November Review
🟡 The Yellow Wall-Paper:
The Yellow Wall-Paper is a horror short story by Charlotte Stetson. It is a quick ten-page read, I recommend it to everyone. A woman married to a physician is suffering from depression. Her Husband, John, takes her to a house away from the urban world in hopes that she can get some rest and feel better. They stay in the nursery room with yellow wallpaper on one of the walls. The narrator hates the wallpaper, there is no symmetry in the patterns. The lines are too messy, but they change under different lights depending on the angle of the sun. The pattern is completely different under moonlight or even candlelight.
She grows fond of the wallpaper and starts spending most of her nights trying to inspect it, to figure it out. She starts to make out several patterns contained within it. She sees bulging eyes and heads. She sees bars and a person stuck behind the bars. The woman stuck in the wallpaper can sometimes get out, and the protagonist sees her creep around the house. She slowly starts to descend into madness. At some point, all she cares about is the wallpaper.
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🐻 Sea of Tranquility:
This time travel saga follows a unique cast of characters across 4 centuries. All these people are connected through an anomaly in space-time. The name of the book comes from what these characters experience; Tranquility. They go into a “trance” and see an old man playing violin music in an airport. The main character is a time traveler from the future who travels back to find out who this old man is and fix this anomaly.
This book was published earlier this year so, naturally, it deals with the biggest issue of the past some years. In each timeline, there is a pandemic and in each timeline, we do not deal with it well. We keep repeating the same mistakes. The simulation argument is another theme of the book. Are we inside a simulation project by some super-advanced alien species? I think we could never really know by ourselves. There is not much difference between actual reality and a really well-constructed one.
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🎮 Ready Player One:
Ready player one is set in a future world where everything can go wrong, does go wrong. The world is a dystopia. There are multiple nations at war, an energy crisis, a food crisis, and a dozen other things. The whole world spends most of its time immersed in a virtual reality game called OASIS, escaping the terrible reality.
James Halliday was the video game designer who mostly programmed the OASIS. In the first act of the book he is revealed to be dead, and he has no heir. He knew he had no heir, so he left an easter egg in OASIS, and the first person to discover this will get his fortune, which is around a quarter of a trillion dollars. The players that are involved in this quest are called Gunters (as in egg-hunters). Wade Watts and his online friend Aech are among the best Gunters in the world, locked in a quest to find Halliday’s egg.
I think the best thing about this book is the virtual reality world-building. The OASIS is such a treat. It is designed so flawlessly that it is indistinguishable from the real world. There are gloves and suits that can simulate the sensation of smell, taste, and touch on your real body as you interact with objects in the game.
