Not much to say here. I love Simon Rich. Highlights were:
History Report (a kid in the future writing a report about our time period). There were some lines here that really cracked me up, especially when describing a date between the narrator’s grandparents:
“My great-grandfather said that all dates began with the same custom. The …
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I don’t know what I was expecting here. This book drops you straight into some pretty challenging material, uses Greek terms without defining them, and was overall a lot of work to read. Surprisingly, that gets better after the first few chapters – maybe those are the “weed out” …
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LBJ had a fear of losing. If a measure might be defeated, he didn’t bring it. “Pyrrhic victories were not his cup of tea.” (17) “He had a horror of defeat” even when young.
His father, Sam Ealy Johnson, paid too much for a ranch and went into debt in order to look rich. “Johnsons always strut. They even …
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WIP.
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Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate general in the Civil War. He was a slave trader and helped found the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan. Those facts can make it easy for us to dismiss him as an evil figure in history, but this biography gives a more complete picture of who he was. I would …
[Read More]Here are all the books I read in 2024:
January 2024
February 2024
April 2024
June 2024
July 2024
August 2024
K recommended this to me, and I read a little each night for a while. It took me a long time, even though it should have been a quick read, but I enjoyed it. It reminds me in some ways of True Grit, though the characters aren’t as hard. Glen Dobie was a bank robber, now an old man, but still pursued by an old Pinkerton detective …
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I have seen this book recommended in many places (e.g., in this list, and in this tweet from Ivan Kirigin). It just keeps cropping up, so I gave it a try.
Here’s a typical review: “A truly epic evolutionary science fiction story about animal uplift that feels very well researched. Tchaikovsky manages to perfectly immerse the …
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Wikipedia:
It was originally published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. Considered a founding work of Western literature, it is often said to be the first modern novel.
Cervantes, in a metafictional narrative, writes that the first few chapters were taken from “the archives of La Mancha”, and the rest were …
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I tried to group related notes under some headings, but this is still something of a jumble. This book took me many months to finish, but I’m glad to have read it. You get a real feel for the people involved. What you do not get with this book are basically any timelines or headers indicating the names of battles. You …
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