Herman Melville Biography. Snooooorrrreeee

I think I DNF’d out of Satanic Verses halfway through the first page. Fuck that kind of prose.

Honestly, only Kierkegaard has ever had an effect like that on me. Fear And Trembling, specifically.

Other than that, I just don’t find prose itself to have that much aesthetic quality. It’s the story and meaning that grabs me. Ordinary People will bring me to tears every time I read it, but what does that have to do with the prose itself? Nothing.

It’s funny, in the movie, the T-Rex just magically shows up back at the main building to save the day. In the book, the T-Rex >!follows them all the way back from their initial encounter!<.

The movie is perfection. But it’s a perfect movie.

The book just simply has more. More different dinos (there’s not just one T-Rex), more interactions between humans and dinos, and more talky-talky stuff (as my daughter would call it) that’s actually pretty interesting.

Some books that together helped give me a certain orientation to the future and to how human society works/doesn’t work:

The Dispossessed - Ursula le Guin. The greatness, awfulness and simultaneous impossibility of anarchy as a workable system.

Holy Fire - (Bruce Sterling), ie what really happens as the population ages and as people start to believe in medical immortality

Beggars In Spain - (Nancy Kress) What happens when technology enables so much inequality that we essentially get a speciation event. What is due to the losers?

The First Immortal - (James Halperin) Another book about the changes wrought by medical technology and anti-aging research. Amateurish writing, but blasts those ideas out fast and cogently, so I don’t mind so much.

Also, I don’t much like Cory Doctorow’s novels, but holy hell, if you get to listen to him speak on a podcast or something, I’ve rarely ever heard some speak with such cogent clarity on complex topics.

And I’d say The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant changed me in more foundational ways that would be hard for me to articulate, but it has something to do why I reject the idea that anyone is unworthy of compassion.