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I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all.

I wish to choose my fate and know something of human affairs beyond what other people think it compatible with propriety to tell me.

" there was always a sort of tacit understanding among women, born of the solidarity of the sex, that they should discover are invent lovers for each other"

I read half the book last year and forgot about it. Picking it up again I'm impressed. If you like Joyce Carol Oats' short horror stories this should appeal to you. 'Audrey at Night' and 'Five Day Summer Camp' are dark ( one a ghost story, one a dystopia) but both have these wonderful endings.

the first section (about the 1951 Giants v Dodgers game) is a tour de force

"Character is Fate, said Novalis, and Farfrae’s character was just the reverse of Henchard’s, who might not inaptly be described as Faust has been described—as a vehement gloomy being who had quitted the ways of vulgar men without light to guide him on a better way."

Despite being written by a Boomer this is shaping up to be the ultimate Gen X novel of 2019.

Page 519. Richard buys a sledgehammer at home depot. :)

" his first instinct with things that troubled him was to wall them off and then wait for them to grow bad enough to threaten the structural Integrity of the wall and then finally to get out of sledgehammer."

I'm at a pint in the novel where I'm looking forward to the payoff that this forshadowing from an earlier sentence implied.

Light on plot and character, heavy on post modern themes.

shelved it without finish. found David Lodge more to my taste.

If you were wondering during the first book where the dizzyingly high concept speculation we were treated to in Counting Heads and the Wedding Album was, it appears here as we get to know (pun intended) the alien and it's tech.

I'd read the Screwfly Solution years ago and left it at that. This time I skipped ahead to Slow Music and was blown away.

"On the morning of of my first day of kindergarten, my mother sat me down and explained why it was important not to suck my thumb anymore, and I took her message to heart and never put my thumb to mouth again, though I did later smoke cigarettes for twenty years."

"Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobsters and call girls and ladies' room attendants with amyl nitrite poppers in their uniform pockets." MARRYING ABSURD, 1967

I've been reading this book for years. I love it but have never finished it. It's one of those books you can pick up and put down, like calling an old friend. I would recommend this over Karuac's Big Sur any day.

"...she wanted to hear it again as soon as possible. It was so odd, just a few inches from normal."

"On the sink there were new bottles of moisturizer and mouthwash, both organic and local..."

Funny look at social media gone too far. Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode in which everyone gets a rating from everyone else. Make you want to stop posting to goodreads and Facebook and go out and sit in a kyak in a quiet place.

enjoying these stories quite a bit. the feel real yet dream-like in a way that reminds me of Steve Erickson. Got stuck on the title story, which didn't grab me the way the previous stories did.

Young woman starts work at a fictitious company that is Google, Facebook and Apple combined in one in what is sure to be a book about how the road to hell is paved with good intentions

enjoying these stories quite a bit. the feel real yet dream like in a way that reminds me of Steve Erickson

Enjoying this immensely!

I jumping around the essays in this book, haven't gotten to the book reviews yet but the film criticism is enjoyable. she covers Louise Brooks, The BBCs adaptation of Crime and Punishment and their teleplay Spend, Spend, Spend!, Nagisa Oshima's Ai No Corrida and Gone With the Wind

I skipped the first two fantasy stories and went right for the Lovecraftian 'The Devotee of Evil' about a man who has taken residence in a derelict old house and is working on a machine that will evoke absolute evil

Finished the first story, A Psychical Invasion. A humorist takes one too many overdose of liquid cannabis indica and opens his mind to the ghost in his house. Can John Silence help him? London 1908.