bookpost nov-jan 2026
hellooooo what did i last read. stag dance? ok what's in my library. yeah that seems right
the island of doctor moreau, by h.g. wells
11/11/25, 3:29 PM WOW that was an impressively racist sentence (1896)
So, upfront: the reason I read this is because I played Resident Evil 8 and didn't know why Moreau was named that. Shortly afterwards, I realised that the only thing adjacent to Wells I'd actually experienced was the 2025 War of the Worlds movie starring Ice Cube, which is surely no way to live. I was updating my Gutenberg epubs with those from Standard Ebooks, noticed there was some Wells and that they were short, and figured I'd knock one or two out, get some culture down me. Shocking nobody, it was actually really good. Packs a lot of ideas into its hundred or so pages and distributes those ideas with some very lovely prose. It's paced quickly but that doesn't mean its peak and denouement hit any less.
The way it handles race in this though... Wells is quite firmly an anti-racist who despised racist stereotyping and suspicions, but that doesn't mean that a book from the 1800s that is broadly about and contemporary to eugenicist thought is an easy read in 2025. The beast people are scary in a subconscious way, with an instinctive distrust, and their skin colour is drawn attention to in a way the white cast's is not. It's reminiscent of modern and thoughtless descriptions of PoC as animalistic or savage by white people. Even if perhaps Prendick's staring at these strangers is technically reasonable because they are literal giants with distorted animal features, and because it is about the uncanny valley and if there is an inherent essence of humanity - thanks to the way it describes them and the language of the era, it still reads like the same manner as a white guy staring uncomfortably at a PoC for simply looking different to him. And Then Moreau Starts Talking About The Gorilla End Of Sentence
It's hard to talk about this sort of thing without sounding insulting or dismissive. Y'know, his heart's in the right place, it's just how things were back then, he just didn't know better, that sort of thing is a little too close to the way current racism is passed over. It's not a thoughtless or clumsy book.
Annoyed as fuck that G******* F****** has definitely given me an interest in mad scientists doing uplift stories though. Ugh
brave new world, by aldous huxley
anyone want to go play a round of centrifugal bumble-puppy after work (1932)
mmmmmy fucking face when i read two scifi novels with outdated depictions of race in a row
The world depicted here is fascinating. It's also kind of overbearingly British at points? There's a twee catchiness to its satire. 'Oh in this world we all worship Henry Ford and religion is outlawed so we say Our Ford instead of Our Lord' is cloying, especially when characters named things like Fanny Crowne are saying it. It's deliberate, though, and I think it does land the connection between its twee language and the Pavlovian advertising-speak every human on its Earth is born to think in. Some absolute weapons-grade thought-terminating Slogans in this.
I don't really know any Shakespeare so it's hard whenever that comes up, which it does a lot. Obviously the book's utopia/dystopia (general -topia?) inspiration is explicitly brought up in Terra Ignota but I think it's interesting that these both utilise classic works as their PoV character's personal canon? To be so explicitly like 'this work is the lens that this character sees the world through' is cool. BNW uses its Shakespeare kind of adjacent to concepts of high/low art, worthless entertainment providing harmful and useless perspectives. It gets pretty into the weeds about it and avoids just blandly being like All Book's GOod or Only Shakespeare Is Good ( a la this post and all that )
But yes this book is also weird about race and Native American practices and people. The white man who lives among the Savages, etc. I hesitate to decry it all because the scene where John watches the shallow and racialised porno in the cinema and comes out like clinging to Othello as an example of high art but also as representation is pretty good.
astral season, beastly season, by tahi saihate
killing 5 children to go to my imprisoned oshis handshake event (2015, eng tl 2021)
ughhh i would LOVE to read non-sensationalist and morose lit about idol otaku going to extremes for their oshi in an interesting two-part form by a better author or translator but unfortunately this sucks ass and is a torment to read. i love navel gazing about outcast teens and obsessive fans. it's got the kind of prose and depth that makes me think of what gamers think good stories are - it's on par with a literary vn in the most negative way i can mean. i described its writing as sounding like it had textbox character limits imposed. wish it was good in any way
the last children of tokyo, by yoko tawada
sad little slow-reveal family drama?? (2014, eng tl 2018)
Tawada is a good writer. I think that this is a good book? I don't care for it, though. The author is a Japanese woman who lives in Berlin and writes in both Japanese and German and is very interested in what it means to write in a non-native language - the word for this is apparently 'exophony'.
The Last Children of Tokyo is about a super-isolated post-apocalyptic Japan with a Kafkaesque government, and part of that is that they no longer import loanwords and export their own languages as a commodity, and its protagonists are a grandfather who remembers things like 'pan' for bread, and his grandson who only knows this new world. A lot of the language is about observing the Japanese language from a distance? Japanese phrases even English speakers know are brought attention to - there's a good page or two about gratitude, and how 'arigato' is a dead word. Words citizens invent and use, words discarded, words government imposes or bans, etc. I think it's notable that the English translation chooses to render the 'this word is written with the kanji for xyz' sentences throughout as 'Chinese characters'. Where relevant, it describes the meaning, the sound, or the visual of the kanji used. I've not read translated Japanese lit so thoughtful about the fact it is and will be a translated work before.
The intersection of language and disability is interesting... in this post-apocalypse, the youngest generation are all severely physically changed, unable to eat food, unable to move for more than a few steps at a time, etc. So the language passed down from the elder generation is no longer even useful, because it describes a way of living that no longer exists, and especially language that describes physicality - like pain and suffering - have a completely different context for a generation normalised to certain types of pain, unable to work towards anything that would have current abled conceptions of suffering as a byproduct.
But it's just... for a work so interested in language and assumptions, for a work that is interested in physical sex and gender differences - a setting that says children naturally swap sexes at least once in their lives, where men get menopause, where everyone shits communally - why are the women in it so terrible? So unsympathetic? There is a paragraph about Marika that describes her tits and ass so insanely that it got me to double-check if the author was a man and I was shocked that it wasn't. It doesn't feel like a pre-apocalypse gender role commentary at all. It ruined the entire thing for me...
dnf:
the ark sakura, by kobo abe
creep goes to the toilet (1984, eng tl 1988)
Kobo Abe is a figure that is pretty well-known in Japanese lit, although admittedly I only know of him because I read an old interview where Kojima mentioned him. They call me the cultured knower. Conceptually I like a book about an outcast who is trying to sell tickets to his apocalypse-avoiding 'ark' written with a dreamlike level of space and detail, but the reality is that it's mostly about a very annoying man thinking about shitting. Is this because he's a fat and ugly heterosexual incel? Am I doing the human resources meme about lit? I don't know or care. It's bland to read. English readers don't seem to like it much generally - a problem of an 80s translation? Maybe I'll read The Woman In The Dunes at some point instead.