Shawn Huelle

some notes on some books read in 2020

(see the list of books read here)

  1. Somehow, the first book I read in 2020 was The End of the FXXXing World by Charles Forsman. This proved to be portentous? This proved to be dumb luck?

  2. The filmic adaptation of Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer is quite good, but explains too much. The whole Southern Reach Trilogy (see nos. 6 and 7 on the list) is still with me in terms of some of the questions it poses: Why do we assume we'd be able to communicate with another (possibly alien) life form? Why do we think we'll understand the End when it comes?

  3. I need to mention Beckett's The End here not only because I wrote "the End" in the previous item, but also because there was an unintended them in 2020's reading. Unintended but totally understandable. Actually, there were two themes: apocalypse and a serious foreshortening of my attention span because pandemic and politics and worry. This tiny book contains two short stories, and I required multiple sittings to get through them. I have almost no memory of either story.

  4. I started reading Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy in 2016, put it down, picked it back up again, etc. It's kind of a dark coffee table book? It's kind of a reminder that 2020 may have been bad, but we've had bad years before? Bad decades? Wisconsin hasn't, in the intervening century, gotten any less dark, really? Fewer barns are being burned? Photography has gotten faster?

  5. Akira von Katsuhiro Otomo präsentiert die Zerstörung Tokios durch die außerordentlichen Kräften eines Kindes. Dies passiert zwei Mal in den 6 Bänder, von denen ich in diesem zerstörerischen Jahr nur 5 (Nummern 21, 22, 23 & 30 in der Liste) gelesen habe. Ich finde es passend, dass ich das Ende von der Geschichte erst in 2021 lese.

  6. "Every something is an echo of nothing." "If things weren't empty, how could they change?"

  7. In 2020, I finally started the meditation practice I'd been meaning to start for the last 22 years.