It’s almost the start of a new year and my TBR pile is significantly reduced. To reward myself I have been gorging on several internet shows I overlooked until now: Yellowjackets, The Mandalorian, The Sex Lives of College Girls, South Park. All good fun. Although I also discovered a strong source of disguised left-wing mind control.
It probably started on Star Trek in the 1960s (although casting Skippy Homeier as an alien threatened to destroy the subtext) but I prefer to acknowledge the full-on assault on traditional values as originating with the cantina scene in Star Wars, the original space opera. Watching The Mandalorian I realized that, despite there being a continuing preference for more hominid heroes (hey, how many one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eaters are there down at central casting?), the future of life in the universe includes a very diverse population and for the most part, whether they have four eyes on ten inch stalks or leave a slime trail as they move around, they all sidle up to the bar for a foaming neon blue cocktail .. together.
True. Han Solo might be a white supremest but following form, he is moreover a giant dick-head. You know?
Rather than dwell on the future replacement of right-wing over-reachers who pride themselves on open carry for blasters and the newest Death Star (How’d that work out for ya?), I’m going to start off the new year with a new pool of fun and enlightenment that will be useful when I finish my internet binge and return to the frozen sea with a new axe. Titles like these:
- Swans Over the Moon — Forrest Aguirre
- Trunk Music — Michael Connelly
- Second Place — Rachel Cusk
- Coming Up for Air — George Orwell
- Darwin’s Ghosts — Ariel Dorfman
- Hard Case Crime: Web of the City — Harlan Ellison
- The Televangelist — Ibrahim Essa
- The Comedians — Graham Greene
- Two On a Tower — Thomas Hardy
- Disclaimer — Renée Knight
- Cass Timberlane — Sinclair Lewis
- Mary Ann in Autumn — Armistead Maupin
- Cloud Atlas — David Mitchell
- Hazards of Time Travel — Joyce Carol Oates
- Prisoner’s Dilemma — Richard Powers
- Beautiful World, Where Are You — Sally Rooney
- The Golden House — Salman Rushdie
- Under the Wave at Waimea — Paul Theroux
- The Last Chronicle of Barset — Anthony Trollope
- Brazil — John Updike
A Celebration of Reading 