The Last Books in 2024
Jan. 1st, 2025 06:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. LeGuin – This is such a contrast after reading Card. Like, they both have a bad case of Worldbuilder’s Disease, but LeGuin addresses it by writing travelogues and giving her central characters rich inner lives deeply influenced by those worlds. Also, LeGuin writes about casually bisexual free-love societies where people occasionally also make deeply personal bonds; and Card writes about people who change their personalities completely upon achieving heterosexual marriage and then have sex only because they want lots of babies. Anyway, this book is about a compare-and-contrast between the semi-idealized sci-fi versions of capitalism and communism, and is extremely aware of human nature as it does so. When people sit around talking in LeGuin’s work, I feel like I’m learning about them and the world they inhabit—hell, this opens with a mess of language-barrier culture-clash and it really works. And LeGuin has no illusions about utopia; at the end of the day, every society is made up of people, and like unhappy families, they’re all differently unhappy.
Dear Cthulhu Vol. 5: Cthulhu Happens by Patrick Thomas - Years ago, I read the first four volumes of the “Dear Cthulhu” series, which imagines the horror from R'lyeh as a classic newspaper agony aunt, dispensing advice to the nuts who write in. After the first few volumes, the gimmick got a little stale, so the writers got increasingly nutty and Cthulhu’s advice became shockingly sensible in comparison. This volume includes sex robots, ostrich pimping, infidelity like whoa, and all the stalking you could want. It’s amusing, though I probably want to wait a little before I read volume 6.
Dear Cthulhu Vol. 6: Cthulhu Explains It All by Patrick Thomas – Or maybe not wait, because these entries are a decent substitute for scrolling on my phone. More decent advice to really goofy questions, including several recurring and interconnected writers.
Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson – This is a pop science book by the guy who did PHD Comics. It’s entertaining, though a few of the chapters get a bit repetitive. His jokes were always a little weaker (and more repetitive) than the XKCD guy’s, but his art is significantly better, and the little snippet comics are very cute. Basically, if you have questions about the nature of space, mass, and particles and how our knowledge of them might have advanced since you were reading pop-sci books in the 90s, this is a decent one.
Super Mario Bros. 3 by Alyse Knorr – Another from the Boss Fight Books bundle that I occasionally return to, and another with the standard formula of vignettes from the author’s life that involve playing the game interspersed with history and details about the game itself. SMB3 was a connection to her father, a common theme to her relationships with friends, a framework for seeing the world as a queer person; or in other words, a central point of fixation in her childhood. And while she gushes about the quality of the game, she’s also correct that it’s a seminal platformer that defined everything that came after it (and certainly in the running for the best game on the NES). There’s an impressive nostalgic joy that this captures that makes me want to pull up SMB3 myself.
Fifty Shames of Earl Grey by Fanny Merkin - A skewering of the worst popular representation of BDSM of our time; this is a goofy parody but a witty one, clearly aware not only of the original book (and Twilight, which it was originally fanfiction of) but also of the common tropes of terrible erotic fanfiction. It’s absurd and overdone and exactly what it needed to be. “I like my tea like I like my men…named Earl Grey!”
Dear Cthulhu Vol. 5: Cthulhu Happens by Patrick Thomas - Years ago, I read the first four volumes of the “Dear Cthulhu” series, which imagines the horror from R'lyeh as a classic newspaper agony aunt, dispensing advice to the nuts who write in. After the first few volumes, the gimmick got a little stale, so the writers got increasingly nutty and Cthulhu’s advice became shockingly sensible in comparison. This volume includes sex robots, ostrich pimping, infidelity like whoa, and all the stalking you could want. It’s amusing, though I probably want to wait a little before I read volume 6.
Dear Cthulhu Vol. 6: Cthulhu Explains It All by Patrick Thomas – Or maybe not wait, because these entries are a decent substitute for scrolling on my phone. More decent advice to really goofy questions, including several recurring and interconnected writers.
Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson – This is a pop science book by the guy who did PHD Comics. It’s entertaining, though a few of the chapters get a bit repetitive. His jokes were always a little weaker (and more repetitive) than the XKCD guy’s, but his art is significantly better, and the little snippet comics are very cute. Basically, if you have questions about the nature of space, mass, and particles and how our knowledge of them might have advanced since you were reading pop-sci books in the 90s, this is a decent one.
Super Mario Bros. 3 by Alyse Knorr – Another from the Boss Fight Books bundle that I occasionally return to, and another with the standard formula of vignettes from the author’s life that involve playing the game interspersed with history and details about the game itself. SMB3 was a connection to her father, a common theme to her relationships with friends, a framework for seeing the world as a queer person; or in other words, a central point of fixation in her childhood. And while she gushes about the quality of the game, she’s also correct that it’s a seminal platformer that defined everything that came after it (and certainly in the running for the best game on the NES). There’s an impressive nostalgic joy that this captures that makes me want to pull up SMB3 myself.
Fifty Shames of Earl Grey by Fanny Merkin - A skewering of the worst popular representation of BDSM of our time; this is a goofy parody but a witty one, clearly aware not only of the original book (and Twilight, which it was originally fanfiction of) but also of the common tropes of terrible erotic fanfiction. It’s absurd and overdone and exactly what it needed to be. “I like my tea like I like my men…named Earl Grey!”
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Date: 2025-01-02 12:18 am (UTC)