
The imagery of bright Las Vegas lights and having a ‘good time’ are juxtaposed with these types of references throughout the book. So I’ll retract my statement above, and say that this book has disguised itself as a drug-addled adventure, but in reality is about the end of an era and the beginning of new forces in America.
Regardless of what you think of the plot (or lack thereof), Fear and Loathing has cemented itself in American literature and popular culture. Once you read the book (and watch the movie as well, 4.5/5 stars), you start seeing references to it everywhere in popular culture (especially this music video from The Weeknd, and this album title from Panic! At the Disco).
“And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… […] So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Truly a haunting book, with a thrilling ride in the latter half. I had seen the film a few years ago, but it didn’t have much of an impact on me, so I had forgotten most of the plot. The book better captures that lingering fear throughout, in my opinion – it definitely felt like something dreadful was always lurking around the corner (thanks to Merricat’s pseudo-extrasensory ‘skills’).
The book does start off a bit slow, but the arrival of Cousin Charles really sets things into motion. Many things are left open to the reader’s interpretation, partially because of unreliable and eccentric narrator Merricat, but also because of Jackson’s writing. The writing for events occurring in the present are well-articulated, but passages describing the past are very ambiguous, something that Jackson likely did on purpose. This allows the reader to speculate what might have gone on in the past, and how those events affect the plot.
Mild spoilers ahead: I wish I remembered where I read this, but someone mentioned that this book is like the prequal of how houses become haunted, and how urban legends get started in small towns; an idea I’ve really come to appreciate.
“I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.”
FILM REWATCH: After rewatching the film after this read, it was definitely better than I remember, but didn’t capture a lot of mysteriousness the book had to offer. Book: 4/5 stars, movie: 2.5/5 stars.
I can honestly say I’ve never read anything like this in my life, definitely one of the best pieces of American literature I’ve read in a long time. The style of writing, and imagery that is conjured up by said style, is spectacular. That said, I also understand that this book’s writing style is not for everybody. If you prefer coherent storylines with plot and subplot resolutions, this book does not offer that. However, I still recommend it just to get a feel for its unique style of writing.
“At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did.”
The story itself is actually fairly simple: our main character, Oedipa Maas, becomes executrix of her former rich boyfriend’s estate, and in the process of settling these affairs, seems to uncover a conspiracy against her. But the real treat of this book, as mentioned before, is the writing and imagery of a 1950s southern California town (aptly named San Narciso). This writing style was one of the first things I noticed (and ended up really enjoying).
To me, he writes how we think. Now I can’t speak for everybody, but I feel that humans think in fragments of time, cutting from one scene in our minds immediately to the next, no transition, just pure thoughts. Similarly, in this book, we the reader are taken to one place, and then when you least expect it, we are suddenly ripped away and placed in a new location, possibly days later, in the next sentence. At first, seeing this type of writing on paper is daunting and off-putting, but I ended up really enjoying it (some have described it as beat-poetry like, which I also agree with).
“San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment’s squall-line or tornado’s touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities—storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence.”
“What distinguishes man from the rest of animals is his ability to do artificial things,” said Paul. “To his greater glory, I say. And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.”
Player Piano chronicles the life of Paul Proteus, an upper-class engineer in a version of America after the third world war. While citizens were out fighting the war, engineers created automated machines and artificial intelligence to do all the daily jobs left behind, displacing the workers when they returned. The workers didn’t have many options when they returned, and many of them wanted to get their lives back, best symbolized when the character Ed Finnerty is seen manually playing a player piano, a piano which can automatically play itself.
I think this book gets a bad rap, but I get why. Being Vonnegut’s first published novel, it is often written off as ‘lengthy’ or ‘bloated,’ and the sarcasm/satire not as polished as his later novels. But it would be unfair to judge this book just because it wasn't full-on 'Vonnegut'; it was really great, especially the ending. It did seem to drag on in a few parts, especially during the Meadows segment, but for every part that seemed out of place, there was a passage later on that brought it all together. Some other notable highlights include Finnerty’s brashness, the barber’s monologue about war, and anything to do with the Ghost Shirt society, especially in the latter half of the book.
The primary reason for reading this play was to complete what Albert Camus termed ‘The Cycle of the Absurd,’ a trio consisting of The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Caligula. In this play, the Roman Emperor Caligula, after the death of his sister Drusilla, essentially goes mad and makes life a living hell for all of his constituents. This is the side of Caligula that those invested in Roman history are familiar with. But, in Camus’ version of events, Caligula suddenly obsesses over the impossible, wanting to “transcend God” and “truly be free” (it is truly unhinged behavior).
On the actual play: it wasn’t bad. It was definitely more violent than I expected (I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised; the play is called Caligula after all). A good number of scenes are just Caligula getting someone to admit they should die, often through some faulty logic. There are interesting conversations happen between Caligula and Scipio, who seems to give Caligula a taste of his own medicine. This play probably had the most on-the-nose absurdist imagery, as there really is no plot to the play itself, it’s just a series of scenes used for philosophical debate.
What I did love was realizing the imagery in all of these works were connected. Caligula is obsessed with the impossible, as seen in the task he assigns one of his patrician: he wants the moon. In The Stranger, Meursault was obsessed with the sun, and of course Sisyphus had his boulder. Whether intentional or not, I was enamored by the symbolism provided by these three natural elements (sun, rock, and moon).
“ESTRAGON: I can't go on like this.
VLADIMIR: That's what you think.”
Although this play was famously described as one in which “nothing happens, twice,” any book or work that plays with the concept of time always piques my interest (this isn’t exclusive to time-travel). Time and memory are a large part in this play, but without spoiling, it only really works when you put together both acts. Act I was a bit boring, though it had some pretty funny dialogue, but reading the second half with the knowledge of the first half is a treat, because I wasn’t quite sure what to believe.
Quick sidenote: plays are meant to be seen in person, though, so I have a feeling that seeing this performed live (especially with Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart) would turn this into a five-star play.
As a quick summary: the two titular characters, Estragon and Vladimir, are waiting for Godot, who is supposed to arrive soon. That’s all you need to know going into the play. With lots of references to absurdism and religion, you can really study this play as much as you want. On the surface level it works fine, and the conversations are actually pretty funny and witty, but as you read more into the dialogue and characters, you can really have fun with analyzing and speculating on what is truly going on.
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
