2025-11-30 Journal Entry

Another Day, Another Entry. I’ve spent all day reading. It’s been nice, I have to say. The main downside has been my reading location, which is just the inside of the hostel. The seating area is on the second floor only illuminated by string lights and the slightest window, which means my circadian rhythm is surely fucked. I’ll need to sleep soon – it’s already 7pm – and I’m afraid I’ll have some trouble. But perhaps not, maybe it’ll be fine. It’s dark now, at least, and reading all day has made me quite tired.

I made it through a sizable chunk of Joel Brinkley’s Cambodia’s Curse, which is good if excessively negative (though perhaps deservedly so, given the country’s current state). I’m thinking of writing a bit of a review on it, though this one’s perhaps a bit finicky given that I’m certainly no expert on the place. But I think some AI-based fact-checking and assistance can help me come to grips with it. My sense is that my review won’t so much be a counterargument so much as a “space-opening,” giving more room to some of the fairly hard-line arguments that Brinkley makes, as well as trying to open up his “curse” moniker a bit more. Just because a country has had a hard time does not mean that it has some fundamental curse dating back a thousand years, as he basically claims.

I also really want to write a review on The Waves. This book has absolutely enchanted me, and I’m very tempted to give it a second reading. (The stack of books in my bag groans loudly.) The way it flows so keenly between self and other, singular and plural, is wonderful. It’s such a beatiful framing of what it means to be a person in the world, to share experiences and to be perceived, for all of the beauty and pain associated with them. I wish to hold this book in my heart forever. It’s decided then: I shall read it again soon.

I still haven’t even touched on Cloud Atlas, which I’ve been meaning to review for quite some time. That’s another special work. I don’t think it has the same written-just-for-me quality that The Waves does, but it’s a book of polyphony and color that I think is actually special. It’s interestingly like so many “systems novels” in its breadth, but it’s usage of voice is another thing that feels really special. Often, I find really futuristic prose to be somewhat painful, and I admit that sometimes the usage of brand names in words like “fords” for cars and “nikes” for shoes or whatever is a bit ham-fisted, but the most compelling usage of voice is the middle section. I think he actually really does pull off the strange future-slang-dialect of the whole thing really well. I think it’s because it manages successfully to move beyond the relation we have to many of the words and then presents them afresh. It’s sort of like reading the etymology of a word that’s derived from the latin, but that latinate origin is so incredibly different that it’s almost funny.

Clearly, some of the sections of the work are much better than others, but it almost seems like some of them are intentionally weak – namely the bit around the murder-mystery around the power plant, which feels like it’s almost designed to read as pulp mystery genre fiction. But it’s hard to say.

But even then, I think most of the other sections come around to be interesting. The middle section is touching, the story of escaping the retirement home is a blast, the composer character is so arrogant that you feel compelled to love him. It just feels a bit like a love letter to the world, like each story is a comet in a meteor shower, all appearing briefly and falling away of their own accord, separate but together in their spectacle.

Anyways, all this means I need to do some research. Reviews were intended as ways to engage with these works more deeply, so that’s what I’m going to good-and-god-damn do. I think one of my goals for these next few months is to reread all of the books in my Favorites and to write reviews for them. Currently, there’s literally nothing written for any of them, so I’ll just go in order, probably. Should be an absolute blast.