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For a boy named Hawkins growing up by the (fresh, decidedly not pirate-infested) water, Treasure Island was a formative and exciting read about a boy named Hawkins traveling the world, finding pirates and treasure and friends. Rereading it to get in the proper headspace for dressing as a pirate for a costumed wedding - it holds up. Excellent swordfights and intrigue, and Long John Silver is to be sure a character for the ages.

This book is a fascinating little history of Madagascar and the kingdoms and societies during the golden age of piracy. I (and I imagine I am not unique here) know little of this corner of the world and corner of history, and enjoyed learning about the unique cultural mixture driven by the intersection of Arabs, pirates, slavers, colonists, and Madagascar people. Graeber's writing is as always entertaining and educational, although there is not much here of his usual grand claims of historiographical reinterpretation and generalization - it is a more focused anthropology that I think likely has a less wide interest than the exciting title and Graeber's name might otherwise incur.

The second book in The Gunslinger series is less engaging. It is more ambitious than the previous, with King filling out his patchwork universe with connections to times, places and trends from Our World, that are ultimately not particularly poorly handled - but I don't find King to be the best writer for wading into issues of addiction, racism, criminal psychology. He can write a good cereal-box thriller, and the characters are somewhat fun, but it mostly just feels overstretched.

I recently reread Rosshalde because I was curious about an alternative to Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - an author exploring what it means to live as and pursue art in a non-linguistic medium. I found what feels more authentic, more meaningful and a bit more depressing. Hesse continues in my opinion after a few decades of reading him, to be Very Good...although this reads as maybe a bit more personal, a bit less generated towards a general audience. It is a quick read, a bit fraught, good stuff but probably would not be my first recommended book by Hesse for anyone.

Stephen King's voice is smooth, straightforward, easily digested. Technically, aesthetically, he is quite good at that voice - but I don't think when it comes down to it, that I care very much for it. It is maybe without flaws, but that makes it without character? Or perhaps it is simply unambitious to the point that it becomes uninteresting. The plot of The Gunslinger, on the other hand, is quite ambitious, aiming for the unusual, unpredictable, and potentially offputting. Snippets of Lore are dropped here and there, slowly filling in the backdrop of the strange Arthurian-Western post-apocalyptic dystopia. I think at periods in my life I would be enraptured by that, but at the moment I feel like it is little more than a random collage, a patchwork of tropes and times thrown together based on authorial whim - surely a story, a cohesive world can be woven of a random collage, but again, it becomes a bit uninteresting.

Brilliant! Thought-provoking and insightful into the forces and structures of decolonialization, and a bit challenging. The prefaces by Sartre and particularly Homi K Bhabha (sesquipedalian though it is) do an excellent job of contextualizing the rest. It is a bit fascinating that Sartre's preface, embracing (reveling in? maybe an ungenerous read of Sartre but it does feel like there is a bit of that) the necessity of violent revolution, criticized by Arendt for encouraging violence that dehumanizes, was removed at the bequest of Fanon's widow from certain editions following Sartre's support of Israel in the Six Day War.

I mean rating things on a numeric scale from 1 to 5 is of course silly and non-objective. I think, in many way's, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is in fact a great book! Well-rounded characters in an engaging narrative focused on the notion of a life-long friendship, a relationship dynamic that is underemphasized and too-often overlooked in novels. I had to apportion my readings carefully, because it was obvious that this was the sort of book that would cause me to stay up too late to finish - and in the end I finished it in 3 sittings, separated by 2 weeks each. I am more likely to recommend this book than many other books that I have rated higher, and probably technically it is in fact better than many of those books!

Virginia Woolf is pretty cool, and a great writer. This is a good book

Gross - like if Terry Pratchett was a Vogon.

I can't really decide whether Dumas is great without being good, or instead good without being great - I suppose it depends on the point of view. He is unquestionably amazing, astonishing, a grandfather of Adventure as a genre. Sure I guess there was Don Quixote and the Knights of the Round Table and Odysseus and Enkidu and it really does go back aways. I'm not really sure what Dumas has that the others lacked, and I'm not super eager to downplay Cervantes and Homer. Perhaps it is just that Dumas is culturally the closest, writing in with the rhythm and language (in translation) of an empathetic modernity. But he definitely got something right, and is a joy to read - not for the depth of characters, or insight into the human condition or beauty of the language but just for the excitement of it all. It is fun to watch these lovable(?) rogues foil the dastardly plans of their enemies, and what more do you really need.