The Conspiracy Against The Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

-vs-

Night by Elie Wiesel

Project Hail Mary

Thanks, I edited.

This KU urban fantasy book about a meth smoking wizard from the south that lived in a storage garage. If you’re going to write about that kind of addict you need to know how drugs and addiction work. It was painfully obvious the author knew nothing first hand, because he played it all for laughs and it just came off as punching down. If you’ve ever been around tweakers, you know there’s nothing funny about them, at all.

Rand came to the USA as a refugee from Russia, where her father’s business was seized by the communists and she watched it all as a little girl. It is little wonder she had such a fixation on paternalistic men and worshipped capitalism.

I’m in my 40s. I read more nonfiction than fiction. I read fiction almost exclusively until around 2012, including lots of classics and modern literary fiction.

I think written fiction today has limited ability to enlighten; it’s all target-written for one market or another (either a genre market or if litfic, for MFA students and professors) and is as fragmented and insular as the rest of our society. I already know the third world sucks and that there’s some way people can survive poverty and terrible ordeals without breaking and that people call it “the human spirit”.

When I want an entertaining novel I read something in a genre and don’t take it too seriously.

The writer Abercrombie reminds me of the most is Elmore Leonard. He writes fantasy with the same sharp eye for criminal behavior and ethics and the plots that result from them. That’s fairly novel in fantasy.

It’s about the conflict between the idea of liberty and the reality of it. The takeaway is “authoritarian institutions see anti-authoritarians as their mortal enemies and make special effort to crush them.”

Chief Bromden gets well and breaks free because he keeps his mouth shut and stays out of trouble.

There really are people like Amy out there, and Gone Girl is realistic in its depiction of them.

This is it OP, nothing more complicated than this

Do something besides reading, something real-world like a craft or hobby. Most entertainment is on screens and that makes it even less real to our minds.