Thomas Jiang

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2023 Reading List

10 September 2023

Trying to be better than last year.

Anxious People

Author: Fredrik Backman
Date published: April 25, 2019
Date read: October 30, 2023

As a kid, I grew up reading a lot of Encyclopedia Brown. But I never figured out any of the gotchas myself. I always had to turn to the back of the book and read the solutions. Each of the short mysteries would hinge on one particular detail, some of which have become permanently lodged in the back of my brain in the very unlikely case that I would need to summon it again. For instance, knowing the fact that books are typically numbered such that you cannot actually fit a will between the odd and even pages (say between pages 321-322) because those are two sides of the same physical page got me priority to line up for the buses in the fifth grade. Unfortunately, as an adult, this combination of enjoyment of mysteries and inability to actually solve puzzles in addition to my aversion to horror or violence precludes me from enjoying crime dramas, true crime, Sherlock Holmes-esque detective shows, and even the slightly scary escape rooms; unfortunately, grown up Encyclopedia Brown tends to take those forms more often than not. The fun and charm of Anxious People comes from Backman’s ability to effortlessly remove the death, suspense and horror while keeping the intrigue.

Anxious People is a mystery about a bank robber that fails to rob a bank and vanishes. There are no murders, no inheritances, no corporate spies, no high stakes political assassinations. In their stead, there’s just people trying to figure out how to handle the struggles of their modern lives.

You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child.

When the stakes are reduced, it gives an opportunity to raise the meaning of the mundane.

And apparently you could hear that if you knocked on the wall, at least you could if you were Roger, so he did it everywhere at every single viewing, knocking and knocking and knocking. Anna-Lena sometimes used to think that everyone gets a few moments that show who they really are, tiny instances that reveal their entire soul, and Roger’s were this knocking.

Can you imagine what a bad parent you must have been for your children not to want to be parents?

And humor can find its opportunities in the ordinary.

The real estate agent takes a deep breath and says what women usually say to men who never seem to think that their lack of knowledge should get in the way of a confident opinion. “I’m sure you’re right.

“Wine, too,” Julia said patiently, and thought of how Ro had said “All the time! I’m drinking for three now!” when the midwife at the antenatal clinic asked a routine question about how much they drank.

It looks so easy, weaving together these personalities and people and lives together in a way that still makes the murderless mystery still have its ah-ha moments while still having its compassionate moments.

The hardest thing about death is the grammar, the tense, the fact that she won’t be angry when she sees that he’s bought a new sofa without consulting her first. She won’t be anything. She isn’t on her way home. She was.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Author: J. D. Salinger
Published: November 19, 1955
Read: October 15, 2023

No one in our family, not even Seymour, felt drafts. Only terrible drafts.

If I could ever come up with a line this apropos, it would lead the march, trumpeting the rest of the work to great fanfare. Instead, this line is buried near the end of Seymour: An Introduction. But by the time you learn about the terrible drafts, you’ve already learned about Seymour’s poetry,

I’ve never known a poet to give the impression of playing a cornet in the middle of a poem before, let alone playing one beautifully, and I’d just as soon say next to nothing about it. In fact, nothing.

about his propensity to worry,

No one in the family could worry his or her way down that block the way Seymour could if he had Decent Material.

his physical appearance,

The fact is, he was five ten and a half–a short tall man by modern, multiple-vitamin standards.

At the same time, no one must be led to infer, through my damned incompetence and heat, that S. was, in the usual, tiresome terminology, an Attractively Ugly Man. (It’s a very suspect tag in any event, most commonly used by certain womenfolk, real or imaginary, to justify their perhaps too singular attraction to spectacularly sweet-wailing demons or, somewhat less categorically, badly brought-up swans.)

and his paucity of yawns.

It’s just struck me that I never saw Seymour yawn. He must have, of course, but I never saw him. Surely not for any reasons of etiquette, either; yawns weren’t fastidiously suppressed at home. I yawned regularly, I know–and I got more sleep than he did.

Because the line about drafts, while it tickles the brain, might indeed be lost in the sea of quality.

It is hard to put into words what qualities make Salinger’s writing great, so instead I’ll use a roundabout method, by using Buddy’s roundabout way to describing what qualities make a great poet.

But from watching the guests for some three hours, from grinning at them, from, I think, loving them, Seymour–without asking any questions first–brought very nearly all the guests, one or two at a time, and without any mistakes, their own true coats, and all the men involves their hats. (The women’s hats he had some trouble with.) Now, I don’t necessarily suggest that this kind of feat is typical of the Chinese or Japanese poet, and certainly I don’t mean to imply that it makes him what he is. But I do think that if a Chinese or Japanese verse composer doesn’t know whose coat is whose, on sight, his poetry stands a remarkably slim chance of ever ripening. And either, I’d guess is very nearly the outside age limit for mastering this small feat.

I think the difference between regular writing and great writing is that I chose to introduce Salinger’s writing with a metaphor about a parade when Buddy chooses

A line exists in Kafka’s Diaries–one of many of his, really–that could easily usher in the Chinese New Year: “The young girl who only because she was walking arm in arm with her sweetheart looked quietly around.”

Crying in H Mart

Author: Michelle Zauner
Published: April 20, 2021
Date read: September 20, 2023

They were conversations I wanted to have with people but couldn’t.

I thought I could, but when I met the person I should have been able to have those conversations with, I found myself at a loss. So they recommended this.

Korean people tend to disavow measurements and supply only cryptic instructions along the lines of “add sesame oil until it tastes like Mom’s”.

And though I am sure that everyone of my generation has a mother that eschews recipes, I was reminded of the exact dish I wanted to preserve but never did. But I thought I was searching for myself in those pages. In the anxiety about robbers breaking into the house. In being the kid at the party guaranteed to be crying. In the Mad Lib understanding of my ancestral tongue. In reality, I was looking for confirmation. As if Zauner’s life were a blueprint for a building that I had already constructed and was inspecting for misspaced closets. Instead, I found whole missing rooms.

I had not studiously tracked the calories, the medications, the doctor’s instructions. I did not learn to cook her favorite dishes or sleep weeks besides her hospital bed or organize a return trip to her homeland. I did not write and record an award winning album. I did not get married. Here was the range of possibilities, Zauner says by way of example. Possibilities that I did not even consider, instead preferring to try and hide from it all; exhausted and short tempered. Energy I did not have, but clearly should have given.

And yet.

Here were the conversations I wanted to have. I wanted to talk about the hatred.

I hated myself for not writing to Eunmi every day she was sick, for not calling more, for not comprehending what Nami Emo had endured as a caretaker. I hated myself for not arriving in Eugene earlier, for not being at the appointments, for not knowing the signs to look out for, and perhaps desperate to shirk responsibility, my hatred seeped toward my father and the warnings he’d failed to heed, the suffering that could have been avoided if we had just brought her to the hospital when the symptoms first began to appear.

And the nightmares.

Shortly after we returned to the States, I started having recurring dreams about my mother.

And the things lost.

Now that she was gone, there was no one left to ask about these things. The knowledge left unrecorded died with her.

The things I’m worried about losing.

Why can’t I have these conversations with you?

Elegance of the Hedgehog

Author: Muriel Barbery
Translated by: Alison Anderson
Date published: 2006
Date read: September 10, 2023

More than any other book in recent memory, I found myself highlighting passage upon passage and found that, at the end, when I was reviewing these lines, I needed to further strain them into a finer concentrate to avoid overflowing my notes. I am a sucker for profound insights and Hedgehog has no shortage of them.

Eternity eludes us. At times like this, all the romantic, political, intellectual, metaphysical and moral beliefs that years of instruction and education have tried to inculcate in us seem to be foundering on the altar of our true nature, and society, a territorial field mined with the powerful charges of hierarchy, is sinking into the nothingness of Meaning. Exeunt rich and poor, thinkers, researchers, decision-makers, slaves, the good and the evil, the creative and the conscientious, trade unionists and individualists, progressives and conservatives; all have become primitive hominoids whose nudging and posturing, mannerisms and finery, language and codes are all located on the genetic map of an average primate, and all add up to no more than this: hold your rank, or die.

The combination of counter cultural anti elitism expressed in refined literary prose speaks to the MSNBC slice of my emotional core. After all, don’t we all have days where we are feeling a little bohemian and anti establishment?

How about fatalistic and existentialist? Hedgehog offers benefaction that way as well.

Animals we are, animals we shall remain. The fact that a rich person’s cat suffers from the same afflictions as a civilized woman is hardly a reason to call this cruel and inhuman treatment of delines or the contamination by mankind of an innocent domestic animal: rather, to the contrary, one should point to the deep-rooted solidarity underlying the fate of all animal species. We share the same appetites, we endure the same afflictions.

But the ingredient that prevents the whole affair from devolving into intellectual navel gazing, though some may argue otherwise, is the seeming self awareness and the ability to hold many contradictory ideas simultaneously.

Humans, at the end of the day, are animals, so say the previous passages. And yet, we are not just animals.

What his sentence means isn’t that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it’s words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who’ve been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make out territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.

Do we rise above our base animalistic selves through language, or as Paloma sees it here, a perverse method of suppressing that nature? Renée seems to see it differently.

For those who have been favored by life’s indulgence, rigorous respect in matters of beauty is a non-negotiable requirement. Language is a bountiful gift and its usage, an elaboration of community and society, is a sacred work.

Perhaps both are true.

There’s a self awareness baked into Hedgehog about the previous intellectual posturing.

What if literature were a television we gaze into in order to activate our mirror neurons and give ourselves some action-packed cheap thrills? And even worse: what if literature were a television showing us all the things we have missed?

Hedgehog even comments about self awareness, which I believe to be a meta commentary about the fact that it is performing meta commentary on itself.

She’s one of those who think that knowledge is power and forgiveness: If I know that I belong to a self-satisfied elite who are sacrificing the common good through an excess of arrogance, this liberates me from criticism, and I come out with twice the prestige.

Olympe is not one for affected charades, the way some people in the building are, to prove that because she is a well-brought-up-child-of-leftists-without-prejudices she is conversing with the concierge.

Fascination with intelligence is in itself fascinating, but I don’t think it’s a value in itself. There are tons of intelligent people out there and there are a lot of retards, too. I’m going to say something really banal, but intelligence, in itself, is neither valuable nor interesting. Very intelligent people have devoted their lives to the question of the sex of angels, for example. But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have on idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid.

And because I am simple and struggle to hold contradictory ideas in my head and one layer of meta commentary is enough to incite my migraines, I am only left overwhelmed and impressed.

Of course, there are certainly pithy enough lines that stand out beyond the intellectual navel gazing.

Must this man forever startle me?

I am startled.

“But I’m a judge and being judged at the same time,” I say, sitting down, “I can’t vote.”

Melancholy overwhelms me, at supersonic speed.

Other notes:

I first discovered this book from this article.

And I love the variety of critical reviews.

Piranesi

Author: Susanna Clarke
Date published: September 15, 2020
Date read: July 24, 2023

Sometimes I am convinced my mind is going. Names, dates, places all seem to slip away unnoticed. Only when I am put on the spot and am forced to run an inspection, sort through the files do I notice the empty shelves and boxes where I swear I put my experiences. I’ll keep this right here, next to the memory about napkin insulating a popsicle in France, and besides the sand dune buggy adventures in Peru. This will certainly be a cherished memory I say, not noticing the suspiciously China trip shaped dust print I have just covered. Certainly, these items, stored in the basement or attic or vault or warehouse, are not often inspected, and so may be more forgivable to lose track of. What is worse is misplacing the tools I use daily. One doesn’t often think about where they are to put their arms or legs. You aren’t often without them. Why is it that I forget the names of my colleagues, with whom I have been working with daily for years, after a week?

I often blame myself. Perhaps it was that folding chair that fell on the back of my head when I was lying down playing Halo with a friend. Or the various tumbles down the mountain caused by my poor snowboarding skills. Or perhaps it’s my inability to get a good night’s sleep. Or most probably, my newfound phone alert incited, habitual Reddit browsing, technologically induced, self diagnosed ADHD. If only, I tell myself, I could take away all my distractions, detox from the notifications, prevent the constant refreshing of the online dopamine engine, I could learn to focus, improve my memory, and correct my failures.

Piranesi is strange to me in that it doesn’t take a strong stance on this topic, the one fundamental issue driving the intrigue of the novel. At times, Piranesi is distraught and angry. And then he is stoic and removed. And finally, accepting and growing. But at no time did it seem as if any of these reactions were unwarranted or wrong. There was no hint that it would have been wrong to be angry, or to be removed, or accepting in part because it never seemed as if it was right to be any of those three either.

One reviewer noted it was apt that Piranesi was published during the height of the pandemic lockdowns. The isolation of the House, the little developed rituals and rhythms, the fascination with the otherwise mundane echoes my lived experience to some extent. Most of all, it is the blending together of time that makes the comparison sing. I could technically look up the official dates in which events took place during the pandemic, but to this day, I split the pandemic into phases. From the Lupine phase to the San Mateo phase to the Wellington phase. And despite this separation, it still all blends together uneasily. It is easy to start the clock over with the pandemic as year zero.

I would have liked to have found the zen that Piranesi found. Because I am still angry and I think I am right to be angry. With the cosmic circumstances of the universe, with the way I behaved, with the way I still forget. What if I’m wrong about feeling right?

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Date published: July 5, 2022
Date read: July 3, 2023

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow covers a lot of ground: identity (race, class, gender), pain (physiological, psychological, emotional), art (meaning, purpose, money), relationships (love, friend, working), and more. There’s video games and theater and dogs and clowns and abortions and Mormons. It spans decades of time. And if one tried, I think it might be possible to draw connections between all of these pieces to justify their inclusions. There could be a line between the names of all of the Anna’s and then a line from the coyote that Anna stops the car for to the rescued dog and then to the mixed identity of the main characters. And while the sheer volume of elements in the book makes it move and keeps the content new, the potpourri of elements also invites comparison. I could not tie all of my disjointed thoughts together

Cassandra at the Wedding

Author: Dorothy Baker
Date published: 1962
Date read: June 19, 2023

About a third of the way through, I had two thoughts cross my mind: I wish I had written this and I don’t want to keep reading. Cassandra was a problematic, neurotic force whose actions and behaviors were setting up for an alarming outcome. At the same time, she is strangely riveting. Judith captures this dynamic well.

We sat in a booth for part of an hour and I tried to tell Jack everything I was afraid of, and more or less exactly what Cass’s character is like, or what her problems are–problems and character being in her case so bound up together that you can’t have one without the other; she’s a problem character.

To me, Cassandra at the Wedding is challenging literature. Not because it is long or overly verbose like a title like Infinite Jest. It challenges me despite being short and readable because of how complex the characters are. There are no complete villains, no pure heroes (well, maybe with the exception of Jack), and there are no two identical characters. Cassandra is loquacious and so self assured that she projects her own incongruent reality onto the world in a way that often shapes the real one for better and worse.

A simple word like yes, for example, can take on fantastic implications if the one-sided hearer is forced to invent the question it’s in answer to. I took the towel away from my eyes and caught a quick look at her. She was all furrowed in thought and she came up with something quite good. “It depends on who’s doing the inventing,” she said.

Judith is more stable, more reserved, but she has sought saviorhood in the form of an outside power to compensate her lack thereof.

But I didn’t need it, and I couldn’t quite decide whether to rejoice for my sake, or regret it for hers. All I knew was I didn’t need saving. Not any longer. I belonged somewhere, and Cass didn’t. And probably never would.

From their father and mother to the grandmother and psychiatrist, each character is full, realized, problematic. It is too embedded in my own nature to avoid conflict, to simplify things into binary classifications, that causes me to want to shirk from such circumstances–to stop reading. And makes me jealous of the seeming ease at which these characters emerge from the words on the page. How could anyone be so comfortable realizing such, such, fixable characters? Moreover, how was it possible to contain so much in so little? References to all manners of literature, religion, philosophy, art mixed with character clues and behaviors and actions.

In one of the gen ed literature classes I took in college, we were introduced to the concept of close reading. At the time, I did not understand the concept at the time - evident in the assigned essay I wrote at the time. Later, Reading Like a Writer helped me understand it a bit more. I strongly suspect that Cassandra deserves such a reading. Just not from me – too uncomfortable. The afterword by Deborah Eisenberg does a better job than I at that.

A lot of us have spent a certain amount of our adult lives trying to sort out what is properly “oneself” from what it was convenient within the family that we be. And a lot of us have spent a certain amount of time learning to acknowledge in ourselves abilities that “belong” to some other member of the family.

Trust

Author: Hernan Diaz
Date published: May 3, 2022
Date read: June 11, 2023

When I finished reading the fourth and final part of Truth, I was disappointed. The seeming twist was not subtly introduced for consideration early and each passing section reinforced its possibility. When it was finally confirmed, its shock had all but been discharged. But the more that I reflected, the more that I doubted myself. What if, after all that the book had been trying to convey, I had failed to internalize its primary message about trust. Unlike the mystery books referenced within, where the culprit is conclusively revealed and brought to justice, the grand reveal here could possibly be yet another misdirection, never to be resolved by the text. Haven’t I seen firsthand how one’s circumstances, health or wealth, can so easily color one’s already skewed view of the world and themselves in it?

There’s a scene in Trust where Andrew intentionally or mistakenly recites someone else’s account as his own, an Inception feeling moment. This moment is, of course, a clue for the reader as well as a clean way to tie together various sections of the novel and give them new meaning. And so, the narrator justly highlights this for us.

Later, over the years, both at work and in my personal life, I have had countless men repeat my ideas back to me as if they were theirs–as if I would not remember having come up with those thoughts in the first place. (It is possible that in some cases their vanity had eclipsed their memory so that, thanks to this selective amnesia, they could lay claim to their epiphany with a clean conscience.) And even back then in my youth, I was acquainted with this parasitic form of gaslighting. But someone presenting one of my family stories as theirs?

And in the context of the rest of the novel, it does not truly matter if Andrew realizes his own substitution of someone’s reality for his own. The novel is about who gets to tell their story and why. And in the manner of Andrew grappling with the manner, wording and tone, of how to tell his own story, so too have I been thinking about mine, or at least a piece of it. Seeded by a recent trip to Los Angeles to reunite with my college friends in person, one recounted their first impression of me.

Freshman year, question and answer session with an invited speaker, sharp and insightful opinions. The only problem with that recounting–I have no memory of it ever happening. Even with reassurances that it was indeed me in the described affair, I have my doubts. But what can I say to the contrary? It was so long ago, and although I trust my own memory, I am keenly aware of its many limitations. As Trust seeks to demonstrate, we rarely get to control our own story. Perhaps only in our minds can we do so and even that story is rarely the truth wholesale.

More importantly, at least for myself, that feels like it could be a scary but liberating conclusion. It pains me not to have that control of how others view my story, or my part in theirs, but accepting that everyone does not have the same conception is also meaningful.

What mattered was that she was unable to stop thinking about her thoughts.

Trading became America’s favorite indoor sport. The debauchery of leveraged speculation attracted endless small fry with big dreams, always the most irresponsible actors in the market. Minor millionaires fooled themselves into believing they had “made it big” and could multiply their loot indefinitely. Gangs of undisciplined parvenus, speculative tourists and riffraff encouraged by unscrupulous croupiers rode on the coattails of the success of hardworking businessmen.

Every single one of our acts is ruled by the laws of economy. When we first wake up in the morning we trade rest for profit. When we go to bed at night we give up potentially profitable hours to renew our strength. And throughout our day we engage in countless transactions. Each time we find a way to minimize our effort and increase our gain we are making a business deal, even if it is with ourselves. These negotiations are so ingrained in our routine that they are barely noticeable. But the truth is our existence revolves around profit.

“Thank you for not attempting a response. My job is about being right. Always. If I’m ever wrong, I must make use of all my means and resources to bend and align reality according to my mistake so that it ceases to be a mistake.”

“There is a better world,” a man said. “But it’s more expensive.”

Who is “I” in “I hurt”? The one who inflicts the pain or the one who suffers it?

Kitsch is always a form of inverted Platonism, prizing imitation over archetype. And in every case, it’s related to an inflation of aesthetic value, as seen in the worst kind of kitsch: “classy” kitsch.

For I’ve come to think one is truly married only when one is more committed to one’s vows than the person they refer to.

Overheard: “He just pretends to pretend.”

“Imagine the relief of finding out that one is not the one one thought one was”

Last Chance to See

Authors: Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
Date published: 1990
Date read: April 6, 2023

I’ve never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I’ve seen a few and they’re never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you’re in the right frame of mind, which is usually about lunchtime.

I like to think that I can trace parts of my personality and quirks to some genesis event. I like to think that I got my taste from my mom, my aphantasia from my dad, my interest in games from my brother. What I did not know was that my sense of humor, which I believed to be a concoction of the various friends, media, and personalities I’ve had the pleasure of being entertained by over the years, actually entirely originates from Douglas Adams.

It doesn’t even like the company of other kakapos. One conservation worker we met said he sometimes wondered if the mating call of the male didn’t actively repel the female, which is the sort of biological absurdity you otherwise find only in discotheques. The ways in which the kakapo goes about mating are wonderfully bizarre, extraordinarily long drawn out, and almost totally ineffective.

I am not sure which genius at the BBC decided that the best way to document an extensive wilderness exploration in search of critically endangered species would be to create a radio series and book written by Douglas Adams, but it’s that particular vision that makes me so glad that not everyone thinks like me. Today, such a project looks like Planet Earth: gorgeous high definition video truly capturing stunning wildlife moments narrated by a serious narrator whose tone matches the profundity of the subject and orchestrated by a team of well funded experts. I’m extremely happy that Planet Earth exists - but I’m similarly happy that Last Chance to See also exists; the same way that I’m glad both Star Wars and Spaceballs exist.

You will have heard it said before that these creatures are awesome beasts, and I would like to add my own particular perception to this: these creatures are awesome beasts.

Documenting nature in writing is hard, especially for the purposes of the general audience. Capturing the sheer magnitude of the rhino or the silverback gorilla in text feels like using a bicycle to hunt whales. The wrong instrument for the wrong domain. But Adams makes it work by focusing on many of the non-animal related items. In China looking for the Baiji dolphin, Douglas starts by detailing his newfound compulsive habit of purchasing aftershave and then disposing of them by hiding them in hard to spot places as if he were inventing geocaching. It is the places, the people, and the whole ecosystem surrounding these animals that occupy most of Douglas’s retelling.

Happily, Professor Zhou did exist. Not only did he exist, but when Mark went to look for him at Nanjing University (I was ill that day), he was actually in and agreed to come and have dinner with us at the Jing Ling Hotel (by which time I was better because it was a quite a good restaurant).

I’m not sure which approach is more compelling, the Planet Earth approach or the Last Chance to See method. But having just completed the latter, there’s something to be said for it.

It’s easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo, we are now sadder and wiser, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.

The Island of Doctor Moreau

Author: H. G. Wells
Date read: January 29, 2023
Date published: 1896

For a short period of time in high school. My debate partner had worked to convince a mutual to read this book. Having finally read it, I am still not sure I see why. Of the various themes that the book touches upon, perhaps the one that may have most closely resonated with them is Wells’ treatment of religion. At that time, their views of religion perhaps were less favorable and may have respected Well’s portrayal of religion on the island.

Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau–and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me.

At one point, I might have regarded religion in the same manner. I might have thought that Well’s was being sarcastic when he writes

I feel as though the animal was surging up through them; that presently the degradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger scale. I know this is an illusion; that these seeming men and women about me are indeed men and women,–men and women for ever, perfectly reasonable creatures, full of human desires and tender solicitude, emancipated from instinct and the slaves of no fantastic Law,–being altogether different from the Beast Folk.

After all, I might have thought, religion for humans and the Law for the Beast Folk could scarcely be different. But it is hard to pinpoint Wells’ opinion here. While there’s ample evidence to suggest that the Beast Folk have very human behaviors or at least humans have very Beast Folk behaviors,

But whether he treated it well or ill, it loved nothing so much as to be near him.

there are lines such as these

This is a mood, however, that comes to me now, I thank God, more rarely. I have withdrawn myself from the confusion of cities and multitudes, and spend my days surrounded by wise books,–bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men. I see few strangers, and have but a small household.

which suggest that there is something, something which separates human from beast.

Ultimately, Wells raises, but does not answer for me, uncomfortable, but practical ethical questions about human and animal rights, pain and suffering, egocentrism and nihilism. And if nothing else, it blesses us with a new Shakespearean line about futility.

What’s it all for, Prendick? Are we bubbles blown by a baby?

Dear Committee Members: A Novel

Author: Julie Schumacher
Date read: January 27, 2023
Date published: August 19, 2014

I didn’t appreciate him returning the car with the gas tank empty.

To my ear, this sentence sounds like it flows.

I didn’t appreciate his returning the car with the gas tank empty.

But this sounds formal and correct.

This example was taken from a small note shared by my friend and there was a lively repartee about the sound of it all with people discussing quadruple successive gerunds and the like. Certainly, the raw semantic meaning conveyed by both are identical, but as readers and listeners we take away different impressions. That formality, the choice of expression, all of that breathes life into the main character of Dear Committee Members. The work comprises solely of letters written by a small university English professor, whose personality of being an oversharer, old fashioned, and forthright mixed with the sharp tongued, erudite, pen wielding skills of a novelist produce such letters as

Ms. Vanessa Cuddigan has asked me to submit a letter of reference to your poorly spelled organization [Kompu-Metricka, Inc.] on her behalf. While I have only praise for Ms. Cuddigan, who graduated two years ago with a major in English, I had expected her to ask that I recommend her for graduate school. Instead, having completed a stint with Teach for America, she is now apparently desirous of some sort of data-entry position with your firm–clearly a soul-squelching enterprise. I have asked her to explain herself but she is evasive, leading me to wonder if something unfortunate happened during the past two years to destroy her ambition.

It is the little things. The use of the words “desirous”, “soul-squelching”. The somewhat circuitous phrasing of “leading me to wonder if something unfortunate happened during the past two years to destroy her ambition”. They give our main character a certain English professorial je ne sais quoi. And while our main character is not particularly likable, although he does display some redeeming qualities, one can certainly imagine such a character without the author needing to include a description about him because the language that is used draws from our assumptions and prejudices about language and class and behavior to produce an amalgam of stereotypes that is our main character.

There is a small, but meaningful amount of plot that happens in the work, but the purpose of the plot is not to be the point of intrigue. Instead, the plot is used as the starch in this letter of recommendation based paper mache where the real entertainment is the language. Formal and biting, correct and unabashed. Even if I, myself, would say “him returning”, there is still something to appreciate about “his returning”.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Author: Kim Fu
Date read: January 19, 2023
Date published: February 1, 2022

In any short story collection, there’s inevitably one that sticks. It was the sheer cruelty of 400 Pound CEO from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, the clever design of The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate from Exhalation, the elegant construction of Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes from Nine Stories. It will be the familiarity of the stories in Lesser Known Monsters.

After reading several of the stories, but in particular the first, Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867, I felt the urge to tell everyone I knew. But though I think anyone can appreciate the story, I think my fondness of it stems from a particular sensation of identification. While I hold all of the previous short stories in high regard, and would effuse endless streams of praise for them, I think that might stem from a quasi intellectually detached frame of mind. I love the stories in Lesser Known Monsters because they feel like someone better than I took my thoughts and gave them the legs necessary to reach others.

From “Time Cubes”

Alive’s Depressive Specialist said they were living in a paradise, and Alive had to agree, in the sense that the recent past was worse, the future would almost certainly be worse, and the present was worse for most other people, living elsewhere.

“Depressives are selfish,” her Specialist had said. “You’re selfish, and then you berate yourself for being selfish, which is just another way of focusing your attention on yourself.” Said in the same gentle, infuriatingly patient voice in which she said everything.

From “Twenty Hours”

Our once-reasonable anxieties grown distorted, outsized, habitual. There will never be enough money to make us feel safe.

And the stand out story, Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867

– What else is important?

– We’re walking through the gardens together. She’s holding my arm. She’s telling me plant facts, boring ones, like “Did you know bamboo can grow a full inch in just an hour?” And she’s gossiping about relatives I don’t remember, and kids I went to elementary school with. “Little Rusell is a newscaster now! Aunt Sandy is pregnant!” That sort of thing. And I’m just listening. I say things like, “That’s interesting,” and “Russell did love to hear himself talk.” I’m not getting snide or impatient, or looking at my phone, or thinking about work, or picking a fight.

– Enjoy your unicorn.

– I will.

Perhaps others feel as seen as I do. Or, perhaps, it’ll help others see.