Margaux
Rivera Garza's prose is gorgeous, atmospheric, dreamy, and unsettling in all the right ways. For the first half of the book, I was completely on board with the weirdness. I kept thinking things would click into place eventually, or at least that I'd understand more as I went on.
The final chapters (really more like vignettes) lost me completely. They're so abstract that I couldn't piece together what was happening or what it all meant. I finished feeling impressed by the writing but also kind of frustrated that it never came together (at least for me). Either something's lost in translation or I just don't understand the symbolism the narrative is trying to convey.
Either way, it's worth reading if you love lyrical prose and don't need a clear plot. If you want things to make sense by the end, maybe skip this one. Otherwise, try to read it in the original Spanish if you're able.
This is the first RF Kuang book I've read, so I came into this without too many expectations aside from the dark academia tag and the hefty reading list attached. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really enjoyed the writing style, which could veer on the pedantic (and would probably come off as pretentious to some).
Having recently left grad school myself, the book's portrayal of academic burnout felt immediately recognizable. Also, reading this closely after Vita Nostra, I was struck by how both works depict knowledge as something you're expected to earn through exhaustion, isolation and self-erasure. Kuang shows this through the everyday grind of scholarship, while Vita Nostra pushes it to a far more surreal and punishing extreme (Btw, if you liked Katabasis, I think you'd also enjoy Vita Nostra).
The book does hammer in a lot of the points it's trying to make, especially with the injustices common in academic institutions (the petty rivalries, the clamor for funding and limited opportunities, and just the general systemic abuses). I mean, Hell is literally a campus. That being said, I did appreciate how exploitation and the abuses stemming from power imbalances were handled. It didn't feel cheap or emotionally manipulative. I think where the book falters is in characterization. Despite having a morally complex protagonist with very confusing and contradictory motivations, many of the characters feel more like vessels for exploring ideas about academia than fully realized people with their own inner lives.
As for the reading list, familiarity with Dante's Inferno would certainly help, but I don't think it's strictly necessary to enjoy the reading experience. Some complementary readings I'd actually recommend are Alice in Wonderland, the first few chapters of Gödel, Escher, Bach (I've never read past Chapter 4 myself), and The Myth of Sisyphus. The connection to Camus is only thematic, but it's one I particularly enjoyed and found worth thinking about after slogging through the last few sections.
Yes, the ending drags a little, but the intellectual journey makes it worth pushing through. There's something cathartic about watching the protagonist grapple with big existential questions as she descends through the courts of hell: What does it mean to truly understand something? Is knowledge worth the cost we pay for it? What keeps us going in the face of suffering? And, in the end, what makes a life worth living? You probably won't find the answers here, but Kuang doesn't pretend to offer easy solutions to questions that have haunted philosophers for millennia. Instead, she offers something perhaps more valuable: a honest exploration of why we keep asking these questions despite knowing they might be unanswerable.
It's an okay read, though nothing exceptional. The book centers on two main arguments:
1. China lagged technologically because it wasn't divided into smaller kingdoms, unlike post-Roman Western Europe.
2. The imperial examination system (Keju) suppressed creativity.
The first point isn't new-many scholars have made similar observations. The second argument, however, is more compelling. Huang provides extensive details about the Keju system and how it strangled innovation. Basically, it became a double-edged sword for the nation's progress. While it ensured a meritocratic bureaucracy by selecting officials based on their mastery of Confucian classics, it also monopolized economic mobility. Success in the exams was virtually the only reliable route to wealth and social standing. So by prioritizing scholarly achievement over practical or technical expertise, the system diverted resources and energy away from fields like commerce, engineering, and science. This stifled the development of alternative career paths that could have spurred technological progress, leaving China at a disadvantage compared to societies that rewarded a broader range of abilities. It's a massive W for China that today, they actively foster innovation through massive investments in research, development, and education, building ecosystems where technical expertise and entrepreneurship thrive.
When discussing recent developments, Huang sticks to mainstream views but peppers his narrative with interesting anecdotes. He seems to view the 1990s-2000s as an ideal period and is entirely critical of Xi Jinping's leadership (which is understandable from a certain point of view). The writing style occasionally resembles that of business consultants, with some sections reading like PowerPoint slides, and that's what really irked me. This came out of an academic press and yet the writing would occassionally devolve into corporate lingo making it feel more like your average pop-business book rather than a scholarly work.
Edit: After some digging, I found out the author is a professor of International Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In hindsight, I should have looked into the author's background before deciding to read the book.
Ilan Pappe on the genocide in Gaza:
‘Even the Nakba, which was an unimaginable catastrophe, does not compare to what we are seeing now – and what we are going to see in the next few months.
We are, in my mind, in the first three months of a period of two years that will witness the worst kind of horrors that Israel can inflict on the Palestinians...
‘We are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there's no doubt about it.
‘This historical project has come to an end and it is a violent end. Such projects usually collapse violently. And thus it is a very dangerous moment for the victims of this project – and the victims are always the Palestinians along with Jews, because Jews are also victims of the Zionism. Thus, the process of collapse is not just a moment of hope, it is also the dawn that will break after the darkness...
‘Collapse like this, however, produces a void. The void appears suddenly; it is a like a wall that is slowly eroded by cracks in it but then it collapses in one short moment. And one has to be ready for such collapses, for the disappearance of a state or a disintegration of a settler colonial project. We saw what happened in the Arab world, when the chaos of the void was not filled by any constructive and alternative project. In such a case, the chaos continues.
‘One thing is clear: whoever thinks about the alternative to the Zionist state should not look [to] Europe or the West for models that would replace the collapsing state. There are much better models which are local and are legacies from the recent and more distant pasts of the Mashraq (the eastern Mediterranean) and the Arab world as a whole. The long Ottoman period has such models and legacies that can help us taking ideas from the past to look into the future.
‘These models can help us build a very different kind of society that respects collective identities as well as individual rights, and is built from scratch as a new kind of model that benefits from learning from the mistakes of decolonialisation in many parts of the world, including in the Arab world and Africa. This hopefully will create a different kind of political entity that would have a huge and positive impact on the Arab world as a whole.'
From https://www.ihrc.org.uk/it-is-dark-before-the-dawn-but-israeli-settler-colonialism-is-at-an-end/
I will be thinking about this book for a long time...
Some of my favorite lines:
She was learning something about grief, that it begins with a great blow, but heals with a thousand tiny strokes.
“We are all dying,” he said. “We just forget that when nothing is trying to kill us.”Tales and memories, however inaccurate, are all we have. The things I have owned, the people I have loved—these are all just ink in notebooks that my mind stores in trunks and takes out when it is bored or lonely. It is necessary to keep track of things [...] It is the recording of things, in our memories if nowhere else, that makes them real.
My first 5-star book of the year! Factory Girls is a powerful and eye-opening account of the lives of migrant workers in modern-day China. Written in 2008, the book provides a unique perspective on the experiences of young women who have left their rural homes in search of better opportunities in the cities. Through interviews and personal observations, the book delves into the challenges these women faced during China's period of hypergrowth in the early to mid-2000's, contrasting the grueling work conditions and desperate exploitation with ample opportunities for social mobility.
One of the strengths of this book is its humanizing portrayal of the workers, who are often seen as faceless and anonymous in the media. Chang brings their stories to life, highlighting their ambitions, hopes, and fears, and demonstrating the incredible resilience and determination they possess while navigating a rapidly changing economic reality.
Despite being written over a decade ago, many of the issues discussed in the book remain relevant today, as exemplified by recent worker protests at Foxconn triggered by the strict enforcement of no-COVID policies at that time.
In addition to its focus on the lives of migrant workers, Factory Girls also explores the author's family history, including her own experiences as a Chinese-American. Although I think this part could have easily been written as a separate book, it still provides a rich and fascinating insight into the experiences of the Chinese diaspora as well as the sufferings borne by those who stayed behind during the Cultural Revolution.
Overall, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary China and the lives of those who are driving its economic boom. It is a well-researched and insightful look on the realities of life for the millions of migrant workers sacrificed on the altar of globalization and serves as a stark reminder of the costs of rapid economic growth.
5 Questions to ask yourself:
1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what's called for is a little discomfort?
James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” ... you usually know, intuitively, whether remaining in a relationship or job would present the kind of challenges that will help you grow as a person (enlargement) or the kind that will cause your soul to shrivel with every passing week (diminishment). Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.
2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
What would you do differently with your time, today, if you knew in your bones that salvation was never coming—that your standards had been unreachable all along, and that you'll therefore never manage to make time for all you hoped you might? ... let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.
3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
The attempt to attain security by justifying your existence, it turns out, was both futile and unnecessary all along. Futile because life will always feel uncertain and out of your control. And unnecessary because, in consequence, there's no point in waiting to live until you've achieved validation from someone or something else.
4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you're doing?
It's easy to spend years treating your life as a dress rehearsal on the rationale that what you're doing, for the time being, is acquiring the skills and experience that will permit you to assume authoritative control of things later on. But I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to date as one of incrementally discovering the truth that there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn't just winging it, all the time.
5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn't care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
... it's worth asking: What actions—what acts of generosity or care for the world, what ambitious schemes or investments in the distant future—might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you could come to terms with never seeing the results?
Excerpts From: Oliver Burkeman. “Four Thousand Weeks.”
This is the best history book I've read in quite some time. Having mostly read history from a Western point of view, reading this gave me a better understanding of world events that have led us to where we are now. And while it is true that “history is written by the victors”, I find it invaluable to have a different perspective in interpreting historical events.
From the very beginning, the book relates a steady stream of epic battles, characters and lessons in world history, taking care to place all in their proper context. It offers a sweeping view of events from the time of the prophet Muhammad through the fall of the Ottoman Empire, to the crushing defeat of the Six Day War and beyond. It contends that far from a “clash of civilizations” that has raged on and off since the Crusades, today's conflicts and those of the past are “better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting.”
The author is Afghan-American so while he doesn't condone the atrocities wrought by various radicals and religious extremists, he does situate it in a much broader historical and societal context. He is no apologist either and the book doesn't shy away from the darker side of Islamic history, down to the bloody infightings that have plagued Islam ever since its foundation.
Simply put, this book is an essential part of any attempt to understand the movements and events behind the modern-day hostilities shaking Western and Islamic societies and I highly recommend it to everyone interested in broadening their knowledge of the world.
“How sad that youth, with all its power,Was given us in vain, to burn;That we betrayed it every hour;And were deceived by it in turn;That all our finest aspirations,Our brightest dreams and inspirations,Have withered with each passing dayLike leaves dank autumn rots away.It's hard to face a long successionOf dinners stretching out of sight,To look at life as at a rite,And trail the seemly crowd's procession—Indifferent to the views they hold,And to their passions ever cold.”
(Chapter 8, XI)
I enjoyed this for the beautiful language, but sadly found the character development quite lacking. In the end, I did not feel like I knew the characters at all which kept me disengaged from the story.
The novel is divided into five sections and told through three separate narratives. One thread is told through the point of view of Daniel–the grieving father of twins Lucy and Levi. His wife died after giving birth to their children. In the beginning, we follow Lucy after having left home due to some mysterious circumstances. She has newly arrived in Vancouver where she runs into several enigmatic characters and ends up working as an assistant to the owner of The Holy Circus which showcases bizarre acts that couldn't easily be explained by reason or science. In the latter half, we meet her twin Levi as he navigates his new life as an art student in Montreal and as he deals with the sudden disappearance of his sister. All this is interspersed with Daniel's letters to his wife through time as he mourns for her death while single-handedly raising their children. So while Lucy's story is the driving force keeping the narrative forward, in the end I found that I empathized more with Daniel which is probably because his part of the story is told through first person, thus giving us more access to his thoughts and motivations.
While I get that this is a novel based on a well-known myth and some elements of fairy tale—that things don't really have to be explained or even to make sense, I think too much stuff have been left unexplored. I'm not just referring to the (supposedly) supernatural stuff that happens in the novel but also the relationship between Lucy and Levi and to a lesser extent, that between Lucy and Phineas, the mysterious owner of the circus who seems to know more about Lucy and her personal struggles than a typical boss might. We do find some answers in the end but I still I feel like I'm missing a whole lot, just thinking about it. I just wish that the story has been given more room to unfold so we could get to know the characters and their backstories better.
Nonetheless, I'm giving it a solid three stars for the poetic prose and the creative use of mythical/supernatural themes. Recommended for those who enjoy fragmented narratives told through beautifully restrained language.
As with any collection, this one's a mixed bag. While the stories cover a range of themes—mostly dealing with the struggles faced by black women in America—some of them are dealt with in quite a heavy-handed way. The latter ones epecially, read like non-fiction that I'll often forget I'm reading from a fictional character's point of view (and I'm not talking about the one originally written as an introduction in Ms. Magazine). I guess the author has a very strong voice, to the point where I conflate her with her characters.
There were a few standouts though (again, in my own opinion). Nineteen Fifty-five, the opening story deals with the commercial exploitation faced by black musicians and was supposedly inspired by the life of Elvis Presley and Big Mama Thornton. While How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State?... is an unnerving revenge story dealing with abuse. Another of my favorites in this volume is The Abortion which was a visceral examination of the hard choices women make about their own bodies. I also particularly like the last story, Source which is about a lifelong friendship between two women who deal with race in very different ways.
Overall, I'm glad that I've read this collection. It is an important work and is especially relevant to the current political landscape in America. I just couldn't distinguish between Ms. Walker and her characters which is a probably a failure of my own imagination as much as hers.
Probably a 2.5 but upgrading because I agree with her views on library funding and the welfare state in general. Her essays about growing up in poverty were also quite touching. Plus, Moran is a very very funny woman, though some of the essays sometimes border on the silly side. Good thing I listened to this on audio so I was only half-listening when she writes about fish or the royal wedding or British politics (of which I know nothing about). Still a very enjoyable read if you get her brand of humor.
I enjoyed the first two parts of this book but was rather disappointed by the underwhelming ending. The setting is very vivid, with the scenic location really setting the tone of the story. Some parts are also quite unexpectedly funny, although the narrative lost its focus and the latter part of the book felt quite disjointed. Still quite an easy and enjoyable read if you're interested in the time period discussed and if you want to read about the importance of intellectual freedom and the potency of literature.