recursion

• There is one trick to successful mental health in this awful, exhausting time: escapist, engrossing fantasy literature.
• Do not try to read contemporary fiction or fiction with a realistic setting.
• Television shows are great, but they’re over in 10 hours, and there are 3,000 hours between now and the end of March.

I also like his pitch for The Power Broker:

My friend/partner/boss is really into Robert Caro, does his stuff count?

The incomplete LBJ biography does not, but “The Power Broker” is about a clever man who rises from nothing to accumulate a vast amount of power in a corrupt political system, doing some stuff in the process that now seems pretty racist, and that sounds like an Orson Scott Card protagonist to me! Not to mention that it’s set in a fanciful, magical city where it was possible for someone to fix the subway, so yeah technically speaking it’s fantasy, go for it.