I'll accept The Light Fantastic as stand-in for Pratchett's entire work

March 2, 2022 4:46 AM

In the early 1980s, Anthony Burgess was commissioned to write a book of book recommendations. He was well placed to do it, as a prominent international author himself, as well as a prolific reviewer of fiction since the 1960s. Lore tells us that he wrote the book in a mere three weeks. By contrast it has taken me three days just to produce my own list which takes us from where Burgess left off – that resonant year 1984 – to the present.

Following on from Anthony Burgess' Ninety--Nine Novels (1984), Jim Clarke provides us with Ninety-Nine More novels for us to disagree violently with.
posted by MartinWisse (60 comments total)

I enjoyed Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair series, and was glad to see it on this list.
posted by Bee'sWing at 5:04 AM on March 2, 2022 [4 favorites]

I don't read that much (at least compared to the rest of y'all) but this list uncannily hits almost everyone I do read. So it seems like maybe The Corrections got snubbed? Sure, Franzen is a bit insufferable, but that was a big book.

In general it seems like it's going to be a useful list. :)
posted by anhedonic at 5:06 AM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also not a big reader here, but I was really surprised to see graphic novels like Watchmen and weird fiction like Perdido Street Station and Annihilation on this list. I guess genre works really have become mainstream? Or I guess it's the slant of the author of the list, yes?
posted by blakewest at 5:32 AM on March 2, 2022

All writing is genre.
posted by signal at 5:40 AM on March 2, 2022 [17 favorites]

It is interesting to see so much genre fiction on the list.

I wince a bit for The Light Fantastic. It's not Pratchett's strongest, by a long way. The first Tiffany Aching novel perhaps or a stand alone like Small Gods would have been my preference.

I'm also a bit sad to see Gene Wolfe not on the list either, but his output wasn't as popular as many on the list. Still would have loved to see Soldier of Arete or one of the books of the long sun on there.
posted by bonehead at 5:40 AM on March 2, 2022 [18 favorites]

With a lot of these lists, it always strikes me how very, very few men have any habit of seeking out novels by women and how very few white people have any habit of seeking out novels by people of color. If those novels rise to the very heights of the literary best-seller lists and the chattering class literary pages, then they get read; but not until then.

Obviously we all have one life to read and who wants to chew through a bunch of obligation novels, but then I remember that women read men, POC read white people, queers read straight people, etc, as a simple default. Is it that men go to the bookstore and see books by women and just think, "no not for me, can't possibly be a serious book that leaves a philosophical residue"?
posted by Frowner at 5:41 AM on March 2, 2022 [28 favorites]

Man, I liked Cloud Atlas and Snow Crash as much as the next painfully-white guy, but six novels by Neal Stephenson or David Mitchell novels on a list of 99 books seems a little excessive.
posted by Mayor West at 6:05 AM on March 2, 2022 [37 favorites]

A list that recommends that everyone actually read Infinite Jest presupposes that anyone has actually read Infinite Jest and certainly that can't be true, can it?
posted by jacquilynne at 6:07 AM on March 2, 2022 [10 favorites]

Wel, I bounced off IJ, but my flatmate-at-the-time read it in enough detail that he was complaining about all the maths errors in the appendices, so...
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 6:26 AM on March 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

Even when I took an earnest crack at IJ, I mostly skimmed over the tennis parts lightly, and after finding out (via Mary Karr) that Wallace violated the confidentiality of his fellow rehab residents by putting them in the book, I've given up on the whole thing and wouldn't recommend it to anybody. As for The Light Fantastic "stand[ing] in for Pratchett's entire work," well, I wouldn't "violently disagree" (Burgess' phrase) as simply say that that's just wrong; it's the second part of the story begun in the first book, and thus not really fit for a stand-alone read in addition to having the flaws of the early Discworld books. I'd suggest Guards! Guards! as the one in which Pratchett really hits his stride.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:37 AM on March 2, 2022 [18 favorites]

Looks like I've read most of these.

I wince a bit for The Light Fantastic.

Yes. Early Ringworld is not as good as what came after.
posted by ovvl at 6:37 AM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Early Ringworld is not as good as what came after.

Discworld. Ringworld is a different thing, right?
posted by zamboni at 6:42 AM on March 2, 2022 [8 favorites]

I had not heard of Burgess' Ninety Novels.
For those curious, here is Burgess' list.
Thanks for posting!
posted by storybored at 6:59 AM on March 2, 2022 [5 favorites]

If this is the thread where we fight about the best Pratchett, then I'm throwing in for Witches Abroad or Night Watch.

If this is about his actual list, then it feels a bit trendy rather than honest. Surprised it's missing The Poisonwood Bible, Gilead (or Housekeeping), and (maybe less surprising) Americanah. I'd put Kavalier and Clay over Yiddish Policemen's Union, but if we're giving almost every David Mitchell an in, you'd think he'd add both.

Then again, based on the titles he chose, I suspect he's kicking himself that he left off Geek Love.

[ / backseat judgment of his psyche based on his bookshelf. ]
posted by Mchelly at 6:59 AM on March 2, 2022 [4 favorites]

Seconding Guards! Guards! as a good entry point for Discworld.
posted by suetanvil at 7:13 AM on March 2, 2022 [10 favorites]

this is quite a good model for any list intro, and list makers generally ought provide similar.

They are therefore novels which

• I have read
• which feature superbly drawn characters
• which have haunted my thoughts afterwards

Hence, they’re subject to the whims and prejudices of

• someone of my age, gender, class and race
• raised in the place I grew up
• educated in the way I was
• circumscribed by which books were available for me to encounter.

• There’s probably a lot of Irish fiction here. I’m Irish.
• There’s probably quite a lot of science fiction too. Well, I study it for a living.
• If there’s an especial density of texts from the late 90s, that’s probably because I was having to read umpteen novels a week as the Books Correspondent for Dublin’s Sunday Independent at the time

[my bulletification, ed.]

surprised and heartened to see 'oranges are not the only fruit' and 'the girl with the dragon tattoo' and 'dirk gently'. a laudable range of 'genres', to use a volatile descriptor.
posted by j_curiouser at 7:19 AM on March 2, 2022 [12 favorites]

good link, botw
posted by j_curiouser at 7:20 AM on March 2, 2022

The new list is boring and dull compared to Burgess's unhinged trolling. His book has short essays on each of his nominations where he really lets loose.
Gormenghast is an explicit allegory of post WW2 English society with each character representing a different social class? OK.
Golding's The Spire is actually not just a mismarketed horror novel with a view of human nature so bleak it makes Lord of the Flies look cheerily optimistic? OK.
Huxley's Island isn't just an embarrassingly bad book by someone who discovered hallucinogenic drugs late in life? That's simply going too far Anthony.
This new list doesn't have the feel of bitter, long standing grudges being settled that came so naturally to Burgess.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:23 AM on March 2, 2022 [9 favorites]

that's funny.
posted by j_curiouser at 7:25 AM on March 2, 2022

> The Three-Body Problem – Cixin Liu

One of my old roomies raved about this book, and although I enjoyed the bits about the cultural revolution, the actual scifi part of it was sophomoric at best and lacked imagination to the point that I couldnt enjoy it. The hostile aliens bent on the destruction of the human race (already a boring trope) have a swarm of magic particles that they can use to write messages inside the iris of individual humans. If they had this ability, it would be trivially easy to wipe out the entire human population without all the space battle nonsense that comes later. These god particles are a) everywhere, b) unstoppable, c) perfectly controlled by the aliens, which they then decide not to use to accomplish their stated goal of wiping out the human race. Its a bad plot device done poorly and ruined the book for me.
posted by KeSetAffinityThread at 7:43 AM on March 2, 2022 [5 favorites]

Small Gods here too. It always struck me as a sort of culmination of Pratchett's whimsy, deadly seriousness, and writing ability.
posted by SunSnork at 7:49 AM on March 2, 2022 [11 favorites]

If nothing else, I had never heard of Jim Clarke before. He seems to read a lot of the stuff that I've read, and hopefully, like me, he has taken the last decade or so to branch out and read more from the blossoming garden of work by POC.
posted by OHenryPacey at 7:50 AM on March 2, 2022

but I was really surprised to see graphic novels like Watchmen

if you go by one of the criteria of "Finally, he argues that novels should “leave in the reader’s mind a sort of philosophical residue.” the graphic novels he has on the list, notably Maus and Persepolis, were inflection points for me after I read them. The way I saw the world changed permanently and if that's not "philosophical residue" I don't know what is.
posted by Dr. Twist at 7:54 AM on March 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Three-Body Problem

Yeah, that book was an excellent short story about a woman in the Cultural Revolution, plopped into a ridiculous sci-fi story that's an example of all the worst stuff people criticize the genre for. There's one superbly drawn character and a book full of boring wooden cutouts. I guess it did haunt my thoughts afterward, because WHY DO YOU KEEP SAYING 'THREE BODY PROBLEM' WHEN YOU'RE CLEARLY TALKING ABOUT FOUR BODIES
posted by echo target at 8:16 AM on March 2, 2022 [5 favorites]

was really surprised to see ... weird fiction like Perdido Street Station and Annihilation on this list.

The author has an aside about this: "There’s probably quite a lot of science fiction too. Well, I study it for a living."
posted by doctornemo at 8:23 AM on March 2, 2022

The Light Fantastic is wrong, of course; I'll mostly forgive it for the sake of This Is How You Lose The Time War. (My vote's for Guards, Guards in the Pratchett slot - Night Watch is better but is also more of a payoff for the series.)

(Was Jemisin on the list somewhere and I missed her?)
posted by mersen at 8:24 AM on March 2, 2022 [4 favorites]

Jemisin is one of the big misses here, I think. Leckie maybe too.
posted by bonehead at 8:27 AM on March 2, 2022 [8 favorites]

Burgess' book is many things in a small package: a fun reading list; lots of trolling; a glimpse into a novelist's view of novels written by other people. I read it back when I was trying to read everything by him, and now remember it better than some of his novels.

This list... not many surprises. It hits a lot of popular books.

(I would definitely add Gene Wolfe)
posted by doctornemo at 8:28 AM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Last week, I was asked...

Whom by?
posted by BWA at 8:38 AM on March 2, 2022

All writing is genre.

can't agree here. Maybe all published fiction eventually gets assigned to a genre to make easier for bookshops to know where to shelve it (I imagine Naked Lunch is in somebody's Transgressive Fiction section) but that's something that happens later. I'm pretty confident that, when written, Naked Lunch wasn't informed by any particular set of dictates or guidelines or conventions or cliches as to what it could/couldn't do, which to me, is what genre is. Your definition may vary.

And ummm ... in case that doesn't give us something we may "disagree violently with", here are five selections from the list that I really wish I hadn't wasted precious hours of my life on, sometimes even reading every f***ing word:

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – Michael Chabon
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
The Tailor of Panama – John Le Carre
Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
Underworld – Don DeLillo

emphasis mine.
posted by philip-random at 8:42 AM on March 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

As far as I can see, Kingsley Amis, JG Ballard and Thomas Pynchon are the only three on both lists, although you can make a case for a couple of others who could to be on both (e.g. William Golding, whose Fire Down Below trilogy is a great career finish.)

What I always find interesting about older lists like Burgess' - even allowing for his epic trolling and score-settling - are the books that were clearly noteworthy once but are now mostly forgotten, such as LP Hartley's Facial Justice. Even huge successes fade.

If I'm getting into quibble territory, I'd drop Vineland for Mason & Dixon. And both lists need more women: I mean, where's Agatha Christie?
posted by YoungStencil at 8:53 AM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

I liked Cloud Atlas and Snow Crash as much as the next painfully-white guy

I assumed I like Seveneves as much as the next guy, ie not at all.

Seveneves but not Anathem?
posted by biffa at 9:01 AM on March 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

It's really very heartening to see Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency starting to be acknowledged as DNA's best work, though I tended to award more style points when people mentioned it before the series came out. Everything in the book is interconnected, including the plot point that everything is interconnected.

Except the cave paintings. I still don't know what was up with the cave paintings.
posted by darksasami at 9:45 AM on March 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

The new list is boring and dull compared to Burgess's unhinged trolling.

Let's wait and see. This is just the list. There are some sacred cows on it.
posted by bonehead at 10:16 AM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

I know this list is basic as hell because I've read like half these books. I know that's a self-own, but still.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:27 AM on March 2, 2022 [8 favorites]

Happy to see Circe from Madeleine Miller on this list. If there were going to be repeats, The Song of Achilles is, in my humble opinion, every bit as good.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 11:03 AM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Well my favourite Chabon is Gentlemen of the Road so ner (*sticks out tongue*).
posted by Coaticass at 11:24 AM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'll forgive the omission of Little, Big because it was published 3 years to early, although AEgypt should have qualified.

There are some disappointing inclusions, I feel like

Perfume – Patrick Suskind
Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami
Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel – Milorad Pavić
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
Fight Club – Chuck Pahlaniuk
Perdido Street Station – China Mieville
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson

Are all either past their sell-by dates and/or not their author's best work in the time period. I'm not sure any Stephenson really needs to be on this this list, especially multiple times, since he doesn't write great characters. I'd add Caitlín Kiernan's magnificent The Drowning Girl and maybe Johanna Sinisalo's The Core of the Sun.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:34 AM on March 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

My initial response was the same as Frowner’s.

18 women authors on a list of 99 novels. 18 authors of colour by my count (I didn’t count the same author twice). That’s not just underrepresentation, it’s close to erasure.

[my selections are] subject to the whims and prejudices of someone of my age, gender, class and race, raised in the place I grew up and educated in the way I was, and circumscribed by which books were available for me to encounter.

No dude, it’s the Year of Our Lord 2022. I just don't accept this airy handwaving anymore. Do better.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 11:52 AM on March 2, 2022 [11 favorites]

I'm not sure any Stephenson really needs to be on this this list, especially multiple times, since he doesn't write great characters.

This is a weird place for me to defend the man, but Stephenson appears to have listened to the critics who have pointed out that (a) he can't write female characters for shit and (b) he doesn't know how to end a novel. He teamed up with Nicole Galland to write Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., which was surprisingly excellent and suffered from neither problem. Working with another author let him focus on his strengths, notably military-bureaucracy-as-absurdity.
posted by Mayor West at 11:57 AM on March 2, 2022 [5 favorites]

Stephenson was one my favorite authors for quite some time but the more he writes the less I like his stance. His latest book was well written with even a decent ending and a female protagonist. Still, it was close to hate-reading for me. All his libertarian nonsense really puts me off.

My other long time favorite writer is William Gibson. Also on this list and well deserved with Neuromancer. In my opinion he only gets better though. If you really want to include multiple entries from authors, his latest two books are much more deserving to be on it instead of Neal's or even Mitchell's.
posted by Kosmob0t at 1:12 PM on March 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

No Octavia Butler, no NK Jemisin or Ted Chiang, no Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Midnight's Children would be my pick over The Satanic Verses. There's Hanif Qureshi, Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, all acceptable markers of diversity for the time.

If Terry is up for argument, you get a crossover with Neil Gaiman if you take Good Omens. But also don't overlook Only You Can Save Mankind for the turn of video games into dreams into the nightmare of televised war as propaganda.

qntm's There Is No Antimemetics Division had me doubting my own memories as it introduced a new-to-me class of horror monster.
posted by k3ninho at 1:27 PM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, I only read Cloud Atlas, and there's not enough time in the world to read any more David Mitchell.
posted by k3ninho at 1:29 PM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

I really do not like Gibson, Robinson, Stephenson, or Wallace. In my view all Pratchetts are dead on the shelf from terminal aphorismism, and if Adams had been ... well, out of respect for the dead man and those who love him and his work, let's just stamp RIP on every accessible surface of that one. I haven’t been able to finish any Pynchon since Gravity's Rainbow mainly because of crushing grief, and if Franzen were any farther up his own ass he’d be the first living Klein bottle.

So I haven’t read very many on this list. His taste and mine are almost 180° out of phase.
posted by jamjam at 1:33 PM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, I only read Cloud Atlas, and there's not enough time in the world to read any more David Mitchell.

I think I was quite lucky in that I discovered him through The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which was a lot more my cup of tea than I would have guessed from the blurb (though the paper must have been seeped in onions, or something). In theory, Cloud Atlas should have been right up my alley, but it mostly seemed like a bunch of unconvincing shorts with only the briefest whiffs of intertextuality that might have added some much needed cohesion. The Bone Clocks was a lot better once it got going, but I'm not sure it fully warranted its large wordcount.

I'm also of the opinion that the Three Body Problem is a wonderful series of philosophical thought experiments wearing a superficial disguise of hard science fiction (which even the most cursory investigation would reveal it isn't). It uses archetypes rather than characters, metaphor rather than science, and theme over realism. Plot holes and ropey science translation is the price of admission for the gargantuan concepts the author wrestles with.
posted by Sparx at 2:24 PM on March 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm also aware that CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN stuck with me, so cstross' Laundry Files ought to be on that list. (It's to my shame that I've not got to Merchant Princes yet.)
posted by k3ninho at 2:30 PM on March 2, 2022

The Burgess list is fine, if a bit.... fusty. If I read it not knowing who compiled it, I'd get the sense of a person of strong and humorous opinions. The second list gives me no impression at all of the author except as a white male trying to be expansive. Neither makes me violently disagree, but it reminds me of the distinction of you listing your favorites vs. what you think are the best. My favorite books would tell you more about me than about the books. My "best" would be predictable and not very interesting.

Still, where's Roberto Bolano?
posted by acrasis at 4:06 PM on March 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

Black Swan Green by Mitchell is my favorite, but was omitted. I really like him as an author, but I would have chosen one book.
I had forgotten about James Kelman! I really liked him when I first found him, but haven't gone back.
posted by Acari at 4:19 PM on March 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

six novels by Neal Stephenson or David Mitchell novels on a list of 99 books seems a little excessive

I don't have a problem with two Stephenson novels on this list, but I do have a problem with one of them being seveneves, what a mess of a book.
posted by 3j0hn at 6:24 PM on March 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, I only read Cloud Atlas, and there's not enough time in the world to read any more David Mitchell.

Just last year, after finishing Utopia Avenue, I started at the beginning and re-read all of them again. Sublime.

This list was never advertised as definitive of anything other than a modernized continuation of what Burgess (about whom the author has some expertise) had begun. Omissions simply reflect this one particular reader's blind spots.
I'm a bit surprised no Pynchon past M&D, since Inherent Vice seems in his wheelhouse.
posted by OHenryPacey at 6:36 PM on March 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

Even huge successes fade.

Huge successes will almost certainly fade. Books that a super-popular in their time, whether low- or high-brow, are so because they speak powerfully to that time. When the times change, that virtue becomes a vice, and the books are forgotten. For every Dickens, there are a couple dozen Ouidas and Bulwers-Lytton.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:11 AM on March 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

of the cyberpunks it continues to shock me that Sterling isn’t the one everyone goes for on a list like this. Prescient and understands what goes on inside the head and the social group brain to a T imo
posted by thedaniel at 8:18 AM on March 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Man, I liked Cloud Atlas and Snow Crash as much as the next painfully-white guy, but six novels by Neal Stephenson or David Mitchell novels on a list of 99 books seems a little excessive.

Utopia Avenue is where I was finally where I bounced off Mitchell, maybe for good. I really loved Black Swan Green. I hope he comes back to something to it.

The Burgess list is surprisingly pretty great, by the way.
posted by thivaia at 10:37 AM on March 3, 2022

of the cyberpunks it continues to shock me that Sterling isn’t the one everyone goes for on a list like this.

Remember that this isn't exactly a list of "best books;" here's the charge:

What were Burgess’s criteria? That they be a) novels, b) published between 1939 and 1983, and c) concerned with what he called ‘human character’. It is, as he wrote in the introduction to Ninety Nine Novels, “the Godlike task of the novelist to create human beings whom we accept as living creatures filled with complexities and armed with free will.” I have ignored his proscription against ‘comic strips’, which he himself in agreement with the critic Leslie Fiedler, felt was already an outdated exclusion in the Eighties.

Finally, he argues that novels should “leave in the reader’s mind a sort of philosophical residue.” Whether he intended that to be as didactic as it sounds is unclear, but it has been the guiding principle in selecting these books. They are therefore novels which I have read, which feature superbly drawn characters, and which have haunted my thoughts afterwards.

I would argue that no cyberpunk author, with the possible exception of Pat Cadigan, ever wrote a "superbly drawn character." That's not really what they are there for. Which is why I suggested Sinisalo, Kiernan, and Crowley, who do draw characters finely (at least in the works suggested).
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:43 AM on March 3, 2022

Without the thumbnail reviews or rationales, the lists of mere titles are far less interesting. That's how one figures out how to use the list.
posted by lathrop at 11:52 AM on March 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Just finished reading D Mitchell's Utopia Avenue; it's interesting... but wow, that continual slush of name-dropping real-life-person cameos just feels so awkward...
posted by ovvl at 4:53 PM on March 5, 2022

Utopia Avenue is a bloated prog-rock cover of the melancholic pop-rock of Espedair Street.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:41 PM on March 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

I would argue that no cyberpunk author, with the possible exception of Pat Cadigan, ever wrote a "superbly drawn character."

Speaks someone who hasn't read any Melissa Scott.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:50 PM on March 7, 2022

I would argue that no cyberpunk author, with the possible exception of Pat Cadigan, ever wrote a "superbly drawn character." That's not really what they are there for. Which is why I suggested Sinisalo, Kiernan, and Crowley, who do draw characters finely (at least in the works suggested).

Remember Bettelheim's account of 'Joey, the electromechanical boy', who could only function when he was plugged in, or otherwise part of a machine?

During the weeks in which Joey made the drawing of the hen electric, Bettelheim tells us that “he behaved more and more like an excited hen, flapping his arms like wings, stuttering and cackling, fluttering about as if he were trying to take off and fly” (325). Finally, the day of his rebirth had come:

On this day his cackling, flapping of wings, and his stuttering reached a paroxysm. Suddenly he became very still and crawled under a table over which he had draped blankets so that he was entirely hidden beneath them. There, by his own statement, he gave birth to an egg out of which he pecked his way newborn, into the world. “I laid myself as an egg, hatched myself, and gave birth to me.” (325)

To describe the event, Joey writes a riddle whose culminating sentence reads, “A hen is living” (325). Bettelheim insists on his easy humanist narrative however, writing on the same page:

Obviously he had feared all along that in the process . . . the life-bearing hen that carried Joey might die. That was one of the reasons he had waited so long, testing us out. When at last he felt sure that the egg would not be destroyed . . . he broke through and came into this world. He was not longer a mechanical contrivance but a human child. (325; my italics)

And thus, with a subtle tip of his hat to himself and the counsellors at the School, the disturbed boy emerges into a properly anthropomorphic self.

I wonder, however, if this insistence on the starkly moralized myth of man and machine does not discount the singularity of Joey’s story as well as the unique means by which he was able to effect his remarkable rebirth and recovery. Where Bettelheim seeks to impose a narrative of orthogenesis, I see instead a tale of heterogenesis. Joey’s regeneration does not simply result from the solicitude of his human caretakers, but passes through a host of animal, technical, and hybrid others that animate and enrich his new coming-to-life. Even Bettelheim himself was, according to Joey, “a chicken who laid an egg” (321). Instead of embracing this extraordinary and imaginative kinship, however, Bettelheim grants himself the right and the authority to choose a more familiar, more appropriate, and, to my mind, more impoverished, designation for this newborn child.

Kid was a prophet among prophets and a truly mind-boggling intellect as well as an exemplar and harbinger of generations to come.

"Character" isn’t what it used to be, and never will be again.
posted by jamjam at 6:02 PM on March 7, 2022

In short, Joey was the true 'Starchild' of Kubrick's 2001.
posted by jamjam at 6:06 PM on March 7, 2022