Mikhael
Maybe four and a half stars. I enjoyed this, and I am thankful to have grown up in a place where things actually got dark and bugs and wild animals and plants were part of everyday (or should I say everynight) life. I'm still on a nature high after visiting some national parks, so this was a good book to fuel that wonder. Only critiques are that she sometimes she tries too hard to be profound and edgy by romanticizing darkness, but like, duh humans aren't nocturnal animals so don't expect us to be as appreciative of the night as the day. I do appreciate that she came closer to balancing it yin-yang style at the end, dualism but make it circadian.
Read most of this on a flight, occasionally looking out over sunlit desert hills, pretty scenic. This is some rich poetry, and my biggest takeaway was I think my brother is an unintentional Taoist, which if Lao Tzu is to be believed, is the perfect kind. Do without doing; be without being(?)
Also Le Guin’s footnotes for almost every chapter were helpful and sometimes contained nuggets more valuable than the poems they comment on.
Also kept in my mind that “Tao” is the same word used to translate “Logos” in the famous John 1 passage. Makes for a sort of Jesus-centered mysticism of the Tao, about which I wanna read more in the future
Very good book. The (based-on-a-true) story is worth five stars, but somehow the writing cruised between dry and sappy. 2024 was unintentionally the year of historical fiction for me (Faceless Old Woman, Babel, The Satanic Verses, The Sea and Poison, One Hundred Years of Solitude, All the Light We Cannot See), so I think my tastes are changing because I'd never though of myself as a fan of these generational tales.
My brother gifted me this back in November, but I'm glad I waited til break to read it. Felt bizarre how much the details resonated generally or even specifically with my life:
- UIUC, and specifically my current town Urbana
- Polynesia (although I've mainly been studying Polynesian languages, not the actual land)
- French, which I started learning last January
- AI (my advisor and I have had several discussions on this)
- Friendship among two avid readers of different cultural backgrounds, one of whom introduces the other to Go (subtle nod to my buddy Tanfu who taught me the game last January)
- Taoism, about which I just started reading this week (also at Tanfu's recommendation)
- Lady Wisdom. Literally YESTERDAY at church the pastor discussed Proverbs 8, of which verses 22-31 Powers inserts into the funeral scene before closing the book
Above my pay grade. This is much more academic than I thought it'd be and assumes proficiency with Biblical Hebrew and Greek. I powered through, and I'm glad I did. Morris takes clear stances on the important of capital concepts like Justification and Substitution while also not using absence of evidence as evidence of absence (regarding certain perspectives on the mechanisms of salvation). Readers with a one-dimensional belief regarding atonement will be challenged to ditch the myopia and embrace something closer to Eastern holisticity, while those who chalk Christ's death up to an opaque mystery never to be explained will be challenged to plant a stake where things are elucidated with Western, academically rigorous interrogation of the documents.
Every chapter, I'm thinking to myself "so close!" In this book, Stavrakopoulou has a field day with ancient artefacts. Everything is of equal value, there's no notion of one description/artefact being more authoritative than another. That said, the pieces are still cool. The photos of idols, documents, paintings, mosaics, etc all remind me of my visit this past year to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures in Chicago, where ancient people's beliefs are transmitted and almost certainly misinterpreted by us modern folks. Stavrakopoulou has amassed a ton of "evidence" in this book, but her story is sorely mistaken. She gets it right when in acknowledging God has a body; she gets it wrong in concluding it's a dead one. The most baller epilogue I've ever read synthesizes millenia of revelations of God's body, and yet, she doesn't have faith. She chalks up as mere stories the descriptions of the Son from thousands of years ago, failing to trust the prophecies and failing to see that her "ancient" God is actually the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow
I like just about everything Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor write. Night Vale was one of the earliest podcasts I tried, and while it's been years since I've listened, this book was the perfect amount of references while still standing alone/not requiring much world knowledge. Bonus point for nestling Mountain Goats references throughout the dialogue.
Regarding the contents of the book, I dug the start and the surreal sections, but started to lull when we got to historical fantasy. Eventually I was reeled in, and sure enough, this is a well-told story, with really sweet sensibilities despite the protagonist (antagonist?) being so corrupt. Main stylistic complaints are that the authors don't always stay on the right side of the silly-dumb divide, and they shoehorn in more 'progressive' lines/descriptions than the story warrants, but that's par for the course for these guys.
Final note, this is the audiobook, and I'm elated they got the original voice of the Faceless Old Woman (yes, it's Mara Wilson, aka Matilda) to narrate it!
Excellent book, she tells/adapts/expounds the story well. Charitable but also frank about people and our constant cycle of error and redemption. A lot of this reinforced notions that I'd heard from the Lord of Spirits podcast, stuff regarding neighboring cultures in the Near East. Her decision to avoid metaphysical topics like capital Substitution and obscure things like the Nephilim left me a tad disappointed, but the way Robinson handles the rest of the story reminds me that it's okay to leave a little mystery.
This is a good book, only thing to complain about is the dearth of info on Afro-Asiatic and several East Asian languages/families. Pretty blunt critiques against computational approaches to the field, but hey, I get it. Maybe one day ChatGPT will be able to autosort all languages, but until then, humans will have to keep thinking.
Read this on recommendation from a friend who knows the author. The friend got a lot of insight from it, but he felt like I might not learn many new lessons. He was right. Most of the deconstruction of certainty and the reinforcement of humility in this book can be cultivated in a high school literature class, which is what happened for me. Even in the middle of rural, conservative Indiana, people really are learning to stop and just consider other folks' motivations and reevaluating how certainly we can assess the intent of an interlocutor. I have a hard time believing that this book will transform too many people. The people who are open to the idea of climbing out of certainty (while remaining confident) are probably not the ones who need to read this.
Instead, the people who would profit a lot from this book probably wouldn't take a recommendation to read a book of this one's nature. Kind of a catch-22. You can tell that's who Redstone is writing to because one in three pages includes some kind of COA, some defense of an abstraction because there are people who will miss the abstract point and zero in on the irl example.
Good for a dissertation assessment of eleven languages. Purely synchronic however, which makes sense for her OT framework. Leaves questions like the origin of divergence between dialects unanswered. She doesn't really consider exceptions to the Souletin Basque data, nor does she address epenthetic aspiration in loans and compounds. Still, comprehensive for a synchronic typology paper.
The premise is cool, all the linguistics stuff is right up my alley, but time and again I'm reminded that I'm just not into fantasy. I started to lose interest two-thirds in, and I'm also not the kinda reader who adores ‘young revolutionaries' types of literature. Nevertheless, I was happy to finish it, and the messages aren't lost on me. Overall a good book.
Also this is alternative history and fantasy, so no points are lost for bad etymologies, however there are so many cases of almost right etymologies that make it clear that Kuang is just wrong (the etymologies don't change the fantasy narrative). Stuff like saying English ‘night' and Spanish ‘noche' come from Latin ‘nox'. Because of errors like this that I am familiar with, I am sad that I can't add the other etymologies that I'm not familiar with, on account of Kuang's mishandling of etyma
Dense language throughout doesn't stop this from being very entertaining. I am a sucker for dreams and multiple plot lines across time so this stuck all the right compositional chords. I can see how it offended folks. I pity Rushdie as he doesn't come across as a friend of God, but I respect him for writing in terror at even a peaceful, foreseen death (feels almost confessional).
Been learning about Catholicism, Orthodoxy, some heretical sects, and adding this progressive author to the list now. Reminds me a lot of Bema Podcast-style interpretation. She says the church “is a group of people caught up in the same story, with Jesus at the center,” although her prose at times leans more into coddling our humanity than actually centering God. Nonetheless, I'd recommend this to anybody needing a sort of biblical refresh, a sort of interpretive jostling
