A. > Recent Status Updates

Depressing and beautiful so far. Still getting used to McCarthy’s prose.

Yes, I get it. Elwood is a black nerd. I GET IT.

It’s a start! Beautiful writing, terse and luscious at the same time.

Looks like the gang’s in Gilead!

The Handmaid’s Tale felt like a paralyzing nightmare. This is just another novel.

No fucking way they would ever send Nicole INTO GILEAD. It’s a good thing this was an audiobook, because if it was a physical object I would have flung it across the room over this shit.

It’s a sign of how uneven this book is that every time I hear “THE ARDUA HALL MANUSCRIPT” I celebrate silently.

Sally Rooney has a brief paragraph here about money, as it applies to the scholarship Connell has just won, that’s singlehandedly better than the entirety of Martin Amis’s 1986 novel Money.

Very much digging the back-and-forth narrative structure of this book—alternating characters, the story lurching forward and doubling back.

Alas, delays. And the thread of the book is slipping

Okay, now I get the sense that he’s trying to meet a word minimum—but he’s an entertaining enough writer that he can get away with it.

DFW is going on and onabout abstractions.

Can already tell this is going to be the hardest book I’ve ever read.

Finished three short essays in one sitting. Enjoyed the one about civil affairs, where Montaigne laments that he never asked his accountant to keep a diary.

Income is healthcare. Education is healthcare. Housing is healthcare. Food is healthcare. Faust is very forceful about this, but he’s not wrong.

Really enjoying this book’s casual profane style. Faust is against DPC.

Yeah yeah, only three pages. This is an essay on overinterpreting the Will of God in day-to-day events. Shades of Hannibal Burress’s “God probably doesn’t deal in stupid-ass coincidences.”