hexbienium:

I’m 75 pages into The Instructions by Adam Levin, which I picked up on the strength of @nostalgebraist’s recommendation, and it is…I’m not sure how to summarize except to say that it pushes a lot of buttons that make me happy as a reader. The characters are fascinating in every detail—I think in part this is because I can’t slot many of them into any archetype that I’m familiar with, and yet they all manage to seem true to life and basically believable. The dialogue and narration hits kind of a sweet spot where it’s idiosyncratic enough to feel fresh and distinctive, but not too clever for its own good, so it doesn’t seem contrived or create a drag while I’m reading. Not that it isn’t clever:

Certain kinds of men like Ron Desormie. What a name. What a pervy name. What a perfect name for a perv like him. It could even be verbed like pasteurize. I thought: It could be? No. It will be. I thought: From now on, desormiate = perv the world, and rondesormiate will, for a while, be an acceptable, however overly formal, variant in the vein of irregardless, then become archaic, whereas sorm and desorm, the slang of tomorrow, will eventually dominate, rendering desormiate itself the over-formal variant.

Okay, that is far from the best or most inventive bit in what I’ve read so far, but it’s the least high-context one I could find.

The book is also wonderful in how it takes a very narrow slice of the world (setting and time) and elevates it to a grand scale and importance—but in a very unironic and honest way, without the appearance of making a big deal out of trivialities. (I am not satisfied that this actually gets across what I’m trying to say, but it will have to do.) It reminds me more than a little of A Prayer for Owen Meany, which I’m very fond of, in this respect (also the “young messiah” thing, though already it’s not hard to tell that The Instructions is handling that motif in a distinctive way).

Maybe some of this is premature, but not many books have me this engrossed so early on, and the fact that this one does has me really excited for the rest of it.

I’m really happy you’re reading this!  It’s my favorite novel, and the best book almost no one has read.

(via hexbienium-deactivated20160126)

ketzerei-heuchelei:

nostalgebraist:

momothefiddler:

a man now known as Yud the Lesser

DID U REALLY

After I learned that he was (apparently?) reading the story, my sense of mischief gave me no other choice

did you know yud is (one name for) a hebrew letter

that’s what i think of when people say “big yud”

Yes.  (A fun coincidence: it comes up a number of times in The Instructions, a book with a somewhat Yudkowsky-esque protagonist [messianic child prodigy who writes a giant rambling treatise celebrated by his followers].  In that case it’s because two yuds in a row is an abbreviation for the name of Adonai)

(via temporary-tempo-deactivated2018)

Faker, Monster, Victim, Mad Genius

ozymandias271:

Faker, Monster, Victim, Mad Genius

If you’re neurodivergent, you get to be one of about four things, and all of them suck.

The Faker.Fakers aren’t really neurodivergent. They’re making it up! Probably for attention, or to get accommodations so that they don’t have to study so much. They are taking normal life problems that everyone has and pretending that they’re some kind of ‘disorder’, and they definitely shouldn’t seek…

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There’s a great running thread in The Instructions (the book I will never stop raving about) about neurodivergent middle school kids aiming for the “Mad Genius” option – the narrator describes his social group in these larger-than-life terms, almost like they’re mythical heroes, and at one point maybe 1/3 of the way through the book you get to read a report by their group counselor and it’s really shocking because it reveals (from an outside perspective) that a lot of people just find the group creepy (the report mentions that some of the teachers have started referring to it as “Spooky and the Spastics”).

(via aprilwitching-deactivated201808)

It occurs to me – shlevy, have I had a chance to recommend The Instructions by Adam Levin to you?  You 1) like my writing and 2) know about Judaism and Jewish culture, which means there’s a good chance you in particular would enjoy that book (if you haven’t read it already).

And it’s one of my favorites and I try to recommend it as much as I can, because it seems to have slipped under many people’s radars.

Yesterday I learned about the story that the Septuagint was produced by 72 scholars producing identical translations because God willed it, and realized that this is probably what the “re-translation” thing in The Instructions is a reference to.  (Or possibly to a broader set of such stories in the Jewish tradition, if there are others, but this is the first one I’ve heard.)

My favorite novels just keep on giving!

[thinks about yesterday’s book genre exchange]

[gestures yet again toward “The Instructions” by Adam Levin]  This was published in 2010.  I don’t know what genre it is?  It is not really science fiction or fantasy or anything.  "Lit" reviewers liked it but it does not feel like contemporary litfic.  It is not exactly realistic, but not quite in a way I know a word for?  It is about middle schoolers and includes a lot of the kind of stuff middle schoolers care/think about but it is definitely not YA?  It’s about religion and charisma and all kinds of Deep Important Things but not in a way that is overwrought and clobbers you over the head with them?  It is very cute and funny?  Anyway it’s REALLY GOOD and probably my favorite novel and it was written in 2010 and is in no genre I know of, and that’s the kind of place I’m coming from here

Tbh the main effect of that bad John Green post on me was to cause me to look up the first kiss scene in The Instructions to see whether I could have a new angle from which hawk that book

Unfortunately it’s kind of ambiguously described

Anyway it’s a book involving teen romance and Judaism and is the best book I’ve ever read (maybe)

I think there’s a recurring feature in my life where I encounter charismatic, controversial people who tend to inspire very polarized reactions, and end up feeling conflicted about them, which doesn’t put me in sympathy with either of the poles

Yudkowsky is an example: I give him a lot of shit, but I’d be lying if I said his writing didn’t resonate very intensely with me when I first discovered it.  A lot of his more mundane posts about “rationality” were essentially saying things that I believed but had resigned myself to thinking no else did.  I write about him negatively now because I wish there were more people who had the qualities I like about him without the many, many qualities I dislike about him.  It’s different from the perspective of someone who just sees him as a risible dweeb.

One of the reasons I like The Instructions so much is that it is about one of these kinds of people, and depicts him as both compelling and scary, and just kind of assumes that the reader will be endlessly fascinated with him.  It’s not lauding him, it’s not satirizing him, it’s not making some point about how he’s good or bad or even somewhere in between, it’s just presenting some personality traits and rhetorical styles that really exist and saying “I hope this stuff is as fixation-worth for you as it is for me”

It’s not like the author is holding back and suspending judgment … more that his judgment of his creation is largely “wow, holy shit”

And I really get that.  I relate to that “wow, holy shit” a lot more than “this person is clearly wrong” or “this person is clearly right” or “the truth is always somewhere in the middle” or “ah, what a complex issue” or etc.