The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis 📚
This was the most influential book of my last year.
How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City
As we said our goodbyes, it felt like we’d just emerged from one of Delany’s late novels. Their pastoral pornotopias, conjured as though from the homoerotic subtext of “Huckleberry Finn,” had more of a basis in reality than I’d suspected, one hidden by the shopworn map that divides the country into poor rural traditionalists and libertine city folk. Delany hadn’t abandoned science fiction to wallow in pornography, as some contended; he’d stopped imagining faraway worlds to describe queer lives deemed unreal in this one.
Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89
With an eye for the darker side of human nature, his novels remain some of my favorite.
Headed Into the Abyss by Brian T. Watson 📚
I just finished, laying here in my bed, the dogs and cat asleep beside me. Crickets chirp out my window. In the distance a train’s whistle breaks and rolls over the valley.
More than anything, I prize seeing things clearly. Nothing fills me with that particular and precious joie de vivre — that electric sizzle — quite like close proximity to the truth. But most people don’t like the truth. We’ll do anything to avoid it, if we know it at all. So it’s a rare thrill to read something so transgressive in its honesty, so clear-eyed.
Credit to Brian T. Watson for his courage to accept the inevitable, and then to write it. May his acceptance be an inspiration.
Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.
A lot has changed since I first read this almost 15 years ago, but it has only become more prescient.
She’s fast becoming my favorite writer.