Thomas

I picked this up from a Little Library this morning, recognizing it from when I read excerpts of it in a Clinical Supervision class in grad school. I read several of Lencioni's articles in the Harvard Business Review, as that class was married to the publication as The One True Source of Knowledge. Lencioni is thus partially to blame for my near-lethally allergic reaction to that magazine. Now, when I see an article come through my work e-mail with an HBR link, I have to launch myself from my desk in search of an Epi pen.

Anyway, Lencioni spends nearly 200 out of 228 pages of the book telling tales. No joke, the first several parts of the book consist of The Fable. It's about a blue-collar-adjacent retiree (at 57) who is brought out of the shadows to lead a tech company in the Valley and whip them all into shape. It's dreadful writing, which is probably why it sells so well to the Fortune 500 dweebs.

Starting on Page 181 and going through the rest of the 228 page book (if you don't count the page about contact info for CONSULTING, god help us - oh and where the author thanks God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), you get The Model This is helpfully written in great big, bold, serif text so you know you've gotten to The Good Stuff (tm).

Lencioni's core 5 Dysfunctions are good to pay attention to: Absence of Trust, Fear of Conflict, Lack of Commitment, Avoidance of Accountability, and Inattention to Results. He sets these up on a pyramid with Absence of Trust as the foundation - makes sense. It reads a little like a Corporate Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and that's well enough.

I didn't plan on lighting the book on fire until, skimming through the TEAM ASSESSMENT (don't forget your business serif), I stumbled upon this shiny little firecracker: “The profiling tool that I use is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). However, a number of other personality profiles are also popular, and one of the best and most common is Everything DiSC. The purpose of most of these tools is to provide practical and scientifically valid behavioral descriptions of various team members...”

Folks - neither MBTI or DiSC are scientifically valid. The phrase itself, “scientifically valid” is an oxymoron. These tools are not well founded in research, they are not peer reviewed, they suffer numerous reliability problems (notably test-retest). Lencioni goes on a few sentences later to say why he likes them, “their basis in research (they are not founded upon astrology or new age science)” - I wonder what makes old age science better than new age science? I can tell you these tools are exactly as reliable as astrology, and if you read the horoscopes for today, you'll have as good an idea about your team's performance as you will if you spend thousands to some consultant to waste your team's time taking a personality quiz to then chat about how “omg it's so insightful).

Yuck. This is going back to the little library.

I picked this up for a book club at work. I'm going to try to keep my review here quite short, because I have multiple things that I want to writer longer responses to / reflections upon on my Substack over probably the next few weeks. This book has caused me to reflect even more deeply and in much more specific ways about my particular role as an agent of the State in regards to housing standards, program provision, etc. These are not new thoughts, but they are honed here by sharp criticism and by realizations that this writing sparked.

Some notes on writing. I found myself wondering who the target audience for this book is. Is it housing organizers? That is the population that the author reports to represent. Yet, there is a distinctly academic vernacular in the book. Maybe this is because the book is in such heavy discourse with particularly Marxist ideas (and I do not consider this a bad thing!). I do not actually know enough about political theory to know, which I am a little embarrassed to admit. I know that I have not read the words bourgeois and proletariat in a book so much in a very, very, long time. I also know that the word ‘imbricated' appears twice in the text. I feel no insecurity about looking up words, I delight in opening up the dictionary app on my phone to find them. I get a little annoyed when I feel a cumbersome or overly-fancy word has been chosen where simpler language would communicate the idea more clearly. “Imbricated” seems to me a “tell me you've got a PhD without telling me” word. This is a petty thing to be annoyed by, and I recognize that.

I think why it occurs to me is that I want these ideas to be in discussion, and I wonder how in-discussion they will be if they are inaccessible. Maybe I'm not giving enough credit to folks. I had opened a dictionary app and surely other folks could. I don't know.

There is quite a lot of exploration around the idea of home. Privacy, the private space as obscuring violence, and the inefficiency of single family homes re: climate considerations. I admit I have a hard time envisioning some of the proposals because the commodification of necessities are so deeply established. I found myself balking at the idea of communal laundry, thinking back to using laundromats and how absolutely miserable this experience was, growing up having to use them. Broken machines. Not enough machines. Machines that were technically working but took two cycles to fully dry (and thus cost MORE money). Not having the freedom to do laundry whenever is convenient. You can see that much of these is because the owners of those laundries have no incentive to keep the machines at their best quality, especially when there is no competition among them (I do not believe competition breeds good quality, but still). So, halfway through writing out my notes on this I sort of had to pause and think a little more deeply.

Some of the proposals are very similar to housing as discussed in Ursula K Le Guinn's The Dispossessed. I sort of bumped on a lot in that. I'm going to reflect on this more before I write up deeper essays about them. But I am not comfortable giving up the extent of privacy that I think the author asks for a New Housing.

That said, I think many of the proposals operating in concert to other types of housing would be tremendous. This book is written from a UK perspective. In the US, the country has almost totally abandoned housing to the private sector. Landlords have no significant market force opposing them. The landlord never has an incentive to maintain high quality housing for low cost. That is in fact the opposite of their interest. I detest this. That publicly supported housing has abandoned the public housing model in favor of conversions to Project-Based Rental Assistance and Tenant-Based Rental Assistance (vouchers) is a great crime, and a heist from the landlord lobby. Now, meaningfully public housing is so limited and so restricted as to have no impact whatsoever to the landlord market. And vouchers are now in competition for the “limited” supply of housing available to the very poor. This means that localities are hesitant to apply even the most modest of standards to housing, because in most places it is perfectly legal to discriminate against voucher holders.

I can talk about this for a long, long, time. And I will write a separate piece about this (here's another thing: during COVID, the emergency housing response even included landlord incentives. Yes, sometimes thousands of dollars as a bonus to landlords willing to accept a voucher. Landlords being paid for the honor of being paid. That is fucking crazy!). It gets me worked up.

I like these parts of the book. There are parts I really bristle at (much of the family stuff is very hard for me to envision and I'm reflecting on that a bit more before I write more about it). I like that the book inspired questions in me. That is valuable.

All of that aside, it is firmly an “ask questions” book. I am relatively unconvinced that anything in it is even remotely implementable. The cultural changes are a matter not of decades but probably a century or more. I don't know. Much of it feels like pure fantasy, not practicality. That is a hard thing for me to deal with.

I did love the Conclusion. Pages 157-163 talks about ‘doing feeling' and the necessity of sitting with bad feelings and harnessing them towards social good. There is a particularly good passage on page 157 about anger, and how anger is “a way of expressing that the current state of things is unacceptable, and what [sic - I think this should be ‘that'?] we don't deserve what happens to us.” I was in a protest the other day and felt that I could not raise my voice, and I have been thinking about that a lot, because it really disturbed me. I don't get angry very easily. I got angry in a meeting at work last week, and it was a righteous anger. I liked that I had the reaction, because it was exactly as described here – it was a moral anger, not a violent anger. That is a meaningful difference.

I'll write more about this book on my Substack in the next week (maybe the next two weeks).

I picked this up at Politics & Prose at the Wharf on Tuesday, at an event with the author. This was the first I'd heard or read Demsas' writing. It's good! The event was enjoyable.

The book is a collection of Demsas' writing on housing for The Atlantic. I appreciate the continued focus on housing supply as the critical component to our struggles, especially as relates to homelessness. Our country loves finding scapegoats, but it really is a simple problem: we need more housing. All other considerations are secondary.

There are some parts of the articles I'm not in total alignment with, but these are relatively few. Good collection of articles.

Really an odd book! I believe I saw a review of this in the NYTimes a few weeks ago and thought it sounded interesting, but forgot everything about it except the name. I picked it up in my local bookstore's summer sale based on that and the cover art, which makes it look like a spec-fic. Needless to say the first 50 pages were pretty unexpected.

Parts read like a fever dream. I had no concept that this was based on / inspired by / referencing a real person until about halfway through. Not sure what to think of that.

In some ways it reminds me a lot of Stoner, in that it follows a person who is sort of stumbling through his life. This character is less endearing.

I enjoyed the writing. I might have more to say on this after I let it digest.

Odd double feature with my other review/finished book today, [b:On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century 33917107 On Tyranny Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century Timothy Snyder https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1484763736l/33917107.SY75.jpg 54882949] (link).I started this book a month or two ago waiting for some friends to get to dinner, and when they got there I ended up drawing maps of processes and systems that take place in homeless Continuums of Care all over the opening pages. So in some ways, the book is semi-un-loanable because it looks like a lunatic has had a time with it. In others, if you had any of the words to go along with it, you could get a pretty good sense of coordinated entry systems, prioritization, funding flow, and more. But mostly you'd just get a lot of bad sketching. (And I'm happy to loan it out anyway.)I have little in the way of nuanced thought about it. The 15 myths are quite well structured and Mary does a tremendous job of providing the historical angle, her personal practice experience, and practical policy thoughts on the myths. It is non-technical and straightforward without being overly simple. This is somewhat because homelessness is not a difficult moral problem if you have a heart. It is mostly because Mary has spent decades working on this cause and knows what she is talking about.I have been in the field for a little while and arguably have a policy job in homelessness. I think this book will be my go-to from now on when people want a ground-level introduction of why the systems are as they are in this country and the myths that go along with them. Most of these myths I have known and have worked against. Some of them I believed myself, and really value the background that Mary provides (that one would be Myth 4, that Ronald Reagan created modern homelessness – though he did exacerbate it, as we'll see shortly).It also gave me a chance to bust out my absolute disdain for Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan again. Clinton hollowed out and almost totally destroyed the social safety net with PRWORA, but I had no idea he outright offered the destruction of HUD:“Democratic support for the federal government's central role in providing affordable housing had diminished so thoroughly that, early on in negotiations to ‘reform' welfare, to avoid the possibility of any outright veto being overridden, Clinton offered House Speaker Newt Gingrich the wholesale dismantling of the Department of Housing and Urban Development—the realization of a decades-long Republican dream.”(page 102)Hey Bill, what the fuck?Reagan gets a lot of well deserved scorn. Here's one that I didn't quite know all of:“After famously not recognizing his own HUD secretary at a meeting of urban mayors (Samuel Pierce was Black), Reagan slashed HUD expenditures—both for public housing complexes and portable Section 8 vouchers—from $26 billion to $8 billion. It's impossible to overstate the significance of this carnage. If you are looking for the single, most significant factor that transformed US homelessness from a cyclical ebb-and-flow to a permanent fixture on the American landscape, this is it.”(page 88)Very frustrating that these are the folks in leadership positions. And that was back then. Take a look at who is in power now. You'd better be as worried as I am. And I know what to worry about, so please take my word for it.I really loved the section on international perspectives on affordable housing, particular the Finnish models. I love co-ops! I wish we better supported them in homelessness programming. I think it would be tremendous if some of our first-time homebuyer programs had options to help people purchase property in a co-op fashion and maintain affordability permanently.But again, relatively few thoughts on this. It is very basic and a great entryway into this area. I'd recommend it to folks looking to learn the high-level stuff.Notes/highlights:* p26, quoting A. Lincoln - “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”* p31 - “The most destructive aspects of the Calvinist belief system have endured and serve most importantly to emotionally distance the domiciled from the visibly impoverished–preventing us from fully investing in humane solutions proven to work.”* p40 - “In March 1990, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it would begin conducting a yearly national census of homeless people—a single-point-in-time numeration of Americans who were visibly homeless. The following morning, homeless activist Mitch Snyder—leader of Washington DC's largest shelter, ..., responded by dumping a massive load of sand on a bridge, preventing many Virginia commuters from entering DC. Once the two-ton dump trunk [sic] had emptied its load, Snyder conveyed this simple but enduring explanation: “It is easier to count grains of sand than homeless people in America.”“* p88 - “After famously not recognizing his own HUD secretary at a meeting of urban mayors (Samuel Pierce was Black), Reagan slashed HUD expenditures—both for public housing complexes and portable Section 8 vouchers—from $26 billion to $8 billion. It's impossible to overstate the significance of this carnage. If you are looking for the single, most significant factor that transformed US homelessness from a cyclical ebb-and-flow to a permanent fixture on the American landscape, this is it.”* p102 - “Democratic support for the federal government's central role in providing affordable housing had diminished so thoroughly that, early on in negotiations to ‘reform' welfare, to avoid the possibility of any outright veto being overridden, Clinton offered House Speaker Newt Gingrich the wholesale dismantling of the Department of Housing and Urban Development—the realization of a decades-long Republican dream.” (TB: Hey Bill, go fuck yourself. Idiot.)* p109 - “[Broken window theory] origins can be traced to a now infamous 1982 Atlantic article by George Kelling and James Wilson, which badly twisted a 1969 research paper by Stanford Universities Philip Zimbardo, by concluding, “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” Kelling and wilson's enduring malignant conclusion: law enforcement should come down hard on small acts of disorder or they will metastasize into something far bigger.” * TB: Zimbardo! I had no idea he was the origin of Broken Window. You may know him from the Stanford Prison Experiment.* p112 - “For the first time ever, median rent in the fifty most populous metro areas exceeded $2,000. Put simply, “In no state, metropolitan area or county in the US can a worker earning the federal or prevailing state or local minimum wage afford a modest two-bedroom rental home by working a standard 40-hour work week.” More than 40 percent of US workers cannot afford even a one-bedroom fair-market rental with one full-time job.”* p125-128 or thereabouts, discussion on the point-in-time counts. Good discussion! Huge undercount, bad at counting rural populations, etc.* p136 - start of section on Housing First, an evidence-based best practice that you will likely see more or less scuttled by the second Trump administration for no good reason.* p163-172 - great section on international perspectives on affordable housing, including co-ops!!

A very beautiful coffee table book featuring water colors, background stills, reference drawings, etc ft the architecture in the Ghibli films. I adore these movies, they are some of the most beautiful works produced in animation history. This has a lot of interviews and discussion about the various architectural styles and decisions, which are super interesting! Would be a lovely companion in rewatching the films.

I am a little frustrated by the square form factor. Mainly because there are a few two-page spreads of stunning artwork that are ruined by the bisection of the spine. I don't know why they did this. I wider format would have better lent itself to those.

I love noir and detective movies, I especially love noir detective movies. I'm not sure how I've read so much but never hit Chandler, one of the Ur-detective-noir novelists. Written in 1939 and in the genre its in, it's no surprise to find dated language and characterizations some (including myself) would find offensive today. You have to set that aside because they are ultimately manifestations of the world and setting Chandler is writing in. I loved the over-the-top noir of it all.

I think this is my favorite book I've read in a book club. I am afraid to share what I love so much about it. But I see myself in this book in a way I never have so completely. Not all of Leda is me, but so much is that it felt fragile and scary to read at times. Sometimes it was a loving familiarity, or even a pleading with him to do something different. My copy is riddled with sticky tabs sometimes two to a page and often every other page so that it looks like the centrepiece of a research project. I have filled the margins with pencil scratchings. I have no idea if I could ever describe my feelings for it.

Another library photograph book. Some favorites include:
- Parked Car, 1932
- New York State Farm Int. ‘31
- Sidewalk in Vicksburg, MS ‘36
- New Orleans boarding house, ‘35
- South St. NY ‘32
- Hotel Porch, Saratoga Springs, ‘30

I have been habitually in the book store on Saturdays around 10 or 11am for no good reason since getting back into town. I have a 4x4 IKEA KALLAX shelf at home stuffed with unread books and a pile of books on my coffee table and on my record player just staring at me. Yet, I keep going to the store. Anyway, I saw this sitting on the new arrivals table and had a skim of the inner jacket and a random page and thought, well, fuck it. Why not.

My first read of the characters was often one of really unfortunate familiarity, or at least empathy. Thankfully, that familiarity ends at pretty abrupt points in each narrative. There is a place in each where the author takes the commonality of emotional experience and the emotions and thoughts that rejection unsettles within you and stretches them far, far, across the horizon. To the point of almost total absurdity. This makes them feel a little safer to read because you can sit there and feel much better about yourself and point and say, “hey! I'm doing better than I thought!” Then of course the next story starts and you have to see characters doing things you do or think and start chewing your lip again, hoping they too will pass beyond the veil of reasonable personhood.

Not all of the stories were relatable (thankfully). “Our Dope Future” features a narrator speaking via probably-reddit post. The “OP” features no insight whatsoever and describes the absolute worst behavior you can imagine away as being considerate and kind and empowering and blah blah blah. It's a short story that feels ridiculous and stupid, until you think about it for a few minutes and know that if you went to reddit or twitter you would see people just like this and that is pretty unsettling.

Then there's “Main Character” which does have some relatable lines and things that threw me back into the past (mIRC lol, SomethingAwful). The ‘protagonist' of this story recedes so far into the internet that they start to question their sense of self. They come to believe or want to believe that they are literally nothing, nobody. There is something there. I'm realizing I have a habit of saying “everyone” or “all of us” to generalize emotional experience rather than being vulnerable about mine and so I will go to a branch and say, yeah, I think I have felt like no one at all before. Or wanted to be no one at all, because it would be easier. It's a pretty dark place, and so naturally when the author stretches this out to absurdity in this particular story, it goes to strange places.

“Main Character” was not my favorite of the stories, but it is one of the funniest. It also does a lot of meta-narrative stuff, especially towards the end, that always makes for a fun time.

I suppose my favorite of the stories is “Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression.” Probably because this is the sole gay story, and there are certain experiences in the first half that are just very relatable to extents. I definitely remember driving 40 minutes to an insanely questionable hookup and leaving distinctly nonplussed when I was like 20 years old and living in rural Illinois. Hey folks! It's a weird old life.

“Ahegao” also becomes perhaps the funniest and most outlandish of the stories. It even features a recipe and hex code (HEX CODE! written in my giant shocked handwriting in the margin) of the perfect simulacum, which is apparently (#)F6F3E9. No comment.

The story also goes way(!!) into the absurd by about the midpoint and continues to escalate into an ending that made me cackle and cringe. Like I said, you feel a lot of empathy and I at least feel a measure of relatability to several of the characters before the point comes when they jump the shark. That makes it more comfortable to read because, frankly, if you were just reading a book about bummed out people getting rejected and becoming more bummed out, you would be a lot more bummed out by the end of it.

Most of these characters cannot get out of their head. They are overthinkers that have had 8 cups of coffee and whatever other chemical or nootropic they can find that will let them mine themselves deeper into that catacomb. They cannot get out of their own way. Even when they get things they want, they cannot believe it, and they sabotage their lives with their lack of trust and lack of belief and hatred of self. What they cannot do is communicate their feelings, either to themselves or to the people they care about. If they could think about themselves with more care, and be kinder, I think that trust would grow, and they with it. I think this is part of what the author suggests in his final line: “...rejection is not one-way, and always comes paired with its opposite. For a rejection to be settled, first you–the reject–must hear, and comprehend, and accept.”

Overall I really liked the book. It gives you the opportunity to scrawl in the margin, “oh please, don't do this to yourself” or “you don't have to do that” knowing full well that you (or at least I) would do those same things or ruminate over similar experiences, though hopefully to a much lesser extent. At least until they go into the absurd and you can feel a little bit better about yourself by comparison, which is a nice little treat. For those you can scrawl, “holy shit” or “wtf” or “oh my god,” which is a lot more fun than seeing yourself in the book! My annotated copy will certainly have to go on the “think about it before loaning out” shelf. Then again, a lot of the characters in this book are the way they are because they refuse to be vulnerable, they refuse to believe people, and they refuse to trust themselves and the people around them. So, maybe weaving that fine line between good boundaries and bad boundaries helps everyone out.

DNF. I really don't like the way this is written. It reads like pop psychology with a heavy dose of all the worst kinds of academic-turned-public writing. It's overlong, recycles the same points over and over again, and could be half its length.

I think a lot of the vocab it uses is very hokey and mystical. I allowed interest in this book because of the research background of the author, but this is not for me. I plan to review the notes and read the academic literature instead of this.

2.5/5.

I'm giving some benefit of the doubt / grace here to the author, but also to myself because I do not typically read novellas and other short-form fiction. I recognize these as different forms than novel writing, and I don't have a well-developed critical eye for them.

That aside... We're reading this for my spec-fic book club this month. A friend of mine, in her review, called it “trite.” I was surprised by her review, because when I read it I was only about halfway through the novella and had been enjoying myself. I ended up using the same word in one of my notes. That note came on page 81, where some minor mumblings came to a head.

Like many speculative fiction works, the book is interested in a post-currency economy. But... not that interested. I recognize that in a short-form work, we're not going to get a long explanation of how the economy works. The thing is, the book tried to do a little of this and fell into a no-man's land of too-much but not-enough. The book starts in a busy marketplace. We get a sense that information and favors are effective forms of currency. Later, we learn that our protagonist is very rich — rich enough to live several lifetimes at ease, we're told, if not more. But what does this mean? By virtue of what? Many authors write away problems by making characters rich, but that seems really bizarre in this setting where the author is trying to put forward a favor-based economy. Has this character done so much that people owe them so many favors that they don't have to work? Of have they sold information to such an extent that they have monetary means of survival? How do money and favors interact? I don't know, and I'm not 100% sure the book does, either.

That's a pretty minor complaint, and one that basically every speculative fiction bumps into at some point. Star Trek is famously inconsistent and sometimes nonsensical on this, so we can leave it aside.

The characters are a bit strange. Our protagonist began their experience in their current reality as a misplaced Oxford PhD student in the 1960's. I am not totally sure that Bugs Bunny was the most popular thing among Oxford Students in the 1960s, but apparently he was popular enough for our lead to name her computational companion after him. This gave me a chuckle at first, but by the end (keep in mind, only 100 pages later), I was nonplussed at the Bugs Bunny dialogue. Similarly, I had written down, “Can you call a character Alice without conjuring up Alice in Wonderland?” Not 3 pages later, there is a reference to following the white rabbit — so the answer is no. I think calling a character Alice and having them leap across strange worlds is clear enough as a reference, I'm not sure we needed several textual references to the tale. It took the reference from maybe-subtle thematic shorthand to “HEY, YOU EVER SEE THAT DISNEY MOVIE?”

Remember when I said our lead was a 1960's Oxford PhD student? I'm wondering if Oxford had lower standards in the 60s, because for an old(*) and experienced being in the Universe, our lead is remarkably dumb when it comes to how she interacts with the unexploded remnant. This thing tells her exactly what it is over and over again, and yet, she is surprised that it does exactly what everyone, including the thing itself, says what it'll do! I don't get it! In a longer form, maybe we'd have an explanation as to why Alice doesn't listen to this thing and insists she knows better than it.

I think there was space to explore that, even in these 105 pages. There is a chapter where Alice visits a friend and meets their family. It is entirely without purpose and also... pretty weird. I'd have suggested cutting that whole chapter and character and giving us more space to understand and relate to Alice, something we're never given in the novella.

The ending is a little hard to follow. It's sort of unclear as to the sequencing of events and the consistency of things. It doesn't really matter because the ending can be seen coming from miles away and it's not terribly original.

It was a short read and that makes almost everything pretty forgivable. I enjoyed big parts of it, but I think with some editing this could have been something a lot more than it ended up as.

I picked this book off my shelf a few months ago knowing that I was on a high-speed collision course with a re-read. I am not sure where I got this copy. It is dated on the inside cover in handwriting 1966. It is blue clothbound and cotton paged, and the pages feel very nice.

Book spoilers below.

I love the book. It is 250 pages of heartbreak and lovesickness. Every character within is detestable. Jake, the protagonist, is wounded in the war and it is suggested that what happened is he got his penis shot off, or at least rendered totally inoperable. The first time I read this I thought it was his testicles that he lost, but this read I think it is more than that. Jake is in love with Lady Brett, a woman that passes in and out of his life seemingly with the sole purpose of torturing him. She claims several times to love him, too, but she cannot maintain any relationship and engages in numerous affairs with basically ever male character in the book.

One of her favorite things to do is talk to Jake about her affairs right after asking if he still loves her. She'll say she loves him and then talk about another man. Or she'll ask Jake to set her up with another man. And Jake, the masochist that he is, basically facilitates this. I wonder if it's because he feels that, since he can't sleep with her, this is the closest he can get to giving her pleasure.

I find all that pretty tiring. For one, I think it is insanely lacking creativity in a very straight way. There are more ways to give pleasure than a penis and besides, there are tools available for such a thing. I think if these two really loved each other, they could figure something out. Hence my thought that Brett does not actually love Jake at all. I think she is dependent on him for getting her out of messes. She uses him. I think there's a part of her that enjoys flaunting her triumphs in front of him. I think she is very cruel. I think there is basically no behavior that could be more cruel than what she does.

And yet, Jake just takes it all. Early in the book, a different character is lambasted by his fiance and Jake asks why he takes it. Why doesn't he ask himself? He does nothing at all to set boundaries with Brett. He seems just happy as can be to be punished over and over again. Part of me understands this in a frustrating way. But Jake seems to resign himself to getting drunk and watching all of this as a passenger. He always comes to her aid whenever asks. Very frustrating.

The book has a lot of stuff that any consummate depressee can appreciate. Some great quotes:

* p31 - My head started to work. The old grievance.
* p31 - Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway.. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.
* p34 - It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
* p148 - I could shut my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. But I could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn't!

And sometimes it can be pretty funny. It has one of my favorite jokes in a Hemingway book:

* p136 - “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

There is a bunch of stuff in the bullfighting about steers and all that and sure there's some themes you could connect Cohn and Jake to Steers and others to the others and blah blah blah. It doesn't really matter because I don't really care about all that. It's a book about Jake being in love with someone who isn't available to him and he doesn't know what to do with that other than to absorb all of the pain in the world. The book closes with Brett and Jake riding in a car, pressed together. Brett saying how good they could have been together (not that they put any work into even giving it a shot!). Jake says, “Yes. Isn't it pretty to think so?”

Pretty thoughts will only get you so far. And the prettiest thoughts and the darkest thoughts have this in common: they hurt the most.

A very good book full of hateable characters! Classic Hemingway, the asshole knows how humans are.

By the way – the more I read the more I'm convinced he might have been gay. Lady Brett and the other women are described in whatever way. But he is so interested in describing men and their faces and their pretty lips and eyes. He writes about men how I write about men. It's a shame because I am frankly sick of reading about straight relationships and would love to read about gay love and/or grief in the style of Hemingway.

Pretty good - as always the audiobook version has some good production value.

Caro's second volume in his long biography covering Lyndon Johnson's rise to and utilization of power is as interesting as the first, perhaps because it shatters some aspects of Johnson which have crystalized or at the least become somewhat opaque with the passage of time.

It is rare for folks to believe any politician is 100% on the clean and narrow, but it is another thing to see the levels of brazen chicanery that some are capable of. I knew very little about LBJ before diving into these books - he was not a President of much focus in my education other than mentions when discussing the various civil rights legislation passed during his Presidency. What I did know essentially boiled down to his campaign button: “All the Way with LBJ.”

What is clear from Caro's work here is that Johnson was singular in his focus: he wanted to obtain power. It is not clear why other than to correct from childhood experiences, and Caro teases future analysis of what he will do when he obtains power throughout the first two LBJ volumes. What becomes even more apparent as one reads this second volume is that the petty and conniving methods used on his college campus and as part of the “Little Congress” are the rule for LBJ, rather than the exception (at least so far). There were events in the book which were so blatant, so brazen, as to be shocking even to a reader in today's political world. Johnson's campaign strategy of all-out-assault on Coke Stevenson's reputation is certainly an ancestor of today's political campaign strategy, but the outright theft of an election is at least today more technical as opposed to petty theft.

I was somewhat taken with Caro's description of Coke Stevenson. The parallel I grew for him was that of Abraham Lincoln: largely self-educated while working through the day and into the night. His approach to campaigning seemed, at least superficially, somewhat simple. The distinguishing feature between the two is the lack of both magnanimity and political gamesmanship as traits in Coke. Where Lincoln was gifted with political intuition and the will to use it, Stevenson comes across as fairly inept on this front. Whether this ineptitude is due to lack of skill or ethical aversion to such gamesmanship is perhaps debatable - Caro's frame in this work is that it comes from ethical aversion, or perhaps even that Stevenson simply believed it was not necessary to engage until too late.

While I ‘read' this book primarily through Grover Gardner's wonderful narration of the Audible audiobook, there were times when I stopped to review the printed text or read portions in print via the Kindle edition. One portion of the book which is left out of the audiobook but included in the Kindle and print versions is Caro's afterward, specifically his discussion on his presentation of Coke Stevenson and response to articles that emerged after this book's initial publication. I would consider this afterward a required element to this book and was disappointed that it was not included in the narration. The afterward contains some critical context and discussion on Stevenson and his reputation as it exists today and how it has been impacted by the victory of Johnson and his generation (in a way, it serves as an interesting example of reality versus ‘history is written by the victor').

This was a great read, and I am excited to continue on in this series!

Borrowed from a friend. Aggressively not for me, I'm afraid.

Quite an interesting read! I like time travel stories, but they can spin out of control quickly. This one stayed pretty grounded and I thought the cop TV show framing device was interesting.

There were some definitely parts of the book that made me raise an eyebrow - especially the main character's internal-ish monologue and use of some words that I would associate with hypermasculinity. I'm thinking that this is intentional on the author's part to connect to this character's idolization of the TV show cop. It's something I'm still thinking on.

Bonus star purely for the 80's noir vibe. That said, I do have questions about some of the characters and what their purposes were. One, in particular, who seemed a bit of an Elizabeth Holmes examination.

It's hard to argue with a book barely 40 pages of text long that is considered one of the best books on writing. I'd write more, but my thoughts don't mean much and I'm already breaking too many of Strunk's rules just in these few lines.

This isn't a book I can leave much review for. It isn't a book that is read once and then put to the side. For one, I'm not competent to review a book of poetry. And, these are thoughts on morals and power. Much of the translation appears simple, but sometimes the metaphors are hard for me to understand, but sometimes they are so simple that it gives me pause.

Each time I read poetry, I realize I don't know how to read poetry. Especially poetry that doesn't rhyme. Oh well.

I enjoyed and appreciated Le Guin's notes throughout and at the end. My plan is to keep this on my desk and crack it open at random to think on one every once and a while.

I read this for the small press book club at my LBS. I didn't have any big expectation going in — I don't follow book awards and wasn't familiar with Ernaux's work. As I started reading, I found the use of we/one etc interesting, and then challenging. I flipped forward in search of chapter breaks — none! On page 102 I wrote a note: “the tense is feeling exhausting.”

I read the last 110 pages or so (ie the second half of the book) in one sitting, just before book club. I really enjoyed the first and final quarters of the book. In the middle, I started to feel a bit of a lull, and as if we were meandering. On finishing the book, the pacing feels intentional. I don't know how much to go into this, but one does feel meandering in the middle of life, so it tracks, anyway.

I thought a lot about my mom while reading, especially as Ernaux is describing her children as they grow into adulthood, and visit her. There's a great moment where she is following her sons and pondering how they could come from her. In another, she's musing about how she is a grandparent, where she still thinks that word is only for her grandparents.

There's a lot more in the book — discussions of class, sex, consumer culture. I might update this review later to think a little about those parts of the book. Overall, though, I enjoyed this. I think I'd enjoy making an attempt to read it in the original French, as well.

One more down in the Year of Cormac.

I am not surprised to be less than pleased with The Counselor. In my Letterboxd review of Ridley Scott's adaptation (https://boxd.it/5bor6n), I lament the film's incoherence. The screenplay is certainly more coherent, but I think it has some problems.

Reading this let me understand why The Stonemason didn't quite work for me, either. In Cormac's novel/prose work, the entire construct belongs to his language. All facets of the world are crafted by it. The dialogue is enmeshed in the narration, thought, and description. All blends, and he is fantastic in this form. In a screenplay, you have stage direction and dialogue. Nothing else. It lacks a dimensionality on which McCarthy's work depends.

For me, this is evidenced by the strange merging of Cormac's dialogue with a rather contemporary world. Outside of his screenplays, I've never read a line from McCarthy that rang any less than perfect true. Yet, in this, some half the lines read strangely. Part of this is the curse of casting, having seen the movie first I must imagine Cameron Diaz say the final lines. Some of these lines, where McCarthy decides to talk about routers, VPNs, encryption; source code, compilers, machine-readable language, simply not in his element. They do not ring.

There are very good lines. Some examples:

-CAFE MAN — No. Of course not. All my family is dead. I am the one who has no meaning.

or

- JEFE — Yes. An understanding that the world will not take you back. I have no wish to paint the world in colors more somber than those it wears, but as the world gives way to darkness it becomes more and more difficult to dismiss the understanding that the world is in fact oneself. It is a thing which you have created, no more, no less. And when you cease to be so will the world. There will be other worlds. Of course. But they are the worlds of other men and your understanding of them was never more than an Illusion anyway. Your world—the only one that matters—will be gone. And it will never come again. The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass. Until annihilation comes. And all grand ideas are seen for what they are. ...

This mere pages from the Diaz character speaking of Sequel servers and remote access Trojan Horses, Zrizbi or Torig... I don't think so!

I wish I'd have read this before watching the film. I wonder if my approach would be any different. I don't think so — but we'll never know. I think Cormac's work is at its best when it is in novel form and when it has space to really muck around in ideas. Something about the screenplay format hollows it out.

I didn't realize how much I read about the development of nuclear war capability, and the after effects of a nuclear war, compared to the conduction of a nuclear war.

Of the 90 or so books I read last year, my favorite non-fiction was Richard Rhodes' 1987 THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB. It describes in close detail the scientific history leading up to the development of the most powerful bombs ever developed, at the time. DARK SUN, the sequel, which describes the sequel to the Bomb (the Super) is on my list to read.

In fiction, post-apocalypse stories are some of my favorite. THE ROAD is perhaps my favorite book, and takes place after some world-ending cataclysm (which is left ambiguous, but reads nuclear to me). On the other end of the spectrum, the video game series (and now TV show) FALLOUT has been one of my favorites for years upon years.

There's a theory about why we haven't encountered alien life called the Great Filter. It imagines that something makes it extremely difficult for life to progress to such a stage as to develop into something we would or could identify. Civilization-ending nuclear war (e.g., any and all nuclear war, Annie Jacobsen writes) could be a possible filtration event for our species. It would also be a filter through which survivors pass.

I read parts of this book sitting in Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C., about 2 miles north of the White House. After each section, I looked up to watch dogs playing, people running around, a little kid pick up a stick. I imagined what it would look like if these were instantly turned to carbon following a bright flash, all grass and trees around me vaporized instantly, the stoneworks and roads turned molten. In D.C., helicopters are constantly passing. Big Sikorsky VH-3Ds frequently pass over the Park, and each time I imagine that the President must be on it (who knows?). A large helicopter passed in the distance and I watched it and imagined being in the back cabin as the first pure white silent flash of a nuclear detonation blinded me. Not having time to understand that words like “time” and “reality” would no longer have any meaning to anyone nearby. Perhaps anyone, anywhere, if the scenario this book describes were to occur.

I told my mom what I was reading and she asked if it made me nervous. No, I live 1.5 miles from the White House. If a nuclear bomb is detonated, most likely I will be dead before anyone could hear it. Then again, I live in a basement, so perhaps I would live for a while crushed under the building. Or maybe I would be lucky and the force of the detonation would blow all of the buildings totally away and leave me with a view of the gray, fire-lit skies. Lucky enough to die imminently of radiation poisoning. Hm.

What makes me nervous is that everyone interviewed for the book knows that this situation doesn't work. Everyone. No one thinks it is a good idea for nuclear bombs to exist. At best they deter other people from using nuclear bombs. In a way, deterrence does less to guarantee that no one will ever use one, and more to guarantee that if anyone ever detonates one, everyone will detonate all that they have.

There are a few scenes in the book where leadership fret about what appears weak and strong following the detonation. That is to say, once where I am sitting right now ceases to exist and once what survivors of government and military there are sheltered in Raven Rock pondering the end of humanity and proportional response. I had to set the book down and think about this. Is anyone concerned about looking weak after taking an intercontinental ballistic missile to the cranium? I thought it sounded a little unrealistic. Then I got nervous because it sounds a little too realistic.

I am not sure what else to say about the book. The long and short of it is, if there's ever a mistake or madness that leads to a nuclear launch (let alone detonation), there's a good chance that no one will ever say anything ever again. Or see, hear, or think anything ever again. At least not after a few months for the few survivors to starve to death. They might think of a few things. One of them might be, “oops.”

But probably not.

It's been a bit since I read Annihilation, but I'm surprised at how different this is from that! Nearly a totally different genre. Yet, the story picks up more or less where Annihilation ended.

I definitely had more fun with Annihilation. This book tries to feel a little more John Le Carre and doesn't really get it, IMO. I had a hard time suspending my disbelief when it came to some aspects of the organization management / roles / responsibilities drama (which takes up a lot of this book). When we start using codenames like Control, Central, Voice, etc., some of the spy novelty wears off. Can't say why, but it becomes far less interesting, to me. For example, there are a few things that are in question throughout big parts of the book (who ix X, what is Y, stuff like that). Yet, when they're revealed, I am never that surprised.

The final third of the book is worth the much slower first third. The middle third is a transitional space. Once we get a bit nearer the ‘weird fiction' of it all, the suspense elements return and it is far more interesting.

I'll be interested to see how the third book continues on. It is clearly setup and that bodes well for a compelling beginning. I wish this had been a bit shorter. I also bumped upon the author's use of sentence fragments as illustration's of internal thought or whatever. I'm not sure if this featured so prominently in Annihilation, but I noticed it big time in Authority.

Somehow I've avoided knowing anything about this book throughout its popularity and adaptation into a movie (I also haven't seen this). Still, the book subverted my expectations as I had no idea it was a work of weird fiction. I enjoyed Van der Meer's writing style - there's an element of Cormac McCarthy in there, somewhere.

Excited to read the next one, eventually.

Another read for work. This is the third Tufte I've read and they certainly have diminishing returns. I found [b:The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd Ed. 17744 The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd Ed. Edward R. Tufte https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1560425455l/17744.SX50.jpg 522245] dated, but worthwhile in its approach to data. Then [b:Beautiful Evidence 17743 Beautiful Evidence Edward R. Tufte https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1392420570l/17743.SX50.jpg 19271] to be more of a coffee table book repeating some strong opinions from Tufte that have not survived their aging.This is more of the same. Tufte loves complexity - in several of these books he cites archaic handmade train schedules. These are prettier to look at than to use, and they're not the prettiest things to look at to begin with. Tufte often talks about simplicity being essential, but then also repeats statements something like: “you can't treat your audience as if they're stupid, uncaring, or obtuse.” It feels like he makes those statements to get away with overly complex graphics.He highlights a projection of the Rockefeller Center surroundings by Constantine Anderson as a great joy of visualizing information, noting that it goes so far as to depict individual windows. What is the point of identifying individual windows on a map? There really isn't one. Tufte notes that Anderson spent 20 years on this map, and then it becomes clear that this is an art piece, not a utility.I would be interested in seeing a modern version of these books, using modern examples and modern design language. These have been rather left in the past, and I can't imagine anything but the first book being useful to the practicing data scientist or designer. I think [b:Rastersysteme für die visuelle Gestaltung - Grid systems in Graphic Design 350962 Rastersysteme für die visuelle Gestaltung - Grid systems in Graphic Design Josef Muller-Brockmann https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1173989527l/350962.SX50.jpg 341206] is an excellent design reference for layout and much more practical, having read it over 10 years ago, anyway. Page 82 of the Tufte cites [b:Die neue Typografie 5785533 Die neue Typografie Jan Tschichold https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1677797992l/5785533.SX50.jpg 114711] which I haven't read, but the excerpt/graphic from that seems in the same design language as Muller's work and so is probably the most practical thing I took away.