Nosemonkey > Recent Status Updates

I still find Wittgenstein almost impossible to understand. At least this makes clear that I'm in good company - if even Bertrand Russell struggled for years, despite being able to quiz the man direct on what the hell he was banging on about (and, it seems, Wittgenstein himself even struggled to explain himself), then my own inability to work out the logic of logic feel infinitely more excusable.

This really is astonishingly packed with stuff to think about, even while constantly taking the piss about people who like to think about things. And everyone else, really. Excellent stuff.

I'm actually now on page 467, so not sure what's going on here. Hey ho!

This is a bit unsubtle, a bit too evidently written with a film/TV adaptation in mind, but fun enough, and races along.

This started like any number of decent magic realist African novels I've read in the last few years - I was getting a bit disappointed, following the glowing praise from Marlon James on the cover. It's worth sticking with it - soon starts heading in a rather different direction: Ben Okri's The Famished Road, but darker, more brutal. I like it.

Keep forgetting I've not finished this one... Very good, but very dense.

The first 300 pages of this have been excellent, introducing me to all kinds of parts of history and myth from the Indo-Pacific region I had very little clue about. I'm going to have to go back and re-read to take it all in - not because it's complicated, but because there's just so much that was new to me. Great stuff.

This is confusing (due to a large amount of assumed prior knowledge of who's who and what's going on) but fun.

Continues to be fascinating. Now on early medieval Japan. Other than the narrator constantly pronouncing Kyushu wrong, he's doing a good job. The maps in the physical book are quite basic, but also bring to life the scale of it all. Good illustrations too - lots I'd never seen before, and lots of stuff I'd not been aware of in the history. I'm very ignorant of early Asia-Pacific history, it seems.

Listening to the audiobook while walking the dog, and it's excellently done. The physical copy's now arrived so I can check the maps and illustrations. It's quite chunky, even in paperback - and good fun. Extremely readable, even with the smallish print, thanks to short chapters and an engaging style.

This is rather well done. Not a great deal new to me so far, but superb historical storytelling with a vast scope.

This is kinda fun, but TBH the whole left brain / right brain thing is proving more of a blocker to my engagement than a useful tool for understanding. Same deal as system one / system two in Thinking Fast and Slow, different name. And once again, I can never remember which is which. What's wrong with calling them rational / intuitive, or logical / creative, FFS?

This is rather good. Intensely meandering stream of consciousness, digging into the Mediterranean underbelly.

This is still infinitely longer than it really needs to be, and rarely saying anything not obvious to anyone who's not rabidly right-wing or a sociopath. I'm quite enjoying his attacks on the post-1990 era of "hypercapitalism", though.