This Year 365 songs: January 7th

 Today's song is "Pure Milk" (I see what you did there, John)

Watch on YouTube

This is a weird song. I'm not sure I can explain what makes it weird, after all, if you listened to the last six songs, its not like any of those are "normal" songs.  But even by that metric: this song is weird. John is singing in a weird way, the lyrics have this conspiratorial tone (you, the listener are being invited to participate in some crime with the narrator). I definitely like this one among the most of the ones I've encountered so far through the book (second place probably goes to Going to Alaska). 

The annotations are mostly about Darnielle liking this song, and his own relationship to not knowing the narrative details that are unstated in the song, and his own lingering curiosity about the answers.  I guess The Author is Dead.

Ship of Fools (Richard Paul Russo)

On the app I am using to track my reading I gave this book 4 stars but I think it is more like 5 stars for the concept, 2 stars for the ending, and somewhere between for lots of the other elements.

A generation ship has been traveling for so long it has lost track of its mission and its history. It had a giant cathedral at the center of the ship, such that the ship must have been designed around this enormous cathedral, but there was some uprising on the ship hundreds of years ago and lots of history and navigation data was lost so it’s unclear what the ship is supposed to be doing.

The ship stops at a planet that is emitting some sort of radio signal, and they check for signs of life. It is the remains of a colony. They find buildings, bones, but no survivors. In one building, they find a basement area chock full of what appear to be ritually massacred corpses. They decide they should leave. However, they leave in the direction of a giant mysterious derelict alien spacecraft! Which they then explore! And people start to die in accidents, or go mad. 

“Cosmic Horror Canticle for Leibowitz” is, it turns out, something I will jump at. I read this in a day. I don’t think it stuck the landing, but I can point to it and say “I will gladly read more books that are doing this!” It was atmospheric and tense and more books should have people on generation ships making awful decisions about continuing to explore extremely dangerous alien spacecrafts!

If you know of more books in or adjacent to this genre: do not hesitate to recommend them to me!