Personally I’ve been finally back making some progress on my pile after not reading much for a few months.
First I finished Kathy Acker’s “Blood and Guts in High School” - it would be hard and dishonest to try to describe it, it seems to elude any easy definition that wouldn’t reduce what it is. In a way it’s a mad world, an ethereal descent and ascent into a broken mind, or the ur-broken mind, an epic of the object of society. In less pretentious terms: it’s for the neurotic girls out there. Heavy TWs for basically everything though:
spoiler
pedophilia, incest, sexual assault, sexual slavery, whatever you get the point at this point.
I just finished “Amérique” by Baudrillard - I guess it is easy to describe it as just an application of his concept of hypperreality to the most hyperreal place - America, taking the loose form of a travel diary. And it is! But it is really as thought-provoking as “Simulacres et Simulation” was - his vision of space and the desert itself as a signifier and “precursor” to the self-proclaimed city on a hill being really the strong-point of this short essay.
And I am finally starting “The Dangers of Smoking in Bed”! I’ll try and talk about it here when I finish it.
Given recent events, I plan to read Cory Doctorow’s somewhat prophetic short story “Radicalized”, which he made available for free: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/09/radicalized/
Other than that I have been reading along with my daughter’s high school English class reading (three years). Just finished The Scarlet Letter and now working on Into the Wild and I think The Great Gatsby is next. Nothing terribly exciting.
I finished Use of Weapons and Player of Games from the Culture Series and am looking for something new. I should definitely check out Amérique after you and others have been talking about it so much
It’s a very short read too so I can only encourage you!
How is the Culture series?
They’re really great. I wish that TV could produce something similarly interesting but lol that isn’t going to happen
