Steven Yenzer > Recent Status Updates

This is infuriatingly hard to read. “Next up was another big hitter with a thunderous one-handed backhand and powerful serve but a better overall package—the ninth-ranked Dominic Them of Austria, who's a fixture in the top ten but whom Goffin had proved in the past to have the measure of—he'd defeated him in the round of sixteen of this year's Australian Open, as he had the year before as well.”

But when he came back for the hard courts and beat Kyrgios to help Belgium get past Australia to play in its first Davis Cup final and won the title in Shenzhen and the title in Tokyo, qualified for the end-of-the-year ATP Final, and beat Nadal in the
round robin and Federer in the semis before losing the final, once again as in January, to Dimitrov, he ended the season for the first time ever as a top-ten player.”

He also loves to jump forward and refer to things that he hasn’t told us about yet. Some of these moments would probably be known to people who followed tennis at the time, but I didn’t, so it’s really confusing.

I think the author’s problem is that he loves the wind-up. He loves hinting at and previewing what he’s going to tell you about, in the hopes of piquing your interest. But most of the book ends up being wind-up, and it’s confusing and frustrating, especially when he closes an anecdote in a weird truncated way that makes it unclear whether the wind-up is over or not.

This book desperately needed an editor. The author defines terms and introduces ideas multiple times, mentions things that have not been introduced, and just doesn’t seem to grasp how to make his stream-of-consciousness style comprehensible. It’s just confusing at times and overall not enjoyable to read.

I appreciate the author’s historical revisionism and my view of the events described has certainly changed. However, I just don’t trust him as an objective observer. He’s more than willing to criticize GM (up to a point) but I don’t get the sense that he was equally willing to give Nader and others’ arguments a full airing.

After O’Neil is (understandably) skeeved out early on when he catches Hansen chatting with his wife on the phone — before he is even certain Hansen is a spy — O’Neil “suppresses a smile” when Hansen looks at a picture of her and says “You’re a lucky man.”

Also, I just cannot believe that most of the interactions with Hansen actually happened this way because they make O’Neill sound completely inept. At one point he claims he said to Hansen, “I can see why people spy for the Russians.”

This guy is the kind of enlightened modern man who refers to his wife as “very independent.”

This book could probably be 25% shorter if Walker didn't insist on providing a near-constant stream of unnecessary simile.

Same problems as The Making of Home, which I couldn’t finish because the writing was so often difficult to parse. Here’s an example from Christmas: “By the beginning of the eighteenth century, greenery more generally, being so routine at Christmas, itself came to be called, simply, ‘Christmas.’” The unnecessary complexity of that sentence is baffling. Why write it that way?

“The latest science on depression echoes Hippocrates suggestion that depression is a disease of the brain with oral remedies” bullshit

This book is actually about the “apparently arcane debate[s]”

Why is Mann spending so long describing the early 20th-century debate over fossil remains? This book is long enough; I don’t need a deep dive into the historiography.

The genius of Cixin Liu's narrator, and translator Ken Liu's translation, is the willingness to take the time to explain complex science in the service of storytelling.

Liu dives into stuff like interdimensionality and the nature of spacetime with the candor of Mark Watney in The Martian, except that Liu's story is exponentially (seriously, exponentially) more epic.

Incredibly frustrating, irritating dialogue