Christopher > Recent Status Updates

Third reading commencing.

Already more than a quarter of the way through. RFK's style is a little less intimate than I was hoping for. His praise for his brother is effusive, and he's showing magnanimity toward those who differed with less aggressive policy. Interesting book, but it feels lighter than it should.

'The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden did one of the most beautiful things a city is capable of doing when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one.'

Just wanted to share that wonderful sentence.

'The champagne was dead. So it goes.'

Laughed out loud at that one!

Just getting started. Auditioning. So far so good.

Boy, Buckley whines a lot about how Yale is anti-Christian. I'm catching him making a slew of unabashedly biased assumptions and fallacies. This is supposedly where the modern conservative movement took root. The rhetorical content is specious, and one could have a blast tearing it to shreds. Note pencil always at the ready position for this one.

Basically auditioning this book to see if I want to continue with it. It's sort of a bucket list book, in that it's something that is probably needed to help explain why WFB was popular.

Brilliant writing. I'm becoming a big fan of Philip K. Dick. I may zoom right into The Man in the High Castle straight after this.

Just getting to the point in which Carraway was asked to invite Daisy to his house for tea so Gatsby can make an introduction from his next door mansion.

Exquisite writing. This is the kind of writing you read slowly, savoring each drop. It's not even about the story, it's about how he tells it.

Reading this for the second time. I read this in high school for an English class and I recall almost none of it. Just getting started here and Fitzgerald's lush writing is a revelation. Beautiful prose. I completely missed that when I first read it at age 17.

There's a section where Arnold and Gennaro are discussing the Malcolm Effect. I don't know if it continues beyond page 248, but Arnold basically says Malcolm and his chaos theory are wrong, but doesn't spell out why it's wrong. In fact his argument--I think he's saying living systems contradict chaos theory--is a pretty good case for why chaos theory is correct here. Living systems are inherently chaotic.

Just passed the part where Nedry ... you know ... gets it. I've been having a nagging feeling about Crichton's writing--that Jurassic Park is written for a young adult audience. I think Crichton is deliberately writing below his skill level, or perhaps using his skill to write for a broad audience. I think to a point Crichton should have been satisfied with negative reviews, feeling he had done his job.

Hammond and Wu taking about Malcolm and how Malcolm is a negative element in this tour because of his skepticism. He was an early critic of the project, so why was he even invited? Did Hammond assume the park was so good that it would convince him? Kind of an idiot plot device.

The mistaken gender pronouns are getting annoying. The book spent some time earlier saying the dinosaurs are all females so breeding can be strictly avoided. But then using he/him/his pronouns are somehow excused. I'm now at the point where they are trying to see the T.Rexes, but they're being addressed as he/him/his. I think it would have made more sense to get it right and refer to females properly.

This is the part where the visitors are shown a presentation of the island. It's followed up for some reason with a discussion of infant mortality on Costa Rica, theorizing that dinosaurs have a causal relationship. Very strange part that strikes me as lazy. Crichton is capable of better. Infant mortality has many possible reasons. Pointing to dinosaur activity is nonsense.

Haven't read Crichton in a long time. He still has quite a flair for morphing science fiction and reality and making them one. His dialoguing is still kind of wooden at this point, too. It is lot of fun to read.

All of a sudden I'm getting a good idea of why a number of friends and family have vacationed in Costa Rica in the last thirty years. Michael Crichton made Costa Rica a popular destination with this book, I imagine.

Getting to the home stretch of this classic baseball book. Wanted to note here that I think I reached the high point of the book here. Bouton is dealt to the Astros, and suddenly the clouds part and his skies brighten. He gets a start, pitches into the 10th and loses, but still he's happy because he pitched well and his club believed in him. Huge resolving moment with real life analogies.

Update on 2/2. That's 'apparently,' not 'differently.' Stupid autocorrect.

2/2. Also found out from the Wiki that differently Ball Four has been revised a number of times. That means my version, the 1990 20th anniversary edition, is different from the original 1970 paperback my dad used to have. I'm well known to be biased toward the originals.

1/2. Reading the Wiki on Bouton. Apparently Bouton dictated his diary into tape machines. I'm not sure what to make of that, because the writing becomes more the work of the editor piecing the stories together.

Auditioning a couple of baseball books--the classic Ball Four by Jim Bouton, or the more modern classic Men at Work by George Will. Bouton wins because his writing is more engaging and less formal than Will. Haven't read a baseball book in a few years.

Almost over the finish line. I'm going to want a stiff drink after this one. Already thinking about books for the next read. Maybe a great author Rand hated.

An interesting passage a little while before on attaching value to the things one buys and possesses. Of course, it was Gail Wynand saying this, so the words take on greater malice. But it's true that we tend to seek to see the things we own as special because we endow them with our ownership. Looking forward to being free of this oppressive book, haha.