Tome Waster

Rapid-fire! Are these reviews? Are these just disparate thoughts? They are whatever you want them to be. From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón This book is...what? Less than 300 pages? Anyways, I started reading this book at the same time I started college. Long story short, my sleep schedule got fucked, and what would normally take a couple weeks to read took 4 months to read. This is very much not a book to be read in that fashion, because what Sjón is writing is a coherent narrative, yes, but one punctuated by historical allusion, and which pauses occasionally to make room for passages of creation myth and encyclopedic description of flora and fauna. It's a slew of parts which are at first disparate, but given time, will stew together and subconsciously combine after the actual reading of a chapter or more... It takes place in 17th century Iceland, and follows this sort of physician/poet/scientist figure. Though I don't think he is ever called an alchemist, that is probab...

I read things and I think things and I feel things, and then since my memory is garbage and nobody reads the same things I do I can't discuss them and I begin to doubt what the fucking point of fiction even is. So, casually, I'm gonna talk about some things I read in the last year that I can remember and that I have opinions on. First up: Dune Messiah So here's the 2nd Dune book. Herbert spent like 10 years writing Dune —that book's like 700 pages, a slow burn, a batshit exercise in world-building and Shakespearean drama, a fictional, internally-consistent space that iteratively opens up and explains itself to the viewer. Then it sold like a zillion copies and Herbert said "word, gimme a couple years, I'mma write a sequel." Okay, that's pretty dismissive. Once you lay the groundwork of a fictional space, you can focus on telling stories in that space, so it makes sense that it would take less long to write further installments. But then again...