Reviews and Comments

K Allado-McDowell wrote this book with GPT-3, mixing their own voice with that of the LLM. The only rule they followed while writing was to make it "as cringe as possible." I'm interested in how the book is steeped in the bodily (lots of sex) while also making clear the lack of connection in a world shaped by social media. The main character is lost in a world of people who are the "main character," looking for community in religious communities and raves. They never find that community - they mostly just offer hallucinatory episodes (GPT) is good at that.

Sally Rooney gets hate, but I'm convinced that people are made that she's so good at such a young age. She's great at relationships. I want to write a paper about her use of the word "Yes" in this book - it comes up during so many internal monologues, across characters. Characters stumble into an understanding of something and say "Yes." I'm not sure if it's a tick across her novels - I've never noticed it before.

Beautiful book.

"Even at this distance, Jupiter is incomprehensibly vast. We stare through the porthole at its soft milky hue, the watercolour whirls, repeating our unbelief. K looks at the settings on the screen showing the camera feed. Something in the rendering of Jupiter looks too virtual, too predictable. It's exactly like the images I've seen of it before. This is a senseless thing to say, of course, but I expected the gas giant to appear different when I saw it myself, so close. It looks too perfect, too controlled. It lacks independence, as if conforming to our expectations, which is ironically not what we expected at all. You're in shock, Tyler says. We all are. It isn't the camera, or the screen, K, it's us. We don't know how to see it." (357)

This is a beautifully written book that focuses on Camden, New Jersey, where I teach. I was also lucky enough to meet the author during a visit to campus. The strongest feature of this book is its ability to sit with the complexities of urban spaces that are constantly exploited, "revitalized," ignored, bulldozed, exoticized, and more. Romero grew up in Camden, and she wrote the book during a return visit to the city after her home was gone. It's a work of poetry, narrative, and analysis. It's rare to see an author pull of all of these at once.

Anderson can craft a sentence and a story. He's also great at historical fiction, and this one is quick, funny, and based on historical events. I was raised Catholic and was always weirded out by relics - this book leans into that weirdness.

This is a detailed study of Mobile Image, an artist group that built innovative projects using telecommunications in the 1980s and 1990s. Super detailed account of their experiments with satellite technology, videoconferencing, BBSs.

Most importantly, if you've seen the hullabaloo about the "portal" in NYC, you should know that Mobile Image built that in 1980 - a live, synchronous video connection between LA and NYC. It was called A Hole in Space and there's footage on YouTube.

This is the second of Ishiguro's I've read (the other was Klara and the Sun), and I'm struck with how much his characters love to revel in tedium. In this book, it's done to comedic effect often (since the narrator is obsessed with the details of what makes a "good butler" or what counts as "dignity"). But it then surprisingly dips into a love story and Nazi sympathizers. The book is deep in the weeds of something that seems ridiculous while all of these other more important things are happening around the edges. In the end, it works.

The introduction to my edition says that the third part of this book was initially its own thing, and that makes a lot of sense. The first two parts of the book offer a kind of nest for the last part of the narrative.

An intergenerational story, which seems to be a trend in the 20th Century Japanese fiction I've read. Bleak also...kind of another trend. I have tended to link both of those things to WWII, but this one was published in 1914, so that theory doesn't hold up.

I bought this book because Jeff VanderMeer blurbed it. It was not what I expected. All the issues with tech (AI, privacy, virality, inequity and inequality, the difficulties of parenting in a world of devices) are right on the surface. The book reads like YA fiction, but it doesn't appear to be marketed that way. I skimmed through to the end to figure out the narrative payoff, but mostly this book just wasn't what I was expecting.

This book is a history of socialism, and a pretty accessible one. I was expecting more of a manifesto (because of the title...), but the final section is really the only thing approaching that. And even then, it's not really a manifesto in style or substance.

This is a great historical introduction to socialist projects, but if you're looking for a fiery defense of socialism you should look elsewhere.

In the U.S., we tend to draw a fairly firm line between "research" and "creative activity," especially when it comes to granting agencies. It's frustrating, since the most interesting work straddles this boundary. This book is good for both people in places where research-creation is more of a possibility (like Canada) and for those who are not often trained to think in these ways (like the U.S.).

I think it's probably best as an intro text for beginning grad students in art and design or for advanced undergraduates. It lays out steps for developing a "research document" and offers some examples in each chapter, but I wish the examples were a little more fully fleshed out...sometimes it seems like they're just listed rather than used to explicate the idea of the chapter.

The design of this book is excellent, so it might offer some inspiration in that way as well.

My favorite parts of this book were dream sequences where the protagonist is dreaming about dialogues between all kinds of people (at one point, Lisa Simpson and Trump).

There's a deus ex machina that I didn't love, but the writing is great.

I think most will find this book eye opening. During the Cold War, the U.S. government helped reactionaries in Indonesia slaughter a million communists. They then repeated that approach (the Jakartra Method) in Brazil. This book gets into the weeds, but it does a nice job of balancing personal accounts of victims with the bigger picture history.