Sylvia Chi
It's a classic and everything, but I felt that there was no need for such pussyfooting around killing the suitors, and the ending was real abrupt. I mean, I love Homer, but I would have ended it differently.
Found it fairly difficult to understand Miriam, or to really empathize with Paul's relationship with his mother, but still a good read. I'd like to see a modern day screen adaptation starring the guy who plays Adam in Girls.
Multiple people recommended this book to me because they know I like books and dogs. This book is narrated by a dog, so it already starts off strong.
However, I found the dog, Enzo, to be pretty unbelievable in his lack of dogginess, and he also wasn't very sympathetic in his self-loathing – it's revealed pretty much off the bat that this dog wants to be a human in his next life, and he often laments the un-humanness of the body he's trapped in. He seems to spend his whole life with the background expectation that he should NOT be a dog, but a human, and looking down on typical dog behaviors, and I think that's too bad because I like those things.
Enzo also spends a lot of time dispensing platitudes and pearls of wisdom about racing - car-racing, not running in the rain, like you might think a dog would love. His great passion, for unpersuasively presented reasons, is being a spectator to others racing cars.
Also, sometimes I wondered if the author even ever had a dog. I just have never personally known a dog to like bananas or watching TV all day. And the author implies that neutered dogs can't get erections, which isn't true. There are some calculated acts of revenge that Enzo takes that are pretty feline.
Overall, the pacing and structure feel slightly amateurish, and the events are quite predictable. There are some nice and surprising turns of phrase in here, though, and overall it's a pretty nice story. They could probably make a good movie out of this and make tons of money.
I feel like a lot of the assumptions that the writer/the two narrators think you have about like, class don't apply in the same way in the U.S. In that way, the two voices in this book come off as kind of irritating.
Also, the two narrators are set in two different typefaces: Helvetica and Garamond. Just sayin'. Some people may find that obnoxious.
I feel really ambivalent about this book for a lot of reasons. One is that I don't think it's that useful to reinforce the notion that there even is an “empathy wall” between liberals and conservatives. I frequently read and hear about how elitist liberals are always looking down and sneering at rural conservatives, and I don't doubt that that's how they feel, but I don't see evidence that that's what's actually happening, at least not on any kind of significant scale.
I'm of the belief that facts matter and there is such thing as an objective reality, and - setting aside the separately disturbing bit about how we're in the end times and the Earth is going up in flames so who cares about this existence! - it's extremely disturbing how much of Hochschild's characterization of these Tea Party/Trump-supporters' “deep story” is based on misperceptions if not outright falsehoods. Hochschild doesn't seem to seriously address this with her interlocutors, which is maybe outside the scope of this book.
It's a fairly interesting look across the cultural and political divide, anyway, although it's probably not going to be especially revelatory to anyone who's paying attention. About 2/3 of the way through this book, I kept thinking, No surprises here. But there are some fascinating anecdotes and Hochschild's discussion near the end of the book about this conservative “deep story” seems like a useful analytical frame. I am very curious to read what folks on the right - and even people in the book - think of it.
(On one nitpicking note, the chief U.S. chemistry industry lobby is the American Chemistry Council, not the American Chemical Association, which as far as I know does not exist.)
Minus one star for not discussing the best two time travel movies ever: (1) Primer and (2) Hot Tub Time Machine.
The stories are thematically repetitive, although I think that's the intention. Tao Lin does a really good job in a couple of these stories describing like, social anxiety. I also like the idea of naming your toy poodle Wong Kar-Wai.
This book contains four essays. “Why I Write” is sort of too short to be very useful. The longest essay is “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, in which Orwell argues that World War II should be a revolutionary war for socialism. It's fairly interesting in a historical sense. “A Hanging” is a well-observed vignette of an execution. The last essay is “Politics and the English Language”, in which Orwell sets out his prescriptions for good (or less awful) political writing. It's got good advice that I should heed more often.
My first Cory Doctorow book. It reads like a technoparanoiac's fanfic about a slightly-counterfactual near-history, mashing up Anonymous and Occupy. This is one of those YA novels that is hard for adults to appreciate. I did not find it enriching to read a 17-year-old's rants about LARPing, city planning or basic crypto principles. It's also sort of distracting how the story seems to take place around 2008 (when the book was first published) so the technology described in it sounds just slightly obsolete. However, overall, the story moves fast and is fairly entertaining. I imagine it'd make a pretty good movie.
I was first recommended this book by a white guy from Kentucky when I lived in Beijing, so naturally I ignored his recommendation. I got re-interested in it after reading Peter Hessler's writings in the New Yorker, and when my cousin gave it to me as a gift. It's a very good book; clear, quick-moving, and frequently hilarious. It continually surprised me how much Hessler's analyses of Chinese culture overlapped with my own, and maybe that's why I liked it so much. I was constantly amused by how much the Sichuanese peasants reminded me of my parents and how weird they are. Recommended if you want to know about China and what it means to be Chinese.
Finally, a satisfying ending!
As to movie adaptation speculation: there's no way they can do this story justice and get a PG-13 rating.
The tradecraft details are fun. The main characters are ridiculous, the misogyny is out of control, and the superfluous recipes aren't even usable. I haven't seen the movie but I can't imagine it's worse than the book.
If you haven't studied [much] linguistics, this will be a great book for you. It's playfully written and covers really interesting material, with a healthy dose of scientific intellectual history. If you took Semantics with Pulju at Dartmouth, you will learn nothing new and just be frustrated by that fact.
P.S. It's a little annoyingly Eurocentric.
I read this because it's always referred to in like, everything else I read. The ideas in this book are super interesting, and were certainly pioneering when Snow Crash first came out. However, the narrative voice was so obnoxious. It's like it was written by a 14-year-old boy who wants to be congratulated for his paltry attempts at thinking about the human condition. I mean, the two main characters are (1) the [male] [biracial Japanese/African-American] greatest sword-fighter in the universe/hacker and (2) a hot 15-year-old skateboarding girl.
There is terrible exposition – it's like Stephenson wants us to be impressed by how much data he has dredged up in text form. Basically, I think the person who wrote that Internet hit “If all stories were written like science fiction” had this book in mind.
I also found Stephenson's speculative futurecasting pretty distracting, especially when it was crazy wrong. Like, we have the Metaverse but we still use pay phones?
Anyways, I read this thinking it'd be much better as a shorter, more tightly-edited action movie with great special effects, so I guess it makes sense that, as is explained in the acknowledgements, it was originally conceived to be a graphic novel. It was also interesting that Stephenson cited as a chief influence on his conception of the Metaverse the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, which he describes as a book explaining “the philosophy behind Macintosh.”
Really interesting, but kind of excessive in parts. I think I would've liked it better if I read it when I was younger.
I just wanted to read the sections on fat loss/the “slow carb diet” and the PAGG stack. Those were pretty informative and at generally the right level of detail that I require. The book is a good starting place for learning some of this stuff; if you try starting to learn about it by straight Googling, you're likely to get pretty overwhelmed pretty quickly.
That said, at least some (if not all/most) of the key material in the book is also on Ferriss' blog. For example, re: the basics of the slow carb diet: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/06/how-to-lose-20-lbs-of-fat-in-30-days-without-doing-any-exercise/
However, the whole tone of this book is written as if you're an idiot, by a person who is not a very good writer. You really get the sense that Ferriss had to meet some kind of page/words quota and so he tried to meet it by including long excerpts from emails/writings by other people. It's a really palpably lazily put together book.
I was also interested in the exercise section, but as a kettlebell/weight-lifting n00b, I found it pretty confusing. (Although I didn't check the online references for further clarification.)
I skimmed the section on sex and it looked pretty worthless to me, plus obnoxiously heteronormative, but might be helpful to some.
Overall, this is a pretty useful and interesting read, but her dismissive tone (why would anyone want to watch TV when they could instead have a nice conversation with friends!?!) and failure to acknowledge her privilege really turned me off. I found some of her critiques really unpersuasive, especially with regard to online services/retailers and why and how people engage in fashion.
Also, Annie Leonard/her editors do not know the difference between rein vs. reign and positive vs. negative feedback loops.