Maybe I have to stop writing the same opening over and over again, ‘it was a slow month for me’, and accept that this is my pace of reading for a while. I feel like I’m having some kind of slow burn mental health event (my life lol) so anyway here we are.
For Better Book Club we read JURASSIC PARK, because of this conversation in our groupchat:
(Yes her real name is ‘Pussy Galore’.)
NB. If anyone is reading this using a screen reader, I apologise for the lack of alt-text. Every time I try to add it, for any image, it breaks the image.
I have already read JP a few times, but not for a few years. I remember reading it when I was a kid and the movie came out, because if you could only handle reading the kid’s novelisation of the movie you were basically a loser - for us you were a loser if you weren’t enough of a nerd? Anyway I lied to my friend and said that I had read it, and then he asked me all these questions to ‘test me’ if I had really read it or not and somehow I fluked and got them all right (I think they were all things that happened also in the movie?), but shortly after that I read the book anyway because it felt weird lying about something like that. When all your friends are a year older than you at school, idk I guess it makes a difference. I still remember the last day of Std 3 when he was like ‘well, I’m off to Intermediate School now and I don’t really want to stay friends with a kid who’s still in primary, so. BYE!’ And that was how I ended up with no friends in my final year of primary!
A battered film tie-in is the only edition worth having imo. I paid way too much for this copy.
I read it again when I was living in Adelaide so 6-7 years ago and it still held up. And now it held up all over again in 2024! It’s such a good read. I would highly recommend it to EVERYONE. I got laughed at in my writer’s group in Adelaide for suggesting that it was a good book(???). And that was how I ended up with no friends in my writer’s group! I kid.
It’s very 80s/90s and filled with fun little graphics on the page like this:
I guess people didn’t know what computer screens looked like back then. If you read it with your ears as Lily did, you didn’t get any of this cool content. I did wonder what the narrator just reading a full page of GACATACTACATCAGGAGATCCAAT would sound like. I guess I’ll never know.
Each chapter is like maximum 4 pages long and it’s like ‘here’s an exact description of the things that are happening and who’s saying what and what’s being said.’ I don’t want to say that it’s devoid of style but it kind of is? And I don’t mean that in a bad way! It’s just good solid writing. There are like 100 chapters and every single one of them has a cool name. As Lily put it so well in our book club meeting: ‘they just don’t write books like this any more’.
Also, Ian Malcom is way cooler than I remember him being. He’s such a good voice/conscience of the author here casually dropping bombs like this all through the novel:
‘My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn’t have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines… . It was a whole different world. But to the world, a hundred year is nothing. A million years is nothing. The planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.’
Hopefully he is right, whether he is talking about dinosaurs or climate change or war. That we cannot destroy the world, we can only destroy ourselves.
I also read the BOOKS OF MAGIC Omnibus Vol. 1, a comic omnibus edition of one of my favourite comics from when I was a kid. It’s 1502 pages long so maybe you can forgive me my low reading count for this month. It’s like, not the best thing in the whole world BUT DC never bound the last 25 (of 75) issues of the main series in trade format so I have never finished it and don’t know how it ends. There’s so much additional material I think I was 600-700 pages in before I was at the start of the actual series.
If you can believe it, BOOKS OF MAGIC was written in the mid-90s it’s about a young boy from England who has glasses and a pet owl and finds out he’s destined to be the greatest magician of all time. SOUND FAMILIAR? Weirdly he is also a TERF! Just kidding. He actually spends some time with a magician who inhabits both male and female bodies and is very cool with it AS HE SHOULD BE.
Neil Gaiman is so good at getting this stuff right.
I’m still waiting for 1488 pages of vol. 2 and 1200 pages of vol. 3 to arrive so see you on the other side I guess.
ONLINE I read this thing in the New Yorker (warning - long) about what 14 years of Tories skull fucking Britain to death while overseeing an enormous upwards transfer of wealth has done for the country. SAVED YOU A CLICK: literally nothing good.
Alan Sepinwall wrote a great piece for Rolling Stone for the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos. I never watched it when it was on TV because I thought it was EXTREMELY STUPID that the ‘r’ in Sopranos was a pistol on its end. I still think it’s stupid. The logo, I mean. I have since come around about the show.
See???
We all hate Justin Timberlake after reading about him in Britney Spears’ not really that great memoir so here’s some schadenfreude for you, a terrible review of his album in Pitchfork.
Okay that’s all off to lie on the floor with my Roomba on so every time he bumps into me I can pretend it’s a kiss.