Tom

A return to form after the just-ok second book. Still funny as hell, but surprisingly moving too. The end got me pretty good (though nothing actually happens in case you’re worried I’ve spoiled something, it was just rather lovely).

Giving this a 2.5 because it feels like data and I think that would annoy the author. It started so strong. For the first time since college (long ago) I had to remind myself highlighting everything is the same as highlighting nothing. And then Chapter 2 happened. We went from him trashing capitalism’s effects on humans to him complaining after the French Revolution the fashion got boring. Because they started painting pictures of poor people, dude. There is a whole thing about how tattoos nowadays are pornographic, but they were cool in the Nineteenth Century when rich people got them to indicate membership in a group. If you have a tattoo, this guy doesn’t like you on spec.

Chapters 3 and most of 4 brought it back until, well until the train completely derailed and I kept reading just to argue with him in the margins and amuse myself. PORNOGRAPHICALLY. Like highlighting, you can overuse that word when you apply it to everything. I kept telling myself things were getting lost in translation and I assume the author kept describing things as porn for the strength of the word, but when you seem to completely squicked out about other human beings, I’m not sold. This is a gooner explaining seduction and a second level hobbit paladin explaining the experience of combat.

I’m not trying to dunk on anyone (the forty notes in my Kindle copy were me doing that). This is a person who is smarter than me and far more well-read, but there are blind spots you could fit a bus into sideways. I assume his publishing house has some kind of clean room procedure where no woman was allowed within a mile of the production of this book. And it exists in a world where almost no one, at least after Chapter One, actually has to work even though when it’s going good, this is a book that really pushes on the flaws in what we in the US call capitalism and what the author tends to refer to as neoliberalism, but he and we both know he means US cultural more verbally and rightfully so.

But then he hits you with a contrast of a “ritual society” and I cannot tell if he is unaware or does not care about the amazing problems those tend to have. But he never has to defend his thoughts against antithesis. Whole chapters will have a dozen footnotes and they’re all from some Mr. Ibid he decided to quote at length this time, to the point I kept wondering why I didn’t just read the source material instead. I did make myself smile when one of my notes on how sex and seduction all work simply read, “It would be cool if Mrs Ibid were consulted here.”

And yes, I know how citations work, don’t @ me APA or MLA-style. Let me close with the passage where it went from “this is all quite strange” to “For the first time in a long time, a book just made me physically queasy”

Between hunter and quarry there is a kind of reciprocity, a symmetry. The animal must be killed face-to-face. Before the killing it must be ‘addressed’. An animal must never be killed while asleep. It is asked to wake up. It must also only be wounded in particular places. It is prohibited, for instance, to injure the animal’s eyes, and it thus retains its gaze until the end. Even in the case of hunting, then, there is a reciprocal relationship. The other, after all, is the gaze.

P.S. It pisses me off to realize your man is totally right and to some extent I stuck around just to write bile on the Internet about it instead of sitting with myself and figuring out what that was all about.

A lovely overview of the subject, my only complaint was as an amateur really interested in language I would have loved more of the How, but the bibliography will get me there. And, like the best non-fiction, the book is about more than just its stated subject which is a tricky thing to get right, but I feel the author did it well.

Liked a lot, but not quite loved. I subscribe to the idea “there is no art without constraint” and feel it was an issue here compared to the first book. This was still a wonderful look at history with a ton of laughs and wonderful lines with real insight into the human condition but, where the first book was constrained inside of a submarine, letting Otto roam freely across half the globe made it into a series of unconnected, wacky adventures. The framing device of him telling the stories as an old man was good in the first book, but felt tacked-on at the front of this one and would confuse a new reader. Doubly so given there’s no bookend at, well, the end of the book.

I had so much to say about this book throughout the reading of it but, having finished it, I am winded. I will say a couple of things:

• If you try to scale this particular massif, know in advance it does not try to get where it's going ahead of time. I fell head over heels for the book in the first 20 pages. The next 80 or so were a bit of a slog. And it slowed down again around page 1000. Also, if you happen to be my wife, the book is in dialect and we all know you'nt have truck with that.
• I've come to think the things you truly love are not inherently great, nor must they have a commonality. They find you at the right time and place and that combines with their quality to make a great experience. Go chasing more of the same and you'll be forever disappointed because you can't step into the same stream twice.

None of which is to say you should stop trying.

I'm in that big Venn circle of loving both The Mountain Goats and Sabbath and was really excited to read this. When I saw it was actually fiction, and a journal of a teenager in an institution in the '80s, I was let down, but I figured “he's a good writer and he worked as a psych nurse or something in the past, so let's give it a shot”. So glad I did, it was a great framing device for talking about a band who was better with expressing emotion than speaking about feelings, which is pretty spot-on for one's teenage years.

I hope the dude got promoted again and is doing well. Gary can suck it.

Such a hard book to rate: the incredibly important point of the book is sometimes obscured by the author's prickliness and need to settle any and every score. I've seen online that she's controversial with younger generations, but as someone with a foot in the grave, I appreciate a fellow traveler who could get into a fight in phone booth (and even knows what a phone booth is) and I let it go by because the specific history in the book is so important and because the abstract point is so important as well and incredibly applicable to Our Current World (in the US), which means, sadly, it is probably timeless.

A perfect old-school show biz biography, cozy like a pair of old slippers. The chapters about individual movies got repetitive after a while, but that's my only small nit.

I wanted to love this book and thought I was going to from the opening chapter but it meanders. The author is weirdly repetitive at times (e.g., the author is weirdly repetitive at times) and the book can't seem to figure out if it wants to be pop science or more philosophical architecture discussion. Regularly swapping between the two means neither ever quite gets fleshed out.

That said, I liked a lot of it and it gave me a couple of ideas about how to improve our house's security, so I can't complain.

A good book, just relentlessly depressing as it's simply a history of bad business decisions and people screwing each other over. Also, Jim Shooter is an ass.

This was a weird one for me. I really liked it at first and I like the author's voice, but near the end of the book he finally gets to a part of the country I know quite well and I started wondering how accurate the rest of the book had been. And he got really bitter. I think that was probably a function of the trip dragging on and his failed marriage weighing on him, but when he hit Newport it fell apart for me. He turned into a bitter old crank about how Newport was better when he was in the Navy and you could find a fight and a prostitute on every corner of Thames Street. He threatened to pull it together when he hit Quonsett Point and realized change is natural and not every change means things are worse, but he quickly gave up on that and just bitched. Admittedly he hit Newport just when the '80s did and while the popped collars on Izods are remembered fondly now, those people were mostly pricks and I wish he did punch one and bang a hooker on the table of a nice restaurant.

(I'm not checking the SPOILER checkbox because you're better off) If I could give it fewer stars, I would. Stupid self-aware cutesy crap spawned by McSweeneys after the people who could write left. I got all the way through because I was actually interested in the Julia sub-plot, but what happens to a female character in a comic book? Well, she didn't die, so that means a horrific rape. Good ol' Women in Refrigerators.

This was a fantasy novel for people who don't like fantasy writing.

Just wasn't for me.

FIne as a beach read. I'm pretty much all set with former alcoholic former cops with incredibly accomplished younger girlfriends who are way out of their league, but I made it through to the end, even though I figured the whole thing out halfway through.

Ok for an airplane read, but yet another book by a TV/ comedy writer who seems embarrassed to be writing a long-form piece.

Not bad. It's probably 3.5 stars for me because it dragged in places, but it was a fairly fun ride. I think it could have easily been 1,000 pages instead of 1,200+; the stream-of-consciousness descriptions of travel became something I quickly learned to skim past.

Seriously my favorite cookbook of all-time. I'd say it's a cookbook “you can't put down” except it's like 300 pounds, so you can only read it in short bursts, but that's ok because it lends itself to that.

I thoroughly enjoyed both this and the preceding book (The Sparrow). Can't recommend them highly enough, though it probably helps to like science fiction and be ok with Jesuits. Maybe these books were just targeted at nerdy Catholic school grads. But it was a great take on the perhaps overused First Contact scenario and poses some interesting questions about what it means to be . . . “human” for lack of a better work.

Good book, but it sort of died on me once the plan worked out about halfway through. I'll probably go back at some point.

More of a 3.5 star book, but rounded up given how much I like the series.

Another fantastic episode, though yet another that moves Flashman away from cad toward more standard heroism. The story of the Taiping Rebellion and the Manchu emperor is all the more fascinating when viewed against modern China and its Maoist origins, because it all seems a lot less Communist and a lot more consistent with how China has been ruled for centuries.

Reading this out of order because the library doesn't have the first volume and this is the only book by Holmes they have other than the fantastic “The Age of Wonder” which I read a little while back.

Update: couldn't finish it. Nothing against the author, it was fantastically written. I just couldn't put up with more wasted opportunities by Coleridge. So frustrating.

Still picking through this. It's not bad, but like “Further Cuttings”, it suffers from the fact the pieces are ordered by topic/ style instead of chronologically. This means that everyone of his “Keats” pieces, which are giant set ups for groaner puns it laid end-to-end so no matter how good the individual pieces are, you're sick of them long before you get to the end of the chapter.

Still a fine bathroom book.

More of the same. Not bad, not great. I wish he would sort his damn daughter out one way or the other.

Of the 4 or 5 I've read so far, this is the best Flashman book I've come across. Only the first one even comes close. It's aided by an amazing cast of characters, but the impressive thing about the books (at least in the order I've read them, somewhat constrained by my local library) is the characters keep getting more outlandish and over-the-top. Impressive because they're all historical figures. Like all the better Flashman books I've found, this makes me want to go dig up some of the original sources and read them as well.