Patrick Link > Recent Status Updates

First time reading about Soviet Foreign Affairs Commissar M. Litvinov. Interesting official.

Better understood as a yarn.

Podesta, church-state relations, etc.

Focusing on smaller towns and general themes. The book is very readable no doubt a factor in it having five editions.

Octave quits a job in a huff just to waltz into a new one.

Fine-grain look at terms like class and class conflict and what they entail.

They give them enough leeway to hang themselves.

Summit meetings degrade the institutions.

Loving the structure of focusing on one’s person at a time.

A little upstairs downstairs more hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie.

My first foray into the Chinese Imperial Court (Ming or otherwise). I think this will be a great exposure to the how’s and whys but I wish there had been more of a preface.

Quick read so far. Pervasiveness and rot.

I love early chapter a in novels like this with a party to introduce a lot of characters and show their stereotypes and prejudices. There should be something on balls and parties in nineteenth century novels, I’d read that.

The reason I keep coming back to Zola is that his characters are still with us. His bourgeois mother, Madam Josserand, with the crosses to bare of a husband less successful than she wanted and daughters that she can’t marry off and won’t put out to respectable suitors, is as familiar to me as the back of my own hand.