Individualfrog > Recent Status Updates

I really enjoy this book but I sure don't agree with Rebecca West on much.

Cruisin. Past halfway. Lots of Serbian history just now. Thoughts about having an introduction by an insufferable tool like Hitchens, brought on by stumbling on another insufferable tool talking about this book online. It is feeling like winter now. I want to look at beautiful Byzantine art. But I live in the cultural wasteland of California.

Over a month and not at the halfway point yet lol. It's so good though.

One thing this book has emphasized to me is the delicious freedom of being a non-academic writing about history: we have no standards to follow, no peers to appease, and can with contempt for consensus and rigor decide ourselves what we think of events and characters, and assert our interpretations as true however we please! Eat shit, historians!

I've been eyeing this for 2 decades or so. It feels like now was the right time; so much I wouldn't have gotten until I had learned more history. I was immediately won over by the prologue's discussion of Empress Sisi. Finding contemporary parallels of fascism is counterproductive imo but I was nevertheless struck by the Italians' use of minor vandalism to justify massive violence, they still do that to this day.

taking a turn for the seriously disappointing

Continuing the theme of reading the sort of book that would make certain liberals declare they'll never date you, lol. But if it's good enough for Isadora it's good enough for me. (What a hideous edition this is, she would not approve.)

book is too close to its subject, like a "third person limited" YA novel. I crave an omniscient narrator

Very boring so far; I wish every biographer used the method in Schlesinger's Crisis of the Old Order and instead of wasting our time with the subject's childhood, gave a giant overview of the state of things.

reading like the wind because it's interlibrary loan, no renewals!

I really like the late scholastic solution to the imaginary problem of "original sin" invented by that most evil Church Father, Augustine: they said human virtues are a kind of fiat currency of grace, worthless in themselves, but accepted by God as legal tender for the debt of sin. Elegantly incorporates his stupid nonsense into the common sense of everyone, who all think that doing good is good and what God wants.

I've surely said here before, I experience a book as a physical space, and a big fat book like this is a cozy space in unsettling times.

stress + bad feelings = comparative speed reading from this normally very slow reader

Launches immediately after the 2-page preface into listing exactly what crops were grown in each region of Italy. It looks as though it's literally half the book before we get to any narrative or political history. I admire the reckless commitment to the boring.

From the epigraph alone, I knew this was a book for me: "aaa ooo zezophazazzaieozaza eee iii zaieozoakhoe ooo uuu thoêaozaez êêê zzêêzaoza khozaêkheudê tuxuaalethukh" --Jesus, the first book of Jéou, from Werner Wolff's Changing Concepts of the Bible (1951)

"The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes!" -- Borges

So....laborious.....

I requested this from the library weeks ago, and it finally got to me, and I am somewhat unenthusiastic about starting by now. It's not that it doesn't seem interesting, but I fear it will be another book prompting "everyone is wrong but me" alienation from the world, and depress me. We'll see if I get through it.

I always suspect authors of bending their stories (from what they would 'organically' be like) to get the results they want, especially when they were serialized and feedback was coming in; and in this book, my paranoid suspicion is that Dickens put in Esther's mystery illness just to screw over Mr. Guppy in the readers' estimations.

It's interesting re-reading this; I have forgotten a lot of side things, but at the same time, some parts at least of a central mystery (of sorts) are so heavy-handedly alluded to that I am surprised to think anyone could possibly have missed it -- but I can't remember if I did or not, when I read it the first time... and I also wonder what can happen in the 500 pages left. Loving it.

A very welcome reread, I read this last in 2006 I think.