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book
Finished reading Cosmoknights, Vol. 2
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Wants to read Great Short Works of Joseph Conrad
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Wants to read Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices
Added Blood of Elves to Currently Reading
Finished reading Tattoo: Symbol and Meanings
Rated McGlue 6/10
A deeply bleak monologue from a broken, alcoholic 19th-century sailor accused of a murder he doesn’t remember. Skillfully done and blessedly brief. Moshfegh really knows how to put you directly face down in whatever she’s writing about; your opinion of whether that’s a good thing may vary.
Rated Anna Karenina 10/10
Correctly regarded as great; it feels very modern despite being a century and a half old. It's only partly about the title character and her affair that upends a social circle of mid-level Russian nobles; more generally it's about *everything* that's upending these people's lives. In this era, Russia is very tentatively confronting modernity. They have photographs, bureaucracies, telegraphs, plumbing, and (notably) railroads, but they're also just barely emerged from agrarian feudalism, and nobody quite knows where they stand now. An emerging professional-managerial class overlaps largely with a fading hereditary noble class, and Anna's infidelity, like the character Levin's freethinking, is just a symptom of this sense of societal flux and displacement. It took me a long time to get through but I quite enjoyed it.
Rated Today Will Be Different 8/10
A fast-reading, absorbing and bright family drama. If you liked [b:Where'd You Go, Bernadette|13526165|Where'd You Go, Bernadette|Maria Semple|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1338822317l/13526165._SY75_.jpg|17626728], you'll probably like this - it's not quite as inventive, but it's more consistent, I think.
Rated A Closed and Common Orbit 8/10
High-quality sci-fi; laid-back about narrative but deep on characters and settings. You don't have to have read [b:The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet|22733729|The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)|Becky Chambers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405532474l/22733729._SY75_.jpg|42270825] for this book to land, though it's good for an understanding of the world and if you think you'll like this you'll like that one too. There are two interlocking plots that don't really intersect until later; in general the transitions are well-handled. The story concerns the relationships between sentient beings and artificial intelligence - one viewpoint character is actually an AI trying to adjust to living among people. As in the first book in the series, not a lot happens but the universe Chambers describes is fun, well-thought-out, and complex, with lots of basically decent people trying to do their best.
Finished reading I'm Glad My Mom Died
Edited 43d ago
Finished reading Behind the Bench: Inside the Minds of Hockey's Greatest Coaches
Rated On the Road with Hillary: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Journey from Arkansas to the U.S. Senate 6/10
A fun, anecdotal memoir from one of HRC's advance staff, giving a nice mix of the nuts and bolts of political travel, delightful stories of misadventures and an overview of the 1992-2000 period in politics and history. Utterly hagiographic, but doesn't suffer for it.
Wants to read A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Faust’s Lament - from the front matter of The Anarchist Medical Book
by Wolfgang von Göthe, translation by Four Thieves
Alas! I have completed study of Philosophy,
Law, and Medicine,
And tragically, also Theology
I have taken great pains to study thoroughly,
Yet here I stand, poor fool that I am,
And am no wiser than before.
I am called Master, even Doctor,
I reflect on these ten years:
Up down, criss cross
Have I led my students by the nose—
And seen there is nothing we can know!
Inevitably, this will burn my heart.
Indeed I’m smarter than all those morons:
Doctors, Masters, Scribes, and Priests;
I am not plagued by scruples or doubts,
I fear neither Hell nor the Devil—
For this though, all Joy is torn from me,
I do not pretend that I know a single truth,
I do not pretend that I could teach a single thing
To improve or save humanity.
Also I have neither goods nor money,
Nor honor or glory of the world;
No dog would want to continue living this way!
So I have devoted myself to magic,
In hopes that through force of will,
No secret will evade me;
That I no longer need embarrassingly admit what I do not know,
That I recognize what the world holds at its innermost core,
Show all my strength and greatness,
And toil no more with words.
—Faust
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Rated Circe 10/10
Wow, what a knockout. A brilliant, engaging and beautifully-written riff on classic stories of Greek mythology, as narrated by the immortal witch Circe, one of the key figures in the Odyssey. Like [a:Emily Wilson|478455|Emily Wilson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1523444389p2/478455.jpg]'s Odyssey, this book looks at the sex, violence, and social norms of these stories from a new perspective, surfacing all kinds of emotional and sociological insight from within the tropes. Particularly good in this book is the sense of the world of the Greek gods and heroes as both epic in scale and like a small town, ruled by grievance, whim, and pettiness - and the way that mortals given access to godlike powers almost instantly abuse it. There are so many great questions raised about the stories we tell and what we value and choose to emphasize and how the norms of power shape our stories and vice versa. I could go on and on about this book. Highly highly recommended.
Wants to read The Bear and the Nightingale