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Well, this is a miserable reading experience. Which, to be clear, it should be - in fact, it would be weird if it wasn't miserable. But, still. Misery.

This section gave me AP World History flashbacks. Reading this book is nice; not the kind of thing I'd normally read for fun, but I'm sort of glad I am.

I find philosophical conservatism to be a little less repugnant than the political variety, but only barely. Burke does have some good reservations for political revolutions, but those reservations would be best utilized if they were incorporated into revolutionary thought, to give revolutionaries a needed note of caution. Burke's insights don't work well as the foundation for their own anti-revolutionary dogma.

After reading a lot of bad history books for school over the years, it's a relief to read something relatively clear and straightforward that still has a lot of information.

Conservatism: The philosophy of, "I don't know what we should be doing, but it certainly isn't what progressives are doing."

Al Roosten: 4/5 The characterization feels a tad bit obvious, but the writing style is original and funny enough to make up for it.

The Semplica Girl Diaries: 5/5 Incredibly creative and on-point allegory. There are a lot of hugely emotionally resonant moments here, and Saunders does a shockingly good job of making the conflict two-sided, rather than the judging condemnation of its protagonist it could've been.

Escape from Spiderhead: 5/5 Uncomfortable from start to finish. I think Saunders might be missing his true calling as a horror writer, because that was the perfect mix of introspective and terrifying.

Exhortation: 2/5 This was just obvious and forgettable. It's structured like a story with no point other than a twist, but the twist never even comes, so there's just... nothing here except cliches.

I still maintain that Zooey is weaker than Franny, because the pacing is needlessly slow and a lot of the scenes feel dragged out. But the characterization and theming are top-notch.

I guess Rousseau didn't have any real-life examples of democracy to draw on, so he can only get lost in theory. Still, I feel like this theory hasn't aged very well. As it turns out, sometimes democratic leaders are corrupt.

Puppy: 3/5 Pretty good twist, and it's mostly well-written. I guess I'm just off-put how all of Saundrs' characters feel like caricatures. It's not weird enough to be magical realism or anything, but it's definitely too weird to be realistic or believable.

"[A man's] life is no longer the bounty of nature but a gift he has received conditionally from the state."

This is a terrifying view of what it means to live under a government, and even more terrifying is the fact that Rousseau is describing an ideal government when he says that.

Victory Lap: 3/5 Undeniably well-written, with a few near-trancendental moments, but the characters feel one-note and exaggerated, and by the end of the story it's hard to see the point of all the edgy violence.

Sticks: 4/5 A nice little vignette, could've been a bit more memorable, but I still found it very thought-provoking.

Salinger is just... so good at writing dialogue.

So far, I don't like this as much as I did On the Origin of Inequality. It's just so stuck in the abstract so far; no actual government has ever worked like this, and the frustrating thing is that I think Rousseau knows it.

I'm actually kind of enjoying this, despite the excessive wordiness. I have to keep reminding myself that Locke didn't think Black people were human, because if not for that fact, this would actually be a decent conception of liberty and property.

This is not at all what I was expecting. I'm not sure how I feel about it thus far. On the one hand, I like Hobbes for calling out the nonsense that philosophers hide behind metaphors and unclear language, but he takes it so far that he ends up being a hypocrite whenever he uses metaphors himself.

Your interest in this book will depend entirely on how interested you are in the conditions of Serbian prisons in the 19th century. The fact that Dostoyevsky wrote this has shockingly little impact on its literary value.

Zooey isn't quite as tight as Franny was, in terms of efficiency. Still, the dialogue and characterization are both excellent.

This is moderately interesting, but the amount of detail into relatively minor matters feels excessive to me.

In principal, I don't like Sachs' ideas, but in practice, this actually makes a fair amount of sense to me. This is more nuanced than I expected it to be.

There are interesting moments here and there, but the complete lack of any organization - even the kind of organization that episodic stories/memoirs have - really works against this book as a whole, and means that I probably won't remember much about it in a few months. Which is a shame, because there are interesting elements to this story, and I'd like to see it told better.

I guess I can sort of get into this, as a series of snapshots about prison life. I almost wish it were more explicitly episodic - the fact that there's some veneer of narrative makes it a lot harder to deal with the fact that that narrative doesn't work at all.

This is somewhat improving as it goes. It could just be that I'm getting used to the style - it's still not great or anything. But it's at least mildly interesting now, even if I can't really get very invested in Nikitenko's success or failure in his endeavors.

This is surprisingly uninteresting. I expected this to be more organized in some way or another - so far at least, it just seems like a collection of thoughts about the prison camp, rather than a novel or formal memoir of any kind.

This isn't annoying me nearly as much as I expected it to. I like how much focus there is on positive outcomes beyond economic growth - he only likes economic growth when it's a means to rising living standards, which is refreshing.

There are interesting moments of prose here and there, but overall, the lack of any organization to the book, on a micro and a macro level, completely sink it for me.

Sachs does know his stuff, it's hard to deny that. I appreciate that he doesn't take countries as monoliths, and explores how 'economic progress' on paper doesn't mean progress for everyone. That said, it's distressing that he brings up debt without mentioning the west's (particularly the IMF's) role in keeping this situation perpetuated. But maybe that's yet to come.

There's really very little to say about this. It's badly-written and not very interesting. I can't read it without thinking about all the more insightful, human, and focused explorations of serfdom that must exist out there.

I kind of feel like if Plato's name weren't attached to this, modern philosophers wouldn't put any stock whatsoever in this guy clearly just making things up without any evidence. This is making me hate Nietzche a lot less than I did when I first read him - there really was a serious problem of philosophers just deciding how they thought the world worked and drawing conclusions about running society based on that.

This is honestly much more boring than it should be. This is an interesting point in Russian history - there's no excuse for a lived account of it to be this bland.