Wednesday Morning Mitchum

Hello there. Bob has something he would like to say to you.

 G  O  O  D   M  O  R  N  I  N  G  .

the best part of waking up is Mitchum in your face

Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can.

~ Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

Doing my duty by catching up on reading my dead tree books. I've several nonfiction books, three short story collections, and three novels going at the same time. I'm out of bookmarks and will have to resort to dollar bills or receipts soon, so I will attempt to finish some and will probably not be around when this posts. I did finish Tremblay's Horror Movie recently. Spouse bought it for me in June. The prose is clunkier than usual, and he's often pretty clunky. Which isn't to say it's terrible, but I would not recommend it either. 

I'm wrapping up Mickey 7. Easily the breeziest and most likable novel I've read this year. Light sci-fi with hard sci-fi trappings. If you can get through terms like "field generator," "sub-relativistic speed," and "plasma blast," you'll be fine. Also a mention of Theseus's Paradox, which is patiently explained by Mickey 1's instructor, Jemma, who seems keen on teaching philosophy as it pertains to cloning. Yes, it's about clones, hence the 7. Mickey the narrator is the seventh incarnation. An expendable left for dead on a mission, Micky 8 has already been instantiated. Mickey 7 survives and discovers 8 in his bunk. On a hostile planet with limited resources, he's now a huge liability. 7 and 8 have to conspire to survive, plus 7 has a girlfriend who doesn't know he's still alive. Complications. Hijinks ahoy. About 300 pp that just fly by in a few hours, unless you listen to the audio. I haven't read anything else by Edward Ashton, but the tone and brisk pace made me think of The Martian by Andy Weir or Sea of Rust and Day Zero by C. Robert Cargill. Violent skirmishes with alien hostiles reminded me of Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead too, if you remember those fondly. I'm reading it because Bong Joon-ho adapted it into Mickey 17, and the release date is early next year. That's right. He added an extra ten iterations. Probably for the grisly laughs.

Will start this shortly after finishing Mickey 7:

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.

Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.

Sounds hilarious and depressing, like so many Irish works I've liked.

So how are you all, actively or passively, fighting tyranny today?

ETA – as if on cue, I received a package from bookshop.org with two new books shortly after typing the OT (~ 3pm on 10/8). Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud and Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker. They're just novellas though, combined they only amount to about 230 pp.