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Anderson can craft a sentence and a story. He's also great at historical fiction, and this one is quick, funny, and based on historical events. I was raised Catholic and was always weirded out by relics - this book leans into that weirdness.

This is a detailed study of Mobile Image, an artist group that built innovative projects using telecommunications in the 1980s and 1990s. Super detailed account of their experiments with satellite technology, videoconferencing, BBSs.

Most importantly, if you've seen the hullabaloo about the "portal" in NYC, you should know that Mobile Image built that in 1980 - a live, synchronous video connection between LA and NYC. It was called A Hole in Space and there's footage on YouTube.

This is the second of Ishiguro's I've read (the other was Klara and the Sun), and I'm struck with how much his characters love to revel in tedium. In this book, it's done to comedic effect often (since the narrator is obsessed with the details of what makes a "good butler" or what counts as "dignity"). But it then surprisingly dips into a love story and Nazi sympathizers. The book is deep in the weeds of something that seems ridiculous while all of these other more important things are happening around the edges. In the end, it works.

The introduction to my edition says that the third part of this book was initially its own thing, and that makes a lot of sense. The first two parts of the book offer a kind of nest for the last part of the narrative.

An intergenerational story, which seems to be a trend in the 20th Century Japanese fiction I've read. Bleak also...kind of another trend. I have tended to link both of those things to WWII, but this one was published in 1914, so that theory doesn't hold up.