commentary for a few of these: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
i… very much do not like I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, and i feel like i only need this particular passage to illustrate why. what i can appreciate about it is really limited to keeping this serial killer from recessing into history and getting away with his crimes. as an actual book, and as actual text on page, i have a lot of issues with this one! i don’t really like how it’s written so casually; i dislike how it’s presented and the jumbled order of things; i really did not appreciate[^1] the gratuitous detail of how many of the Golden State Killer’s rapes were committed, leading to such just. unbelievable paragraphs as:
Common sense, and any cop, will tell you that the no-pants rapist is an unsophisticated teenage peeper who just graduated from misdemeanor to crudely conceived felony. The punk doing the no-pants dance suffers from poor impulse control and will be arrested swiftly.
i think in general, the book reads like a jumble of blogs—and that would be fine if not for the fact that it’s a book and not a jumble of blogs. it’s a book that has been edited, and if this is what they salvaged in editing it, then… yeah. probably should have been kept in drafts overall. this solidified my general dislike of true crime
[^1]: for reasons both publicly decent and personal
I couldn’t get into Beloved when I attempted it (I definitely will try it again, though), but I read Song of Solomon this last year and really enjoyed it!
My favorite book was The Winners by Fredrik Backman! It felt like a decent conclusion to the trilogy and I really loved living with all the characters again. My second favorite fiction would probably be The Dark Tower, I’m glad to finally have that series wrapped up! I avoided most major spoilers too so it was a satisfying conclusion.
My favorite nonfiction would be I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy narrates her audiobook and that added a lot to the already tragic story.
Upgrade by Blake Crouch put his work on my radar. The premise sounded intriguing and I couldn’t put the book down. It led me to Dark Matter, Recursion, Pines, and Abandon, of which only Abandon I opted to quit reading. He went from essentially nobody to me to “Ooo, there’s a new book coming out!” in the span of this year.
My other surprising hit was getting back into reading comic books and diving into Radiant Black and the associated Massive-Verse stories. It felt like a blend of superhero and Power Rangers style storytelling and parts of it felt very unique and interesting to me (how they handle the main character and where the power of Radiant Black is in the comics releasing now is really cool, trying to avoid spoilers!). It also comes across as a more realistic version of the stories that superhero/PR tell where there’s social media and dialogue that comes across as real speech. I think of it akin to Star Trek vs. The Orville, both great but I see the path of how we get from here to the type of world The Orville embodies but the people on Star Trek don’t feel exactly like real people by today’s standard and it seems that much farther out.
the vibes have actually never been better, and i have a general contempt for doomers like the residents of /r/collapse and other weird subreddits like that
i am familiar with okdoomer and i think it’s indicative of the sort of goofy goober shit most doomers have to work themselves up about to even get in the mindset in the first place, which is hyperfixate on anything which validates their priors and ignore the overwhelming body of evidence which contradicts or actively rejects their priors. even people on /r/collapse sometimes complain about how most of what the subreddit does is post poorly sourced suicide-bait and i think okdoomer is the tenuous but logical conclusion of that
in my mind, the resistance is just a common sense thing. active nihilism is dumb and brain poison. you will simply never do anything useful if your starting position is “this doesn’t matter and i don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to make it matter”–in any case this is a completely falsifiable and illogical position. a whole lot of shit does matter even on the margins. 2.9C of climate change is not an academic distinction versus 3C of climate change.
from a practical and crude standpoint, the conclusion of the position is you might as well kill yourself because it’ll never get better–but conspicuously, the vast majority of self-IDed doomers don’t do this and instead continue to do what amounts to malingering in a world they believe is going to eventually be characterized by resource wars, mass famine, and a climate that wants to kill them. that makes no real sense unless you think these are exaggerations, which i think many of them do actually recognize deep down.
from a personal standpoint, engaging in doomerism will just ruin all your relationships–nobody likes to hang around a complete downer.
Yeah, I don’t actively engage in that and try to avoid it, but pathologically I tend to get lost in doubt and dread. This occasionally spirals me in the direction of doom, with or without doing Google searches on climate change.
Admittedly it’s a much less of an issue since I stopped using Reddit so that’s probably got something to do with it. Beehaw has been a godsend.
imo the most productive way to deal with the inherent anxiety is just to do something or be engaged in something, however small–being in an organization you can devote even a few hours to a month is usually a godsend in this regard, whether that’s DSA or Sunrise or Food Not Bombs, or a non-American equivalent to these groups. it’s so, so much harder to default to assuming nothing will get better if you surround yourself with people and groups fighting to make things better
i managed to steamroll through it in about a day (combination of no computer + no television) which i don’t recommend as it is a very voluminous book–it’s one of the largest i have in physical form. basically guaranteed you’ll get some value of out of it though if you’ve liked Graeber’s previous work, either as a reference text or as a reading experience (it seems amenable to being used as both).
Shout-out for I’m Glad My Mom Died. It’s incredible how McCurdy captured the feeling of constantly walking on eggshells around an NParent, not knowing what would set them off. Also, fuck Dan Schneider.
I love history books, so a long history of the Targaryan dynasty written as a history book just really, really hit with me, though I wish he’d write a novella spelling out Saera Targaryan’s story in full.
You have a stronger will than I, being able to read all that and (presumably) not go insane in the process. Was there anything in particular that you learned that stuck out to you?
climate change projections are really a CYOA depending on how optimistic or pessimistic you want to be, and there is zero agreement on what remedies should be undertaken as a part of resolving it
virtually all of the reporting you’ve probably ever heard about Columbine is polluted by some degree of mistruth, miscommunication, or lies from the media, the police, or relevant parties with their own agendas
if there’s any justice in the world, Pacific Gas & Electric executives will all be sent to the 9th circle of hell
socialists got pretty wacky when they were allowed to take power throughout the mountain West during the heyday of the Socialist Party of America, and communists even moreso during their brief period of relevance in the eastern corner of Montana
a lot of conservative Americans are very clearly best described as “stupid fascists”, which is to say they are essentially fascist politically but so politically propaganized against that term, politically ignorant, or just plainly stupid that they don’t realize they are essentially fascist. this is probably and currently saving us from an even more developed fascist movement than already exists, but how long it’ll hold is not clear
That sent me on a !!fun!! Wikipedia trip. My favorite was a sniper attack on a substation that DHS alleged might have been an inside job. Also that’s a lot of fires.
I actually split between reading and listening to the audiobook. It was long either way! I didn’t care for it as much as I thought I would. The first part took me a while to get into, I loved the second part, but after
I remember where I was driving when I listened to the first part, the narrator was excellent and made the whole tree section a surprisingly engrossing listen.
I agree about where the story started to falter, too. There was a lot of build-up to that point and it felt like it kinda meandered to the end afterwards.
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