some people i follow on twitter were doing an "append 'Harry Potter and' to the title of the nearest book near you" and uh
Harry Potter and An Introduction to the Theory of Point Processes

@er1n "Harry Potter and The Art of Game Design"

or "Harry Potter and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", they're on top of each other the same distance from me

@lycaon @er1n oh man, I really really loved Wallace's nonfiction when I was at university, but then I read his maths book, which was so wrong in many places that it made me question how much he actually knew about the other things he wrote about and now I'm a bit wary.

(The fiction's still great though. Good Old Neon is one of my favourite stories ever)

@tomharris @er1n having read A Supposedly Fun Thing recently, i think most of it holds up? really the biggest problem i have with it is wallace's frequent use of the word "females" but that's basically water under the bridge. like i think "e. unibus pluram" was dead-on about how the internet wouldn't actually make us more free or less beholden to corporate control than tv just by virtue of being more interactive

@lycaon @er1n Yeah, looking back I think my comments apply more to Consider the Lobster than A Supposedly...
The journalism pieces there I like a lot, and I feel like I can trust him in e. unibus pluram because, y'know, postmodern US fiction is something he genuinely is an expert on. I really liked the grammar essay in Lobster when I was at uni, but now I find it pretty insufferable.
My favourite thing in Supposedly was the piece about Michael Joyce

@tomharris @er1n god yeah that essay is great. i cannot stop thinking about the part where he's like "try to imagine being one of the best 100 people in the world at something, anything."