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 […]
Hi. I’m Badkittyuno, and I’ve fallen behind again…
Hi. Sorry. I really thought I was like 10 reviews behind and it turned out to actually be 19. So then I started up this list of reviews…and didn’t post it…and now I’m 26 behind. I would blame my kids/divorce/life, but really — I’d much rather read than write! Also, I’ve been working from home a lot and doing laundry instead of writing reviews (which is what I do when I get bored at the office), so that’s not helping. Anyway, here’s 26 brief reviews […]
Consumerism and total social decay: contained in an apartment.
My sister read J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and then wrote a rave review on Goodreads, calling it a sort of adult version of Lord of the Flies, set in a high-rise apartment building. I was sufficiently intrigued, and also by the news of a recent movie adaptation. You know me—read book first, then watch movie. So I read this book in an evening, while The Chancellor was under an enormous time crunch to get his final grades in. I decided to stay up and be supportive, […]
See, this is why we can’t have nice things
“Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realised that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.” Not far from where I live, across the border into Belgium, you’ll find yourself in the Ardennes, a collection of rugged forests, ragged mountains and quaint, picturesque towns where it’s perfectly okay to have a beer at 11 AM and where French […]