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Notes -
Finally finished Moby-Dick, which I've been meaning to read since I was 15 or 16, and started reading mid-December. The ending was actually pretty cool, but my God did it take a long time to get there. The actual plot is a pretty engaging slice of proto-Lovecraft cosmic horror, but I must confess that I would love to see a condensed version of the novel which cuts out the pages and pages of cetological rambling. I sincerely think it would lose nothing in the process (especially given that many of the factual assertions made in these chapters are now known to be false).
After finally defeating my white whale, I cleansed my palate by reading another story from my Ted Chiang collection. This one was called "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" (great title) and envisions a future in which you can communicate with "paraselves" - versions of yourself in a parallel universe in which a quantum coin flip landed heads rather than tails. Cracking story - not just thought-provoking in a speculative sense, but also engaging at the level of plot and character. The concept of multiple slightly different versions of the same person interacting with one another echoed some of the points in Age of Em.
My girlfriend and I play this game where we go into a bookshop together and each buys the other a book that they think the other would enjoy. Sort of as a joke, she bought me this Japanese YA novella called Idol, Burning. I'm about fifty pages in and I'm not exactly sure where it's going yet, it's about this teenage girl who's an obsessive stan of a J-pop idol (her "oshi"). UPDATE: didn't like it, didn't do anything for me.
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