Peter McLaughlin > Recent Status Updates

On p. 54, Hornblower has a conversation in French where the other participant says '[w]e are carrying a cargo of rice'. The reader is explicitly told Hornblower ‘grasped the implications of what was being said to him’ vis-a-vis rice.

On p. 59 – five pages later! – another French character says ‘The rice!’, and we are told: ‘The French word “riz” was unknown to Hornblower.’

Just lazy, lazy, lazy.

Carrying on from my point about Houellebecq: the impression I get from the first chapter of this book is that the Catholic critics of the French Revolution (a category that included several popes) were just fundamentally very unimaginative. They rejected representative government primarily because they could not imagine a world in which it functioned, even as it was demonstrably already functioning in Britain.

Extremely like me to get stumped by literally the very first exercise in the very first chapter. Misunderstood the question initially and kept banging my head against a wall trying to prove something that (I have since learned) is not true. When I figured out my mistake, I managed to prove the correct thing, but only by bringing in some real analysis—which can't be what Kreps intended?

On p. 216, Buehlman describing a demon: ‘How unlike a bird it was, though it had wings, or at least explained itself with them; no bird could just hang in the sky like a still image of itself.’ How sad that the man has clearly never seen (even a YouTube video of) a kestrel!

I'm not sure whether it's an unfair advantage, or actually a handicap, to title your novel with a line from Shakespeare. On the one hand, every time I catch the spine of this book in the corner of my eye, it suddenly becomes the centre of my attention, because my brain's like 'fuck, remember that line? that's a fucking amazing line.' On the other hand, when I pick it up, I am now expecting Shakespeare.

This is a book and a half. I'm not a hundred pages in and I am already pretty confident this will be the best book I read all year. The density of insight is unbelievable. (Also I get to listen to the Specials while I read it which is good fun.)

The introduction seems compelling, but when I spot-checked a few particularly interesting claims, it was not clear that Sells was correct. I won't commit to saying anything stronger until I've read more and checked more, but I have shifted to a more sceptical footing.