Fascination Street #2

Writing for the week of Jan 20, 2025

This week my coding projects have involved writing Rust and Ruby. Last week I wrote a technical post about Rust so this week I’m going to go non-technical and talk about books and writing.

I’ve spent a decent amount of time this week thinking about José Saramago after learning some of his books fit into a genre called Magic Realism. If you haven’t read his books, my wife and I both encourage you to read Blindness. The style is fascinating. The plot is fascinating and equally terrifying in a non-horror way. I usually stick to Science Fiction but I am going to seek out more Magic Realism.

Putting the genre and plot aside for now though, the writing stlye used in Blindness can be very jarring at first. I wondered how it was even published that way. There is definitely an art to it. It’s like grammar was just abandoned. It includes sentences that are exhaustingly long. There are no hard breaks and it can be confusing knowing what character is speaking. Wikipedia explains it well:

“Saramago’s experimental style often features long sentences, at times more than a page long. He used full stops sparingly, choosing instead a loose flow of clauses joined by commas.[9] Many of his paragraphs extend for pages without pausing for dialogue (which Saramago chooses not to delimit by quotation marks); when the speaker changes, Saramago capitalizes the first letter of the new speaker’s clause.”

When I read Blindness years ago, I remember wondering if the style was used for that book in particular to convey the madness. I’m putting some his Death With Interruptions on my queue. I wasn’t aware of it before. I encourage you to check his work out.

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Back to Science Fiction.

This week I’m finishing another space opera called A Desolation Called Peace. It’s a followup to the popular A Memory Called Empire. I think I’m enjoying the second book more. The first is considered a space opera, but it focuses more on political tensions than it does spaceships and interplanetary battles. It is set in space and there is a controlling empire. The interesting technology bit is that a planet has developed a brain implant that can be used to preserve the thoughts and memories of another person and wired into another person. It allows the host to have inner dialogue with the preserved person. The two slowly merge into a new person that shares memories, thoughts, and feelings. The idea is to preserve generational knowledge and pass it down. It’s a fascinating idea.

The second book is more of a traditional space opera. There is an alien race, more politics, space travel, and war. I’m on the verge of finishing it. The author’s writing style is fairly dense. Long conversations that fill pages. The character naming has a convention that drives you absolutely crazy at first before accepting it. But that is my only critcism. The memory preservation idea gets really rolling in the second book. I’m anxious to finish this series and see if more is added in the future.

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Links

• The Buddha on Leadership - I like Dan’s newsletter. It’s certainly not preachy. It’s littered with little statements that keep it grounded. From the newsletter on Monday, I highlighted the following towards the bottom: “I mess these things up all the time. Perfection is not on offer for me—or, likely, for you. It’s about messy, marginal improvement over time. Which is doable for anyone.” Perfection is not on offer for me. That resonates.
• Joy & Curiosity - Thorsten’s newsletter is my favorite. I like the collection of content. I like the perspective. It was the inspiration for including links in this newsletter. I’ll steal some of his from time to time inevitably.

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Music

• I’m continuing to listen to Songs of a Lost World on repeat.
• I’ve listened to a few interviews with Robert regarding the making of the album.
• I gave the new Whirr album a once through as well for some Shoegaze wanderings one morning.

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A couple of promotions each week. First, use my invite link to try Warp as your terminal. It’s fast and has some great features. I’m not affiliated with them at all, just really like it. Also, check out my project–Schemabook, especially if you work in an organization that wants to get organized around defining data through contracts and collaboration. Lastly, I’m writing a book about learning Rust if you are familiar with Ruby. Stay tuned. As always, you can connect with me more at https://mikekrisher.com.