This Year 365 songs: February 3rd

 Today we are listening to Pure Heat

Watch on YouTube

Today is another day where I don't have much to say. The annotations are about Darnielle's progress with vocal melodies.

I have been thinking about how to handle travel for this project, and I think for times when I travel, I will probably mostly do a batch post on my return from travel.  Better than trying to bring the large hardcover with me everywhere, or stressing about posting these when I am elsewhere.

Reading Updates

 I've been tracking my reading this year using Hardcover.app, so I can easily pull up my January reading history.

I read 11 books in January:

1. Piranesi (Susanna Clarke) (reread) post
2. The Loop (Jeremy Robert Johnson) post
3. Ship of Fools (Richard Paul Russo) post
4. Far From The Light of Heaven (Tade Thompson) post
5. Pontypool (Tony Burgess)
6. The Last Astronaut (David Wellington) post
7. The Keeper (Sarah Langan)
8. Mysterium (Robert Charles Wilson) post
9. The Deep Sky (Yume Kitasei)
10. As The Earth Dreams (edited by Terese Mason Pierre)
11. The Surviving Sky (Kritika H. Rao)

I also read (at the start of February) Jennette McCurdy's "I'm Glad My Mom Died", which was a very difficult read but a good memoir.

Not sure what exact combination of factors has increased my reading pace the way it's upticked since December. I know part of it is starting to use Libby more, which means I triage books quickly as "actually going to grab my attention right now" or "tag it to re-borrow some other time" or "not for me", and then I have the time pressure to read it before the library needs it back.  The bolded entries above are library borrows via libby, so that is for sure part of it.  But I also think the act of using a tracking app is making me read more than I would otherwise (which is not a bad thing).

Thoughts on some of books I read which didn't get their own posts:

Pontypool: I am always want to read stories about information hazard/memetic spread, but I am also often disappointed by them.  Two that I do like a lot in this heading are Cordyceps Too Clever and There is No Antimemetics Divisiion (I have only read the original version of this latter, not the revised version linked here). 

The Keeper: The entirety of my review of this book when I finished it was that it made me feel gross.  I don't mind reading things that are unsettling or provoke that kind of feeling, provided they are doing something interesting with it.  It was Langan's first novel, so I may try another of hers, since the prose was nicely done and the premise wasn't bad, it was mostly issues (in my opinion) with structure and execution.

The Deep Sky: This is a sort of generation ship mystery, but I don't think the mystery part was executed as well as it could have been. I'm not a mystery maven so I don't actually know whether this is just me not liking mysteries or whether it is doing a bad job as a mystery, but I did like a lot of characterization and world-building.  There were some elements that didn't get the space to breathe that would have been ideal, and as with many other things I've read that intersperse timelines (in the sense of chapters alternating between the present and the past), I don't think the story was well served by that non-linearity.  It mostly felt like characters in the present-set chapters were talking around things because the information was being saved for a reveal in an upcoming past-set/flashback chapter.  

The Surviving Sky: I was on the verge of abandoning this book early on, and never entirely got away from that mood, even when I realized I would be reading the whole thing.  I don't know when made up fantasy/sci-fi jargon will rub me the wrong way, and when it won't, but I was 100% tired of reading the word "traject" by the time I was midway through this one.  I also think it holds back information from the reader in order to make things a dramatic reveal, but this again means characters awkwardly talking around information they have, so that the audience isn't let in on the Architect's secrets too early. This is especially a shame because revealing some of those in the first fifth of the book would easily have gotten me to be somewhat less harsh of a judge of one of the two main characters. I think I still wouldn't like him very much, but I would have been a lot more sympathetic to him if I'd spent most of the book knowing what his internal conflict was.

As The Earth Dreams: There were a couple of stories in here that I liked, but as far as short story anthologies go, it was for sure not my favorite.  If I ever get around to finishing my book club retrospective posts, I'll maybe say a bit more.

Seven Taoist Masters: A Folk Novel of China (in progress)

One book I’ve been slowly reading is “Seven Taoist Masters: A Folk Novel of China”.

Kate got it for me a couple holidays ago as a gift, knowing my interest in Taoism.

I am 8 chapters in (out of 28) and it is sort of a fascinating book in that, if this hadn’t been presented as “a novel about these seven people achieving self-mastery by Taoist sages”, it would 1000% read, so far, like a story about a charlatan establishing a cult.

The main master, and instructor of the other seven, Wang Ch’ung Yang, commences his journey to enlightenment because he had a vision at/of a nearby mountain. In order to cultivate himself he deceives his spouse and family and pretends to be ill so that he can have solitude. He then goes out in search of students (abandoning his family), and encounters a couple, Ma Yü and Sun Yüan-Chen, who are worthy of being his disciples. But only if they sign over all their wealth and family property to him.

It is one thing to have a spiritual leader say “you need to divest yourself of material possessions to pursue this course”; it is another thing to have them say “actually you need to formally sign all your wealth and property over to me, so I can use it to build a spiritual retreat/school, and to require them to formally and legally arrange the transfer rather than, as they initially offer, letting him use the funds without transferring them.

The couple then creates an elaborate lie to get the transfer done with the approval of the couple’s other relatives, claiming the transfer is temporary and related to the husband’s ill health. Immediately upon getting the transfer done, the Master then creates some charitable activity to create the impression that he is just a custodian of the couple’s wealth, and then the couple decide that instead of husband and wife, they will be brother and sister in the Tao.

If you’ve watched literally any documentaries about cults and how they operate, it is impossible not to parse virtually every part of this as red flags!

Anyway, I am curious to see where the narrative goes but it doesn’t seem like a manual for cultivating one’s virtues, on the face of it.