2021 books

The World of Edena, Moebius

A good way to begin the year. I think about it daily.

10:04, Ben Lerner

Immaculate. A summer shower of insight preceding the deluge we are doomed to endure. Imagine New York City, Marfa Texas, and Occupy Wall Street as a series of miniature dioramas in the Natural History Museum. Lerner is a tour guide of this teetering world, prophesying of the world to come -- "Everything will be as it is now, only a little different." I cried when I read the final line.

Philosophy of Nature, Hegel

I've been reading this since 2018. I finished it so that I could begin it again back at the beginning. I cannot now find one of the passages that initially struck me, so instead of quoting, I'll paraphrase like this: We often think of life as an accident of physical bodies bumping into each other in the vast emptiness of space after uncountable aeons of time. But the fact of the matter is that there is life, and there is consciousness, and these are made possible by the physical processes that we hypothesize precede them. Why not instead conclude that because we have life, because we have consciousness, it is therefore a motivating desire of these physical processes to arrange themselves in such a way so as to make an opening, as it were, for the generation of life within the vast emptiness of time and fulness of space?

Nova, Samuel Delany

Stellar. I read it in two days.

The Incal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius

The Star Pit, Samuel Delany

Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler