Brent
Relatively easy to read and enjoy, the comparisons I'd heard of the author to David Sedaris seem pretty on-point.
The concept of this book is through ten words (characters) and how they have evolved political and cultural meaning, using the lens of personal anecdotes as microcosms, Hua gives us a look into the everyday social changes and surprising parallels from Mao to Jinping. These stories are sometimes funny and sometimes awful but to read them feels like listening to an old friend.
For anyone interested in how basic Chinese culture has changed over the last several decades as told through the eyes of a man who's formative years came during the Cultural Revolution without getting a dense history lesson, this is certainly recommended.
Of note: I have never had to read the word “bamboozle” so many times in one chapter.
A sprawling epic tragedy.
My initial impression after having read this is that, despite its somewhat disjointed nature (the author can go on some tangents, some chapters feel like they contain information better suited for a different chapter, sometimes there is too much information which drowns out the narrative a bit, and overall it could have been a tighter book), the amount of crucial information and analysis were very effective. After all, when covering the complicated messiness of these events, is it possible to not have a bit of a complicated mess of a book if one is simply following the events?
The author drives home two messages in this book: that the baffling stupidity of the tsarist regime to not make any concessions to the peasantry was its own downfall, and that because Russia was so behind the West in terms of modernity (specifically the peasantry, filled with old world villages still living as if it were the Middle Ages, believing in witchcraft, etc.), the people of Russia were contributors to their own revolutionary failures. Lenin's brand of Bolshevism was to reject Marxism's understanding of a necessary stage of capitalism, to properly educate the peasantry so that they would be “ready” to participate in a socialist revolution and to instead “jump over” this key contingency and force the revolution upon them instead. Imagine that: ideologues claiming to know what's best for the peasantry that they actually despise and that ending up in disaster.
In Lenin's dying years, he understood that this turned out to be wrong and that there should have been a capitalist stage after all, since the peasantry was so provincial in the way they lived and simply would not tolerate having their grain requisitioned for a higher abstract ideal such as socialism. This was the role the NEP (New Economic Policy) served when another peasant revolt in 1921 terrified Lenin into actually giving concessions and introducing some capitalistic organs into society to fast-track the peasantry to the ideas of socialism.
Something truly amazing read through this book is the number of times tragically bad decisions were made that kept this going. It feels like the “Idiot Plot” trope in literature, only real (for those who don't know the term, an idiot plot is when a plot is only able to move forward if everyone in the story is an idiot with their decisions and awareness). From Tsar Nicholas absolutely refusing any concessions to the rioting peasantry and writing in his journal about the weather and playing dominoes after having civilians violently repressed in the capitol, to the tsarist censors allowing Marx's writing into Russian society because it was too statistical and dense for people to want to read and therefore harmless, to politicians and governing bodies seeming to have a contest over who could do the least and make the worst decisions to give the public a stable and trusted authority after February 1917, (which allowed the Bolsheviks to fill that void), tragedy is truly the right word for all of it.
In tandem with the above, there were also some tragedies of figures who did everything they could to prevent Russia from being destroyed. The most tragic case is Gorky, who had a very strange and interesting relationship with Lenin - both his great friend and aggressive intellectual and political rival. Lenin had a soft spot for Gorky and seemed to enjoy indulging in granting Gorky's requests to loosen his terror, free innocent prisoners, not persecute writers and artists who were valuable to Russian society, etc. The most notable thing he did was beg Lenin to accept famine aid from the United States. Lenin was very reluctant and hated granting this request but he eventually did and because of Gorky's insistence, tens and tens of millions of Russians were fed, clothed, and given medicine, and the famine was able to take a positive turn as a result.
Figes has done an excellent service by writing this book - it feels exhaustive, as the history of the Russian Revolution can only be. From the opening of the first chapter, the reader is convincingly immersed in the Romanov tercentenary parade. By the time we finish up events around Lenin's death, that parade, along with Tsarist society, seems to have been a dream, as if it had never really happened.
Nearly every page is an inspiration. King's presence as a man of conscience and moral insight, of intellectual integrity, and of unmoving commitment to non-violent resistance should be required reading for anyone with a passing interest in one of the most important figures in all of history.
King's focus of winning empathy, friendship, love, and understanding from his enemies to enact real and lasting change over aimless anger, destruction, vilification, division, and becoming like those who oppress you feels even more moving relative to today's activism climate, which often brands King's core messages of color-blindness, non-violence, and seeking union with whites for the greater cause of shared humanity as troublingly naive at best and an oppressive right-wing racist delusion at worst.
For the record, King makes it abundantly, passionately, and lucidly clear that he whole-heartedly rejects violence in all forms. Those who would cherry-pick quotes out of context to convince people he supports violent riots and zero-sum strategies need just read his actual words for more than five minutes, where it cannot be mistaken how fundamentally against violence he was with every fiber of his being. To King, violence does nothing to increase empathy and support for a cause - it just begets more violence and results in even deeper resistance from the opposition. This is what King believed, and his tactics were directly responsible for the biggest lasting gains of the Civil Rights Movement.
This book brought me to wet eyes on several occasions due to the man's profound integrity and vision. He was a man for all people. It's truly a shame that he died just when he begun his Poor People's Movement, to promote eradicating poverty for every single human being on the planet, who would then know dignity, liberty, and true personhood.
This worked for me.
Sophy Roberts gives us a half travelogue / half history book as she makes her way around some of the most remote places of Siberian tundra, in search of a piano for a supremely talented girl in Mongolia whose family Roberts had befriended when she was a journalist working in the region.
Her historical segues are relevant and informative without going too into the weeds and the writing is warm, simple, and elegant. The dots Roberts connects around the importance of the piano in Russian life during the instrument's boom in the 19th century and how their collective disappearance is a microcosm of Siberia's colonization and obscured history are fascinating.
Roberts went into her journey with a romantic lens. It'll be an adventure to a remote land with a lost history and I'll be searching for pianos! What a story this is going to be! But throughout the book, as she meets people and hears their stories, as she actually stands seemingly at the edge of the world overlooking the Bering Strait, she realizes that there is a difficult duality to Siberia: in its vast snowy remote stillness lies therein a unique awe and beauty that has to be experienced to be believed, but also the terrible and suffocating darkness of a brutal history. A core message of the book is that one can usually learn the most about the history of a place from what has been lost, and the author understanding the meaning of her piano search through that framework comes as a sort of revelation later on, which I greatly enjoyed.
2024 was a proud year for me and my reading, as it was by far the most prolific reading year of my life. I also wound up reading a few books which now stand as some of my very favorites. For fun, here is a ranked ascending list of everything I read, starting with some DNF's.
N/A (Almost done): A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891 - 1924 by Orlando Figes
I'm more than halfway through this behemoth but can't honestly say I have read the whole thing yet. It's super detailed and sometimes it can be tough to follow all the different political faction splits and governing bodies, but I'm learning a ton and generally have not been bored at all. I expect this will be a 4 star read by the end.
I have read far enough to say: Lenin seemed like the worst guy. Don't invite him to parties.
N/A (DNF): Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul by Taran N Khan
I was excited for the subject matter and for the concept, as history expressed by walking through a city is in line with my preferences, but the writing was overly-dependent on vague emotional romanticizing without enough objective information about the cultural history or interesting characters (the people she meets) to keep me hooked. The people she meets are spoken of as if they are perfect brave souls who represent the beating heart of the city and it becomes far too biased in that direction. This was a let-down.
N/A (DNF): Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J Bass
I got to about 250 pages in when I needed to pivot to something else, and by no fault of this excellent account of the lesser-known Tokyo Trials and their aftermath. I learned a lot, but it's a very difficult read (the atrocities...) and after several hundred pages I felt like the information was having diminishing returns (or maybe my brain just wanted to read something else, which just happens sometimes). I'd love to come back to this.
15. Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell by Sy Montgomery
Quite disappointing. I love turtles and tortoises and thought this was going to be a fascinating dive into their world. Instead, we follow a turtle rescue team and the author's day-to-day working with them to save some turtles. There are some fun parts to read but the anthropomorphizing of the turtles borders on ridiculous and this is coming from a person who has a tendency to do the same thing because of how awesome animals are. There is very little science in here. There was no clear unifying theme to the book and I found myself wondering why I read it.
It should also be noted that the chapter near the end of the book in which the author admits that she just learned about what a trans person was five minutes ago and yet now needs to annoyingly and authoritatively lecture the reader on what a trans person is in 2024 was a bizarre move. There is plenty of excellent material to read about that subject and I whole-heartedly welcome trans stories and perspectives, but not in a short book about turtles out of nowhere from someone who admits to barely knowing anything about the matter.
14. Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History by James A Benn
A fascinating topic (I'm a tea drinker) but this was too dry and boring for me. There is solid research in here and some cool facts around tea's role in the culture over the different eras but it was too much “this happened then this happened” instead of telling a grabbing story.
13. Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic by Michael Axworthy
A very solid account of the 1979 revolution and its aftermath. It was difficult to maintain all of this information after having read it, but I enjoyed the way the author weaved between what unfolded from the ground up and what unfolded from the top down. It felt like a neutral account without feeling like a boring account.
12. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Perhaps it was the translation that kept this one from being as interesting as I'd hoped, but this was still a fine read. Turgenev's characters seem like caricatures, but that is seemingly the point. Bazarov is the cartoonish social revolutionary who's likeness transforms Russian society in the decades to come and Turgenev writing this in 1862 (just after serf emancipation) is very impressive. It's amusing at times and there was enough in the story progression to keep me reading, but I wasn't bowled over.
11. What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman
As a huge fan of birds, owls, and Ackerman, this was high on my list when I heard it was coming out. Lots of really cool stuff about owls in here, of course, especially that when they sleep, sometimes they wake themselves up by the sound of their hoots while dreaming. Incredible. I did feel like Ackerman is better when she is writing about a wide range of birds and jumping around - it's not as lively a read when it's just focused on one subject for 300 pages, even if that subject is owls. So while I enjoyed this, her previous books were better reads for me.
10. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
An enjoyable romp with imagination, dark humor, and a little bit of heart. The main character wondering how anyone could have ever worn clunky and uncomfortable knight's armor as a fly buzzes around in his helmet was probably the funniest moment for me, and the relationship between Hank and Sandy was a treat. I felt it went on too long for me once we have established the concept, so the middle was more of a slog, but that was hardly a dealbreaker.
9. The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention by Guy Deutscher
This would be a little higher if it were not a re-read. As a linguistics nerd, I just felt like going through this again for all the little fun facts about various languages and the author's grand theory around how we went from what he calls the “Me Tarzan” era of language to the complex sentences of today.
One of my favorite obscure facts about English: at some point due to the influence of late Latin / Old French, Middle English swapped “s” out for “r” in words which surrounded the “s” with vowels. This is why we have “rural” vs “rustic” or “justice” vs “juror”.
8. The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S Wood
This was really good. It was fascinating to get a look into the day-to-day life of the colonies – the shifting culture and standards of daily life, the building up of settlers and movement, and the clear story of how conditions led to the Revolution. One of the most interesting things was learning about how shockingly fast it took for the Revolutionaries to have the very ideals they envisioned thrown away by the Federalists. To paint this more clearly, when Jefferson ran for the Presidency in 1800, he ran in opposition to the Federalists to restore the ideals of Republicanism founded only 20 years earlier. Getting the day-to-day of that was awesome. Indeed, many of the founders considered the Revolution completely squandered, with America being unrecognizable to what they had hoped for, in their own lifetimes.
The author also points out how insane it was to the rest of the world that George Washington led the Revolutionary Army to victory and promptly retired. Revolutionary leaders achieving power and victory and immediately relinquishing was utterly unprecedented, and reading more about Washington's personality and mannerisms explains his decision well.
The only knock I have is that, while the author tells things in a pretty neutral way, there really isn't much negative about any of the towering figures of this era and it would have been nice to see some more of their missteps.
7. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr by Martin Luther King Jr
See my review for this one, but it was great. Always nice when you read about someone who is instantly recognizable as an intellectual hero.
6. The Great Book of Amber by Roger Zelazny
I only read the Corwin cycle (1-5). This was the third or fourth read and the story and the twists get me nearly as well each time. I recommend this to everyone who enjoys fantasy since unfortunately people don't really know about Zelazny, even though the Gaimans and the Martins of the world consider him their greatest influence. Re-reading this, I did find that Zelazny includes a LOT of pure exposition. Much of this is likely because he released each book separately and felt the need to catch the reader up of all the information and story turns Corwin has accumulated and experienced thus far, but it can be pretty redundant hearing Corwin tell Random what happened to him when we just read it two chapters ago. I also thought the language was a little cringey sometimes, since the royal family seems to speak in a hybrid of “yo dude what's up” and “thou shalt go there not, faretheewell”.
But make no mistake, I absolutely love this story and Zelazny packs so much awesomeness in here. I can't wait until this is a TV show (at least if it's done justice) because these books are tailor-made for an incredible fantasy series.
5. The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts
See my review for this one as well. Part travelogue and part history. Enthralling and it ends with a really nice emotional note.
4. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
One hell of a book. The positives here are that it, like East of Eden, feels epic, and you're there every step of the way. Augustus McRae is one of the best characters I've ever read and he absolutely drives the book. If Augustus were less interesting, the entire story would suffer. Anybody who comes onscreen yelling, “You pigs git!” has got to be worth reading about and boy was he ever. This story has a big cast of characters and a theme of not being able to accept love or recognition. It takes about 200 pages for the boys to even leave for Montana and I almost felt like I didn't want them to go yet because there was so much tension and entertaining dynamics in Lonesome Dove. I also thought Lorena was an exceptional character, also carrying a lot of the book in her limited but always-good scenes. I loved Deets as well - whenever we got inside of his head it was beautiful. McMurtry does a very good job of hitting on the strange dynamics of this group and keeping us rooting for them to get to Montana. McMurtry's writing style is not flowery but not boring, and even though the book is long, he is straight-forward and everything serves a character or the overall story (or both).
Some of the negatives: Sorry for the cursing but it's warranted here. Fuck me if that wasn't the most traumatic and awful violence I've ever read. I never want to read it again. The violence is the only reason I could not recommend this book to a bunch of people I know. Outside of the violence, there is also a lot of suffering. The western plains are a brutal affair and not much good happens to any of the characters, to be honest.
Something else: Roscoe and Janey's brutal demise was a huge bummer. I was coming to really like them and hoped for them to be together as a super oddball couple. I would have liked to see more of them before their deaths.
I also felt that Lorena's story "ended" abruptly and was disappointing, since up until that point her story had been built up beautifully. We did get to see her finally find her place of acceptance and love, but even that became a dark and possibly temporary affair and I felt like I wanted some resolution for her that I didn't get.
3. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
An epic feel from the beginning that never lets go. One reads of multiple generations of a family and follows Adam from infancy to his hospital bed, with a surrounding cast of unique and destined-to-fail characters and plenty of thought-provoking wisdom. I felt like I was there. It's tough to find literature like this anymore.
2. The Master and Margharita by Mikhail Bulgakov
I tried reading this a few years ago, as it's one of my wife's favorites. Couldn't get into it. Apparently, it's because I was reading a translation that is widely known to be unsatisfactory, so I read the Burgin-O'Connor translation.
This was sooooo good. Non-stop fun, craziness, suspense, subtle (it had to be) social commentary, and really memorable characters and scenes. This is everything a book should be. It felt absolutely wild to read and I plan on re-reading next year when the mood strikes again, especially after my wife kindly explained some of those subtle commentaries to me that I will pick up on when I re-read. One of my favorites.
1. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich
I wanted to write a review of this after I read it but barely thought words would do it justice. This is one of the most affecting books I've read in my life. Alexievich's style of talking to everyday people and making history about them, chronicling what she calls “domestic socialism”, speaks to my sensibilities in a major way. This is exactly the kind of history that I love and which I believe needs to be prioritized. Some of these stories are (predictably) heartbreaking. What was so fascinating about these accounts is how different the perspectives were: we talk to people who are thriving in Putin's new hyper-capitalist oligarchy who feel free and finally able to succeed and be who they want in the world, people who long for Stalin because leaders like him were necessary to build the greatest idea in the history of the world, people who recounted the all-encompassing and unspeakable misery and horror of Stalinist life. We learn about how people got by in a totalitarian regime, about how the kitchen was everything for Soviet families.
We meet people who felt betrayed when the wall fell and crony capitalism replaced socialism, since they, detesting Stalin as they did, thought, “finally, now we can do socialism the right way, with benevolence and freedom of expression” and yet overnight everything their society had branded as evil was now the way of the world. Some people who were celebrated as heroes and given high-ranking official titles in the Soviet Union were now living in poverty as cabbies and branded as part of the immoral old system by most of the citizenry. We talk to people who elaborate on this change, lamenting that “we sold out socialism for bananas and cigarettes” and that (paraphrasing) “we used to talk about plays and literature at the dinner table, now it's nothing but business” . Money now ruled everything and if you didn't have any, you were a nobody.
We get so many illuminating perspectives from real people who saw everything completely change about their society that you don't really hear anywhere else. I got a real sense of how total the concept of socialism was and still is (for some) in Russia. For many, it was “The Party first, family second”, literally. “We have streets named after the milkmaids and the postal workers! What other place in the world has that?”
It was edifying to see the psyches on display of people who truly committed to the Big Idea and get those perspectives, but Alexievich also does not hold back on her interviews with the many many people who are forever living in debilitating trauma because of the sheer horror they went through in the Soviet Union.
For anyone who wants to learn about everyday people in Russia displaying a wide range of perspectives of how they view the old days and the new days, this is essential.
Just quickly need to say that the endings for books 3 and 4 are worth the read alone – the ending of 4 caused me to throw the book across the room (the only time I have ever done this) because I was so floored by the twist.