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This a story about violence and masculine trauma and impotence. About the allure of the open road to pull us out of the restricting communities where we grow up. About being too fucking stupid and stubborn to be with the person we love.

You make mistakes when you are young. When you get older you think you have gotten wiser but in fact you're just as dumb, you're just a little better at hiding it. Maybe you can talk someone out of making the same mistake you did, but probably not. You misunderstand what they want, they lie to you about what they can do.

None of this gets tied up neatly, no one achieves integration or resolution or happiness.

This book is vicious and brutal, but extremely funny. The kind of book where an unsuspecting teenager might start to idolize the characters for acting tough or being cool, but this hits you completely over the head with how shitty and pathetic they are.

I enjoyed it quite a lot.

A British writer gallivants around Europe conducting light espionage during the first World War. Based on Maugham's own experience doing the same, this book contains a number of separate stories, clearly chronologically linked but with no shared plot. Ashenden is batted around a bit by his handlers, and must learn the ropes quickly. He muddles through with a deft touch, a dry sense of humor, and a lot of luck.

This work is a kind of anthropology of the world's nations. Ashenden's portraits of a Mexican general, a British diplomat, a German fraulein are funny, unsparing, a little racist, but ultimately full of love. In the final story, the longest and most emotionally affecting in the book, our narrator gets tangled up in St Petersburg with an American businessman and a beautiful Russian intellectual during the autumn of 1917: the chaos that comes to surround this little group draws out their contrasts and delivers them to the fate predetermined for each by their national character.

Ashenden mostly floats above Continental turmoil and suffering throughout the war due to British privilege and a sense of humor. At the very end, with a close companion shot dead in the street, he has a chance to let in the cruelty of war; the last line is a joke which leaves us a little unsure of whether he opens up to the pain or continues to float.

This book is about turpentine, and about how to use turpentine to make Form and Structure and Meaning. It is full of beautiful, funny little anecdotes from Lumet’s dozens of films, most not so well-known. Lumet comes across as practical, dedicated, kind and wise. The chapters are organized thematically: The Script, Actors, Music, etc.

By far the most interesting chapter was The Camera. Lumet makes simple physical tweaks that completely change what an audience gets from the movie. Angle, lens choice, light and color: not just in each shot but telling a story across the scenes and with different characters.

I also loved seeing the call sheets and his detailed breakdowns of them.

Movies are the most complicated, multi-authored works of art our civilization produces. Beyond the vision, there is a great deal of craft and an obsessive focus over months, with limited room for mistakes. It’s not glamorous, but we are left with the sense that it is work worth doing well.

This is one of the great management books I’ve ever read. A director is the manager of a small company, assembled hastily to operate over a short time period. (What would it look like if we built software on the film model? Assemble a top-notch team for a fixed time period, sprint to delivery.) He must take all these experienced professionals, each with their own goals, and align them behind his own vision. The highest compliment you can pay on the set, he claims, is to say “We’re all making the same movie”. In other words, we’re all working towards the same goals.

Toer was an Indonesian intellectual imprisoned by the Dutch during the struggle for independence in the 1940s, after which he set out to write about the birth of Indonesian nationalism. He began a decades-long research effort, but after the 1965 coup he was imprisoned on the island of Buru for suspected communist sympathies and all his work destroyed. He composed his greatest work, the "Buru Quartet" orally while imprisoned, and then published it later. The works were seen as subversive, and banned in Indonesia from their publishing in the early 80s until 2000.

This is the first work in the series and is fully as powerful as its origin story suggests. Its narrator Minke comes of age in 1890s Java, and due his high birth is educated at the top European school in the "Dutch Indies". But his place in the racial hierarchy is clear: he is a "Native", below both the "Indos" and "Europeans". His immense talents as a writer bring him some renown by Dutch liberals -- sometimes in a tokenizing way as a "credit to his race", showing what Natives are capable of. But his mother laments that he doesn't write in Javanese, so she cannot sing his poems in her native tongue. Minke is trying desperately to escape into the European world, but events keep dragging him back to acknowledge his heritage.

The story centers around Minke's relationship with Nyai Ontosoroh, a native concubine to a Dutchman, and her two children. Nyai is lowly birth, with no formal education and no formal power or legal standing, but she is astonishing. Brilliant, wrathful, upstanding and a business tycoon, Nyai is more alive than anyone else in the story and this contrast provides the potential energy which powers the breakdown of young Minke's pro-Dutch worldview.

This is a political novel, sure, but the main historical events and movements are mostly in the background. There's a passage on the rise of Japan and what it means for the self-worth of other Asian nations; there are allusions to nationalist movements and even the deportation of a liberal "agitator". But I was reminded most strongly of Jane Austen.

The atmospherics are there: grand country estates, heartfelt letters from brilliant sisters, dark rooms in which beautiful maidens fall ill with lovesickness. More importantly, politics are expressed here mainly through etiquette. Javanese is a notoriously hierarchical language, and characters moving between that grammar and the Dutch racial caste system must always be exquisitely sensitive to their own status and that of their interlocutors. They cannot, for a moment -- just live.

Nyai, in fact, is not the woman's name, but the legal title for a concubine. She cannot be called miss, or ma'am and she corrects anyone who makes that mistake, as if to remind them of the absurdity of the system: she is haughty, ashamed, but unbowed.

Our characters move in their private lives for most of the story, but are drawn inexorably into contact with the formal system, where its contradictions and cruelty become more and more obvious. We are left weeping, left chewing bitterly on the inhumanity not just of Dutch colonial law but of all law, all "impartial" systems of power which do not make room for love.