Erika > Recent Status Updates

I found the essays at the end, especially the first one, more compelling than the actual correspondence but an interesting idea

Another incidence of how studying history destroys everything - I was liking this book a lot and then there's repeated references to the characters hanging out in Sacre-Coeur in the 1750s and now I just cannot get that out of my mind.

Creepy premise and some very creepy moments but overall could have been developed a bit more beyond the stock characters.

Had this book not received the kinds of glowing praise that it has, I probably would have stopped reading it a third the way in. It was a *slow burn* However, having enjoyed All The Light We Cannot See and having a weak spot for intertwined multi-narrative novels (indeed, there was a lot in this book that reminded me of Cloud Atlas) I kept going. By the last third of the book, I was hooked and finished in a day.

Trump supporters resented liberals’ rhetoric of rising, not because they rejected meritocracy, but because they believed it described the prevailing social order. They had submitted to its discipline, had accepted the hard judgment it pronounced on their own merits, and believed others should do the same.

Sandel, Michael J.. The Tyranny of Merit (p. 73).