Giovanni
I did have some moments when my resolve faltered, but overall this book met my "made-me-think, would re-read-if-I-had-the-time" criteria for 4⭐️. Chilling descriptions of addiction and depression. Loved the irony/sarcasm, and the prose (albeit often showy). Occasional sexism, racism, ableism etc, not always ascribable to the characters. Erudite, encyclopedic. Learned of many online resources about the book, at least one podcast and an entire community of enthusiasts.
Tough, complex read (and listen). Takes a while to get oriented. Reminded me of a piece of contemporary music, where you are allowed to follow for a while but then plunged back into a confusion of fragments. Some of this confusion is deliberate (for example, the use of the same name for multiple characters, or the name change in another). Will need a second read! Faulkner wants you do so some work too. How nice when a book (or, for that matter, a poem, music, movie, dinner, painting) makes an impression that stays with you for days!
It’s a marvel of adulthood to realize that when you strip away all the years and all the learning, much of who you are was there from the start.
I loved the description of the teenager's excitement and infatuation with coding, its addictive nature well visualized with the slot-machine metaphor. The audiobook made me appreciate professional narrators (which Wheaton is not).
A microscopic examination of a criminal act through multiple prisms, including the victims'. Then, almost as an afterthought, similar acts are described with less and less detail, 'zooming-out' and showing how a one-sentence summary of a crime often can be accurate and – at the same time – a colossal oversimplification. Masterful.
Fragmented by nature, sometimes heavy with little solace. Now when I feel down I can say with Pessoa: “Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me; everything jades me, whether or not it ever existed. I don't want to have my soul and don't want to renounce it. I want what I don't want and renounce what I don't have. I can't be nothing nor be everything: I'm the bridge between what I don't have and what I don't want.”
For the first third of this book I remember thinking ‘if I wanted to read meandering prose, I would have re-read Proust', and for the last third: ‘... and now? this seems anticlimactic', but that middle third is harrowing and haunting. This chilling description of the walk to the meeting point will stay with me:
The closer we came to it, the more often did small groups of people carrying and dragging their heavy burdens emerge from the darkness, moving laboriously towards the same place through the snow, which was falling more thickly now, so that gradually a caravan strung out over a long distance formed, and it was with this caravan that we reached the Trade Fair entrance, faintly illuminated by a single electric lightbulb, towards seven in the morning.
Ultimately you realize how it all fits together. Masterful.
paraphrasing Einstein, I declare that time must slow down under the pull of complex physics.
paraphrasing Heisenberg, i hereby declare that you cannot explain complex concepts concisely and clearly at the same time.
Maybe if you know these topics reasonably well you can enjoy a cursory review in a 6-hour stroll (which is what happened to me for the concepts I was already familiar with), but if you want to understand them for the first (or second) time, a ‘brief history' won't do. You end up reading paragraphs like this, shrugging, and moving on:
Four years later, a possible solution, called “supergravity,” was suggested. The idea was to combine the spin-2 particle called the graviton, which carries the gravitational force, with certain other particles of spin 3/2, 1, ½, and 0. In a sense, all these particles could then be regarded as different aspects of the same “superparticle,” thus unifying the matter particles with spin ½ and 3/2 with the force-carrying particles of spin 0, 1, and 2. The virtual particle/antiparticle pairs of spin ½ and 3/2 would have negative energy, and so would tend to cancel out the positive energy of the spin 2, 1, and 0 virtual pairs. This would cause many of the possible infinities to cancel out, but it was suspected that some infinities might still remain.
“Well, what should I read?” you say. I recommend Carroll, Susskind, Great Courses, biographies of Einstein, Dirac, von Neumann, Feynman. “But it takes time!” you object. Well, QED
