recognito | doing this to improve my liver function

For reasons (American), I have been more in the mood to play bad, mediocre, and sometimes even good video games than to read, but my beautiful cat continues to demand his tithe... I've read a few books. Most of post will be devoted to descending into a hater fugue state.

Books I'm in the middle of: How Should a Person Be by Heti (enjoying, finding it funny, I had a funny disagreement with someone about the value of Heti's work that I am excited to write about in a blog post where I can take multiple L's at once instead of collecting them one-on-one), The Magic Mountain by Mann (I GUESS I'M UNDERSTANDING WHY HE'S A HIT), Sula by Morrison (she's doing it yet again), Uncommon Carriers by McPhee... I think it's about time I pick up another Malcolm for my spirits and to extend the dominion of the letter M in my reading list. Do you think I should change my pen name to start with m as an homag

In order of completion:

The Third Realm, Knausgaard - I've actually never read any Knausgaard, even at the height of the autofiction craze. In the years since, I feel like autofiction has taken a pretty deep tumble down while speculative/"weird"/horror has swung up, which does seem to coincide with like, our growing sense of living in the prologue of a horror movie. I'm as always curious about the border between autofiction/regular fiction, highbrow/lowbrow, theme/plot writing etc.... anyway, this one isn't one of Knausgaard's autofiction novels. it's book three in a series I didn't know existed... and there will be books after this one?!

This holds up all right without reading the other two books. Actually I wonder if reading the other two might end up feeling a little too slow or if the supernatural elements are more prominent there. The big pieces of the book concern the mysterious appearance of a star and how it links to the ritual murders of a metal band, death stopping in all of Norway for a six+ day period, and the lives of various other figures, including the jealous husband of a pastor who has a connection to some strange occurrences out of town and no longer believes in God, a girl who meets the singer of a mysterious death metal group, and a painter with schizophrenia, who begins hearing and seeing disturbing things as the star's birth approaches. By the end of it, we get more or less explicit confirmation that uh the Anti-Christ has probably been conceived, demons are real, and supernatural murders? totally a thing now. I think this would have been thrilling to end on if the book were also about a hundred pages longer but leaving it off there makes me go, wow uh just what are you going to do from here, Karl?? Enjoyed it despite some familiar beats (art and madness! death metal singers! so many men in middle age crises), I guess I'll pick up the sequel sometime.

Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud - I have really few thoughts on this one except for my general feeling of, "Wow, he was really smart and affable, I feel surprising affinity for doctor father" and now I jokingly call him doctor father all the time.

Sleepless Nights, Hardwick - I loved Seduction and Betrayal and decided to pick up Hardwick's great fiction novel, Sleepless Nights. Its strengths and appeal are obvious at a glance: insightful portraiture, an enviably insightful and intelligent authorial persona, and powerful, slippery sentences.

The narrator, on "sleepless nights," revisits various episodes and figures of her past. structurally, it runs associatively on poet logic; I feel like this is a book you could enjoy even out of order. Whole lives are captured in three pages or two paragraphs or even sentences. Her portraits are of friends, neighbors, cleaning ladies, and even Billie Holiday, though the last will probably not be a surprise to those familiar with Hardwick's other works. Like her analysis of books and authors, you get the remarkable feeling of comprehending a person's entire being through her work. Her sentences are really strong!! They sound good, they make sense, they make cool use of ambiguity... I don't like it when people are like, "oh, she's subtle, understated" no... she's driving a sick powder blue Plymouth Roadrunner!!

Sleepless Nights is an easy recommendation to people who claim to like sentences or poetic-ish books, but personally I think her essays are more my speed. Brian Dillon has a chapter on Hardwick in his fun book, Suppose a Sentence, where he writes an essay based around his favorite sentences of an author's work, and he analyzes a sentence that appears twice in her works: the first time in Sleepless Nights and the second in an essay proper. I agree with his judgment that the Sleepless Nights version is inferior for its dip into melodrama and the insertion of a clause about artists generally... on a whole, I came away feeling like there were multiple overstatements per page and sentences being, perhaps, a little overstuffed. This can be chalked up to a stylistic preference and my uh emotional rigidity... anyway you can read this if you want. Essays are better.

On the Calculation of Volume (book 1 of 7), Balle - What if you're the only person in a time loop???? and it sucked???

Okay. trying to be normal about this. I watched Omniloop (2024) while reading this, and I do agree that On the Calculation of Volume is better than most time loop media... I also hate time loops so much and at this point cannot think of a single time loop thing that I like. This includes Groundhog Day and Russian Doll, I've fully gone from "oh I love seeing this" to "well the deluge of mediocre slop is infuriating but I still love my favorite pieces that feature this trope" to "my hatred has taken extravagant proportion and I am NOT getting over it" ... Omniloop is not actually awful--it has Mary Louise Parker and Ayo Edebiri and some really touching and sweet moments--but also has the loose plotting and lack of momentum of someone's first novel. What is science? How do you test for compounds? What does a physics lab look like? Does that matter when the conclusion of the movie is, Don't forget about the things that REALLY matter in life: being with your family!

So I do think the messaging is inherently regressive ("the point of life is your nuclear family unit")... it's not a crime to have this message, right, I think the basics of it kind of drill down to something like this: I gave up my science career because of the self-doubt I had due to using my time loop powers to do better on tests; I realized I was dying and decided to use my time loop powers to try to save myself; I find Ayo Edebiri to be my science assistant and we try to beat the loop together using quantum physics; through the process of time loop, I discover I was actually right about all the science stuff; I revisit figures from my past who are still in the science world and god they suck and their relatives hate them. Maybe choosing to give up my career wasn't a bad thing because big institutional science land was really bad; I remember I love my family members a lot; I feel such a strong connection with my science child/lover/protege!; I'm going to pass all my research to her and then go spend time with my family; I'm a grandma!; time to die. as I die I revisit my past-self and whisper in her ear, you can do it! you can have it all! This whisper reads somehow like a curse and counter to the overall messaging of the movie, which, if you're following along, comes down VERY hard on the "You can't actually have ALL of it and it's good to not obsess over paths not taken and enjoy what you do have," lol...

I'm sure we all have moments where we're like, I wish I could do that again. I wish I could go back; I wish I could fix it, knowing what I know now, it'd be so easy to fix... I just feel like time loop narratives often tell us what we already know: Be nice. Fix yourself. Other people are not experiencing the world in the same way you are--no, you are experiencing it in a better, more informed, more intelligent way than they are--you are the one who can see that the world is broken, and the others are just cogs, bit players, following a secret script! you are the hero who will break out and learn to love your family and yourself! I hate that.

So in that respect, On the Calculation of Volume does a better job of representing what it'd actually be like to live the same day 366 times. Some interesting stuff in how the perception of the protagonist shifts from "wow, actually, these are some of the happiest days of my life" to "I'm disassociating" to "I'm a monster consuming this world and I feel awful," along with the novel having a dinner set piece from the beginning repeated at the end, the first encounter joyful and the final encounter sour, with the protagonist feeling like an aberration and intruder in their world. The second book apparently has the protagonist traveling to other countries and. I'll probably read more of this series because hating a trope has never stopped me from continuing to read anyway.