Nosemonkey > Recent Status Updates

This is pretty good so far - interesting and easy to follow, despite my relative lack of knowledge

"'The world is quite small now... but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting into a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.'"

Started this again, this time listening to an audiobook version with an *infinitely* better modern translation, then using this edition for the excellent maps and notes. Actually enjoying it this time.

Less a history of photography, more a roughly chronological series of photos of places and people and things. Still interesting, though.

The focus on the secular here involves quite a lot of talking about religion and the freemasons, it turns out.

This started excellently, but lost its focus a little in the last chapter - a bit too much meandering into the thoughts of obscure poets, a little too little connecting thread. Hoping it's on its way back to excellent again as I got a copy for my mother...

Started this a couple of days ago in part of my ongoing occasional effort to expand beyond my usual areas of interest. Kinda interesting, but TBH not that engaging so far. Probably just me.

Picked up on a whim in a sale, and rather fun. Some unusual choices of photo - as it's Taschen, very well reproduced - and heavily biased towards the early years (even by page 500 it's barely into the 1920s), so the emphasis is on the history.

This is rather excellent so far.

This is rather fun so far - dipping in on the back of reading Nausea. Lots of nice short focused chapters, so tearing along at a decent pace, and engagingly written.

Wasn't sure what to expect from this, and a bit of a way in I'm still not. Reminds me a fair bit of Mathias Énard (or rather, his books would have reminded me of this if I'd read this first), so I'm enjoying it despite not much happening so far.

For the first chapter or two I worried I wouldn't get much new out of this, but it's starting to surprise me. The thematic, psycho-cultural approach isn't a new concept from Japanese history books I've read before, but the takes here are so far far more interesting, with more focus on the fringes of society than the elites. Decent.

This is rather fun.

Forgot I hadn't finished this one yet. It's rather decent.

Well so far this is *very* different to the first two in the trilogy. Infinitely more empathetic and humble than both - and especially the second. This is far less about Naipaul's opinions, more about the people in their own words via deliberate interviews. Where the first was travel writing, the second polemic, this is profile feature journalism. Interesting.

This is rather fun.

Reading a book about India written in 1964 to get a stronger sense of the country's drift towards Modi's strange style of Hindu nationalism ahead of the elections later this year - 60 years on - feels a bit odd. But I'm hoping the full trilogy will help me grasp some of the evolution. Naipaul is *brutal*, though - feels extremely colonial, attitude-wise. Albeit self-aware (and a little self-loathing) about that...