Dwight > Recent Status Updates

Would like to know if the various difficult to describe mannerisms that make this sound like the narrative of an anime are “anime-esque” or just “Japanese”

You’re really aware of how often Murakami uses “library” in the book when the reader pronounces it “lie-berry” 😅

Sampson never kills a king in his palace 🤷‍♂️

It’s pretty short, but I’m undecided on if I want to finish… so far it’s a scattered high falutin self justification by Palantir for making AI weapons

I do not like this narrator’s voice for Isabella 🫣

Some Oprah self help woo garbage

Starting out more comprehensible than the most recent McCarthy I’ve read

There are some good bits but man these corporatespeak examples are like brain-Novocain

“…and assigned an executer to…”

Who is in charge of this? 😅

~”…like a parent of a kidnapped diabetic child trying to explain how to use an epi-pen…”

🤨

It has almost become entirely a history of religions in India and China which makes it even more weird that he jumped over Islam… perhaps he is covering them in another book? Or there’s enough left that he’ll get to them after the Far East?

A little strange… he moved the camera to India and all the sudden there were “the moslems” doing this and that… no coverage of the beginning of Islam

The throughly modern cynical humanist viewpoint is really wearing me down… probably won’t jump into volume two when I’m done, but I’m not giving up yet.

The pre history section was very "noble savage" anthropological mish mash... At one point the author even said "we must not imagine the day to day lives of these people that we don't have any evidence for after just constantly doing that for the whole book...

This may be interesting, but we'll see.

“…power destroys the sanity of the powerful…”

This would make a fun dumb movie

Though with Crichton’s movie batting average…

“Words scare him not who blancheth not at deeds”

😬. I think the reader said “the erotica” for “the Eroica” but since it is an audiobook I’m not sure…

Talking about performing at a grave so I’m pretty sure it was just a speako

Wow that is a very long segment in French at the end of chapter 5… I thought I was listening to a translation of this book 😅

This is kinda weird… the reader keeps calling Cage’s 4’33” “four feet thirty three inches”

I’ve never heard it called that. Always “4 minutes 33 seconds”… I can’t even find (through admittedly cursory searching) anyone else referring to it as that.

(Recommended by Kazuo Ishiguro)

Rashomon in 17th century England

Focuses on all of the most boring parts of the life of temujin: sex, woman’s intrigue, dancing

(Actually listening to audiobook this time through… goodreads makes this difficult to notate. Liking it more than last time and I didn’t hate it then.)

Just mentioned “Grieg’s A minor Piano Sonata” which doesn’t seem to exist. Best I can find is that he had one Piano Sonata and it was in E minor.

Oof… some of these statistics feel like personal attacks 🥺😅

This could be pretty good… hope the political/economic metaphors get a little more nuanced going forward or it could become a slog.