Timbo
This is a much more complex book than Spring Snow and Runaway Horses. While those books focus on characters who have a purity of spirit to the point of being unable to lead what we might consider a “normal” life, this book focuses on Honda, the old judge who serves as what seems a sort of spiritual brainstorming proxy for Mishima and as again (what seems to me) a proxy for Mishima's thoughts on post-war Japan.
I was fascinated by Honda's spiritual adventure through India and Thailand if a bit bogged down by the chapters of him reflecting on points of Eastern religion.
Ultimately Honda becomes consumed by a desire that seems inappropriate but serves as a basis for all sorts of interesting ruminations by him.
Gladwell simultaneously argues that Bill Gates is successful due mostly to luck and that it's a good thing a Latina girl from the Bronx pulls 15 hour school days to battle economic inequality.
Some interesting arguments here but overall all I can really get from this thing is that life is fucked, luck is the number one ingredient for success, and the number two ingredient is an inhuman amount of work.
Short, unsubtle, and wonderful. I imagine many of us identify with the main character, some of us nearly 100%.
I'm impressed anyone functions in modern society at all.
Also, my beginner's level of Japanese tells me the original title is “Konbini Ningen” which translates to “Convenience Store Human”. Interesting they chose to gender it for the English title.
I seriously had no idea what was going on for most of it... but I liked it anyway. It's completely insane. Sometimes I thought the writing was a mess and other times I thought it was masterfully woven and purposefully obtuse like a Gene Wolfe novel. I still really don't know... but I am intrigued by the third book so I guess Muir is doing something right.
In my brain, I have been envisaging a fantasy novel for a while. It's not Lord of the Rings, but a basic high fantasy romp that is thrilling but still has slow world-building. This is kind of the best example I can think of of that baseline fantasy novel that has always existed in my brain. It is not the most exciting, well-written, nor most inventive fantasy but it certainly scratches the itch for a basic, fat, fantasy. It's a big blanket of inoffensive world building and compelling enough characters and mythology. It's fine! I would never tell someone they need to read it but for people like me who want to suck on a fantasy pacifier, this does the trick.
This is essentially an advertisement for the work the Gates Foundation does around the world with women and girls. Gates gives a voice to many women around the world who support hardships and highlights some of the key elements of progress that are most effective in empowering women and communities in poverty. Gates is emphatic that lifting women up around the world will also lift the communities around them. She uses some statistics to prove this point but they are light, as you would expect in a popular reading book.
My biggest problem with this book is the point-of-view of Gates. She toots her own horn quite a bit. For example, in one of the chapters, she talks about how she admittedly did a bad job when she worked at Microsoft allowing people to have family leave. Despite of this, she gives an anecdote of when she once succeeded at letting someone who worked for her see his sick brother. She apologizes for giving a positive anecdote for an enterprise she admittedly failed at but I don't forgive her.
I was personally distracted imagining Gates visiting all these poor communities in Africa as one of the wealthiest people in the world. To me, this is a fascinating contrast that I wanted to hear more about. How can you listen to and interact with people who have nothing, when you have so much? She acknowledges that she is rich and privileged. That is my problem. Rich and privileged is not the same as being one of the wealthiest human beings in the history of civilization. I was distracted and wanted to hear more about how she reconciles this. Granted, the book is about the women the foundation is helping but when it is filled with so many personal anecdotes, to me, this question begs answering.
Descartes goes about trying to decide, if all beliefs are eliminated, what indisputable truths remain? He goes very quickly from “I can't be sure I'm not just a brain in a vat” to “God definitely exists”. It's a fascinating and immensely flawed exercise. He references simple mathematics a bit (of course) and it seemed to me that his exploration was not dissimilar from Euclid's Elements but in the Euclid, he starts with assuming there are five axioms. If you change those axioms, you end up with an entirely different geometry. In this case, Descartes belief in God feels more like an axiom than a derived truth. So his declaration of rational truths could be said to be Descartian God truth, with the existence of a deity as an axiom and ostensibly a different set of truths could easily be derived by assuming the non-existence of God. It was a fun short read but by the end it became a slight slog since the “reality” that was being discussed did not feel convincing.
This particular book is anachronistic and not very well-translated. However, I seem to be developing a fondness for books of this nature, so perhaps I like it, warts and all. It does not function as an excellent, English-language biography of Euler, but it does function as a collection of some excellent anecdotes, the broad brush-strokes of his life, and some facts about the people he corresponded with.
This is an excellent book that really helps you understand the difference between getting stronger and faster, and training for football.
The point of training should be to develop speed and explosiveness. There are times when other exercises should be used for base strength, but the core component of a good football program should be training for speed and explosiveness.
This book does an excellent job of explaining how and why this is so important for football. The book gives tests and sample workouts that can be used to chart an athlete's progress.
Overall, this a good reference to create a cohesive and targeted football training program.
This is a very in depth book. It delves deeply into the biomechanics of all the events, getting very technical about the biology.
It covers every event in detail and gives a good primer on coaching philosophy.
The target audience seems to be a serious college coach, as a high school coach for a small program, I found it to be an excellent resource, even if it seems geared toward a much more serious athletic program.
Before I began this book, I was already grappling with the effect that mass communication technology has had on what it means to be a person.
Starting with cell phones, the communication expectations of most humans fundamentally changed. Most people are assumed to be “always available”. This means that if you are texted or called, it is expected that you will answer your phone or quickly respond to a message.
Social media intensified these expectations, with the creation of a permanent avatar that was some reflection of yourself that could be accessed by anyone in your network at any time.
For someone socially detached such as myself, these expectations are a nightmare.
This book takes the nightmare to its logical and awful conclusion.
How much privacy and identity will be lost as social media and Ultra powerful corporations - Google, Apple - control or have access to every data point on you and every aspect of your personality? Could we cease being individuals altogether and simply blend into a collective community?
In this book, Eggers guessed at just how much will be lost and lead me down an engaging tunnel of madness on the way there. I was actually afraid to read Book III, and had to take a deep breath before I did, a rare emotional reaction for me.
This is a great, scary book. I'm not going to go live in the woods, but I will at least continue to be cognizant of the changes that new media and communication enact on my existence.
