George D
Tony Judt dictated this book while suffering from ALS, a disease that causes you to slowly lose all motor function until eventually death with no impact on your ability to think and feel. A tragic, unique, and profound perspective to look back on a life.
He knows how to pick and choose snapshots from his past that both capture that era as well as providing context on the state of the world and how it differs to today.
I love a good book on the beautiful moments found in a memory from a writer who knows how to write. There is no way anyone reading the final lines of the book isn't feeling something.
A brilliant analysis of the socio-political elements of art and how the art establishment tacitly endorses them. An easy read, and helped me appreciate art on a whole other level.
My first impression of his last essay on publicity was that it's a little dated, then I thought of the facial expression of Balenciaga models and realised how wrong I was. It's outrageously easy to draw a link from the 1552 painting “The Ambassadors” and any Balenciaga model posing for the camera.
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Have to mention, the formatting of this book is proper bonkers. I assume there was a better edition of this book at some point because this paperback is so bad it actually gets kind of funny. Every example image is an oil painting reprinted in fuzzy black and white and the typeface used is all over the place throughout the whole book.
A thoroughly entertaining pulp novel.
Half farce, half noir, set in a lovingly detailed Kuala Lumpur that perfectly captures its eclectic mix of religions, races, and politics.
None of the social commentary ever feels like social commentary, instead it's all just fuel for a - sometimes silly, sometimes tragic - tale of wrong identities, corrupt cops, sleazy back alleys, and heists gone wrong.
Very fun.
Set on the estate of Blandings and full of inept uncles, aggressive aunts, bungled marriage proposals and impersonations on top of impersonations, this is PG Wodehouse doing what PG Wodehouse does. As always his ability to turn every second sentence into a work of comedic art is unmatched.
Halfway through I realised this was a plot that would last as long as he felt like it lasting, each time a character seems like they've resolved it all he just has a silly new misunderstanding crop up to keep the story going, the plot means nothing but the writing and characters are so fun it's impossible to care.
A great read, I'm biased due to my love of Stoner but this stands on its own as a completely different sort of novel. Having said that you don't have to squint much to see themes connecting the two.
Never realised how important Augustus was. I'm an idiot! He was the most important one! More than Julius Caesar! My entire view of history has been irrevocably altered!
Love when a book does that.
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A warning for anyone considering this book, for the love of all the Roman Gods, don't listen to this on the Audible audiobook. A great example of the wrong reader almost ruining a great book. Epistolary format is hard at the best times via audiobook, but this was especially bad. The reader managed to take this format - specifically designed to capture a broad range of voices and perspectives - and reduce it down to one voice that didn't suit any of them.
I switched very quickly to physically reading the book and then things were mostly great, the voice still lingered occasionally whispering the words as I read them and ruining them, but it was manageable.
If there is disappointment it's because I hold all Zweig's works in such high regard, I had hope of this, his one novel, being his opus. Instead it is just another of his great works.
I love a novel that has me switching from relating to a character, to finding him the most pathetic person imaginable, to finding that relatable too, to finally his being too much for anyone to relate to. The subject matter is classic Zweig, a humanist look at the complex and often contradictory nature of pity, how a seemingly positive emotion can easily ruin the lives of the people it's meant to be helping. With all the events started by the most insignificant yet understandable social faux pas.
I think the story as a whole could've either been shortened or stayed that length but had the length justified with a little more depth - I would've been happy with the latter for his one and only novel.
I'll be honest, I thought the book was pretty good - the simplistic prose with occasional glimmers of beauty used to capture the bleak emptiness of the world - but then I saw a negative review and was a little won over by it. Maybe I was just fooled by McCartney. Tricked by sparse prose into thinking the book was better than it really was. Hoodwinked into thinking the repetitive plot was very clever even though I didn't get it.
It's definitely possible and I can't shake that feeling, so I have to call this book average.
I'll tackle Blood Meridian one day, from some glances at it I think that one is much more undeniable in its brilliance.
Me while reading: “Didn't expect such a scathing example of the casual bigotry of foreigners towards natives.”
Me after learning a little more about Waugh: “Oh that wasn't the satire part.”
A lot more silly fun than I expected, the fake out in the first chapter sets the tone for the rest of the story. It's definitely of its time but the satirical view of journalism is genuinely hilarious and evergreen.
I was expecting a remix of the same old tips (using tech to force time off tech/sleeping right/planned sabbaticals) in the hope that they would get through my thick distraction addled skull this time. And you do get that and it's great, worded very kindly and effectively.
What I didn't expect was to also get a manifesto on the need to revolt against a system that is turning us into the worst version of ourselves. Unable to focus, to parse truth from reality, to learn and grow and work together. I'm won over, I want to add to this revolution. It's the most important and difficult revolution that's ever been needed. A revolution to reclaim our very souls from the demon of distraction, so we can even begin to fix the other issues in our lives.
The best argument he has in the book? Imagine Facebook was designed for humans to be their best selves. It used all its engineers to design an app that brought people together, made them healthier and more caring and in touch with each other, what would that look like? It wouldn't even need to be a major change, just the small design changes that would make us all better people. It wouldn't be much, and it would change the world.
It's so true! It's so little and it would make the world a better place! It's completely outrageous it's not that! We've been duped!
A story about two couples and their friendship over the years. There are trials and tribulations - tragic sickness, dreams dashed, lives unlived - but the real life kind rather than the overly dramatic kind.
Turns out, when captured perfectly, regular friendships with regular difficulties become beautifully poignant and profound.
This book was more of The Martian, if you didn't like that you won't like this. Still the same enjoyably nerdy sci-fi mixed with simplistic characters and humour.
I have to talk about the ending though. I love when I get the feeling an ending might reflect more of the authors own psyche than they may have intended. In this case, I think Andy Weir doesn't know he wrote a profoundly human tragedy.
SPOILERS BELOW
The ending has Grace living on an alien planet after apparently growing as a person by giving up his life to save someone, showing that he has learned the value of friendship and connection. Sure he is suffering physically from the high gravity and he only has a small barren dome to call home, but he is happy.
Sure, yes, on a superficial level that all seems to work.
But scratch a tiny bit deeper and that's not the ending at all, the ending of the book is really Grace so scared of human connection he is happy to slowly kill himself over many years on a barren alien planet - his only company another species - if it means he never has to interact with anyone except through thick glass. He never has to risk being known, or understood, he's safe from judgement or danger. Safe from anyone questioning him and his beliefs.
And the best part is, the whole situation is framed in a positive way.
That's a great ending, intentional or not.
I respect this book more than I love it. It's a fresh take on the fantasy genre with extremely vivid settings and characters and some seriously brutal violence. At the same time, it never really hooked me and by the end it didn't feel like the sum was greater than the parts.
I'm sure there's an argument for it being the point but to me it felt like - after the first 200 or so pages - you could put this book down at any time and you'd be taking away as much as someone who read the whole thing.
This is a Dickens 4/5 which is any other authors 6/5.
Big, bold, intentionally meandering, I personally prefer Dickens when the lens is more focussed on one individual but I can still appreciate what he's done here in terms of stretching his craft plus taking on societies ills directly.
Can't believe how little the legal system has changed in 180 years.
A great read that was understandable enough to appreciate how gosh darn fascinating this area of quantum mechanics really is.
In terms of difficulty, there were parts that were easy to get, parts that I got once I went over them a few times, and parts I had to throw up my hands and accept it was out of my reach, luckily those were relatively rare.
Most mindboggling part was the experiment that directly proved the non-locality of the double slit experiment applies to time. As in...like...time travel...has been scientifically proven.
I don't know what to do with that information.
An interesting read about a crazy life, regardless of where the truth ends and the embellishment begins (at one point it almost sounds like he's going to claim being the cause of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty).
At the same time, this feels like a character study of a guy that seems nice and friendly but with a dark and bitter side that he either consciously or unconsciously avoids ever discussing. This is not a book with deep self-reflection or insight, any time it seems like it's getting close to something real he quickly sidesteps and talks about another difficult-yet-ultimately-successful deal.
But still, a lot of fun to read about ye olde days of the entertainment industry, from managing rockstars to traversing Cannes to ushering in a new cultural attitude to chefs.
I hate books that should've been articles, it ends up feeling like someone trying to hit a minimum word count rather than writing from a place of genuine interest.
Would've been a really enjoyable long-form article. It's an interesting topic, looking at how some peoples creative talent can be such a torrent, but that's about as deep as it goes. Plus the entire premise of ‘finding all these similarities between the two artists' starts to feel stretched very quickly. When it's not generic “An artist with a rough childhood!” it's not even similar “They were both brilliant as soon as they started! (apart from Prince who practiced his entire life, released one album to mixed reception, and then made it big)”
It's weird cause you wouldn't think Hornby needs the cash.
It's meant to be the easiest parts of his lectures but it has enough equations included (that I'm sure any physics student would understand in their sleep) to make me need a lie down after attempting to read.
Most likely there's better resources these days for understanding the basics at a simple layman level, which is all I'm interested in.
But I think I almost understand the idea behind the uncertainty principle. That's worth 5 stars on its own.
Yes there are symbolic layers and brilliant remixes of mythic stories, examinations of friendship and nature and loneliness and (I only got this last one from the analysis included at the end of the book) fear of sex, but I gotta say, I did not expect this book to have one of the most modern protagonists in all of fiction.
It took me about 3/4 of the book to see the cleverly concealed narcissism of Victor Frankenstein and then it was all I could see.
His manipulation manifests as a constant state of trauma that makes him conveniently incapable of questioning his own beliefs. He spends the entire book crying genuine tears over the burden he's bearing for the people around him while simultaneously never actually doing anything anyone asks of him - you lose count of how many times he takes a few months off to emotionally recover from the latest terrible event that he is mostly to blame for.
And because he is charming and eloquent and wears his heart on his sleeve - plus constantly suffering depression over the trauma he has endured - he endears himself to everyone while being nothing but a burden on them, dragging them all down before finishing off with himself.
Can't believe I haven't seen more of this type of character.
DNF.
Its a fun time, the world building (especially the Blink network) is fun and there are some good lines, but once the world is built and it's time for the characters and plot to shine there wasn't much hooking me to continue. From some quick scanning of comments on here it seems like that wasn't going to change.
It would be good for a light easy read, just wasn't in the mood.