by William Gibson (1984)

2022 reads, 15/20:

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

Everyone quotes that opening line, and for good reason – it’s extremely well-written, it evokes this constant mood of despair, and it sets the tone perfectly for the whole rest of the novel. Henry Case, a data thief, gets called upon to do a job for an unknown boss, undergoing surgery to get his ability to upload into cyberspace back after a previous employer crippled him.

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . .”

Many criticize Gibson’s writing style, though I quite enjoyed it, and don’t think it’s as jarring as others make it out to be. Gibson works in short bursts, quickly switching from one scene to another (which makes sense sometimes, as this is how Case experiences things). But it’s not action-packed all of the time, as there are many atmospheric passages that describe both the real and virtual world that Case finds himself in.

That mood of despair I mentioned is an integral part of the cyberpunk genre. I find that many love to explore the ‘cyber,’ but the ‘punk’ usually gets left behind. Not in this novel – images of the grimy underworld and streets, contrasted with the uncomfortable endlessness of ‘the matrix,’ perfectly capture this dichotomy in cyberpunk.

“Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine. Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky. Voices. Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name pain is given.”

If The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was the sci-fi book I wanted, then Neuromancer was the sci-fi book I needed, as it was probably one of my favorites this year. This seminal novel paved the way for other cyberpunk works – highly recommended.

#readingyear2022 #dystopia #favorites #physicallyowned #scifi

by Jean-Paul Sartre (1938)

2022 reads, 13/20:

“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.”

#readingyear2022 #philosophy #physicallyowned

by Becky Chambers (2014)

2022 reads, 12/20:

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.”

#readingyear2022 #feelgood #physicallyowned #scifi

by Thomas Pynchon (2009)

2022 reads, 11/20:

“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.”

#readingyear2022 #humor #physicallyowned #book2screen #pynchon

by Hunter S. Thompson (1971)

2022 reads, 9/20:

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.”

#readingyear2022 #american #physicallyowned #book2screen

by Thomas Pynchon (1966)

2022 reads, 7/20:

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.”

#readingyear2022 #favorites #physicallyowned #postmodern #pynchon

by Kurt Vonnegut (1952)

2022 reads, 6/20:

“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.

#readingyear2022 #dystopia #physicallyowned

by Samuel Beckett (1952)

2022 reads, book 4/20:

“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.”

#readingyear2022 #absurdism #humor #physicallyowned #theatre

by David Chang (2020)

2022 reads, book 3/20:

I’ve only started watching chef David Chang the past couple of years, when I first saw him guest star on The Chef Show with Roy Choi and Jon Favreau. I then watched his most famous show Ugly Delicious, and more recently, The Next Thing You Eat. But these (mainly) lighthearted food-oriented shows are a stark contrast from the deeply personal stories and thoughts that Chang offers here.

In the preface, Chang says something along the lines of him being afraid for you to read his book – and I understand why. He lays out all of the ugly details here, many of which are his own mistakes. The first part of the book is in classic memoir style, written in a more-or-less chronological order; he touches on his childhood, college, and culinary school experiences, then focuses on his time working in a restaurant, to finally becoming a restaurant owner. The second part then loses its chronological format, and to me became more of a series of essays, where he touches on an important topic/event in his life or the restaurant industry in general.

What Chang does really well is offer a stellar view of what it’s like to rise up the ranks and run a restaurant in a messed-up industry (all with the imposter syndrome he dealt still deals with). We’ve all heard about chefs yelling in kitchens à la Gordon Ramsey, but Chang goes into even more detail about how all the stressors that come from working as a chef, including racism and sexism to name a few, lead to drugs, alcoholism, and poor mental health for many young chefs. I truly appreciated Chang’s candor throughout this book; especially seen in the chapter where he shows you how he would have wanted to rewrite his history, and the chapter where he turns 35 years old.

Bottom line: the synergistic interaction between Chang’s turbulent life and all of the issues that come with working in a restaurant is what made this book so honest, heartbreaking, and hopeful.

#readingyear2022 #bio #foodanddrink #physicallyowned

by Jean-Paul Sartre (1947)

2022 reads, book 1/20:

This book contains four plays of Jean-Paul Sartre, published between 1943 – 1947. I was most excited to read No Exit, but upon receiving this collection, I’ve read and compiled thoughts for all four plays in this edition below. I would rate the whole collection about 4 stars, but read on for the individual scores below.

No Exit (Huis Clos): A simple premise: three people, who didn’t know one another on Earth, arrive in hell. We, as the audience, simply watch (or read) the dialogue that ensues between them. What starts off a bit slow quickly ramps up to accusations being thrown, secrets being revealed, and true natures coming out at full force. I think it’s a great play, because not only is it a fun read at the surface level, but you can dig deeper into the meanings that Sartre hoped to communicate in this play, regarding freedom, acceptance from others and self-worth. 5/5 stars!

The Flies (Les Mouches): A retelling of the Greek tragedy Electra, which I was unfamiliar with before reading this. The main character Orestes returns to his home city, where he was kidnapped/rescued from as a child, as his father, the king, was murdered by his mother’s lover years earlier. He comes back and meets up with Electra, his sister who still lives there, to enact revenge. While the plot itself didn’t do much for me, the themes and motifs on religion, freedom, and guilt were interesting to dig into as I was reading. As a side note, the context in which Sartre wrote this was fascinating; it is said that he wrote this play to mirror the state of the German occupation of France, but in order to get it past Nazi censors, he disguised the plot into a Greek myth. Overall, 3/5 stars.

Dirty Hands (Les Mains sales): This one was a pretty fun read. It starts off in the future, where we learn that the main character Hugo just finished jail time for assassination of a political figure, and spend the rest of the play revisiting the events that led up to the assassination, to learn why he did it. The dialogue between the characters was witty, expertly written, and never felt dry. Not only was there substance, but the whole play even read like a comedy at times. 4/5 stars overall.

The Respectful Prostitute (La Putain respectueuse): Although it was short, this one was a rough. Set in the American south in the 1940s, this play explored not just racism, but power of the different political figures of that time. It was rough to read because of the vulgarity of the language, and the way that most, if not all, the characters acted throughout. Not only that, but the ending unfortunately was a bit unsatisfactory, so this gets 3/5 stars.

#readingyear2022 #physicallyowned #philosophy #theatre