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Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of the Creation.

You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand You see somebody naked and you say, "Who is that man?" You try so hard but you don't understand Just what you will say when you get home Because something is happening here but you don't know what it is Do you, Mr. Jones?

The primary thrust of this book - using dialectical materialist/Marxist analysis to demonstrate the evils of Colonialism - seems kind of wild to me, from a historiographical standpoint. The only people who I can imagine these days denying the abstract notion of colonialism being bad are precisely those who would also deny out-of-hand any conclusions wrought from dialectical materialist analysis. Of course there is colonialism and colonialism, and while the explicit forays of the past are widely derided as probably-a-bad-idea, the colonialism (explicit or more socioeconomically implicit) of the present is less acknowledged - yet here, still, those Marxists I know are the first to call it out.

Florid prose and a large cast of well-rounded characters with an interplay of politics, politicking, ethics and romance that just doesn't quite hit the spot for me, in the end. I mean I enjoyed it, it is by any account quite good, but it ultimately didn't leave me with much. I think maybe a great book leaves me a bit discombobulated, a cartoon character with birds flying around my head or something, leaves me dwelling on the characters and plot or, in the best cases, leaves me dwelling on reality and my position within it. For a 700 page tome, for something making the wikipedia page on the history of the novel, I had higher hopes for this. For 700 pages really it should just be great, shouldn't it? Kind of reminds me of Tolstoy, an intricately constructed interconnected weave of characters giving weight to an emotional situation that slightly misses the mark when it comes to emotional resonance...meaning I suppose that if this does hit the mark for emotional resonance for you, I can imagine it being an incredibly fulfilling novel.

Reading Christie I am frequently struck with the thought: why isn't Christie more popular? And then I remember that she is the best selling novelist of all time - Wikipedia currently has her tied with the bard, but he was hardly a novelist. So I guess maybe the fault is with me, or with my cultural bubble, for not reading her earlier. Probably blame the bubble.

Upon the completion of And Then There Were None, I was a mere 20 minutes into my walk and eager for more, so I fired up the old Libby app, tried to borrow this book, failed, fired up Hoopla, borrowed this book, and spent the next 5 hours in literary satisfaction (also finished the walk, mowed the lawn, did the dishes, played fetch with the dog, and lay in the hammock - a successful morning by every account).

There is, for me, an undeniable allure in Svalbard and the Arctic (and Antarctic). Austere, windswept desolation, wide vistas, creatures eking out a living amongst the snow and ice - it is romantic. It feels so alien, so antithetical to my existence like no other place I can imagine. I have, of course, looked into visiting, living, being an IT person at a research station at the south pole or working as remotely in Svalbard (you hear good things, although finding housing is tricky). The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven captures that attraction, the peril, the loneliness and the scurvy. It is, for all the hardships and pain, for my eyes a pleasant novel of a man finding a place that works for him and a community (small and maybe including some puppetized animal corpses) of kind and caring characters, well-written and compelling.

I was, to be frank, prepared to be bored by this - "debt" is a dry, intuitive concept which seemed little deserving of 500 pages of exegesis. The book seemed vaguely Important and not a bit hip, but not...interesting. Then he got me, in the first chapter arguing with some woman in a garden party. She said "surely, one has to pay one's debts" in response to learning about the IMF enforcing loan repayment from impoverished third world countries; he has half a dozen arguments as to why morally, economically, historically that just doesn't make sense. As a one who generally has probably trended towards the mindset of having to pay one's debts, it was a bit, revelatory? Not judt that he presented persuasive arguments, I was not far from being persuaded, but it was an incredibly clear, efficient encapsulation of a point of view, incredibly easy to digest.

I got into, started studying and eventually made a career out of computer programming because first I wanted to make clouds. The wispy vortices, plastic and mutable at a timescale just longer than that which is immediately perceptible, seemed the height of beauty and therefore the height of art.

I was curious what a classic Japanese murder mystery would be and I think actually it is not entirely my cup of tea. There is a sparsity of prose that I recognize and value in other contexts as somewhat emblematic of modern Japanese writing (or what I see in my limited experience as such) - a direct, logical simplicity that I find incredibly satisfying when painting windswept metaphors, but which feels a bit sluggish and awkward when it comes to bloody murder. I guess its got the classic setup and misdirection and a bit of characters that are characters. But its lacking the charm of say Christie. And I think I have discovered that I like my bloody murders charming.