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Just finished and still mulling it over. On the whole I enjoyed it a lot. It was helped by listening to the author's narration; at several points you could tell he was getting emotional and that added to the impact of his words. It's just a pity that he veered off into gender politics in the Rule 11 chapter—Do Not Bother Children when they are Skateboarding. It's not that I don't disagree with him, it's that it seemed to stand out as not quite in keeping with the chapter heading and he was just looking for somewhere to slot in his views. It didn't quite fit. I did, as a former skater, enjoy listening to him describing the street skating around Toronto or wherever it was!
The highest impact moment for me was in Rule 7—Pursue what is Meaningful (Not what is Expedient). It moved me to tears and prompted me to send a screenshot to a friend that I think would get a lot of out of this chapter if not the whole book.
This is probably the book I've got the most highlights in this year. So much stood out to me as being meaningful and worth returning to. His adherence to the bible fits with my current worldview and philosophy, as too does his love of Dostoyevsky. As for Solzhenitsyn, I've had Gulag Archipelago on my TBR for a while now and have bumped it up for a definite read in 2025. I have the nice hardcover anniversary edition.
The more anecdotal parts of the book really helped to keep me engaged, like when he talked about his friend Chris (RIP) or went through the horrific story of his daughter's health issues.
Will I follow up with Beyond Order? Honestly, I feel like diving straight in to keep it going, otherwise it'll slip down the TBR and possibly right off the bottom.
And now I'm off to read some more reviews to learn why I'm wrong. Ha ha.
Contains spoilers
I'm pretty sure I read the full sequence as a kid, though I really only remember the titular Dark is Rising. That's the book that brought me back to this adult reread, but I figured I'd start with the first book. I have to say I enjoyed it more than I expected to. Sometimes childhood loves don't hold up well—I'm looking at you, David Eddings!—but in the case of this opening novel to the sequence, it really does. There are strong vibes and a sense that this book knows what it is.
And what is that?
I'd say that England is the vibiest part of the book. I know Cornwall pretty well and have visited Mevagissey, the town on which the setting of this book is based, so I had a good time with the location and scenery. The plot was a straight forward grail quest with kids outwitting the baddies in Scooby-Doo fashion. They really would have got away with it had it not been for those pesky kids! They're of a time, when kids weren't helicoptered as they are now. I can just imagine modern parents' horror as the characters set off around a headland at low tide to seek out a grail in a cave in nothing but shorts and sandals.
Character development was thin, with the possible exception of Barney, the youngest of the three siblings. Plot development was fast and also thin, but hey, it's children's literature.
For some reason this book has stayed in my mind since childhood. It makes me think of sitting in the old English block at my high school on a dark, winter afternoon. It's a very vibey book, with a strong sense of Englishness and of winter, particularly Christmas. The family Christmas scenes are very cosy and quintessentially English, perhaps even of southern England. The setting was strongly presented and well written, as was the light vs dark trope.
The characters seem a bit flat and under-developed, even the main character of Will. I'm not sure whether that's simply because this is children's literature and so it moves a lot faster than a more adult fantasy novel would. The plot felt similarly under-developed and fast-paced in a lot of places. Again, maybe because it's for children. We just have to accept things as they are without really being given much of a back story as to how they came to be, although I did enjoy the story arc of the Walker—that was more fleshed out and had a satisfying ending.
I'll be continuing with Greenwitch very soon.
Best of the Elderlings yet. Hobb’s writing and plotting have improved and they were already very good. I didn’t care much for Dutiful and Civil Bresinga in Fool’s Errand, but the way Hobb has developed them here is masterful. So far, the second book of the Elderlings trilogies has been strong and Golden Fool continues that pattern.
The audiobook narration of this is outstanding. I find the sounds of the names going round in my head: Enkidu, Ereshkigal… the narrator really adds a lot to this story.
I’ve read some reviews that say multiple
first-person POV narrators is a terrible idea. I say pfooey to that. Although I did go back and read through the Ninshubar chapters again when I’d got about half-way because I’d got a bit mixed up. That helped.
It’s a fast-paced book and I could easily go back and read it again now. But, instead I’m going to get Snow Crash off the shelf and read the librarian’s infodumps about Enki. That book led me to this one.
I’ll probably go straight into Gilgamesh. Inanna ends on a note with some strong forward motion—not quite a cliffhanger, but it certainly makes me want to continue.
The blurb on the front cover says that 'Jen Stout is very brave, a storyteller of supreme gifts'. (Fergal Keane). It's a perfect description of Jen. She's not fearless, far from it, but she breenges in regardless and takes advantage of every opportunity that comes her way. The writing is very personal and she's sensitive to the plight of the inhabitants of Ukraine. She puts her interviewees at ease with her personality and gets some wonderful responses and some heartbreaking stories.
She describes the friendships she builds with the people she meets in a way that lets us get to know the characters and get a feel for what life is like in these war-torn cities. One of my favourite scenes was of the bakery in Kharkiv.
The thick walls of the old building made it a good shelter. But they also kept the heat in, much better than the thin walls of Tanya's apartment. 'If there's electricity and we can use the ovens, it will be warm inside. I think a lot of people could stay here,' she said. These girls, I thought, really had built a hearth. I was finding warmth and determination all over the place, when what editors expected was fear and despair. This had often been an issue, and I tried to explain that the resilience I described wasn't an individual phenomenon but society-wide. The more Russia attacked Ukrainian society, the less inclined people were to despair. They only got angrier.
Another heartwarming scene was the dancing in the Teatralna metro station in Kyiv. If you look up Jen's website, you can see photos to accompany these stories, including a beautiful shot of a couple dancing in the metro station. Music features a lot in the book—from buskers on the streets to charity gigs and music therapy for children. That makes me happy.
I also loved that she included some Scots language and culture — 'are you, aye?' That bit had me chuckling. (It's a humorous Scots response to someone making a ridiculous statement about themselves). And the reference to the hilarious lift scene in Burnistoun, where the voice-activated lift can't understand a Scotsman shouting out his floor, 'eleven!' How did that make its way to Ukraine?
Jen doesn't shy away from describing some heartbreaking scenes, too. The search for Volodymyr in Kapytolivka was difficult to read but tactfully described. Her trip with the young drone operators was exciting, and the scene where she accidentally hopped into the truck going to the more dangerous city of Siversk instead of waiting for her ride to Chasiv Yar made for an interesting story.
I've come away from reading this book with a sense of hope for Ukraine. Jen perfectly portrays the resilience of the Ukrainian people, and I felt her love for the country blossoming as she got to know it. At one point, she even mentions that she'd considered staying. I hope she goes back and keeps writing her stories to share with us.
Originally posted at youtu.be.
I just finished this one for the second time. I remember enjoying them nearly twenty years ago, around the time my concept of God was evolving. The Wit and the Skill tied in with that nicely.
Here is my favourite part...
The exercise for centering oneself is a simple one. Stop thinking of what you intend to do. Stop thinking of what you have just done. Then, stop thinking that you have stopped thinking of those things. Then you will find the Now, the time that stretches eternal, and is really the only time there is. Then, in that place, you will finally have time to be yourself.
2024 Reread
This dark horror novel is set in Argentina and spans the period from 1960 to 1997. It follows the lives of Gaspar, the main character, and his family as Gaspar comes of age. His father, Juan, will stop at nothing to protect him from the evil clutches of his wife's family, who want to take advantage of Juan and Gaspar's talents of accessing the Darkness to become immortal.
I read the English translation (by Megan McDowell) and thoroughly enjoyed it. The structure moves around, and I never found myself annoyed by the time shifts back and forth.
It has some troubling scenes of violence, particularly of child abuse. The scenes of the children in cages in the dark tunnel under Puerto Reyes were horrific..
If you enjoyed Stephen King's It, you'll probably enjoy this. The part set in Buenos Aires in 1985–1986, in particular, reminded me of the Losers Club from that novel. Fans of Clive Barker would probably enjoy it, too. I felt some vibes of The Great and Secret Show in this in how dark it was.
My YouTube review of this book is here: https://youtu.be/M2GgCPpWEpA
This biography was brought to my attention in a guest post by David Josef Volodzko on Konstantin Kisin's Substack. It had to do with the author's being fired from The Seattle Times for criticizing Lenin. I won't go into the article here—you can go and read it for yourself—but he does cite Service's biography of Lenin, in particular quoting this paragraph: In Lenin: A Biography, Oxford professor of Russian history Robert Service writes that Lenin was an “often unkind” child, abusive and destructive, with “malice in his character.” Service notes, “moral questions for him were an irrelevance,” adding that Lenin was “coldly calculating” and displayed “massive” antisocial behavior. During the Russian famine from 1891 to 1892, Service writes that Lenin showed shocking “emotional detachment.” So that gives some insight into the tone of Volodzko's article, and of Service's biography. A quotation from Molotov is cited in Volodzko's article: People sometimes make the claim that it was Stalin, not Lenin, who was the great evil of Soviet Russia. I like to remind them, as New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Lenin's Tomb, that someone once made a similar comment to the Soviet diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov, one of the few people in history who personally knew both Lenin and Stalin. Molotov replied, “Compared to Lenin, Stalin was a mere lamb.” I'll back this up with another quotation from Robert Service's book: Machiavelli, he confided to Molotov, ‘correctly said that if it is necessary to resort to certain brutalities for the sake of realising a certain political goal, they must be carried out in the most energetic fashion and in the briefest possible time because the masses will not tolerate the prolonged application of brutality'. Chilling. I've been interested in Russian—particularly Soviet—history for a few years now, and have done some reading. But my brain is such that I tend not to retain information very well. It is my hope that writing reviews and making videos for BookTube will help me learn how to read more deeply and retain information better. So, V.I. Lenin. Or Volodya Ulyanov, as he was known to his mum and dad. Obviously, he's the father of the October Revolution in 1917—I'm sure most people know at least that much. But why? And how? Having an interest in learning the answers to those questions is really what drew me to this book. Did it deliver? Well, yes. It absolutely did. The book is split into four parts: One: The Rebel Emerges Two: Lenin and the Party Three: Seizing Power Four: Defence of the Revolution The October Revolution doesn't happen until page 308 of a 494-page, so that gives some idea of just how much detail Service gives us of Lenin's life up to that point. There's lots of detail about his family life, and it plays heavily on the influence of his brother Alexander's death by hanging for his participation in the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander III at the age of 21 (Lenin was 17). We learn a lot about how that affected the family, how they were ostracised by the townspeople of Simbirsk, and led to the family's moving away. There was one section that really stood out to me, which was when Lenin and his entourage were travelling back to Petrograd from Switzerland in 1917 after the fall of Tsar Nicholas II on the famous sealed train. First of all, the notion of the train's being sealed wasn't entirely correct. People were getting on and off at stations to buy supplies—booze and cigarettes, by the sounds of it, with some snacks, I would imagine, because Russians can't drink without their zakuski! Lenin was getting annoyed with the revellers in the next carriage and tried to get them to quieten down, but it didn't work out very well. A couple of standout sections of writing that made me laugh are these ones: The participants, led by Lenin, decided to replace the Foreign Organisational Commission with a Committee of the Foreign Organisation and to empower this new body to hold a party conference. That one made me think of the Judean People's Front scene in Life of Brian. I don't suppose a book about Lenin is supposed to have much humour in it, so it was a welcome reminder. And this one, from p298: In particular, the Congress agreed to drop the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets'. After a lengthy debate about slogans, it was decided to replace it with ‘All Power to the Proletariat Supported by the Poorest Peasantry and the Revolutionary Democracy Organised into Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies'. A clumsier slogan can hardly be imagined. Perhaps his Bolsheviks needed the absent Lenin more than they recognised. Lol, right? It's a slow read, with small text and lots of detail. I felt that I had to take my time over it in order for it to sink in, but I'm not sure how much it did or has. I'd like to go back to the beginning again and read it with the knowledge of the rest of the story, but I think my time would be better spent reading other authors' takes on the same information or adjacent information. Or perhaps if I were to read the same author's biographies of Stalin and Trotsky. Maybe that was Service's goal because this book was light on information on both of those characters. Of course, they are mentioned, but they're given short shrift. Kautsky gets more airtime and I'd never even heard of him. Ah, but Service hasn't written a biography of Kautsky. Ha! The detail of Lenin's health condition was covered in great detail. I suppose a lot of this information is only recently available, so it makes sense. It's actually quite astounding how much work Lenin was able to achieve while dealing with headaches and burnout. He was nothing if not driven. Even after getting shot and being so close to death, he was determined to carry on working as soon as he possibly could. It's also made quite clear just how tenuous the October Revolution really was. It felt like it could have collapsed many, many times. Yes, Lenin was, of course, its architect, but circumstances also played a big part in its longevity. The same could be said about Stalin's succession. If Lenin had lived only six months longer, Soviet history could have been very different. I'm very glad that I read this and I'm tempted to buy my own copy after reading this library copy. I made a video review of this book for my BookTube channel: Lenin: A Biography
What a chilling book. It's superbly well-researched and surprisingly easy to read, given its subject matter. I was led to it after reading Michael Malice's book, The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil.
I'd be fascinated to read another couple of chapters from when the book left off with the events of 2014 and the secession of Crimea.
Just as a point of interest, I spent a year in Odessa in 1995–96 as a student of Russian, and at that time it seemed to be an exclusively Russian-speaking city, albeit with the Ukrainian ‘H' sound replacing the hard Russian ‘G' sound. And the household in which I rented a room from a Ukrainian woman and her son spoke Russian and watched exclusively Russian-language TV. Maybe Ukrainian was more common outside the city.
I had a similar experience when I spent two years in Almaty, Kazakhstan, although I did hear Kazakh more than I heard Ukrainian in Ukraine. I'd be interested to read a book like Red Famine about what went down in Kazakhstan, as it received only short mentions in Red Famine. If anyone knows of any that you can recommend, drop a comment!
It was interesting to read in Red Famine about Gareth Jones' walking trip through Ukraine. Michael Malice mentioned this in an interview I heard him give to either Chris Williamson or Lex Fridman. (I listened to both can can't recall which one it was). In the interview, he talked about a book called Experiences in Russia–1931—credited on Goodreads as being written by Gareth Jones, but it was actually written by the Jack Heinz II mentioned in Red Famine. The full text is available here.
What a story! I was worried I'd find it juvenile as I did Wheel of Time, given that that series seems to be used as means of selling this one. I know the connection, but it's misleading as I enjoyed this immensely and Wheel of Time hardly at all.
One thing to beware of though in the Audible version – highprince Sarrius is also Sadeas. I found it quite confusing. The male narrator was clearly doing that American English thing of turning Ds into Rs, while the female narrator kept them as Ds and moved the stress. There are enough characters to keep track of without having multiple pronunciations of their names!
I've read a lot about Soviet and Russian history. Some of it is dry and challenging. This book is not. It has led to a pile of books appearing on my desk as I have a strong urge to follow up on some of source material.
It's the first book I've read that juxtaposes the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact with what was happening concurrently in the UK and USA; that added a lot of context for me that I hadn't thought about before.
I was born in 1971 in the UK, so I was aware of some of what was going on geopolitically and politically—thanks, largely, to Spitting Image—but I was much more interested in BMX and booze.
I would really have liked for the story to have gone further forward, through Yeltsin's presidency and into Putin's era. Is the white pill still a possibility? I hope Malice is researching for the sequel!
A very well-written book that sets out its themes clearly and backs them up well with citations from other sources. The chapter on Culture was particularly enjoyable.
It will be interesting to look back at this period in history, and I would imagine that anyone who follows Douglas Murray will have similar hopes on how they (we) would like it to go.
This was a bit above my pay grade but I'm glad I persevered through the somewhat boring history sections. I'm here after listening to Hazony's interview on TRIGGERnometry, which I've watched twice and actually transcribed to get a better handle on Hazony's teachings.
I'm 51, married with two teenaged kids, and I'm seeking meaning for my life after 17 years following the teachings of Alcoholics Anonymous. I've never really known who I was, politically speaking, but reading Hazony's book has gone a long way to helping me figure that out. I may follow up by reading some of the source material cited in the last chapter.
I came to this after having heard Lisa on the Rich Roll podcast. I knew from that episode that I was going to enjoy the book, but not quite how much.
Lisa describes the loving and connected human that I wish I were and inspires me to get closer to being that person. I turned 50 a few months ago and have been doing a lot of self reflection around that. It's clear that my disconnection is harming me and my relationships, but I didn't know how to do anything about it.
Depression has featured in my life a few times, and medication has both helped and hindered my recovery. This book outlines not a method for recovery, but a explanation of what can bring about recovery. The big book of Alcoholics Anonymous says that the point is “that we were willing to grow along spiritual lines.” This book explains just how life-changing that willingness can be if one makes changes to allow that growth to happen. And I intend to do just that!
