What I'm Reading Now

A bunch of books by white straight guys. How did that happen?

Queen Esther, by John Irving

I saw this in the bookstore last time I was there, but I knew I could get it at the library so I didn't buy it. I'm glad I didn't. I'm afraid John Irving wrote one kind of interesting book (The World According to Garp) and since then has just been writing it over and over. This is just Garp one more time. A fatherless boy raised by feminists who wrestles in high school at a New England prep school wants to be a writer, goes to Vienna, encounters a German shepherd dog and some LGBT people, meets women with huge breasts, so on and so on. This one includes Jews and Israel and some indirect commentary on the situation in Gaza, but other than that, nothing here is new.

Content Warning: Irving's weirdness surrounding sexuality and people's genitals is very much present in this one. At least this time no one has sex with the dog.

Garp was formative to me as a writer and John Irving is always readable, but get this from your library if you're going to read it at all.

Spark, John Twelve Hawks

To be fair, I don't know if Twelve Hawks is a white straight guy. He's said he's not Native American, though, despite the name, which is a pseudonym. He could be a brown guy who isn't Native American. He writes under the pen name and claims no one in his family or community knows he publishes these books, which strikes me as unlikely -- what do they think he's doing, all those hours locked up with his computer? -- but I don't know his circumstances, so maybe.

Anyway! I did enjoy this one, mainly because of the voice of the main character (it's told from his point of view). Jake had a major head injury some time before the book opens, and suffers from Cotard's Syndrome. That is, he believes that he is dead. He is, he tells us in the book, a "spark" living in a "shell." 

Because of the syndrome, he feels no emotions about anything -- his mother, as he explains, and a empty soda can in the gutter are equal in his mind. This is not entirely true, as we learn, progressing through the novel. Jake does care about dogs. But otherwise -- 

Also because of this syndrome, he makes an excellent contract killer, and is earning a great deal of money, as the novel opens, doing this -- enough to pay his rent and his hospital bills, and to have plenty left over. He's not afraid of death (fear being an emotion) but it is convenient not to be homeless, and murdering strangers in order to pay for things is preferable to working a nine to five job.

The strange worldview of Jake is the best part of the novel, but as it is set in the near future, there's also a science fictional element, with a great deal to say about surveillance culture and the on-going stripping away of legal rights from members of the general population. Worth reading, and less depressing than you might expect. Warning: there are some scenes of animal abuse and human torture.

QNTM, There is No Antimemetics Division

I know QNTM is a white guy (his picture is in the back of the book) and that QNTM is a pseudonym for Sam Hughes (via Wikipedia.) I don't know much else about him, so I suppose he could be some flavor of LGBTQ. He's also the guy who invented Absurdle , a spinoff of Wordle in which the word changes with every guess you make, while "still remaining true to previous hints."

Anyway! I'm not sure I exactly liked this book, which is very disturbing, but I read it straight through. It's about "antimemes." Memes are cultural ideas, symbols, things you remember, possibly even against your will. They're like religions and cults (but I repeat myself), earworms, gestures, even phrases. Memetics is the study of memes. Antimemetics are things you can't remember. Like, literally can't. In QNTM's book, some of these are predators on humans, but since we can't remember them -- or anything they do -- they're difficult to fight.

The Antimemetics division fights the antimemes, except without certain specific drugs they can't remember the antimemes either. Sometimes even with the drugs, they can't remember them. Some antimemes can eat the memory of everything you know, your whole life, the languages you learned, your family, your skills, yourself. This is a bit like Alzheimers, I guess, which might be why it disturbed me so much.

We follow the chief of the Antimemetics division and her husband through a world-ending antimemetic attack, with a number of flashbacks and side quests. I'm not sure the ending is happy. I guess it's sort of happy.

Anyway, a very readable but not a comfortable read.