Books Acquired:
The Crack in Space, Philip K. Dick
Alien, Alan Dean Foster
Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Grimscribe Thomas Ligotti
Cup of Gold, John Steinbeck
Cat’s Cradle (hardcover), Kurt Vonnegut
Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Cornell Woolrich
Progress Made:
VALIS, Philip K. Dick
The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Black Count, Tom Reiss
The Bewildering Effect of Cabbages, Michael Rymaszewski
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
Books Finished:
Lucky Loser, Russ Buettner & Suzanne Craig
Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck
This afternoon I’ve been watching the Warriors game on one channel and the end of the Republic on the other, which is weird. There is a distinct Phildickianness to the news these days, and you’d think someone who’d bent his brain as much as I have would be ready for it. But I’m still adjusting. So for now I’m going to put all that aside and continue with business as usual.
Let me just ask, though, does Elon Musk not seem like a character in a Philip K. Dick novel? Did we somehow slip over into a universe he created? It bears thinking about.
I was sad to finish Travels with Charley, as Mr. Steinbeck was so agreeable a companion. As Marc Bolan said,
Book after book
I get hooked
Every time the writer
Talks to me like a friend
So I went out and bought another one of his books, but I don’t expect the same experience, as Cup of Gold is a novel, not a memoir. I had somehow not really read Steinbeck until now — save Tortilla Flat, many many years ago — so I’ve got some catching up to do.
I wasn’t so disappointed to finish Lucky Loser: How D—-d T—p Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, which was an illuminating but also frustrating read. That Fucking Guy’s whole act is so transparent, and has been for so long, that it’s just infuriating that people continue to fall for it. It would be funny if it hadn’t led to the current moment, where he and his unelected Boer buddy are taking a sledgehammer to the Constitution. Just yesterday they apparently shut down USAID, without notice or proper authority, heedless of who will starve as a result.
Ugh. Let’s not get started on that, or we’ll be here all day. Here’s a favorite passage from Lucky Loser, which seems emblematic of something, from the time of Don Jr.’s birth in 1977:
Ivana, who was pregnant, regularly visited the construction site, but she grew increasingly worried about going into labor in a building without elevators, with no one but plumbers and electricians around. She finally called her obstetrician in December. The doctor induced labor on New Year’s Eve, the one-year anniversary of their engagement and not quite nine months after their wedding. She would later say that when she told her husband the boy’s name would be Donald J. Trump Jr., his response was, “What if he’s a loser?” Ivana told him that the name was her decision because she had carried the baby.
Donald’s work associates wondered whether the timing of the induced birth was pure luck or soulless tax planning. He could now claim a dependent tax deduction as if he had been a parent for twelve months when it had been true for only about six hours.
I keep trying with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which is a bit dry style-wise in addition to being just a gigantic fucking book. But if ever there were a time for it, that time is now. The Black Count is on the back burner; only a few pages were absorbed this month; its day will come. And I made good progress on both the PKD and FSF novels, and they are likely to be finished in February.
The book acquisitions are a motley lot and I don’t really feel like getting into that can of worms now. But the Vonnegut bears some explanation. Cat’s Cradle is next up in the queue, and since I’ve read it many times I was going to skip it; then I thought, why am I cheating myself out of a chance to enjoy Cat’s Cradle? I got rid of my falling-apart paperback a while ago in favor of the American Library compilation of 1963–1973 novels, which is actually not that readable due to an awkward form factor and poor typographic choices. So I started looking around for a standalone hardback and found one — a 1963 Delacorte Press edition that I think may be the first? — for a suspiciously low price. The cover is nothing special:
But there is a lovely portrait of the author on the back:
And on that happy note, I’ll leave off for this month.