Reviews and Comments

I enjoyed this book, but it comes dangerously close to overstaying its welcome.

I have to give credit to Clavell for putting together such a far-reaching epic story in a stand alone work. He does such a good job giving you well-researched details about feudal Japan and how their society hung together in contrast to feudal Europe, highlighting the many ways in which feudal Japan reads as more modern to the 20th / 21st century standard while also acknowledging their sort of collective, efficient brutality. The plot that emerges is twisty in a delightful way that court intrigue seems uniquely capable of delivering regardless of which culture it takes place in. Clavell does an especially great job making each of the many characters feel unique, with their own agendas, secrets, and desires. Not one of them felt like a caricature, or a mindless antagonist.

The one flaw with Shogun is the pacing. You spend the first half of the story getting a very thorough introduction to feudal Japan, then the plot gets moving and it becomes more character driven, but once you're closing in on the end you realize there's no way Clavell is going to give a fully satisfying ending in the remaining pages. The story ends too quickly from a plot perspective, and it makes some of the 1200 pages of exhaustive details seem needless in retrospect. Ultimately, I would have traded a couple hundred pages of early world-building and administrative minutiae (as edifying as I found that at the time) for a couple hundred pages on the end to full settle the plot and explore the short term consequences.

Ending a little abruptly keeps this book from being a true masterpiece, but it's still a damn good read, an interesting glimpse into feudal Japan and its complicated politics, and a very entertaining story of adventure, romance, loyalty and betrayal. I'd recommend it for anyone that isn't scared off by the page count.

Like the musket regiment details when we never get to see them used, or the Blackthorne/Rodrigues dynamic when he never assaults the Black Ship. A lot of discussion and maneuvering went in to setting up a battles that just never happen "on screen".

I enjoyed reading this. I was about 6 when Doom came out, but in the subsequent years I played the shareware versions of it as well as Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D regularly. The first half of this book was a bit of a nostalgia trip but it filled in a lot of the backstory of Carmack (who is a personal hero of mine as a C programmer) and Romero (who was more of a famous name).

I was most interested in the early, hacker days of basically turning pizza and Diet Coke into seminal videogames. The book did a good job chronicling the creation of Commander Keen and Wolf3D as a prelude to Doom and setting the scene of BBS era shareware gaming. It also colored in some of the other notables whose roles were never as clear to me. The contributions of fellow Softdisk guys/id founders Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack, and to a lesser extent designers like American McGee and Sandy Petersen are all made clear. There's a lot of fun in reading about just what a huge splash Doom made and getting some light shed on other players like Scott Miller's Apogee, or Bill Gates trying hard to sell Windows 95 as an upgrade over DOS, Burger Bill, Nintendo trying to keep the SNES a family system, or even Joe Lieberman calling for the creation of the ESRB.

As a programmer I was generally pleased with how technical the book got in some places. Nothing too insane for the non-technical reader, but it did go into details about how each iteration of Carmack's engine was different and better than the last. The rise of the GPU is also a minor tangent here. It didn't get everything right (at one point it referred to OpenGL as a programming language which... is a simplification at best) but it grounds the software work well and even gives some details about the rigs they were using to do their work.

I was less interested in the second half, mostly because I was actually old enough to remember some of the broad strokes but there are still plenty of bits of trivia and readings from .plan files that were new to me. The book does a pretty great job overall of painting Carmack and Romero as the yin and yang of early id, and the later history of Ion Storm (Romero's game developer utopia that failed to do much - classic status of Deus Ex aside) versus id's more diminished role of being an engine publisher (which is harsh but mostly true up until Doom 2016 well after this book) underscores that they both really needed each other to bring balance to their early work. Even with 16 more years of retrospect that analysis holds up.

Anyway, very interesting book and I'd highly recommend it to anyone that enjoyed the 90s PC gaming scene, even if you were just a kid.

Unexpectedly intense and fascinating read.

I read this without knowing anything about the plot, but of course it's reputation as a "sad book" preceded it. I was unprepared for how much of an understatement that is.

The first part of this book, before it becomes a hospital log, is amazing. I feel like it perfectly portrays the morbid cynicism of the suicidally depressed, but also the caged feeling of being a woman in this time period. Esther is straining against the parameters of her society and actually demanding agency of any sort she can get. It is a feminist book and is definitely judgmental of men, but I would say deservedly so... It's radical points of view are based only in equality and resisting the sort of angel-whore dichotomy and double standards facing women in the '50s. As she becomes more fixated on suicide, I wanted to shout to her (and Plath by extension) that things would get better even if her current status seemed hopeless.

It's in the last fifth that the book loses this intense thread. After the main suicide attempt, Esther is treated successfully. I didn't anticipate that, expecting more of a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest style derision for EST and asylum psychiatry... But Esther pulls out of it. In a way that's a relief, but Plath makes it clear that the solution is temporary, that the bell jar that causes Esther to rot in "her own foul air" and become suicidal can surround her again. Especially since this work is obviously biographical, and Plath did indeed kill herself later, the work feels incomplete and the temporary solution unsatisfying. It feels ghoulish to say Esther should have died, but alternatively she could have learned to see something beautiful or hopeful in the world instead of being scrambled by EST.

I have to give this book credit for making me feel raw and sad the way it did, and for being a really powerful account of suicidal ideation that rings true. It's only the rather incomplete end that keeps it from being a perfect score.

This book was great fun. I'd read some of Thompson's short stories and loved his sort of frantic, unreliable, trippy style and this book is basically the epitome of that drug-skewed paranoia without being devoid of meaning and introspection.

That said, I didn't feel like the book added much over the 1998 Terry Gilliam movie based on it. The movie hits all of the major plot points, and frequently quotes the book verbatim in both dialogue and narration. There were a few minor things that didn't make it to the movie, including one that had me in stitches, but the movie ends a little tighter and ultimately was a worthy stand in for reading the book.

Anyway, this was a blast to read and hard to put down (I read it in a day, the 200 pages frequently broken up with chapter and part breaks and great Steadman illustrations) but I was hoping for more content that I hadn't already seen on the screen.

This novel is a bit bipolar reading it almost 80 years after it was written.

There are flashes of great hard-boiled prose in the work and the dialogue occasionally made me smile with how colorfully stilted it is (in a good, film noir way). In these stretches it's easy to see why Chandler was as influential on pop culture as he was.

I got thrown off more than a few times by just how detailed the main character, Marlowe, gets in describing locations and people - particularly women. I was baffled by some of the choices made to describe almost tangential things in great detail. Being written from the first person as the detective explains some of this terse but exhaustive note taking style, but I found myself skimming for some of the better turns of phrase.

There was also surprisingly little action in this novel. Marlowe discovers a lot by questioning, people come to him and point him at others, he finds dead bodies, etc. but he never really feels like he's in danger despite the presence of the usual heavies. There's a token fistfight that doesn't feel very realistically motivated, and all of the crime happens without Marlowe present. There's no sexual element either, no chemistry with any of the women. The result is Marlowe feels relatively passive, mostly just an agent to pursue leads, like a detached Agatha Christie protagonist, right up until he puts it all together.

In that way, I think the intervening 80 years of film noir has really sapped a lot from my enjoyment of this book. I was expecting gunplay and a sizzling femme fatale with creatively oblique dialogue but this novel is more akin to a morally ambiguous Poirot.

However, I have to give it some credit as the pulp fiction of its day. Like those Christie novels, this was intended to be short and to the point, to entertain for a while, and maybe not to provoke the sort of academic dissection more literary fiction might attempt. From that point of view I can appreciate this work like a 1942 version of a TV procedural... but I still feel like I got an episode of Dragnet when I was looking for Double Indemnity.

Well written, compelling take on the hardboiled detective story set in an alternate history where Jews were given grudging shelter from persecution in Alaska.

I found it hard to put this book down. Chabon's clear, colorful prose is nicely seasoned with the more abstract, terse style of Raymond Chandler and the result is delightful. As it is a detective story, the characters are a bit archetypal but they are filled out nicely. The setting is fascinating and well envisioned as a weird mix of Jewish and Tlingit culture that I doubt has ever been even suggested by another author.

The only criticism I would level is that the novel feels a little... tidy. There's a certain economy of characters and locations that felt a little contrived as they were revisited. I would have also liked another hundred pages or so exploring the consequences outside of the main mystery storyline, but if anything that's a testament to the intricate world Chabon created and how engaged I felt at the end. Definitely worth a read.

This is a well thought out and concisely written explanation of the basic tenets of anarchist communism.

I can't say that it converted me to Kropotkin's specific political ideology, but it did raise some very interesting points about how society is organized and envision some very creative, maybe even seductive, ideas about how we can change that organization for the better even if it's light on practical details about how to get from here to there.

Incredibly, for a book written in 1892, it actually holds up pretty well. From a historical point of view, Kropotkin was dealing with the foreshadows of basically every economic issue we face today. Industrialization was in full swing, globalization was in its infancy as colonialism and trade swept the world, even communication (with the advent of the telegraph and the trans-atlantic cable) is easily relatable to the modern day. Kropotkin is seeing the seeds of our current troubles everywhere. The only place the 130 year gap is really evident is when he gets into the statistics or makes pointed remarks at contemporary opponents (although the notes in this edition are very helpful).

I found the basic concept that drives him to communism very persuasive. The idea that work should be done to provide all people with the necessities (food, water, shelter, clothing) with the least amount of expended energy seems obvious but following that thought to a logical conclusion unravels the basic premise of capitalism.

The lowest rungs of our society, those producing the fundamental materials of life and industry with manual labor, cannot just produce enough for themselves and their countrymen because that's not how they assure their own livelihood. They need money for all of their other needs, which means they need excess to sell, which means they are competing against the very cheapest possible producer and, because every link in the chain needs to make money, the worker inherently creates more than he earns - the free market of capitalism working as planned.

But Kropotkin effectively argues that this is rife with problems. Not only is it obvious exploitation (the worker creates more value than he earns and the less he is paid the better), it relies on inequality. The farmer's wheat that ends up baked in bread and is sold to someone that can afford to purchase their food rather than cultivate it themselves. In the reverse, if the baker can buy wheat from someone for cheaper, they will. Without bothering here to factor in tax or rent that go directly to the state/owners, the bottom of society is sinking lower, the top of society is rising higher. Kropotkin saw this in post-feudal Europe thanks to the huge leaps brought by industrialization and the exploitation of cheap colonial labor. We see it today in our societies straining under wealth inequality thanks to automation and globalization taking the bottom out of the labor market.

While the criticism Kropotkin levels at capitalism is similar to Marx, and they broadly agree on the ownership of the means of production, his overall solution is much different. Marx argues that the solution to capitalism is state communism, where the state is given absolute authority to speak for "the people" to enforce equality from the top down, to ensure everyone gets their fair share. In a lot of ways that's a more practical approach because Marx allows for a lot of the machinery of capitalism to stay in place. The state can define prices and wages, levy taxes, hire people and so on. Marxism amounts to switching one state for another rather than a grand scale reordering of society and this is why, mostly after Kropotkin's time, Marxism had such a huge impact on the 20th century with revolutions across the globe.

Kropotkin explicitly rejects Marx, the state in its entirety (thus "anarchist" communism) and all of the machinery of capitalism, like money and wagedom which he calls "slavery in modern garb." He argues that both the state and capitalism inherently lead to inequality and the potential of abuse and corruption. It's hard to look at the intervening 130 years and disagree with his points. In the US we've seen our own government in decline, eroded by the corrosive influence of capitalism, deadlocked, made a mockery by corporations. The communist states aren't in much better shape, either disbanded or turned into one party autocracies that are unabashedly capitalist in everything but rhetoric. A lot of Kropotkin's critiques were damn near prescient.

The way Kropotkin envisioned society the state is replaced by many city sized communes that are basically autonomously feeding, clothing, and sheltering its citizens. A certain part of every person's day is spent serving the common good, and the rest can be spent as one pleases to enrich oneself. Developments that require inter-commune / national / global level coordination are accomplished through federation between the communes, and free agreement to proposals that are submitted there.

It's a very attractive society to think about. It's almost like Star Trek, except instead of replicators each person contributes work to the common good, and if you want something more than the basic necessities, you work directly toward that goal. If you want a telescope, you find who can make telescopes and you work with / for them in order to create a telescope. If you need any materials, you just go down the chain of production until you reach some core material you can help gather, or that society has deemed a necessity. It's almost like quest based communism. To get rewarded with that luxury item, or even create a new one, you basically craft it with the help of the artisans, or barter something you can do to earn the others' work. Unneeded work is never done. There are no imports or exports, no commodity speculation. There is no reason to overproduce, no need to do extra to survive. Society is no longer based around exploitation.

However, as much as I like to imagine living in such a beautiful and fair society, and this book goes to great lengths to prove it's not completely insane to think a society like this would work, and gives many examples of specific enterprises that have successfully worked this way in reality, it never really gives satisfying answers to how a region following this ethos would be established or defended either from internal or external threats. Kropotkin inserts "the community, by agreement" in any place that state management would logically take over. Who defines how much is "enough" wheat, or coal, or bread, or clothing? The community, by agreement. Who tackles public works like pipes, roads, and dams? The community, by agreement.

In a perfect world, where people act rationally, hold rational opinions, and can be convinced by superior logic, that would indeed work beautifully. But in 2020 it's obvious that people don't act in their own best interests, they aren't rational, they don't have to listen to reason. They can, and will, use whatever power they have to elevate themselves and ruin that equality by discriminating against any class of people that can't form a majority. Atrocity and injustice, however small scale, is still quite possible in a world where every action is justified by convincing 51% of the people that care enough to have an opinion.

More broadly, Kropotkin has no mechanism for arbitration within or between these communes. No state means no one person has the power to decide or even just break a tie. Free agreement works when both sides benefit from agreement (like the railway standards he references, each side gets a way to access the other's system). What about when two growing communes want to claim the same corner of fertile land? There is no mechanism to deal with that. What about when a commune that is majority one religion decides another commune is full of infidels and should be destroyed? Does every commune need to be able to defend itself? Need to maintain a military? Ambassadors? When taken in aggregate, rather than in isolation, Kropotkin's world starts to feel like a maze of feudal fiefdoms where it's easy to live with your neighbors as long as they are ideologically identical to you but if one of them shows up on your doorstep ready to rape and pillage you better hope your local military enthusiasts have thought up a plan.

These criticisms are also assuming that the society is already created. The real trick would be convincing a revolution to not just replace the current state (as we've seen time and time again through history) but to actively tear down the apparatus of power and completely rebuild society from the bottom up.

Ultimately, that's what makes Kropotkin's vision impossible. It is a wonderful idea and he does a great job extolling its virtues, but without a way to create, much less maintain, that level of equality from a realistic starting point and without the ability to assume peaceful coexistence with the rest of the world, it's still just another utopic fantasy.

That said, this book never set out to be a manual for the revolutionary. Kropotkin doesn't end it calling for the workers to rise up, or make plans for how Europe will be converted like in the Communist Manifesto. This is a philosophical text, an illuminating of some ideas and possible solutions backed with some interesting statistics. Kropotkin succeeds more in his criticism of capitalism and state communism than he does in putting forth a real vision of the future. Yet, when reading it, I couldn't help but think that just as his criticisms were accurate, the idea that a liberated, federated society might work is actually less far-fetched now than it was in 1892 thanks to computer automation and examples like the proliferation of Open Source.

Anyway, if there is a work that has a more concrete path for anarchist communism, I'd like to read it. For now, I'll just sigh and say "Maybe someday, but definitely not tomorrow."

Within Discworld, this pretty much checks all boxes.

This deep into the long series (17 novels) it's not really possible to review independently, and it wouldn't stand alone as well, but it was really nice to return to Pratchett's Discworld and particularly returning to Rincewind, Cohen, and Twoflower - the main characters of the first two Discworld novels, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic.

In some ways Interesting Times is predictable and in other books I'd consider that instantly lethal to any sort of interest, but like most of the Discworld books the interest isn't so much in the plot as it is being led by Pratchett through the intricacies of this world and his use of metaphor to talk about human nature. In this case, the main characters head to an oppressive regime modeled on China and has a lot to say about that oppression, but also the nature and contradictions of civilization in general and it's all done in the sort of tongue-in-cheek, circumspect way that Pratchett is so good at. I didn't need to feel like Rincewind, Cohen, or Twoflower were somehow in danger, or question whether Lord Hong would get his due, to be thoroughly entertained.

Would it stand up literarily to some of the other work I've give four stars? Maybe not, but I spent half of this book with a grin on my face, so as far as I'm concerned it's mission accomplished.

I read this book based on some snippets of Ellis' writing I found intriguing. This is also a rare example (for me) of a book I read after seeing the movie so, in some ways, Patrick Bateman will always be Christian Bale to me.

I understand that this book was controversial on release in 1991 and it's not hard to see why. It leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. The sex is straight out of Letters to Penthouse, the violence is equally pornographic and barbaric. This is not your typical literature. This is not something you discuss with your children or coworkers. There isn't one scene with anything admirable in it, there is nothing life affirming, nothing hopeful.

Yet the novel is also utterly believable and portrays something that I think needs to be examined - the complete and utter lack of accountability of the wealthy. This is what makes American Psycho so compelling. The sex and violence can both titillate and disgust, but the intervening time is spent showing us how everyone in Bateman's world, the world of the rich elite, doesn't care about anything but their own appearance. Other people don't really exist to them.

Everyone is speaking, no one is saying anything of substance, no one is listening.

Everyone fights over prestige restaurant reservations, no one eats anything which doesn't keep them from reciting snippets of critical praise from a newspaper or magazine.

Everyone is interested in fashion and brands and price tags to measure themselves against others, no one cares about the actual substance of their lives.

Through the book, Bateman is almost always confused for other men and never makes a correction. Much time is spent with his rotating crew of acquaintances trying to identify others and failing. The men who can name a garment by designer and collection, or list the model number, features and price tag of their stereo, can't remember a face if their lives depended on it. The business card is a fetish object more notable for its lettering and thickness than any information conveyed by it.

At one point in time I think the outrageous level of narcissism depicted in this book might have read as a satirical caricature. It might have seemed like we lived in a country where justice is equal and the Patrick Batemans of the world would be punished. In 2020, with 30 years of hindsight with Enron, subprime mortgages, Weinstein, Epstein, and of course Donald Trump (who is explicitly idolized by Patrick's ilk in the book) it's almost chillingly real. During a chase in the novel, Patrick shoots someone on the street and all I could hear was Trump's claim he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose a voter.

The bottom line is that consequences aren't on the table for these people. Bateman tells us that he doesn't have any clear emotion except "greed and, possibly, total disgust." No happiness. No sadness. Certainly no remorse. No fear of discovery. Bateman is occasionally upfront about his violence and even confesses but it's always ignored or taken as a joke because those around him are pathologically incapable of noticing his aberrant behavior for fear that their own will be noticed.

It's a bleak story overall that shows us the ruling class is entirely self-serving, vapid, unfaithful and even murderous and yet the one character central to Bateman's life that is merely average, Jean, his secretary, has actually fallen in love with the facade he presents to the world. It's darkly ironic and indicative of how stupid we, the American people, are that we believe there is any goodness or high intention in them.

The one criticism I will level, and the reason I didn't give this five stars for prose alone, is that I think Bateman's unreliability about murdering Paul Owen does nothing but rob the story of some of its clarity. It would be one thing to turn Bateman into a gutless fantasizer and relegate all of his butchery to his imagination, but we suspect some of his exploits did occur (the taxicab driver accused him of murder he recounted, the police at Evelyn's neighbor's brownstone, the blinded bum) so not knowing how much of Bateman's memory is true just undermines the overall point that it doesn't matter.

I would also say I found the three musical interlude chapters to be rather pointless filler. Assuming they are written from Bateman's point of view all it proves is that he can appear quite discerning about music I don't care about. The main body of the work aged well in retrospect, but these sequences seem far more dated to someone that wasn't immersed in 80s pop culture. I suppose they serve as palate cleansers in a book that only has one character to follow.

All together though, the book was a compelling read that shocked me and made me feel dirty for reading it, and dirty for living in a society where this level of flagrant disregard for humanity is basically par for the course for the moneyed elite.

Rather uneven, but that's almost to be expected from a collection of early work.

The titular story, which takes up about half of the 200 pages, is the sort of science fiction payoff that everyone wants to read but is hard to do well and I'm not sure Banks really pulls it off. It describes the perspective of a highly advanced "enlightened" civilization (The Culture, naturally) on our local setting, the Earth of recent memory (circa 1977) rather than some distant analog serving as a metaphor or another wholly alien culture. Reading about aliens taking an unbiased view of our actual planet and ultimately deciding its fate is quite fun science fiction.

However, none of the moral hand-wringing or even calls to annihilate Earth ever really feel consequential thanks to the decision being left to The Culture who are always portrayed as far too measured and noble to negatively affect us in any way. The use of contemporary references like Star Trek, Star Wars, or David Bowie and the use of many major Western cities as a backdrop can also come off as a little lazy when the Culture lens doesn't add much. For example, the main character's view of divided East and West Berlin as post-modern political art is very interesting, but ship making requests on BBC or fashioning a lightsaber feels a little too much like Earth fan service. Ultimately, that's why I think The State of the Art is left as mediocre novella - the interest in the outsider view of real life is overwhelmed by a philosophical but toothless plot set in a relatively mundane location. Too much of Banks' creativity that I enjoy in the other Culture works is forced into hiding to serve the premise.

The rest of the stories are also quite a mixed bag. A Gift From the Culture and Descendant are good one session reads also in the Culture-verse. Odd Attachment was amusing and short. Cleaning Up was an entertaining retro-futuristic Cold War story. The remaining three stories, Piece, Road of Skulls, and Scratch were less successful in the end, although only Scratch was a complete failure (experiment all you want, but the result was unreadable garbage).

On balance there's more good than bad in this collection, but I wouldn't exactly call it essential reading either.

At this point I'm a confirmed Steinbeck fan, but I'll admit that I was a bit lukewarm on this book right up until the end. The story of the Joad family is actually only half of the text, with every other chapter being this sort of disconnected world building that basically serves as a very eloquent soapbox for Steinbeck to stand on, and while I appreciate Steinbeck making it clear that the system was rigged against a whole class of Americans, these chapters weren't as compelling as the more focused Joad chapters.

That said, the end really took the whole book up a notch for me. I kept expecting the Joad family's journey to end in some sort of positive way. Not necessarily some white picket fence fantasy life, but maybe starting to put down the roots of a new life in California. It never happened. The Joad family, and the class of Americans they represent, just get kicked over and over and over. Nobody's life is better at the end. The core of the family is still together, but penniless and literally underwater on the verge of winter. The grandparents are dead, Noah wandered off, Tom is on the run, Rose of Sharon is abandoned by her boyfriend and has a stillborn child.

Admittedly I took a lot of socialist views into this book but I can definitely see how contemporary critics attacked Steinbeck for his views when they work against the American streak of cowboy rugged individualism. There is a lot of meat on a socialist or collectivist reading of the work, and Steinbeck does not shy away from being quite overt about what he believes to be the solution to the plight of these workers. In that way, I think now is a very good time to read this classic - the sort of inequality Steinbeck rails against is still present in every aspect of our society and it's good to see what that looked like in the age before the corporations learned we were more useful with full bellies and empty wallets. Tom Joad was a hero 90 years ago, and he's still a hero today.

Anyway, this classic doesn't disappoint.

This book was an unexpected gem. It was at once realistic and also very alien, it didn't shy away from being weird or predicting broad generational consequences for a group of humans trying to thrive in an ecology they didn't evolve in.

The book is very direct and straight forward. Partially because the generational scale precludes having one set of main characters, instead focusing on specific individuals in the history of this colony. It feels a lot like Asimov's Foundation series that way - effective, if a bit sparse, prose covering long stretches of history (although Semiosis is closer to 100 years on a single planet, rather than 10,000 across the galaxy).

It also has a bit of Star Trek vibe, which I loved, because the group of humans is so dedicated to peaceful coexistence, study, and survival through adherence to principles. It is a very positive view of a human future despite the exodus from a violent Earth, and it's just so much more fun to read about this group being molded by their new home to live in peace instead of battling to remake it in the image of Earth.

The author also really nails the plant perspective in the novel too. I won't get too deeply into detail, because that's the pleasure of reading this story, but the author never shies away from covering how the plants think, intertwine and communicate in a very satisfying way.

My only criticism is that it's too short, and in some ways it ended right as things were at their most interesting. However, it was a logical stopping point and really the whole story was so jam-packed with payoff that I might just be being greedy. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel.