I read this in about an hour or so. It’s 20 lessons drawn from analyzing authoritarian regimes from the 20th century. As a small start on a bigger issue, it does a pretty good job of getting at the heart of the issues. Some patterns to recognize, some behaviors and positions to adopt, and some ways of being. The lessons range from understanding the purposes of a cultivated private life to how language does matter in both its preciseness but it in its uniqueness in […]
This book is better than you can even imagine. No joke.
When I met my girlfriend she was reading this book under the auspice of “re-reading a classic she loved as a kid.” If I hadn’t been at the tale end of a Masters degree at the time I would have immediately picked it up and read it. I love homework. A few months later we were apart for a bit and when I asked her to recommend me some books, she picked a lot of somewhat older books with spitfire protagonist women and I dived […]
Up to some of his old tricks
I mostly liked The Reluctant Fundamentalist but I thought the weird framing device of a conversation in a cafe was actually quite bad. This novel did not have quite a strange device at the center of its story, but it did have a little trickery. This novel kind of starts us off in Syria, but the ambiguity of the narration suggests it could be a lot of different places in the world. As Nadia and Saeed meet, fall in….something, avoid and circulate sex and marriage, their […]
I like Turtles.
I guess it’s impossible not to mention Nabokov on this one. For an obvious reason in terms of a review, and a less obvious one in terms of something I won’t share. But if you read this one, you’ll see. It’s Nabokov, but specifically Pale Fire. By way of Paul Theroux. In this book, we have the main narrative written and narrated by a brilliant research doctor, Norton, at the end of his career. According to the primary material of the text, he is renowned for […]
But no ship had come, or would come.
“The old terror of his childhood came over Agat, the terror which, as he became adult, he had reasoned thus: this world on which he had been born, on which his father and forefathers for twenty-three generations had been born, was not his home. His kind was alien. Profoundly, they were always aware of it. They were the farborn. And little by little, with majestic slowness, the vegetable obstinacy of the process of evolution, this world was killing them–rejecting the graft.” I have a few […]
How can you tell the legend from the facts on these worlds that lie so many years away?
“How can you tell the legend from the facts on these worlds that lie so many years away?” This continues: “–planets without names, called by their people simply The World, planets without history, where the past is a matter of myth, and a returning explorer finds his own doings a few years back have become the gestures of a god. Unreason darkens that gap of time bridged by our lightspeed ships, and in the darkness uncertainty and disproportion grow like weeds.” This is how the […]
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