Holes was fantastic, and (added bonus) my kids liked it too.
In principle I still really like fiction, but have almost exclusively been reading nonfiction. I think serial TV has displaced fiction for me basically.
I saw that Adam Rex (Smekday, great) has a new book. I'm trying to finish Taubes' short but incredibly dense transcribed lectures The Political Theology of Paul. I finished and truly loved Sontag's On Photography earlier, inherited from a friend's family along with half a shelf of other great stuff I wouldn't have chosen for myself. On Photography is basically a notebook-- bits of research and historical description, and thoughts intermingled, lots of thematically linked but not sequentially dependent short paragraphs, great for browsing. She's not always on target, but she's so good when she is, about 2/3 of the time. She would have loved Instagram and Insta culture. I saw a reference to an interesting-looking attempt to write about selfies, haven't followed up because already a stack of unread books.
Heebie, have you ever read Kac & Ulam's Mathematics and Logic ? Short, thoughtful, not demanding.
I haven't! But I have to warn you: I've got a bad track record right now.
I have a book group with my dad and that keeps me reading actual books of relatively high quality, although we only read fiction. We read a few chapters of our current book for every phone call (phone calls are on the same days every week).
I also have, sort of, an online book group, but that gets backburnered a lot.
We've found that themes have emerged in our reading and that has made it a bit easier to get through things - for instance, we've ended up reading a number of novels about India before about 1980, mostly by Indian writers but several by white writers, and that's given additional interest. I think that summer book lists are often too disparate.
I did make an attempt to read some of the Hugo nominees this year and got pretty into several of them.
4: I'm taking this year off from being a Hugo voter, which is ironic because I've already read two of the Best Novel nominees (Legends & Lattes, and The Kaiju Preservation Society) and already own a third (The Spare Man). I probably won't read Nona the Ninth because of how I reacted to Harrow, but I've read good things about Nettle & Bone, and anyway the world needs more Ursula Vernon Hugo acceptance speeches. If I do wind up getting a supporting membership for Chengdu, it will be because of the novellas: I like Nghi Vo's series, there's another U. Vernon entry masquerading as T. Kingfisher, last year's A. Tchaikovsky was a treat, and both Alix Harrow and Seanan McGuire can be good at that length.
I think I don't know how to read anymore; my brain seems to be broken.
For most of my adult life, I read at least a book a week. This changed in 2016. I remember thinking at the time that world events had become so stressful that I couldn't interest myself in novels anymore. But when I look at my goodreads, I see that I was still reading 30+ books a year from 2016 until 2022, still mostly fiction.
This year, I truly can't focus on anything. I've read just three books so far in 2023 -- Michael Connelly's latest (always reliable for me), a trauma memoir (by Jennette McCurdy, very funny), and House of Eve by Sadeqa Johnson (almost did not finish; do not recommend). I feel this as a real loss -- reading was a source of pleasure I've depended on all my life, and now I can't access it anymore.
Anyway, yesterday I started reading Ernst Junger's The Glass Bees, because I saw an article about Ernst Junger in the New Yorker and realized I'd never read anything by him. I'm enjoying (wc?) it so far, but like I said, my brain is broken, so who knows if I'll be able to finish it.
I don't even finish most of the emails I start.
I read a fair bit, but it tends to be genre fiction rather than literary fiction. Currently I'm re-reading Tim Powers' Declare because I've read a lot of other recent Cold War set novels with an occult element (e.g.Hannu Rajaniemi's Summerland which I liked) and I think Declare is one of the better examples of it and it has been a while since I read it. I started and had to abandon Juno Dawson's Her Majesty's Royal Coven as I really disliked her style. Shit pop-culture Maeve Binchy* with witches.
* no disrespect to Binchy, as a voracious teen reader I read everything my Mum was reading, and I liked her novels just fine.
I was scrolling and watching short videos until late at night, so a few weeks ago we put the router on a timer. The internet shuts off at 10pm. It has been great for reading books since then.
K.J. Charles, who writes MM romances I like a lot, keeps a book list at Goodreads that I've started pulling from.
Soeaking of Hugo nominees, or rather speaking of things that should have been nominated but were not: everyone is sleeping on The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez.
The plot summary doesn't tell you much, because most of the book is structure and mood and theme. I'm not even sure what best to compare it to. It's a bit Le Guinian, it has an eerie dreamlike quality. If you've read Sarah Tolmie's excellent The Stone Boatmen, it's a bit like that. It's a bit like Lord Dunsany. Some parts of it have the same feeling of horror and cruelty that you get in Iain Banks's The Algebraist. Some of the feeling of a strange complex world is a bit like that in the first volume of the Ancillary books.
It's really good. It's a classic. It's going to be a fantasy classic when a number of today's big books are forgotten.
10: Oh that does sound tasty! Added to the Want list.
6: During the pandemic I had to go back to a book I loved in third grade. That was kinda like ctrl-alt-del on my reading brain.
Putting a timer on the router would help, although Jammies would be annoyed.
Some ISPs have apps that let you turn access on and off for individual devices.
then I would be annoyed. How come Jammies gets to watch TV?!
I have really fallen out of the habit of reading books (he admits shamefully). When I was on vacation, I poured through The Three-Body Problem and loved it. Went and bought the next two books and six months later have read maybe 40 pages of the second one. I think Pokemon Go and Civ 6 may have broken me.
But part of the problem is that I read dense, dry text all day long for my job and am just kinda burned out on it by quitting time.
10. Loved The Algebraist, not the first Banks people usually mention, looks promising, thanks!
Jonathan Carroll writes Occult-ish (well supernatural, maybe different) novels that I find really absorbing every time I pick one up, it's been a few years since I have
Way back before marriage, I read a lot and it was a significant part of my self identity. I also consciously did not watch a lot of TV - also for self-identity reasons, really. (Being too cheap to pay for cable, etc., also made it easier. I know that we have so many services that we buy but rarely use... but the effort of tracking which service we use consistently, and which to start and stop is more effort to analyze than will pay back the effort to identify. Particularly since it'll come across as a critique, no matter how carefully I couch it.)
Part of the draw of TV is that it's very low effort but counts as together-time, unlike reading which usually doesn't. (Reading in bed does qualify as together time for us - but I think that my wife is similar to Heebie and jms -- random short articles, tictoks, and phone puzzles have replaced reading, even in bed. And if you're just trading a big video game for a small one... well, at least it's calm together.)
I don't even watch TV. I play Civ V. And not with the expansion packs.
I targeted one book/week this year, and am thus far (barely) on target, much to my surprise.
Notable, Ziolkowski, Gilgamesh Among Us, very interesting. Alan Garner, Thursbitch - really remarkable. A whole cosmology built out of one small landscape.
I'm reading The Black Sea and Everyone in my Family Has Killed Someone. But slowly.
17: Jonathan Carroll and Walker Percy are the two authors I quit reading because their work was good, absorbing, but bad for me in ways that are definite but difficult to describe with any precision.
Peter S. Beagle, though, is a national treasure. I'm glad that The Last Unicorn seems to be headed for immortality because it means people will look for his other stuff, too.
I am also stupidly fond of Beagle.
You and so, so, many others.
I've been reading a lot of books that I've enjoyed but my taste in reading material is so erratic that I'm pretty reluctant to ever say anything about them
||
I'm no Minitrue professional, but I find myself questioning the wisdom of having vacationers drive through 300km of bombed out Novorossiya.
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-18-2023
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I've driven through Ohio, so I don't want to judge.
Based on the tenor of this thread I conclude my next novel will only be read by my spouse, but eh, I don't want to write for TV, it seems stressful.
I just finished the third book in M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract trilogy and recommend to fans of weird-ass space opera. In another mode I've really been enjoying Annie Ernaux.
Oh right, the heart emoticon doesn't work in here. Consider it implicit.
My wife edited an anthology and I haven't read it. But we weren't married when she did it.
Maybe Moby's wife can edit that into a joke that works.
21: I'm reading The Black Sea and Everyone in my Family Has Killed Someone. But slowly.
I just finished The Black Sea based on discussions here. My ignorance was vast going in, so learned a lot. I did wish it had better maps and I found it a bit idiosyncratically organized, but certainly do recommend it. The Karaites, the whole long saga of the Pontic (broadly construed) Greeks, the Polish Samaritan thing, the Laz and more.
I usually have an upstairs and a downstairs book going. One read while falling asleep for the night, the other generally while falling asleep for a nap. So slow going on both fronts. As I age shifting more towards non-fiction.
But for novels let me again recommend The Radetzky March* which I discovered via neb. One of those books that I think will be increasingly recognized as a classic despite getting relatively little notice in its day. Also see Stoner .
*I believe I recommended it here not too long ago but not finding it via search. Anyway here's my favorite quote from it. I am a cheery fellow.
He was old and tired, and death was already lurking, but life would not yet let him go. Like a cruel host it held him fast at the table because he had not yet tasted all the bitterness that had been prepared for him.
Sedentaries and their fucking do-gooder peasant shit.
Oh, I am so happy to be among my people here, who not only know from Sarmatians but make jokes about it.
So I've actually been to a Karaim place in Lithuania, and to some of the more far-flung places associated with Pontic Greeks up in some Georgian uplands called Samtskhe-Javakheti. Although I gather that the Greek presence there may finally be ebbing completely. I didn't get over to Laz-land, or to Trebizond, alas.
Thanks for the recommendation at 38! I may pick that up when I finish The Magic Mountain, which is my train book now, because that gives me largely uninterrupted stretches of 30-45 minutes at a time. Sometimes I even make it through more than two Thomas Mann sentences in that period. I read the first half of the book 30 years ago this summer, so clearly it's time to read the second half.
K.J. Charles
Megan! Me toooooooo! Well, one trio of hers especially. I'm not so into the occultish ones. I didn't remember she had a Goodreads list. Will have to check it out.
I've been reading fiction (mostly genre fiction) overwhelmingly these last few years. First because it was comforting during the pandemic, and now because it's a nice escape from medical caregiving. The baseball fan in me really enjoyed KD Casey's recent MM romance series about (mostly) Jewish baseball players.
I read so much technical material for my day job that I haven't read much nonfiction for fun. I have listened to some good nonfiction on audiobook, however. I especially liked* Invisible Women, about all of the massive gender data gaps that exist in public (and private) datasets.
*well, thought was good -- it made me boilingly mad at the injustice of the world, so hard to exactly call that 'liking' something
The baseball fan in me really enjoyed KD Casey's recent MM romance series about (mostly) Jewish baseball players.
I try not to brag, but my grandmother dated Hank Greenberg.
I dunno, I think that's worth it, heebie.
Oh, you were named in honor of him! I should have realized.
Nobody is named "Hank" anymore and it's a loss.
I have a cousin in law named Henk. Does that count?
My younger cousin went by Hank for some years. I think he stopped.
If heebie's grandmother had balls she would be her grandfather in a historical MM romance.
47: Someone I know from elementary school changed his name to Hank. But his birth name was Walden, so I can't say I blame him.
OT but this was slightly surprising: eight per cent of US adults changed racial identity in the last eight years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/19/racial-identity-fluid-politics-republican-party/
The most likely groups to be transracial are people who previously identified as Hispanic, multiracial or other. A majority of self-identified multiracial people changed their racial identity to a single race in the last eight years. (48% stayed multiracial, 26% changed to "white", 26% changed to a single race that wasn't white). Almost three-quarters of "other" changed; 27% stayed "other", 44% went to "white", 18% to "single race" and 11% to "multiracial".
I worked with a Hank (roughly my age) many years ago, but for some reason everybody called him Hanklin most of the time.
Calling him Hankerin was considered inappropriate by HR.
I binge-read fiction (5-6 books a week), and so I'm more concerned with there being lots of books in a series or by a single author than with the book being particularly good. I still have standards, e.g. I'll read some Kindle Universe books, but will also bail quickly if I'm just not feeling it. I was recently on a Jo Nesbø kick--they were fine.
I call my son Henry Hank sometimes, but he really really hates it.
55: Yes, this was also noticed in the Census from 2010 to 2020 - but your more recent article doesn't mention that and maybe should, because the Census saw it happening predominantly in a different direction, Other growing at the expense of White+Hispanic, maybe because Hispanic/Latino people are seeing "white" as less compatible with their ethnicity.
Maybe it has to do with who answers the GSS and remains in contact longitudinally as opposed to Census-level - or maybe it's because 2010-2020 was a different shift from 2012-2016?
At any rate the Census changes might swing back because they're going to make "race/ethnicity" a single question. (They were going to do this during the Trump administration for the 2020 Census, but Trump quashed the proposal.)
I've posted about that issue before - for Texas Hispanics, who are almost never caucasian-looking, the census categories are nonsensical and anecdotally, people will shrug and say, "I put a different answer every time."
It feels completely out-of-touch with 2023 not to have a "brown" race to check as a box. I get that not everyone who is Hispanic is brown, and thus Hispanic should be an ethnicity, but there is a gigantic semi-cohesive group which is not white, and it feels extremely anachronistic to call brown people "other".
Not sure about all the ins and outs of contemporary hispanic identity, but it seems to me roughly speaking that the census categories are designed to detect southern discrimination and worse against African Americans; they are basically incomprehensible to hispanics, who bring a cultural history of separate incoherent categories. Certainly say any chapter of Octavio Paz's thoughtful Labyrinth of Solitude (which covers some of the difficulties of Mexican identity from a colonial past and substantial postcolonial history) when juxtaposed against the categories that Census uses is about like translating Gilgamesh into emoji.
Clicking through the link in 61, the provided potential sample is very weird if you're Jewish. Under "white", you have options like German, Irish, English, Italian, Polish, and French. My family might be from Poland and Russia, but we ain't Polish or Russian. But we're also definitely white.
If they have an all-inclusive category for Hispanic/Latino, and another for Middle Eastern/North African, and they're checkboxes people can check more than one of, for the time being that might cut way down on the number of brown people who have trouble with the forms. Of course as mixed people increase that too will become an issue. (And this is I believe an OMB-level change, so it should trickle down to most official forms eventually.)
5: You and I have similar tastes, Doug. Legends and Lattes, The Kaiju Preservation Society, and Nona the Ninth were three of the last seven novels I read. (I see you didn't actually read Nona, but you being on the fence about it seems close enough to be relevant.) The other four were Hench (superhero deconstruction), Antigodess (YA modern fantasy), The Doors of Eden (high-concept sci-fi with alternate universes and almost every gender expression except the standard one), and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (kind of like Farscape in novel form, I guess? Or Firefly but with more sapient species and less sexism?).
I enjoyed them all but of those seven the one I'd recommend the most is probably The Doors of Eden. I got to the end, wished it was a series, and looked into the author's other work a bit. Haven't got around to them yet but probably will before too much longer.
That's not all the [prose] novels I've read in the past year, and then there's the graphic novels, and I did a lot of reading in early 2022 as well for various reasons. More than I'd expect now that I actually review the list. Yay.
I suppose you're supposed to just write it in. But it definitely steers you towards thinking about nationalities.
the Census saw it happening predominantly in a different direction, Other growing at the expense of White+Hispanic, maybe because Hispanic/Latino people are seeing "white" as less compatible with their ethnicity.
Both could be true, though. The piece I posted said "look, 73% of people who said they were "other" in this survey eight years ago now say they're not." That is not incompatible with the overall number of people who class themselves as "other" growing, because of a lot of people shifting into it. Not to mention that the census (I think?) gives you the chance to say "I'm white and Hispanic" whereas the surveys in the piece I posted only let you pick one.
I was more struck by the shift from "mixed" to "single race", to be honest. "White or Hispanic" seems to have a bit more room for flexibility. Though I suppose they're connected - whether you're mixed race or not depends on how you feel like defining your parents' races, and if you start to think that maybe your mother wasn't white after all, then that might suddenly make you not mixed-race.
66: Thanks! I've added The Doors of Eden to the wish list. I think someone else mentioned it in a way that sounded intriguing, and your suggestion tipped me over to putting it into "buy, soonish."
Hench! Liked that one a lot.
https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/16/hench-by-natalie-zina-walschots/
I've read two of the Wayfarers books, but not Small, Angry Planet. Liked them both, and preferred A Closed and Common Orbit.
Going on what you said above, I think you might really enjoy Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki.
Ah, I was partially reacting to where the article said "And, in most cases, these switchers moved into the "White" category" but rereading, the antecedent was people who were Hispanic, multiracial, or other and then switched.
Do you get lower interest rates on loans if you say you are white? Or does it only matter if the banker's algorithm says you are?
for Texas Hispanics, who are almost never caucasian-looking, the census categories are nonsensical and anecdotally, people will shrug and say, "I put a different answer every time."
There's a similar phenomenon for New Mexico Hispanics, with the added complication that many both present and identify as Caucasian but definitely don't consider themselves to belong to the same group as Anglos. "White or light-skinned Hispanic" is a common descriptor on local news for crime suspects and so forth. Lots of people end up putting "other" on the Census forms.
And obviously there are plenty of ambiguously Hispanic people around. But I think it's mostly due to being from mixed backgrounds.
Isn't this very sensitive to stuff like the order of the answers. It's not usually people "changing identity" so much as giving different answers somewhat randomly.
I've found a new fun way to pass the time at work - reading old novels! So far I've read The Tenant of Wildfel Hall (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/969/969-h/969-h.htm) and I just finished The Way We Live Now (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5231/5231-h/5231-h.htm) I enjoyed them both a lot, although the ending were kind of disappointing. Anybody have any suggestions for my next book? Thanks, in advance!
74: Yes, the questions were asked in almost exactly the same way 2010 and 2020 (2020 had a few more boxes for extra detail, including under "white", but in 2020 it was almost all online so people probably had more time to mull it over, as distinct from filling in a paper form or standing in front of an enumerator.
Oh yes, and "White" was considered self-explanatory in 2010, but in 2020 had after it "for example, German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian, etc.", which may have influenced people.
Ah, yeah 77 you'd expect to have a reasonably big effect.
I have a friend who says he's "Syrian" but I suspect he's really Lebanese by today's rules.
"Sayed Kashua Is Surprised to Discover He's White" https://www.haaretz.com/2014-06-07/ty-article/.premium/finally-im-a-white-man/0000017f-e60f-dc7e-adff-f6afcc910000
Going through the visa forms beforehand, I had been thrown by the "race" rubric. I looked for Arab but could find no such category. There was white, black, Hispanic and Asiatic, but no Arab. I looked on the Internet to find out what we are and discovered that in the United States, people coming from the Middle East or North Africa are considered whites. That really surprised me, because I never considered myself white. I now remember the moment when I checked the "white" box on the forms: I grinned with a leer and knew that I was going to be a racist - and how I was going to be a racist! Especially after 40 years of experience with this.
I think 63 is basically right. The Census approach to race comes out of the specific history of race relations in the eastern US in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and doesn't mesh well with the very different sets of categories and relationships used in other parts of the world.
I'm very late but while I'm not sure I would have chosen those as the points of comparison, I'm reading The Spear Cuts Through Water now (intermixed with Kuang's Babel, which I'm not super enjoying; her writing may just not be for me, as I didn't like either sequel to The Poppy War) and I agree that it's very good. (When I was trying to describe it to someone it felt like a bit to me a LeGuin/Vance mashup in terms of sensibility and weirdly distanced affect but not in prose; the Banks comparison would not remotely have occurred to me, but I absolutely see where you're coming from, Frowner).
(Maybe also a hint of M. John Harrison? I don't know!)
Oh and reading down there's a mention of M. John Harrison, ha. Gentlefolk and scholars, the lot of you. I'm not at a book-a-week pace (hats off to those of you who are), more like three books a month and mostly light reading. I wish I had read more genre stuff that I could recommend unreservedly this year (last year's was the wonderful, rollicking fantasy novel The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman and the dark, dark climate change comedy Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beaumont) but the closest so far is Harlem Shuffle (Colson Whitehead crime novel/character study rather than SF).
75: Rosamund Lehman's "Invitation to the Waltz". (I need to read the uh, whatever the word is for the book that Invitation was a prequel to, The Weather in the Street, about Olivia as an adult.)
I didn't realize Colson Whitehead had written (something like) SF! I just purchased Zone One.
41: I may pick that up when I finish The Magic Mountain,
They do have some themes in common. Chance you will OD on pre WWI Central European angst.
Speaking of Mann, my wife and I both read and enjoyed Colm Tóibín's The Magician a fictionalized account of Mann's life. Can recommend but not unreservedly as I am mixed on the value of the genre--I'm sure I now subconsciously believe some things about Mann which are merely Tóibín's imaging. But of course that can be somewhat true of non-fiction biographies.
I've bounced of Mann so hard, three different times - Magic Mountain, Felix Krull, Holy sinner. I found them vaguely repulsive in a way I didn't understand and couldn't put my finger on.
90: Have you tried Buddenbrooks or Death in Venice? Those are the Mann works I still remember fondly.
Based on bob's recommendation, I read Dr. Faustus a few years ago. There were parts that seemed great to me, but other parts seemed incredibly bad, and as a whole I didn't get it.
91: No.
There were parts that seemed great to me, but other parts seemed incredibly bad, and as a whole I didn't get it.
Much like bob himself.
89: Chance you will OD on pre WWI Central European angst.
I'm also about 60 pages into They Were Counted by Miklos Banffy and considering the sequels, so please have whatever antidote is required for the OD close at hand.
91: Death in Venice is the one my very Catholic professor of German lit insisted had nothing to do with sex. Thirty-plus years years later, it's still a source of amusement for friends from that class.
The book is at least short, in contrast to Magic Mountain or Buddenbrooks. I don't really think of Mann as an essential author, but I knew exactly where I left off with Magic Mountain in 1993 because I left a 100-drachma note to mark my place. So here I am finishing the book.
I read Dr. Faustus a few years ago
That steaming turducken of a book is for diehard Mann fans only, although the devil speaking in Mittelhochdeutsch as the thermometer drops is a great set piece. Conversations with the devil tend to be the high point of any book they're in, honestly. My favorite German-from-Germany novel of the 20th century is still Berlin Alexanderplatz by a pretty comfortable margin. I'd have to think hard about the runner-up. I liked Böll's Billiarden um halb zehn a lot when I read it, but that was ages ago.
jms @ 6, it sounds like something is up. Have you been structuring your leisure time differently recently? I've stopped using any social media at all and don't check in here all that often, and I've read a fair number of books this year, mostly nonfiction. Something is definitely blocking fiction absorption in my head, but it's clearly more pathology than preference.
Anyway, peep, here is an ebook recommendation (not really) from a previous "reading is hard, especially fiction" thread.
Speaking of social media, would anyone like a Bluesky invite.
the wonderful, rollicking fantasy novel The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman
That sounds like a good recommendation. I've put it on hold at the library.
It's like handing out Bud Light in rural Nebraska.
99: Well, I thought it should go to someone more worthy, but if no one else wants it, I would like it.
I'm not sure it counts as a privilege, but if it does, you're worth it. Send code.
Leo Perutz wrote in German, was Austrian until the anschluss when he resettled in Tel Aviv, is much much better than Thomas Mann or IMO than Boll who tries too hard.
97: A personal favorite for a long time was Sansibar, oder der letzte Grund by Alfred Andersch, but that may also be because it was the first one where my language was strong enough that I could just enjoy the reading.
If you feel up to tackling a lot of dialog in Bavarian dialect, I heartily recommend Die Rumplhanni by Lena Christ (no relation, afaik, to Jesus), I wrote more about it here https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/26/die-rumplhanni-by-lena-christ/
Andersch again in Der Vater eines Mörders with Himmler's father as a petty tyrant of a school director. Wolfgang Koeppen is excellent in his trilogy on postwar West Germany with Tauben im Gras and Das Treibhaus and presumably also Der Tod in Rom, but I've only read the first two.
If' I'm completely honest, though, the books in German that have brought me the most joy in the last 10 years are Cornelia Funke's trilogy of Tintenherz, Tintenblut and Tintentod. She pronounced herself completely satisfied with the English translations (and lives, I think, in California), but I find Tintenherz better than Inkheart, and Staubfinger better than Dustfinger.
https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2002/12/19/life-in-plastic
"The average American girl aged between three and 11 owns a staggering ten Barbie dolls, according to Mattel, the American toy giant that manufactures her. An Italian or British girl owns seven; a French or German girl, five"
This figure is wrong. Barbies Claire, who lives in a cave and owns 800,000 Barbies, is an outlier and should be excluded.
99 and 103: How is Bluesky? Is it poised to take over for twitter? I just can't be bothered to sign up for Mastodon?
The problem with Böll is that he got more heavyhanded and self-righteous the more people treated him as the Big I-Am Moral Authority. The early Trümmerliteratur stuff has a lightness of touch and sense of humour that was gone by the early 70s; Katharina Blum, for example, just goes CLUNK on every page. Would you like some didactic sermonizing with your unconvincing Mary Sue and your parade of extremely obvious stereotypes?
111: I don't think it will take over for Twitter, but it might become entrenched in its niche.
110: Okay, I'll post my most inessential opinion ever: it does strike me as a little sad to have a single Barbie doll. They're not cuddly. Dressing them is boring, even if you're 3. They're an odd size vis-a-vis other toys, so while they can join in make-believe games from other universes, it's always awkward. If your friend comes over with their one Barbie, then you can make them interact with each other, but it still seems like an uncomfortable proxy for just interacting one-on-one without toys to mediate. Ten seems like a lot even for two kids to manage (the disfavored ones will stay in the bottom of the crate), but four or five? Reasonable.
Elke never took to them at all (as with most toys). My sister and I had a lot, but not 10 between us. My mom had only one, but something had messed up its hair, so she brought it to a store and furtively swapped out the head for a fresh one. We inherited the doll with the stolen head, which was striking compared to the others: a short haircut, extruded eyelashes, a somehow haughtier expression. I have no idea what happened to it.
114: Yeah, I thought the standard toy-play-mode for girls was having them interact socially. Like, to the point that that's the toy manufacturers' working assumption.
Mattel research shows that most girls aged 6-8 who play with Barbie dolls while alone have more than one doll, have the dolls interact socially in goal-oriented behavior, and narrate the play while maintaining an internal monologue in Werner Herzog's voice.
Maybe that should have been presidential.
Maybe you shouldn't have pardoned Nixon.
Maybe you shouldn't have hired Kissinger.
118: the rest narrate in the voice of Sam Spade.
"She had a figure that would make a bishop kick a hole through a stained-glass window. But then so did I. And everyone else. And the only one of us with a stained-glass window was Archbishop of Canterbury Barbie, and unless you had a bankroll as thick as the Malibu phone directory, she wasn't sharing."
World-Weary 1940s Private Eye Barbie has a one-room office with a pink desk, a pink bottle of whiskey and a pink .38 in the drawer, an unmade pink fold-up bed, and a pink filing cabinet with one bulging drawer labelled "B", a smaller partly-full drawer labelled "K" and a third completely empty drawer labelled "Other".
This is the only accurate way to make a Barbie movie - 90% of the characters are played by Margot Robbie and called "Barbie". Like "Being John Malkovich".
Final report of the commercial starship Nostromo, third officer reporting. The other members of the crew - Exploding Chest Cavity Barbie, Panicky Navigator Barbie, Starship Engineer Barbie, Mechanic Barbie, Homicidal Or Rather Barbicidal Android Barbie, and Starship Captain Barbie - are dead. Cargo and ship destroyed. I should reach the frontier in about six weeks. With a little luck, the network will pick me up. This is Barbie, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.
Karina Longsworth is married to the Knives Out/Glass Onion guy?!!
127: Yep. I think she even incidentally mentioned it on the podcast once - probably around the time he got big with Last Jedi.
The Brick guy, to those of us who liked him before he was famous.