{"id":643,"date":"2022-05-31T17:35:42","date_gmt":"2022-05-31T23:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/?p=643"},"modified":"2023-04-02T14:32:45","modified_gmt":"2023-04-02T20:32:45","slug":"may-2022-reading-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/may-2022-reading-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"May 2022 Reading &#038; Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-progress-bars-progress-bar-block\"><div class=\"eb-parent-wrapper eb-parent-eb-progressbar-jbtqrb4 \"><div class=\"eb-progressbar-wrapper eb-progressbar-jbtqrb4\"><div class=\"eb-progressbar-line-container left\"><div class=\"eb-progressbar-title\">15\/24 Books Read<\/div><div class=\"eb-progressbar eb-progressbar-line eb-progressbar-line-stripe\" data-layout=\"line\" data-count=\"62\" data-duration=\"1500\"><span class=\"eb-progressbar-count-wrap\"><span class=\"eb-progressbar-count\">62<\/span><span class=\"postfix\">%<\/span><\/span><span class=\"eb-progressbar-line-fill\"><\/span><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Southern Reach III &amp; I: Acceptance &amp; Annihilation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<article class=\"wp-block-group has-background\" style=\"background-color:#dcf0e7\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<aside class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size:25px\">\u2605<span style=\"font-size:25px\">\u2605<\/span>\u2605<\/span><br><em><span style=\"font-size:15px\">\u201cThe only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse.\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-default\"\/>\n<\/div><\/aside>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"317\" height=\"475\" src=\"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/R3wuy8T4YZ-wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/image-3.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-645\" srcset=\"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/R3wuy8T4YZ-wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/image-3.jpeg 317w, https:\/\/zelda.pw\/R3wuy8T4YZ-wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/image-3-200x300.jpeg 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 317px) 100vw, 317px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-size:15px\">Of course I broke one of my core rules&#8211;which is never read anything from the same author twice in a row. It&#8217;s always good to have a little buffer between them. And I didn&#8217;t just follow up <em>Authority<\/em> with the third part, but I went back and read the first book (which turned out to be quite a short read, I knocked it out in a lazy afternoon.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-size:15px\">VanderMeer wraps up the trilogy by throwing us a multi-perspective book. Where <em>Annihilation<\/em> is first person singular, framed as a journal left by the Biologist before she ventured after her husband, and <em>Authority<\/em> is third person, we have four to contend with here: Saul, Ghost bird, and Control (all third person singular), and the Psychologist (second person singular.) Not saying that he isn&#8217;t allowed to do this, it just made the book feel cramped, considering the pacing previously has been glacial, and the plot has minimal as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-size:15px\">I would love to say that <em>Acceptance <\/em>answers questions. It doesn&#8217;t, really. I could spend the entire post <strong>trying<\/strong> to comb over the questions  they raise but that&#8217;d make one heckin&#8217; long post. There&#8217;s a line in one of the books, Control&#8217;s mother telling him that he peels back layers even when there aren&#8217;t any layers left. And this is the summation of Area X: A depiction of something so vast, so beyond comprehension, that it&#8217;s a bottomless pit of conjecture and theories. Sure, a human mind created this story, and the underlying logic of Area X is obfuscated by the razzle-and-dazzle of a vagueness to the point of specificity. It&#8217;s like a CGI monster meant to appear as confoundingly inhuman as possible, but if it starts with a guy in a motion capture suit.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignleft size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"317\" height=\"475\" src=\"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/R3wuy8T4YZ-wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/image-2.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-644\" srcset=\"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/R3wuy8T4YZ-wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/image-2.jpeg 317w, https:\/\/zelda.pw\/R3wuy8T4YZ-wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/image-2-200x300.jpeg 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 317px) 100vw, 317px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-size:15px\">I preferred Saul&#8217;s stories more than anyone else&#8217;s in the book, except for maybe <em>Annihilation<\/em>&#8216;s Biologist, whose last journal is detailed, and we see how her search for her husband went (bittersweetly, not to spoil it too much.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-size:15px\">I&#8217;d rather have had an entire book dedicated to that time instead of just glimpses, since we&#8217;re told there was a Proto-Area X and a separate event that brought the border up, but what we&#8217;re left with is as stated above, vague. And while I appreciate that the book sets out to establish a beginning and an end for Area X, it never quite felt like a place where those things are applicable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-size:15px\">Revisiting <em>Annihilation <\/em>reveals more of its seams. With the mysteries contextualized, with the boundaries and effects and the theories already laid out, it&#8217;s easier to let the beauty of that desolation colonize you. There&#8217;s an obvious conversation about ecology &amp; preservation, about civilization&#8217;s impact on it that I don&#8217;t think I need to go into, do I? <\/p>\n<\/div><\/article>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Special Topics in Calamity Physics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<article class=\"wp-block-group has-background\" style=\"background-color:#fdfedf\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<aside class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size:25px\">\u2605\u2605<span style=\"font-size:25px\">\u2605<\/span><\/span><br><em><span style=\"font-size:15px\">There&#8217;s a quizz at the end???<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-default\"\/>\n<\/div><\/aside>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"313\" height=\"475\" src=\"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/R3wuy8T4YZ-wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/image-4.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-647\" srcset=\"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/R3wuy8T4YZ-wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/image-4.jpeg 313w, https:\/\/zelda.pw\/R3wuy8T4YZ-wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/image-4-198x300.jpeg 198w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 313px) 100vw, 313px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-size:15px\">That shouldn&#8217;t surprise me, to be honest. A book that feels compelled to cite every literary reference, every pop culture nod, structured like an English syllabus, should have a quiz at the end. And it did. It&#8217;s the closest thing to an epilogue that we&#8217;ll get out of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-size:15px\">Marisha presents us with a coming of age story, framed around a murder mystery that doesn&#8217;t start until the end of Act I (after all, you can&#8217;t just start a novel with &#8220;Me and my high school friends drink and smoke with a teacher, but it&#8217;s not weird or anything, and she was hosting a masquerade party in her backyard that we were explicitly not invited to, but we crashed it anyway and anyway there&#8217;s a corpse in the pool and I&#8217;m going to make cited pop culture &amp; literary references about it now.&#8221;) One that with all its strange flaws, beautiful descriptions, and references ranging from shallow to deep, it comes out satisfying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"font-size:15px\">It is a slog to get through, running a glacial pace. By the time I reached the final pages, there was a theory Blue was going with to explain so much of everything. There was evidence for what felt like a corkboard and yarn, tinfoil hat style conspiracy in the background, and I&#8217;d be lying to say if it wasn&#8217;t compelling. And yet, I felt a tug of doubt, that Blue is in her own ways unreliable. Clever, but grasping at straws. Something about a murder mystery ending with a doubt of the version of events is a choice, but here, it works.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Read Acceptance, reread Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer, and Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,4],"tags":[40,41,59,58,57],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reading","category-reviews","tag-books","tag-kinda-reviews","tag-murder-mystery","tag-science-fiction","tag-southern-reach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":810,"href":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions\/810"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zelda.pw\/VapidAether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}