Al Maki > Recent Status Updates

What surprises me is how much it reminds me of Twain's Roughing It, one of my favorite travel books: a highly articulate, arch observer in an exotic frontier landscape, commenting on the oddities of the locals and both written at roughly the same time.

The irascibility of Tobias Smollet, the irony of Mark Twain and the sentence structures of George Eliot bundled in an aristocratic superciliousness.

My undergrad major was math. What baffled me most was the significance of ‘e’, the base for natural logarithms. It had near magical properties but I had no grasp of why. This book is a history of the discovery of the number 2.71828… and the development of the understanding of its place in math. It is written at about the level of an undergrad course but uses history to motivate the discussion.

I set it aside after about a hundred pages. It felt tedious.

He has this baroque demotic style that is all his own that even at 88 he is still developing, a carnival barker with Clarendon’s structure. I love it.

“Don’t you get it? Our job is to make the sexy serious and the serious sexy,” Tina Brown to a New Yorker editor. Welcome to the eighties.

Seeing the film “Across the River and Into the Trees” I became curious about the back story and so am reading this account. 1, a relationship between a 50 year old man and an 18 year old girl troubles me. 2, the book supports my belief that success turned Hemingway into a self-parody. 3, Donald Trump’s style has a rhythm and a focus similar to Hemingway’s private letters. That gives me pause.

The way I would describe it is to say that if his two master works are like huge Reubens oil paintings then this is like a Reubens drawing: same style, almost all the detail and shading gone but still an excellent delineation.

a master class in international relations
a history of how and why China became involved with the rest of the world from an American point of view
a fascinating history of Chinese power politics
"good advice from Satan's kingdom"

It seems to me that each 30 page chapter contains exactly one interesting idea and that idea could have been communicated on one page. So it’s not a complete waste of time but close to it.

I enjoyed Burgess’s gymnastics but the material didn’t interest me

“He will stand through whatever centuries the story of the Revolution
may be told as he stood on the scaffold looking westward and transfigured by the red sun, still courageous, still powerful in his words, and still instinct with that peculiar energy, self-forming, self-governing, and whole….
Then they did what they had to do, and without any kind of fear, his great
soul went down the turning in the road.”

Of Robespierre: “the mad, narrow enemy of mercy.” Nobody writes English like that anymore.

Not her later style but I’m very much enjoying it.

As a description of working for a living it’s unusually candid. He is also unusally candid about his own flaws. I can’t help wondering if he wrote it to come to terms with himself.

Sympathetic chapter on a Mexican hill town circa 1940, hand to mouth life in a pre-industrial economy.

2 suicides (so far) in a book about food and eating?? As she says in the intro the subject is the satisfaction of hunger in its various forms.

My early impression is that it is not only quite readable but well documented.

The book reminds me of Dickens which has led me to contrast the styles of the two, Dickens being more fluid but also often more sentimental.

It seems.to me that Lewis writes about “who somebody is” while Walter Isaacson writes about “what somebody has done.” Personally, I find Lewis’s books more interesting. Regardless of what Bankman-Freed did, he’s interesting.

Of Falk: “We are in his case allowed to contemplate the foundation of all the emotions.”

Very readable

There are some interesting details. But court life strikes me as having been excruciatingly boring. I’ve read about court life at the Borgia’s papal court and Louis XIV’s court but this one seems even more stultifying, perhaps because it seems to have been intentionally insular.

Kliuchevski pointed out this book, an acct from late 1600s by a Russian diplomat of recent Russian history. Available through Google books.

I can only stomach it one section at a time, but the worthwhile sections need time to be thought about.

Rebarbative but full of insights that make it well worth reading

The Return is a bit like reading a 130 year old David Mamet play.

But the descriptions of London: its constraints, its monotony, its drudgery, are almost shocking.

The title is apt. I found the stories disturbing in much the same way as Annie Proulx’s. In general I love Conrad’s writing but there’s one aspect that disappoints me, his inability to do anything with sexual passion beyond confused exclamations. I could say it was the time, but even that paragon of delicacy Proust could communicate arousal and passion and jealousy.