Ti | Book Chatter

It occurred to me that none of you know what happened to me so here’s the sorry update.

On Monday, 7/21 I began to feel just horrible. All over body aches. Pain on one side. I just could not make it through the day.

By Wednesday I was worse, holding my left side and struggling with fevers off and on. Kidney stones. I’ve had surgery for them before so I upped my fluids, by a lot and hoped for the best.

By Friday, just a couple days later I was confined to bed, tossing and turning, could not get comfortable and the fever was back. I knew at this point that I needed a doctor but could not even stand.

I was so irritated because my daughter was coming home in a few days and I had stuff to do!

This pain in my side was DOZENS of stones and a major infection that put me in sepsis. Immediately admitted for surgery and IV antibiotics.

TWO days hospitalized. Get out, get home, implanted device falls out! Hospitalized a second time!! Another surgery!

Today, it is Friday and I was just discharged again. I have to take it super easy so that this device stays in and this infection goes on its merry way. I’m out of sepsis now but still taking antibiotics in pill form.

I’ve lost an entire week. To put some humor on this, at the shift change last night, one of the nurses walked past and did a double take.

“You, again?”

Ha. Sadly, yes.

So that’s where I’v been. Still recovering but alive.

Red Pill
By Hari Kunzru
Vintage, 2021, 304pp.

The Short of It:

Kind of a mind trip.

The Rest of It:

“After receiving a prestigious writing fellowship in Germany, the narrator of Red Pill arrives in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and struggles to accomplish anything at all. Instead of working on the book he has proposed to write, he takes long walks and binge-watches Blue Lives,a violent cop show that becomes weirdly compelling in its bleak, Darwinian view of life. He soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all.” ~ from the publisher

I am not going to mince words, Red Pill was really hard to get into. It meandered and seemed somewhat dreamlike, to me. Our protagonist is, in my opinion, living the dream getting to do what he supposedly loves, writing, but he’s unfocused and unmotivated and on the verge of going astray.

Relegated to an open office concept to do his work in, he finds himself completely unable to write anything. So, he wanders. Past grave sites, believing that happiness cannot be found on earth. He meets Anton. A very eccentric guy and also the creator of Blue Lives, the violent show that our narrator is obsessed with. After a night of drinking and going from one place to another, our narrator is convinced that Anton is red-pilling his viewers to brainwash them with his alt-right views.

Reality? Fabricated? As I reader, I am not quite sure but our narrator loses his mind. Or maybe his mind was gone all along?

This book came out in 2021 but there are a few passages that I screenshot because they speak directly to those of us concerned about a select few reaping the benefits of what should belong to many.

Paragraph from Red Pill talking about the elite.

The times we are living in now, most definitely benefit the HAVES, not the have nots. Every now and then, as I was cruising along in this book, a truth bomb would drop and I’d be like, oh… yeah. Wow. Red Pill is that type of read. It’s not “in your face”, much more subtle. You will have to dig a little to find meaning.

Did I like it? Honestly, at 60% in I decided to let it go. I wasn’t enjoying it but since it’s a book club pick, I pushed through and then it began to pique my interest. So no, I didn’t love it but as a discussion book, there is plenty to discuss.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links.

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