Chris > Recent Status Updates

really not enjoying this. it's all preamble. the hundreds of tiny little moments that led up to the firing on Fort Sumter.

He's precariously close to losing me. Book has a lot of "bloat" and side-stories which, sure , have some relevance, but isn't really needed.

In the foreword, he quotes from Nazi regulations prohibiting jazz: #8 of the ten regulations begins... "plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality."
#3.. "the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation."
Fascists sure are afraid of people being free and enjoying life.

As with some other re-reads over the last while, not enjoying this one as much as I did when I read it 20+ years ago.

While I don't remember much... I remember loving this book when I read it (around 30 years ago!). First few pages makes me think I was right back then:
There is beauty everywhere on earth, but there is greater beauty in those places where one feels that sense of ease which comes from no longer having to put off one's dreams until some improbable future (pg 4)

Pg 177... there are "book stuffers" . Authors who "stuff" useless pages into their e-books, which makes Kindle Unlimited users flip quickly through those pages, which, for the author, increases their "pages read" count on K.U. and therefore their profits.

Sheesh!

"After the e-book boom, between 2009 and 2014, romance writers' median income rose 73%, while the median income of all other authors dropped 42% !!!! (page 3)

200+ pages into this book and not a single thing has happened, apart from John Grady falling in love with the girl... and even that seems... artificial.

No wonder I can't remember a thing about this book - it's insanely boring :(

I've read this book perhaps 4 times, and there is NOTHING in literature that devastates me like the dog-fight scene.

He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty. (pg 127)

Pg 118: Para qué trajo la loba aquí? De que sirvió?
(why did you bring the wolf here? what good did it do?)

Some of these scenes, when Billy first catches the wolf, and has her on a leash like a dog.... :)
-Well come on to the house.
-What do you want me to do with her?
-Her?
-This here wolf.
-Well I guess it'll just have to lay around the kitchen till we get done eatin.
-Lay around the kitchen?
-It's a joke, son. Hell fire. You brought that thing in the house you could hear my wife in Albuquerque with the wires down.

they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing. pg 30

Sides (the author) has been doing some worrying "filler" content... all the stuff about the Tahitan, Mai, for many early pages, and now including observations about the sea and flying fish from a random sailor who isn't even on Cook's ship, but on the very far behind sister-ship.

Still struggling with this book. Despite how important the material is, i find it reads like a boring technical manual.

[GOP in Wisconsin} "giddy" about a law that would suppress "minority and college voters". (pg 111)

It must be some kind of warning sign, that your party is about to give up on democracy, when it's a danger to your party to have people with an education able to cast a vote.

I don't know how they've done it - but for an incredibly important topic - and though they've tried to do this in the "popular" style of non-fiction writing (as opposed to a more academic style)... these guys have really made this a boring read so far.

pg 16 - this is parenting 101 at it's best:
(Cyrus feeding baby Adam whiskey from a rag for three days after the death of his wife)
"And when at the end of three days his father finally went out and bought a goat, Adam drank the milk greedily, vomited, drank more, and was on his way. His father did not find the reaction alarming, since he was doing the same thing" :)

"This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies - [the] working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; [depriving] people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power..." (pg 30)
-- all this is Havel describing life under communist rule in the 1970s. A lot of parallels with 2025 :(