I finished Blackout by Hepola. Well written, honest, and really moving. I know she struggled with a real disorder, but so much of the book reeked of first world problems. It's hard to empathize with people like that for me sometimes. Or maybe that's what alcoholism always is, self created problems regardless of real world status. One other takeaway was the value of friends in her life and how well she kept in touch with people. Im terrible at long distance, going to work on that over the holiday.
Next up is some good horror fiction. I'm watching the returned so its got me in a creepy mood.
I finally finished Cryptonomicon after several weeks of delays. It sparked my interest in reading a bit about Japanese history (a topic I know painfully little about), so I picked up a relatively decent sized comprehensive middle ages to 20th c. book called The Making of Modern Japan just this afternoon at the library. I'm mostly hoping to get a decent reading list put together out of it. I've never found comprehensive histories to be all that interesting, because the best they an ever do is give you a snap shot of something interesting. Have you read House of Leaves? It's in the horror fiction genre. I've not read it yet, but my buddy has been recommending it to me for a couple years now.
Check out The Baroque Cycle if you want something similarly sprawling and complex. Stephenson was inspired to write the series while working on Cryptonomicon and it's clearly meant as a spiritual successor.
flagamuffin was really into Anathem, I think.
With someone, maybe you. It was everything, in my opinion, that a postmodern (post-Dickens/Tolstoy/Austen) novel should be, even though most of them are instead gibberish. No one ever needed a second reading to grasp Pride and Prejudice. No one ever wanted a second reading to grasp Ulysses. I've watched modern literature devolve -- hey this turning into a rant, who is surprised -- into postmodernism and nonsense but Mitchell and Chabon and a handful of others continue to prove it's possible to weave storytelling and modernism into literature. I'll never abandon the classics but these guys have found a sweet spot. Also thought the movie did the best it could with a difficult task.
I very much liked the movie. I thought it was similar enough to relate the feeling of the book while also taking their own direction far enough away that it was easy to view them as two separate works. Casting the same people in each time period was brilliant, and really added a new layer that wasn't present in the book, too.
From wikipedia^^ Huh, TIL.By the mid-20th century, Western scholars generally considered "the Orient" as just East Asia, Southeast Asia, and eastern Central Asia.[2] As recently as the early 20th century, the term "Orient" often continued to be used in ways that included North Africa and even parts of southeastern Europe. Today, the term primarily evokes images of China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and peninsular Southeast Asia.[2]
I picked it by going to my library, researching what Japanese history they had to offer, finding that their grand total amounted to one shelf (at least half of which were books about samurai), and then trying to use the internet to figure out which of the books might suit my interest. Fortunately the internet appears to have a high opinion of MoMJ. Will report back in a few weeks.
Been taking a break from the usual sci fi to get through the stuff I've been meaning to read forever. Finished vol. 1 of My Struggle last week (the Knausgard one, not the, uh, Hitler one), now on to Wolf Hall. Makes me wish I paid better attention in high school history. Oscillating between really admiring Thomas Cromwell and reminding myself that he wasn't necessarily anything like his character in the novel. Great read, anyways. To balance it out: some dude at the gym saw me reading a few weeks ago, assumed all books are created equal and insisted that I read "Blowback" by Brad Thor. And by "insisted" I mean "literally put a copy in my hand." Given the title and the author's name, assume the worst and you've probably hit the mark. Needless to say... reading it after I'm done with Wolf Hall. And let's face it, I'll probably eat that shit up.
Just wrote an essay reply, but it could be chalked up to: I don't know yet. I have to think about it a little more. Is book 2 worth the investment?
Had the chance to crank through more than half of Sherry Turkle's The Second Self. I'll just say that a perspective on the philosophy of AI from 1985 is fascinating, but a perspective on the people who work on AI in 1985 is not. Am about halfway through Destiny Disrupted: A history of the world through Islamic Eyes and I'm enjoying it immensely. Ummayads and Abassids and Fatimites and all the rest cease to be blank names and become people. Just started Ken Alibek's Biohazard and it's unsurprising, unrevealing and fucking terrifying.
If you don't mind something a little heavier, there's an old anthology from the AAAI called Computation & Intelligence that covers GOFAI as thoroughly as anyone not planning on writing any code could want. Amazon has used copies for $3. Everyone I've ever met who was doing AI in the 80s has great stories to tell, but maybe not the sorts of stories that make it into a book like that.I'll just say that a perspective on the philosophy of AI from 1985 is fascinating, but a perspective on the people who work on AI in 1985 is not.
So this woman lays bare her most embarrassing episodes and you can't empathize, it's a first world problem like your keyless entry not working or wearing a watch so you don't have to take your phone out of your pocket to read a text. You read two hundred pages about a person struggling with a mental illness and your takeaway was in part "I kinda don't care." This is the problem with addiction. Mitch Hedberg said, "They say alcoholism is a disease but it's the only disease people can get mad at you for having. Dammit Otto, you have lupus. Dammit Otto, you're an alcoholic. One of those doesn't sound right." This is why people end up homeless. Their families can't or won't help them. They don't care because it's a choice to feel like shit all the time. It's a choice to wake up with a black eye you don't remember getting. An intervention a family saying if you don't fix this now we're going to throw you out to the wolves because we can't understand what you're going through. How is that for therapy? We don't abandon late stage cancer patients and Alzheimer's patients but every day this bullshit tough love approach forces people already with deep psychological problems against a wall. A&E even makes it into spectacle. Not for cigarette smokers, they aren't fun to watch stumble around but I digress. Hepola never got so down low that it was horrifying and pitiful and her writing style was more like a long blog post to me but she had a real problem that people who haven't been through it have zero empathy for. But even if she had been through life threatening withdrawal like I have she'd probably get no more thoughtful consideration as to the broken mechanism that causes addiction. "Well, you made a bad decision. Repeatedly and in the face of massive evidence that your behavior is going to kill you. You deserve scorn at the least because I certainly can't imagine waking up in a pool of vomit and diarrhea after realizing that was a possible consequence." I go to meetings, I hate AA, it's a cult, but it's effective because you have to live through it to understand it apparently. And at every meeting someone mentions the type of people they meet in treatment. It's fucking everyone. Doctors, lawyers, clergy, executives. Someone you know and when you find out you better remember this book and the struggle Sarah went through before she found sobriety instead of saying you have no empathy for a person in this position. "Really moving" but "Hard to empathize," wait until it's one of your friends.
My dad was an alcoholic and my mom was anorexic. They met in recovery. I was raised by addicts and surrounded by the chaos it causes. It's hurtful you jump to a knee jerk diatribe against me, totally skiping the part where I call the book moving and instead fixation on my one criticism. Her problems are entirely self made, and it is hard to empathize with someone like her. She has an incredible job and a loving family, with tons of friends. Most of it came very easy for her. None of it came easy to me. Her style is open and honest about her addiction, but she doesn't seem to show gratitude for all the other good in her life. That is the part I found grating. Her lack of appreciation for things I spent my whole life working toward. My life is a study in addiction and it's consequences. Just because I'm critical of her book doesn't mean you're justified in talking down to me. Edit: I also want to add, in case you misconstrued my whole self destructive comment, I'm not saying alcoholism is a choice and we shouldn't empathize with addicts. I'm saying every since that rat utopia article it's been something I wonder about: how much of addiction is caused by our upbringing? Hepola had it pretty good, and yet this still came for her. To me, she's the rat utopia example, but she's still an addict. It reinforces my belief that some people, even if you put them in utopia, will have these self destructive behaviors surface and will have to eventually face them.
Pardon me but you rubbed me totally the wrong way with your glib dismissal of Sarah Hepola's problems. I had some problems with the tone of the book but at no point did I think I was reading some punched up attempt to seek sympathy by a privileged white lady with one fault and everything else falling in her favor. I was touched by her honesty but you apparently want to turn it into a human suffering contest where she loses. That's not how recovery works and that goes back to my comment about how it cuts across all walks of life. When I'm in a meeting I'm not comparing my bullshit to whatever brought someone else there. But you're doing that. Or seem to be based on your reply. This person's road to recovery kinda sucks because it's not tragic enough is what I'm hearing from you when it would be accepted as easily as any other by AA or SMART members
You've read a lot into a very mild criticism, at this point your basically making up what I said and arguing with yourself. I don't think "having trouble empathizing with the author" equates to dismissing her road to recovery or her problems. I think it's perfectly valid to say I have trouble liking someone who doesn't appreciate the good she has (before and after recovery). As far as I'm aware, alcoholics can have character flaws not related to their addiction. For her it's selfishness and a bit of shallowness, for you it might be being a bit presumptuous. I'm happy you got a lot out of the book, but I don't agree that it's sacrosanct or that I'm not allowed honest discussion of it, both pros (which you ignore) and cons. If you can't handle a conversation without talking down to me then we shouldn't be talking.
...or maybe the writing didn't connect with her? Robert McKee pointed out that a bad storyteller can bore you with the tale of their kids dying while a good storyteller can enthrall you with their commute. I, too, grew up the son of alcoholics and lemme tell ya - when people lash out at others for not understanding or relating to alcoholism, it doesn't make me relate better... it makes me tune out the lashers.
To be honest, I haven't got much reading done (I ended up watching binge-watching Evangelion), so I'm still reading Akutagawa and Tagore. Tagore's stories are heartbreaking. Akutagawa has a dark outlook, that is sometimes painfully cynical and sometimes hilarious. I still recommend them both. Also, I picked up 2666 by Roberto Bolaño the other day!
I've started reading Grantmakers in Arts Reader, which is their monthly publication. Super interesting and insightful to learn more about where grant money comes from and what challenges grant funders and fundees face in the arts.
American Psycho was the book that got Brett Easton Ellis kicked off of Doubleday, as I recall. Here's the thing: it's vapid. It's a vapid book by a vapid man about a vapid culture. There's a lot of shock bullshit in it but it's shock bullshit. There are no great truths in American Psycho beyond "we don't really know each other" which is pretty much every book Ellis has ever written. If Stephen King had never met a human before, and didn't care to, American Psycho is the book he'd write.
I just finished Leo Babauta's Little Book of Contentment, and now I'm trying to get the Overdrive app working on my phone so I can read Oliver Sacks' autobiography On the Move. In the meantime I've started re-reading HPMOR. :)
I'm reading The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen. So far it's an autobiography of a hard-as-nails kid going through ever larger trainings to become a SEAL. The writing is gripping, bordering on sensationalist. It is a good read however, in particular because I know nothing about the Navy.