Christopher > Recent Status Updates

It's taken nearly a decade of work and 200 pages, but Leibniz's inquiries are finally starting to return results and it is incredibly cathartic.

The Big History book I've been waiting for. The lack of intellectual humility among most authors in this tradition have repulsed me. Most seem to think that their imagination creates facts, that if they can find a seemingly logical narrative, it must be true. I look upon such writers with utter disdain. So it's quite refreshing to find this book, which has an obsession with hedging within the evidence similar to mine

Final volume. One month to go. I'll finish this this year even if I have to take a week off work. Just gotta focus. I have a dozen books on the go, but this one comes first no matter what.

I want to enjoy this book but so far probably half of his statements about Chinese are just plain wrong. "Other languages are highly impervious to lexical borrowing, above all Chinese, which prefers to concoct new words from old ones for unfamiliar, introduced items." My book on Chinese loanwords strongly disagrees. And this is the least absurd statement yet! 6000+ 汉字 is a better number than 4000 being commonly used.

This has been the best part of the book and possibly the most exciting and film-worthy saga I've ever read. The story of the kings Svein, Knut and Valdimar deserves an epic film equal to Lord of the Rings.

I know more about Tibet, Japan, Denmark, and probably another 20 countries than I do about the one I've spent almost every day of my life in. And I am starting to figure out why Canada seems to be a country with no history worth speaking of: It's just one giant embarrassment after another. We're a neocolonialist power, one of the worst, and our internal affairs are no less loathsome. Oh Canada!

Bizarrely comic, nonsensical but comically sensible, of all the authors who wrote with a style peculiarly idiosyncratic, Gombrowicz might be the best I've yet encountered.

I've never been so relieved to have such a long FB trail of my own thinking, because the day will surely come when my original thoughts are misattributed to these Davids, with whom I feel as if I share one mind as I read this. Indeed, this makes me wary, so I've started three books they've cited, seeking more information and looking for any conflicting evidence, along with two more on related topics they don't mentio

Excellent

Totally forgettable, no riveting scenes, no emotion, no memorable rhymes.

A little too inchoate, I'm not sure I'm really getting a sense of narrative yet.

It's been too long since I last read a book where non-final s was written as f.

How obnoxious to find a mistake on page 1. Christoph Harbsmeier is named Christopher. I'm a very big fan of Harbsmeier and I didn't think he'd ever gone by Christopher, so I searched Google and an academic database. There is a single use of Christopher from 1999. It's not the article being cited. I'd often stop reading at this point, but the book is too important to surrender so early.

Engaging and enchanting

The Pope was "evil" because he opposed antisemitism. Periods of topsy turvy, where murder is good and support for humans is evil, come about all too frequently in our history, including today's history.

Amazed at the intense pleasure I experience reading this masterful poem. Medieval epic poetry is usually better than porn, but even sex cannot compare to this one.

I really wonder if Jullien even speaks Chinese since he seems to rely on a lot of stock phrases and tropes in describing the Chinese language and thoughtways that strike me as overly simplistic, the same as I remember encountering in the beginning of my learning but which quickly became apparent weren't strictly accurate, being mere generalizations with countless exceptions - exceptions he never seems to have learned