Nosemonkey > Recent Status Updates

This really is an excellent edition.

Still confused in places, but getting there

Another one I'd forgotten I was reading. I might be a little to unscientific (and unmathematic) to fully get this, and I wish I could ask questions as I read it. Still decent, though - less whimsical than Carlo Rovelli, so feels more substantive somehow. Short sections aid readability a lot.

Still wildly variable - for some of these things I really can't see how they ever managed to find a publisher - but interesting.

Haven't quite worked this out yet, and not exactly fully sucking me in, but intriguing.

I'd forgotten I'd not finished this. It's rather fun. Albeit extremely hard to keep track of the vast cast of similar-sounding characters - who usually come and go in the space of a few paragraphs, so crammed is the narrative.

Genuinely fascinating. Last paid attention to the Crusades at A-level, and did a "dissertation" (I think only about 1,500 words) on the Arab perspective during the Third Crusade. Hadn't heard of any of the accounts from the First.

Damn, Crusaders were psycho.

Wildly variable, but still intriguing.

Some of this stuff is quite fun. Some is like a GCSE creative writing class. Still interesting, though...

Keep forgetting how good this is...

This is amusing. Pretentious as all hell at times, but amusing.

This was *really* annoying me for the first few chapters - ranty polemic that was so assertive it was putting me off despite agreeing with it. Now it's shifted to the history of British deviousness, arrogance and atrocities in Africa in the late 19th century, it's getting much stronger. Using evidence is more compelling than making claims on their own - who'd have thought?

Left this for ages, lost in moving house. Getting back into it bow. Still feels rather Orientalist - much of the sci fi worldbuilding is just India worldbuilding - but despite the confusion of multiple character perspectives, it's growing on me.

This remains good fun - glad to have finally unpacked it again.

I'd been looking forward to this, but am struggling with it. More polemical than I was expecting, despite expecting a polemic of righteous rage. It's all more angry assertion than evidenced argument, with a huge amount of assumptions about malign motives that imply that a vicious, violent, wilfully racist conspiracy is a more likely explanation than low-level, unthinking ignorance and dominant cultural modes.

Needed something light after several weeks of intense work. What better than Pratchett? I have a feeling I've read this before, as some of it's familiar. Decent, as ever, if not a classic so far.

Random charity shop buy from back when the Hong Kong protests were in full force. Finally getting back into it after stopping on the first go. Entertaining historical fiction is pretty good escapism at the moment, even if there's a looming sense that the jocularity and humour is going to be shattered any moment. (Not my period, so unsure of the dates of the Opium Wars...)

Continues to be an informative and amusing overview of French intellectual history. Continues to have a terrible cover.

This Sisson translation is very readable indeed, and the endnotes are equally engaging. I've tried a couple of other translations (including the Dorothy L Sayer Penguin one) before this and given up, but this is pretty promising so far.

Finally getting around to reading this after a bit of gender inequity discussion at work this week. One of those books all men should probably be forced to read. (But a good chunk of them would probably still dispute the central argument, despite all the citations...)