I had to stop the audio book. I just couldnt get into it. Perhaps the pacing doesnt work for an audio book and and reading it will be better. Or maybe it’s just a slow patch.
Like. I’d listen for an hour, and that wouldnt even finish one conversation.
Based on a ton of recommendations, I’ll try the reading version at some point, but my backlog there is pretty long.
It’s definitely dense. I wouldn’t feel bad if it’s one of those books you finish a little at a time over a long time as you read other things.
Theres a version on Audible which is narrated by his son. I think that really added something for me. His delivery was amazing. Theres parts where I was hanging on every word.
A Burning: A novel by Megha Majumdar
A well written debut novel about modern India and the injustices of the justice system
Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America
I thought I was going to enjoy this but I didn’t. The beginning third of the book is a history of Chinese cuisine which I thought fair enough it’s creating a baseline. The next third is the colonial history of China and America, which ok it needs to be in the book and it’s setting up the interchange, but we’re running out of book here. The last third quickly skims over the last 200 years of history. It never really gets down into detail about how Chinese cuisine interacted with American cuisine, like what did Chinese cooks do when they couldn’t find ingredients? Modern Chinese restaurants are, though transference kind of denigrated as places where Americans expect cheap food. Which is true enough, but what about the owners of these restaurants? What are their hopes? How do they see their role in America? What are their stories? It kind of skips over all that. Really any kind of interaction of America which Chinese food is seen as denigrating the pureness of Chinese cuisine.
Interesting tid bits. I had no idea what chop suey was outside of that System of a Down song. Turns out it was just stir fry. General Tao’s Chicken was invented somewhere from the 50’s to the 70’s.
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
Book about the reserve police force and their role in the mass executions in Poland and eventually the round up and leading Jews to the death camps. The conclusions were to be expected but also a bit unexpected. The general atmosphere was that the police initially didn’t want to do the round ups and mass executions, but once done then additional killings became common place.
The more opportunities given to people to not join in the less people wanted to do the killings. The first mass execution the leaders gave the option to any policeman who didn’t want to participate to leave. Very few people did. Those who remains felt worse about their actions. As as opposed to later when they were not given the option of leaving, then more people participated and more people felt better about doing it. Also the more direct killing the more people were reluctant to do the killing. Eventually the leadership got some Polish convicts to do the actual killing and then the German supervisors didn’t mind so much.
The overall hypothesis from the book is that there something like a 20/70/10 split in the population with regards to mass execution of civilians. Occupation, education, previous experience didn’t play too much of a role. With 20% really getting into the killing. Like a bit too much, the other 80% of the people tried to avoid them and didn’t really like them, then there’s 70% of people who didn’t really like doing it, but did it, but also loafed around and avoided assignments when not threatened to do them, but also didn’t go out their way to not do them. Then there’s 10% of people whose moral compass wouldn’t allow them to participate. Incredibly the German leaders generally protected these 10% from retribution for the other 90%, until some random psycho would get promoted into leadership then they wouldn’t.
A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
Speaking of Mormons in stories. This is about a Mormon who gets sentenced to Hell for being a part of the wrong religion and the only way to escape Hell is to find the book that perfectly describes his life in an never ending library.
I enjoyed this a bit. Not too much but it had enough to chew on about life, love, the meaning and purpose in life when there is no hope out of infinity and it’s a brisk book.
The Art of Agile Development 2nd Edition
by James Shore & Shane Warden
Our official methodology is waterfall, but we’re in a not very technological and behind the times environment like nearly all hospitals, but they’re rolling out Jira and there’s some talk about changing methodologies. I enjoyed reading it and I’d be curious to watch a sprint happen in the way it’s explained, especially in a physical space as opposed to all remote as it sounds so different from how we do things.
Wasteland The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror By W. Scott Poole
Kind of what is says, it talks about the newly original and terrifying horrors of the first war and pairs it along the burgeoning horror genres and shows how one affected the other. Some are very obvious, some he doesn’t quite prove his theisis as some people have been writing horror and specifically the types of horror he mentions before WW1 and other times we extends himself too much, but over it was a good book. It’s a good survey of art in the 1910-1940 and it introduced me to artists I didn’t know.
Second this recommendation of the Samurai film trilogy, staring who else but the inimitableToshiro Mifune in the lead role as Musashi. An excellent adaptation of the novel.
Spectrum Women: Walking to the Beat of Autism
I got this hoping to get some advice for my son, but unfortunately it’s mostly for older people in 20’s to 60’s. Nothing really much about kids or teenagers. It’s also very heavily into the women side of it so there are chapters about menopause and elder care. Not exactly helping. Also throughout the book is a bunch of self affirmation, rah rah, material which might be useful if I were an older woman with autism reading the book, but I wasn’t so I couldn’t make it all the way though.
Drunk Mom: A Memoir by Jowita Bydlowska
Girl Walks Out of a Bar: A Memoir by Lisa F. Smith
Listened to the audio books of both of there. Stories about normal people overcoming addition is interesting to me, and I guess to a lot of other people as well because there are a TON of these kind of high powered women / new mom who’s addicted stories. Neither one of these stand out in any way except for Drunk Mom author seems to be an obnoxiously terrible person. Not in a charismatic you love me but I do dumb things kind of way, just absolutely seems like a terrible person to be around. Apparently the reviewers thought so too and she doesn’t come off good in articles that other people have written where she’s involved either.
I quickly Googled this book and found numerous bad reviews plus one instance of effusive praise from … Lena Dunham. Lol.
Used my 2 month of free audible and listened to “Blood of Elves” from the witcher series. Is it just me or was only a part of this in season 2 of the series? Nevertheless I probably got the book done quicker than if I had to rely on reading. Also helped falling asleep so I had to rewind several times once I realized I already dozed off.
Most of the way through 36 hour audible of the 1000 page volume 1 (1878-1928) of Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Stalin (3rd and final volume set for 2024).
It’s a very impressive and detailed work, probably the definitive Stalin biography. It’s perhaps better in print to keep the names straight, but audible is fine. If you listened to 90ish episode Revolutions podcast on the Russian Revolution, this is somewhat like the more detailed version of that, with a lot of interesting information about the broader context of events.
The overall impression of Stalin is as quite smart and, more importantly, a doer/implementer who believed strongly in the “scientific” truth of the Marxist cause. If the party needed difficult things done Stalin was often the go to guy. The approaching utopia and inerrancy of Leninism would justify whatever approach was adopted.
Of course the broader context, like most Russian history, is a mixture of tragedy and farce, where people with bad ideas work hard to implement them in a bad system (despotic monarchy turns into to despotic bolshevism) with resulting general misery. It’s especially amusing how the party prohibited “factionalism”, which essentially banned dissent. Their triumph was as much squashing every other leftist and liberal group as defeating the monarchists. Peasants often intentionally got the short straw as the Bolsheviks focused on more industrial workers.
There’s quite a bit of focus on internal party dynamics, which can be interesting as it clarifies a lot of commonly held misconceptions advanced by Trotsky who supplied often misleading commentary on Stalin.
I’ll probably move on to volume 2, as Kotkin is very good writer and this is solid history. It could be half as long, but then it wouldn’t be as authoritative as it is.
For more general treatments, Kotkin has many quite good lectures and interviews on YouTube.
Here’s a random lecture about the book https://youtu.be/uFcb50HUNvE
I finished Lonesome Dove, which I swear has been on my to read list for 20 years. Shame I took so long, loved it and flew through it. My dad passed a long time ago, he loved western novels. I kept wondering if he had read it and wished I could talk with him about it.
It’s one of four in a series. All are great.
I finally read the Iliad. I read the Odyssey way back in the day, but never got around to the Iliad.
I would feel like an idiot giving it a 0-10 rating, like I did for some books in an earlier post, so I’ll just ask—was it worth it? Yes, but it was a slog in places. It’s pretty long, and sometimes it drags.
The first big hurdle is in Book II, where he gives the Catalog of Ships. This lists all the main ships/groups of soldiers and goes on forever. My translation (Lattimore) has an index that lists every proper name, and at first I dutifully looked up every single name and location. Around that time I picked up A Companion to the Iliad (Willcock), keyed to the Lattimore translation. I discovered that some names are only mentioned once, or maybe just a couple times, and have no bearing at all on the story. After a while, I stopped looking up every name and city mentioned, and only cared if it was an important character.
Lattimore has his own fancy spellings, for example Achilles is Achilleus. Ajax is Aias. This was pretty distracting at first (“where the fuck is Ajax, I though he was in this book”).
Lots of people have three or more names, for example Achilleus is Aiakades (descendent of Aiakos), “son of Peleus,” and I think another name or two that I am forgetting. The Greeks also go by Achaians, Argives, and some other names. Plus there are lots of subgroups. The gods all have at least two names, and other epithets. E.g. Apollo is sometimes called Phoibos, and sometimes “he who strikes from afar,” plus a couple other things. Once you get all that shit sorted out, the reading goes faster. It still can get tedious.
You have to pick a translation, of course. I went with Lattimore as it seemed to be a good mix of simple classic language, while also preserving mood and tone. It’s kind of a bummer reading a translation though, as you are not learning the language of the Iliad directly, but rather some modern person’s view on what the words mean.
Just to take an example from Book 17, lines 424-5 (Lattimore):
So they fought on, and the iron tumult
Went up into the brazen sky through the barren bright air.
I liked this line, but that’s just Lattimore’s translation. I found a Samuel Butler translation online that said:
They fought and fought, and an iron clank rose through the void air to the brazen vault of heaven.
Or later in Book 17, this line 645-7 is apparently kind of famous (Lattimore):
“Father Zeus, draw free from the mist the sons of the Achaians,
make bright the air, and give sight back to our eyes; in shining
daylight destroy us, if to destroy us now be your pleasure.”
Then Butler translates the same lines:
“O father Jove, lift this cloud from over the sons of the Achaeans; make heaven serene, and let us see; if you will that we perish, let us fall at any rate by daylight.”
So it’s pointless to get too hung up on exact wording.
Then you’re left with the plot. There are lots of back and forth battle scenes, with explicit gore. Spears entering through the jaw, brains and guts spilling out, that type of thing. Achilleus hems and haws like a bitch for most of the story. The gods are constantly squabbling and interfering for one side or the other. Lots of speeches. The metaphors/similes are a big thing—many comparisons to a tiger stalking his prey, attacks unfolding like a storm coming in, etc.
I am glad to have finished it; don’t think I would re-read, unless maybe after I retire.
Just finished Ancillary Justice in audiobook.
Absolutely loved it.
In part because of the amazing reading by Adjoa Andoh. Shes in Bridgerton, the Witcher and about a million other things.
Whole range of voices and accents, with the choice of accents being editorially amazing. A bunch of racist aliens (or future people) with south african accents… so good.
Decent plot. Innovative. And the whole no gender thing was done very well.
Why did you put it down?
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
A book that’s mentioned in the Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror that I had read or at least attempted to read. It’s considered one of the great novels of the century and in parts it’s really good especially the parts of WW 1 but it’s also an aburdist novel without stakes or cohesive narrative thread throughout the book so about half way through it became a slog that I couldn’t get through.
I could see how someone else enjoyed the book but it wasn’t for me. I may give it a try at another time.
The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber and David Wengrow
An anthropologist and an archeologist mostly examine prehistory. It’s like something Stephen Pinker could do if he weren’t a psychologist who just made stuff up that he thought sounded good and instead reviewed empirical evidence. Paints a much more complicated picture of prehistory than most other examinations directed at a general audience.
Sounds good. Adding to the backlog.
I dont agree with the Pinkner hate.
The book massively changed how people think about violence and brought some of these discussions main stream.
The fact that it has a bunch of holes and oversimplifications doesn’t take away from that. These broad sweep of history books always have a bunch of gaps.
I put thinking fast and slow in the same category.
Thinking Fast and Slow is awesome. I wasn’t surprised by much in it, but still awesome.
Large parts of it are completely wrong. Many of the studies in it are of the type that are getting smashed by the reproducibility crisis in social sciences and psychology.
Things can sound good and just be full of wrong. When someone does a broad survey of something you assume that they have a grasp on the details and trust them. He’s a good and convincing writer, but if his grasp of the details isn’t great and/or you don’t trust his presentation you can be misled.