Tomorrow sex will be good again by Angel
I’m a member of the Verso book club where the publisher
sends you a book every month. It’s cool and I like supporting independent
publishers.
I have enjoyed most of the texts that I’ve chosen from the
list.
This one didn’t really do it for me. It’s a thin hardback I
read over a couple of days and then the next day I really couldn’t articulate
what I read – It wasn’t bad so I’m not mad that I read it, but it also wasn’t
good, so I have warm memories of it. At best it was forgettable, and I feel bad
since I might not be the direct audience, but I do consider myself a feminist
ally. So, this is just my incredibly subjective opinion, and your mileage may
differ.
Money: A Suicide Note by Amis
I had this book on my shelf for years and I recently picked
it up because I was looking for something different. The first book I read from
Amis was Time’s Arrow, and I loved it so much I went and bought a handful of
this other books, but it seemed like Time’s Arrow was just a one off and I didn’t
seem to like the other things I tried to read.
I did finish this one though. And I have to say I think it
is the worst book I ever finished that I read on my own. I usually don’t have a
problem putting books down if I don’t like them, but I kept chugging on this one and I don’t
know why exactly. Amis does some stylistic things here that I would normally
like- the main character is the narrator, and he breaks the fourth wall, there
is a secondary character who is a writer named “Martin Amis”.
The problem is that the main character is one of the
unredeemable creatures. I think Amis was going for a Catcher in the Rye /
Confederacy of Dunces thing, but it doesn’t hit. John Self, the main character
is an 80s guy doing horrible 80s things in New York and London, and for me it
isn’t interesting. He’s horrible but I don’t care about him in that I don’t
want him to succeed or fail. That’s not great when the book is so character
driven.
Years of Rice and Salt by Robinson
This is an interesting book. Before I read it, the only
thing I knew was the premise – that it was an alternate history positing what
would happen if the black death had been more fatal. Perfect pandemic reading.
Thoughts: I was expecting it to be more focused on the empty
European continent that it was. Shows how Eurocentric I am.
The individual stories are impressive. Robinson had to do
this larger world building, but then get more specific about not only the
culture but how they might have changed as there was greater divergence in the
world as it is and the world as he dreamed it. This does make it a bit hard to
read, as you get used to one set of characters and the situation and then it
moves on.
There is in the world he builds a parallel to the actual
world, so there are equivalents to Newton and Einstein and Columbus, but they
have different names and native tongues. Were I drafting a paper on this book,
that might be the thing I focus on. Is Robinson positing some sort of teleology
in technological development?
Ultimately as a novel it doesn’t really work because it’s
not building to anything narratively, it just cycles and fades. But it’s hard
to complain because that’s really history, right? One dang thing after another.
There is one story that centers around a kid who is captured
and made into a eunuch and that was very troubling and hard to read part. But
it did make me do more research on eunuchs, a thing I was not expecting
happening from reading this text.
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