During university, we had a guest speaker give a lecture on black market economics for an international relations class I was in. The theme of the lecture was how black market economies are so large and cross state lines to such a degree that we are effectively living in a post-state world dominated by illegitimate and dangerous entities (cartels, mafias, cults, whatever you want to call them).

Leaving that lecture, you couldn't help but feel a sense of despair and paranoia. If these illegal criminal organizations are so large and powerful, yet so elusive, what chance do we have at eliminating them?

I couldn't help but think about that lecture while reading this book. Oswaldo Zavala reveals the myth-making language present throughout mainstream media's interpretations of Mexico's so-called narcos and cartels. These interpretations are purposely far away from the reality of drug trafficking to delineate a clear enemy, make this enemy larger than life, and conceal the true nature of this "enemy."

Zavala's literary analysis is helpful to understand how the discourse around narcos has evolved throughout the decades as the War on Drugs progressed, but I found the book to be a bit repetitive in its points by the end.

I was mostly interested in reading the chapter on using specifications via "clojure.spec.alpha," but I ended up reading through the whole book. The part about "reify" in the "Protocols and Datatypes" chapter was particularly relevant for a tool I'm building at work, so it helped a lot to use this book as a reference.

This book is broken up into two stories: Kitchen (the first 2/3 of the book), and Moonlight Shadow (the last 1/3 of the book).

On Kitchen:

I was struggling to connect with the plot or characters for the first half of it. It was only around the point where Yuichi called Mikage that I got invested in the thread of emotions connecting the two. Before then, Yuichi's character was non-existent and Eriko was not in the picture a lot, leaving Mikage to not have anyone to build off of.

Part of the blame lies in the translation, which reads very simplistic and stilted and likely dilutes the nuanced interactions that reveal the emotional connection between Mikage and Yuichi.

Eriko being the pillar of the story was a nice surprise, and I only wish the more questionable transphobic parts surrounding her could've been done away with.

On Moonlight Shadow:

A short tale that tells of how two people deal with grief in their own separate ways, but still manage to converge in the end.

It reminded me a lot of FLCL. A boy and his brother's girlfriend both use each other as a crutch after the brother leaves, and then a mysterious, mystical girl comes to upend their life.