Celina > Recent Status Updates

“New Mexico’s where I decided that if I ever had the misfortune of coming within arms’ length of Bill Bryson I should punch him in the face. He seemed like an affable curmudgeon in A Walk in the Woods, but if you have the misfortune of meeting him in The Lost Continent, and I did, it’s hard to see him as anything but an asshole who hates women and gays and waitresses.” I knew I loved this writer.

“Sí, así era: en su país uno se despertaba y ya no sabía qué esperar, que broma cruel le jugaría la historia, que escupitajo le lanzaría a la cara. ¿Cuando les había ocurrido esto a los Estados Unidos de América?”

I’ve been looking for something that fits my feelings on this crappiest anniversary for America. This bit, about Confederate flags at Plymouth Rock and visiting a concentration camp in Germany, comes as close to the mark as anything.

The culture shock was probably more shocking when this came out 40 years ago than it is now. The writing has its moments but the characters and their dialogue are on the dull side.

This is just lovely. I don’t say that lightly but that’s the best word to describe it. Just because it’s an audiobook doesn’t mean it doesn’t require close attention though. Not the kind of book to set and forget while puttering around the house.

I’m not sure about this. Sixteen pages in (the first 50 were the foreword which I didn’t read), Interiority Overload alarms are going off. But I’ll read past the first chapter, which takes place a year later than the others, before I decide.

Not sure how long I can stand to hear about the abject vermin of the London oligarch class. For now, onward.

On one hand, it’s Patrick Radden Keefe, who’s never not worth reading. On the other, these are some seriously unpleasant people I’m going to be hearing about. Even the sympathetic ones are awful.

I prioritized long stretches of reading time this weekend and finally got back to the point where I’d lost the plot because I’d let the book sit too long. It worked and I’ve reconnected the dots. Onward.

“James, the most vicious of the lot, was forgiven for his crimes. He was white, entertaining, and an alleged foe of the government; in other words, an ideal American.” (2/2)

“The makeover of Jesse James was part of a broader mid-century rehabilitation of slave owners including Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Their biographies were rewritten by Hollywood’s cowboys-and-Indians culture, softened to appeal to 10-year-old boys and the 10-year-old boy in every man.” (1/2)

This is good, but I think I’ll have to read it on paper. The narrator is good, rendering the different characters’ voices subtly and accurately, but the MC’s breathy, naive voice makes already emotionally unsettling content hard to take. Plus, there are subtle clues and foreshadowing that are hard to keep track of in half-hour chunks. I think this is a book that calls for flipping back and forth a lot.

Ever since this came out, I’ve been dying to read it, and it’s just OK. I’m glad I didn’t pay money for this.

This is great so far (if you don’t count wondering if the author ever spoke to an actual woman), but a library reserve has come up and i have to set this aside for now.

On raunch comedies that weren’t American Pie: Crap movies are crap. I appreciate the need to call out toxic pop culture, but I’ve never heard of at least half these titles, let alone watched them.

If I’m not mistaken, Sophie Gilbert is a British writer who moved to the US in 2007, presumably as an adult. So it’s a little weird to see her do these deep dives into American Pie and other classic US trash. Not bad, but weird. Two possibilities:

1. maybe she’s more American than I’d thought
2. maybe this crap is more pervasive and more formative than I want to think.

“And wind speed tends to be higher in the winter than the summer because of sharper temperature gradients. Sun and wind are therefore complementary, and they have a triplet, hydropower, which is just one more form of solar energy.”
2/2

“[Wind energy] is graceful in another sense. Because it takes a while for the sun to heat the air molecules that produce the wind, wind tends to build in power later in the afternoon, just as the photovoltaic effect begins to ebb. Not only that, but the further north you go, the stronger the wind gets, which is useful since Norway has rather less sunlight than, say, Greece.”
1/2

Until now I’d only heard the name Zbigniew Brzezinski. I don’t know anything he did outside of the Iranian Revolution, but I have to say the one thing I know about him is not impressive.

I’ve had a couple of false starts with the preface, keeping track of dates and details, but this time I think it will stick. I paid for the audiobook so I want to listen to this. It’s really good so far.

“July 4 [1939]

To me one of the most alarming – as well as ugliest – symptoms of the moment is the growing tendency (on both sides) to deny any sincerity or good faith to their opponents. If there is a naïveté in too blind a faith in the essential decency of human nature, there is also a naïveté of a more dangerous kind in denying any idealistic motives to one’s opponents.”

This would have been a good book for my dad 😞

Part 1 was ok. Part 2 looks better.

Huh? Anecdote out of nowhere about a “group of South Americans” taking some pregnant women to Antarctica so their offspring could claim some oil reserves as “natives of the region”? But the babies all died for a lack of bacteria? I’m gonna need more information.