klc

rather illuminating explanation of how the economic structure of SEA engenders certain business practices. where it falls flat: 1) argument seems shallow, missing detail and flattening the contexts of very diff countries, 2) suffers from its expat perspective that is at once sardonically derisive of on ground behaviours (those silly asians + weird insistance on calling lky harry?) while pushing a seemingly blind faith in what the home countries offer (see the take on hk in the conclusion)

masterful and comprehensive synthesis of x thousand years of world history to advance a single important idea about the persistent nature of cross-cultural pollination, pushing back on the convenient tendency to homogenise and make monolithic categories we already know are unstable (in this case, ‘the West'). would have been nice if it fleshed out academic dissensus and debates more, but it would probably double the length of the book without changing the fundamental argument

pour one out for the big man. typical for auster, this absurdist genre-crashing yarn defies placement. it could have been his last novel but was pretty much his first.

tasty epistemology obsessed thriller about slippery deductions, vanishing vantage points, and rebellious texts. certainly way too long in the middle, we alr know eco has a big brain

super sharp and practical at its best, missing a critique of its readers' politics but that's not what the book is for

Has all the chef's kiss elements of #1 - structurationist articulation of social dynamics, the interchanging roles of the brilliant friend, the beats of pure alienation that make you feel like you've been hit by a truck - but falters in 2 ways: seminal moments from #1 are reopened from their packaging unnecessarily in ways that diminish the source, the diary format is unconvincing and a tad too omniscient

appropriately sweeping take of 400 years of madness, captures much of the scarring that drives china's bellicose underdog posture even as one of the world's most powerful nations

comprehensive and exhaustive, felt slightly textbook (because it is a textbook) in its coverage and pov

powerful and incisive critique of meta gender politics of the 21st century. i buy phantasm as a framework for understanding reactionary anti feminist positions, with two qualifications: (1) to me it's indicative of how all of us do our thinking more via images, metaphors, genres and thus phantasms, rather than words, sentences and syllogisms - so some analysis of our phantasms on the left would be nice, (2) it's true that the anti-feminists don't engage with the work of the left, but how much do we on the left, beyond our best representatives like butler, truly understand the discontent of our counterparts?

and what about everyone standing nervously in the middle? this book ends with a passionate call to action but it's preaching to the choir using its own songsheets. butler is right, we're not operating in a world of discrete propositions and fair discourse. maybe we must hence more explicitly commit to the politics of collaboration at a time when the left is yet again splintering through purity tests.

fantastic breakdowns of multi-faceted kaleidoscopic problems, weak in its ‘thin' and often functionalist takes on culture (how does it account for difference across place?)

s-tier auster, one of his most successful skirmishes with ‘meta fiction'. here his protagonist author is openly struggling with what is essentially narrative (his memoir, his novel in his memoir, his novel in his novel in his memoir, his screenplay in his memoir, it goes on). these texts fluctuate in complexity, certitude, completion, and ultimately consequence. remarkably, they each bear their own logic and agency in a way that is surprisingly not annoying, and stimulate a collision course of events over nine days