Books from 2024!
Stats
i read 160 books and i will not apologize for this even if no one wants me to
Favs (in no order)
Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo
I already knew I loved it, but haven’t read it in years. Got a copy with birthday money. There’s a certain wholehearted embrace of the movie of it, but not in contrast with the historicity of it. in short: what if da vinci code was actually good
Hirohiko Araki - Jojo’s - Steel Ball Run
Hirohiko Araki understands america. The president, under the thumb of business, is searching out the corpse of Jesus. I believe that this actually occurred
Kenzaburō Ōe - A Personal Matter
My second Oe, and my first of his earlier, crasser stuff. It’s so good, like a plainer Faulkner! I’m current reading Silent Cry now, which ofc colors how i look at this one, but still: the cruelty, the hopelessness, the selfishness. Oe knows how to dig a massive hole
Alison Bechdel - Fun Home
Borrowed from a friend, read it in two days, immediately bought a copy. look, there’s a lot to say about it, but let’s be honest: proust is a major organizing force in the book. i have to love it if only for that
Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai
Not my first DeWitt (see below), but DAMN is it a good one. i almost want to call it a full fledged defense of never being dumb, of intelligence not as some bourgeois self-inflation tactic or calvinist method to enter into the chosen, safe forever, but damn, who cares, the book’s just nice. it gets perhaps my highest compliment ever: the book feel like it simply is
Heinrich von Kleist - Michael Kohlhaas
one hundred and something years ago, some little dude took in a big breath and then, before he’d pushed it out, he’d written the funniest fucking maniacal revenge story ever. i get why kafka called him brother. getting some mad at someone over nothing you destroy your own life and the lives of those around you is simply the essence of 2024
Jack Womack - Random Acts of Senseless Violence
one of my favorite books ever. equal parts parody and tragedy. maybe i love it cause i was raised conservative. what if the fears of the suburb types were right? what if the america really was a terror? people will still have to live
Other Notable Books
Genzaburo Yoshino - How Do You Live
Read because the Ghibli movie, which is really different. The movie is a fantasy about how one lives after fascism, the book seems to be about how to live within fascism, or at least a nationalist proto-fascism. Very relevant to the present, huh :(
Helen DeWitt - The English Understand Wool
it’s my first DeWitt, and still the funniest book i’ve read in ages. i read it in one sitting at a fast-food restaurant waiting for food (this isn’t a brag, it took FOREVER), then i bought all the rest of her books
Earthsea Books
I had sampled these before without much interest (not the fantasy type). I liked them more than expected, tbh, mostly The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu, the slow ones I guess. Still not a huge fan, but I’m glad to have like… seen em.
Franz Kafka - Amerika
Every Kafka book is in and of itself notable
Haruki Murakami - The City and Its Uncertain Walls
First full-length japanese novel I’ve ever read
Eisenhower, or 1958's Place in Postwar History, by Haruki Murakami
my translation of the first story of 夢で会いましょう [Meet Me in a Dream] by Haruki Murakami and Shigesato Itoi, not guaranteed to be accurate. see the intro post to read more!
PS: probably worth it to use your browsers reader mode. this site is hella under construction now
September 26, 1958, evening: it grows dark on the Brooklyn Bridge. Sonny Rollins is alone, practicing his scales on a tenor saxophone.
“Hey old man,” a child passing by asks him. “Whatcha up to?”
“Fightin the atomic beast,” Rollins says.
“I bet,” the child answers. “That’s a lie.”
…
At that very moment, President Eisenhower leads troops through the deserts of New Mexico, to struggle life and death against a repulsive and real atomic beast, which has four large, scissor-like pincers.
“Mr. President, if it keeps like this, the world will be destroyed,” the Secretary of the United Nation announces to the war room, exhaustion audible in his voice. “Our weapons cannot match it.”
“Lord, forgive us,” the president growls. “We’ve given birth to that which can’t be born.”
Snip snip snip snip snip: the beast advances. It crushes tanks and soldiers in its way.
…
“Hey, you got my donuts?” my nine-year-old self asks ask my mother. Her back is to me, in the kitchen, so I raise my voice.
How to match til the end of an input string with a janet peg
aka a parsing expression grammar, aka the only reason i wanna use janet:
to match all the rest of the content in a string, use this:
(any 1)unlike most else i seen in PEGs, this is hella unclear. it literally means, more or less, match any amount of single characters, but god does that not help. instead, i think of it like “match anyone”: get anyone left.
Janet PEGs don't accept unicode??
nope! not easily, at least. you can match unicode characters, but NOTHING is
made easy for you, the way a regex /u flag will. that said, its still possible
with use of (to)
look, for example, at a truncated version of a PEG i’m writing to pull info from a french/english dictionary:
(def dict-result-peg
~{
# ... catch some stuff
:pronunciation (* "/" (to "/") "/")
# ... and so on
})
i wanna catch all the character in the words IPA prnounciation, which luckily
enough are surrounded by /s. since janets PEGs don’t allow for a character
class range of unicode prononciation strings, i instead use a (to "/") to
grab all the text between delimiters. it’s imprecise, but in this instance
perfect, as i know ill never get a / in the prnonciation guide
Kojima San. That move woke...
Kojima San. That move woke…