Throw the books at me

Finished an Anthropologist on Mars and I can't do anything except recommend it. I'm going through some sort of analytic crisis - not sure I want to continue because at this point and for the next few months I'd just be paying $80 an hour to narrate a travelogue and that money would be better spent on opera lessons and massages - also starting to think actually being an analyst might be far too much of a combination of bourgeois and fucking hard for me - but obviously I'm still dewdropped over the brain and how it works.

And while it wasn't the most satisfying book in the world - the amount of time Oliver Sacks spent injecting himself into the narrative made me uncomfortable in the same way the amount of time an analyst spends in his analysand's narrative makes me uncomfortable, though I suppose you don't want a neurologist outside of your narrative if you need him - it was fucking astounding. So, nothing but yes. Read it.

Next decided to switch back to novels, thinking that it's best to swing back and forth between fiction and non, and this time it was a copy of A Clockwork Orange that the F-word brought home for me, knowing I liked the movie. It was very different from the movie, or maybe I was different, not having seen the movie in a few years, but I feel like the book spent much more time on class divisions and the movie much more time on Malcolm McDowell, both of which are interesting in their seperate ways. The book felt miles more political and I'd say it's more timely - I think maybe I liked it better, though I'd have to see the movie again to speak with more conviction. I don't remember the movie's ending, for example, and I found the book's ending a little pat, so I must see.

I do know the book achieved something, like it or not, that was as special as Team America and all those marionettes. I wonder if Burgess wrote it and translated it, or just managed to make himself write like that.