Nosemonkey > Recent Status Updates

Random second hand shop purchase. Written more like a novel than a history book, with lots of descriptions of specific battle actions that couldn't possibly be known in such detail, plus a tendency to repetition, but still, an easy read and fun.

Trying this one again. He's still irritatingly smug and pretentious (ironic considering how often he attacks others for pretentiousness), but there's some interesting stuff in here.

Book Two finished, though oddly this has now shifted to the single-volume edition.

Second book is a single narrative, albeit one that leaps around through time, space, and dimensions. Written in a kind of Enid Blyton pastiche - if The Magic Faraway Tree was set in the afterlife and featured children freezing to death, rape, demons, and fascists - it's readable, a bit repetitive, and hugely self-indulgent. But fun.

Pacing along with near-linear narrative, this volume. Some fun ideas coming out in this alternate death dimension.

Published in 2004, and focused on the death of reason and rationality in the late 20th century. Feels relevant for the age of Trump and Brexit - how did we get here?

Well this is already very different to the grubby magic realism of the first volume. I like it.

More interesting towards the end, with a focus on organisational failures / successes. Good recap of management thinking through the 20th century, while (between the lines) explaining why so many managers today are so fixated on flat structures and decentralisation.

Picked up again after listening to an FT podcast about it. Readable. Hmmm... May read the rest.

Still have no idea what's going on, but I am enjoying it a lot, so...

Very good so far. No idea what's going on yet, but that was kinda what I was expecting.

Dense, tiny text, means the 360-odd pages of this first volume are more like 5-600 pages for most regular books, though...

Not sure why I'm persevering with this series, tbh. It's not bad, and easy reading, but feels disjointed - some very good ideas spoiled by a not very well constructed attempt to interweave series-level narratives with the book-level one. The book-level one keeps getting lost, because the series-level ones are more interesting.

Not my usual sort of thing. Complex, difficult, but good fun. Need a comprehensive dictionary of philosophy to understand a good chunk of it, but it's about time I gave my brain a workout again.

Why do I keep leaving reading this for months at a time? It's interesting and well-written. Bizarre.