Book Reviews and Commentary
Mason and Dixon is a novel by Thomas Pynchon.
TEXT My notes on the book
TEXT Mason and Dixon on gopherpedia
HTML London Review of Books review by Jenny Turner May 1997
A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout is what it sounds like.
TEXT My review
TEXT John Ousterhout on gopherpedia
Calcutta is a travel diary by Amit Chaudhuri. I finished it around 12/20/2023
TEXT Amit Chaudhuri on gopherpedia
American Pastoral by Phillip Roth. Finished 10/2024. Good. I enjoyed getting
into the world of a 1960s NJ Jewish family and participating in the debate
between conservatives and radicals during a time when it probably felt like the
country was headed towards a disaster.
The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov. Finished 11/2024. Good. I read this right
after Trump won the election and I felt a bit too much like a Russian Monarchist
watching their world get destroyed. lol.
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline. Finished 11/2024. I
enjoyed learning about the Bronze Age. I'd never given it much thought. I
happened to visit a Bronze Age exhibit in a museum this summer and it's really
cool to see how the human artifacts jump from crude stone tools to fine objects
like combs and cooking pots during the Bronze Age. When you read Cline's account
the world is surprisingly rich and complex. Sometimes it's a little dry as Cline
gets into not just the dates of events during the Bronze Age but the names and
dates of the archaeological excavations that discovered these sites. On the
other hand, it was fascinating to learn about how the pieces continue to come
together and how hypotheses are revised as new evidence becomes available.
Sometimes the explicit parallels the author draws to today's world are a bit
much.
Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham. Finished 11/2024. Vinson describes his
time working on the Obama campaign when he was a young college dropout. He's
just a couple of years older than me and I enjoyed the approach. His accounts of
Obama are somewhat vague, partially because he was young at the time and not
clear what was going on in the moment, and partly due to the fog of 16 years
passing. On the other hand you get some insidery knowledge that is new. It sort
of confirms the memory, which is that Obama was a lot of hype. We were caught up
in the hype but what was it and why did it let us down? Cunningham injects a bit
of his religious upbringing and perspective as a black man thrust into the upper
echelons of fundraising and that provides more food for thought.
The Suffrage of Elvira by V.S. Naipaul. Finished 12/15/2204. An early Naipaul
novel about an election in Trinidad. It follows a campaign, the bribes, the
superstition and so on. It's mainly in dialect. Frequently funny.