Technically, I started this book in 2018, but I did the bulk of it on the first of January, so I’m giving myself a pass and starting with it. A book with an “A” title is a good place to start. Autonomous is about a future where everything is patented, and people, as individual citizens, are treated like potential property and capital rather than individuals who possess innate rights. The impetus for this change in thinking and living comes from the contradiction that exists when […]
Tony, informed, said: They love funerals.
New York Stories – 4/5 Stars I read Elizabeth Hardwick’s collected essays earlier this year. I also read her novel Sleepless Nights last year. This is a collection of stories that encompasses about 45-50 years worth of short stories edited and selected by Darryl Pinckney, another novelist and critic who also famously worked with and was friends with Hardwick. I read these stories in a variety of orders, and since they are not part of an intentional collection this blending and mixing up of the […]
Suddenly, he felt a paradoxical sense of loyalty…
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how to talk about 98 short stories written over 40 years. But this was an interesting and exhausting reading experience. There’s a lot going on here. So to begin at the beginning, JG Ballard was a British science fiction writer, known mostly to me via the 1995 David Cronenberg movie Crash and the Stephen Spielberg’s movie Empire of the Sun. A few years ago I saw the trailer for High Rise and was blown away. The movie itself is not […]
Post-Cannonball roundup
I actually read more books this year than I have since I can remember. I just don’t have the energy to review them all for various reasons. Last year I did a round-up of all the books I didn’t properly review, and I’d like to do the same now (I’m only counting this review as 1 book read, because even though it’s lots of books, it’s not a full review for each and there’s no overarching theme like I usually do in my multi-book reviews). […]