Cameron's Book Round-Up, 2024, part 5

We have an island of tolerable weather here, so I’m going to give you all a slate of book reviews and rush off to complete other things.

Cameron's Book Round-Up, 2024, part 4

High summer is rolling in to Kansas City. The weather is hot, and I am again working day in, day out to water trees so that there will one day be enough shade around here. Can’t do anything about the humidity, though: we’re just going to have to live with it feeling like we’re nestled deep in Pantagruel’s armpit. Reading in a cool room, though, is just about the best thing in the world.

Cameron's Book Round-Up, Starting 2024 (Reread-a-Palooza, part 1)

Rereading is a fundamentally different act from the initial reading. By returning to a text with a memory of it, you can discover parts of it that you failed to see on initial — or second, or third — readings. I hesitate to suggest that you “decode” texts when you read them, or something to that effect, but it is my belief that the act of reading is a collaboration between the reader and text, and so the results will be fundamentally different if you are fundamentally different. You can never really “read the same book again” because much like Heraclitus’s river-crosser, you’re not the same person.

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The Collapse of Possibility: The Problem of Aesthetics and Ontology in Science Fiction

But all of this is beside the point: the fact that we can pick out two dominant aesthetics in the visual media form of what is supposed to be a “literature of ideas” is a problem. It indicates, if anything, a lack of ideas. If our options are just a visual vocabulary iteration of the old Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate that no one but the people having it are interested in, we've got problems.