Tyler Kieft

A good read! Finished in about 24 hours. The beginning of the book was pretty simple, but the lessons got better and more complex near the end.

My takeaway: overall, I'm doing things right. Stick with the strategy. Stop watching the day to day so closely

I think the biggest thing I can take away is maybe needing to be slightly more risk averse? Hope for a good outcome, be optimistic, but plan for a bad one.

Just finished watching the series for the second time and after reading this book I want to go watch it again! Pretty decent collection of essays, especially the last four about dualism, location, dreaming, and “Gothic daemon BOB”. There's so much to discuss about this show, look forward to digging deeper the next time I see it

This is an extraordinary, haunting story of the ultimately doomed life of Robert Peace, strung together from the recollections of his family, friends, lovers, classmates, and teachers. Born into tough circumstances, he grows up a driven, capable student, athlete and friend, almost solely due to the sheer force of will of his mother. He sets off to Yale with so much hope, yet finally cannot (or will not?) escape the world he came from, maintaining a fluidity with street life that proves to be his demise.

This was a tough book to read, as it exposes in a single life story how difficult it is to overcome entrenched poverty (and, to a lesser extent, racism). Even when so much went right for Rob, it still all went wrong at the end. I'm no expert on it, but the New York Times' review of the book is enlightening: It will force liberals to reconsider their aversion to talking about culture, habits, values and family breakdown as contributors to poverty. Poverty may be “structural,” as liberals like to say, but the structures worked for Peace, and still there was a brokenness to his spirit, “crippling emotional trauma” from the absence of his imprisoned father, and a rage of generations — a rage that cannot be explained by the physics of one life alone. Hobbs is particularly convincing on the idea that no level of achievement or external intervention can compensate for the lack of family.

Of course, Rob himself is not without blame. His choices are mysterious, confounding, more and more frustrating as he gets older and fails to learn from previous mistakes, and it is the interaction of these choices with the realities of his circumstances that make the book so fascinating. Chief among these bad choices are his recurring stints selling drugs as an easy, familiar way to make money. Hobbs spends a lot of time talking about how Rob wanted to be “The Man” - supporting everyone around him emotionally and financially, while at the same time failing to look after himself or accept advice of any form. He also harps on Rob's consistent undercurrent of anger, repressed and undirected, that slips out from time to time.

However, I don't believe this fully explains his failure to “succeed” after college. The expectations of a young person attending an elite university are so high - built up by those one knew in high school, and by the universities themselves - that there is bound to be disappointment on the other end. Very few people have career success right out of college, and the contrast between that and the feeling of being on top of the world as a successful high school senior is crushing (even more so I imagine in Rob's situation). I wonder if Rob was more scared to actually try something (and probably fail at it at least once) than not try at all, and so he spent his time traveling, working low-wage jobs, and dealing drugs.

Unfortunately (in so many ways), we never get to hear from Rob. Hobbs talks a lot about how private, how compartmentalized his life was, and although it seems like he's done the best job possible trying to illuminate all parts of it, I spent most of the book wondering what Rob would have said about his own decisions and path in life.

It's weird and uncomfortable to be a well-off white person reading a book written by a well-off white person about growing up black in the ghetto, a topic which neither of us has any firsthand experience with. There are some pretty hateful reviews on Goodreads ranting about this. I cannot know how much I don't know, but I thought the book was pretty fair, and its creation absolutely felt motivated by the right things. Is he a flawed narrator? Yes. Does he admit as much in the book? Yes. Hobbs actually puts himself into the book for a fair portion, writing first-person about how he saw Rob (before he did all the research for the book). I am a little ashamed to admit it, but it actually helped me relate to the entire work better, realize how little I know and how much was under the surface that if I had met Rob I would have never picked up on, due to no shared cultural context. I want to read more stuff like this, especially from the black perspective (as many reviewers have suggested). It's hard to understand the cycle of poverty without hearing individual stories like this.

Docked a star for some pretty crummy writing at parts. The section on Rob's childhood was incredible, a modern fable, but I felt like the author got sloppy after that. The book should have been cut down and there were some lazy word choices. At the end, it felt like a string of third-person interviews, rather than an intermixed narrative.

I hope Rob Peace and his story remain with me for a long time. There is much to learn from this man's life and the way he lived.

The last two sentences from the NYT are haunting: We are the wondrous country that made him a Yale man. We are the wanting country where even that wasn't enough to spare him.

I appreciate what Zadie Smith was trying to do here, but it just didn't work for me. It's her first novel, and it shows. The first section is too long, the ending feels contrived and unsatisfying, and there are a lot of threads left dangling.

I hated the tone of the narration. It seems like many modern authors are trying their hardest to be “clever” and it's really annoying to me. Sometimes it was funny, but most of the time

My biggest issue, though, is with the characters. They're so one-dimensional! Chess pieces that she maneuvers into position. Caricatures. Megaphones for the author's views. Especially Joyce Chalfens. The liberal self-loathing was a little bit much for me here. I'd like to see the characters treated much more sympathetically, don't just make us laugh at them and feel superior, help us understand where they're coming from.

The best part of this book was understanding how different immigrant generations are pulled in different directions by all the forces in their lives.

A friend at book club mentioned that this was like a lesser version of “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

This is a beautiful book. I've always loved Kundera's writing style - direct, yet beautiful, musical, playful. He's able to get at the deepest core of humanity and philosophy with a light, casual language.

I wanted to give this book five stars. When I was about a quarter of the way in, I thought it was headed there. But I think the middle was a little bit soft - it's the part of the book I remember least. I never really connected with the part of the book that focused on Franz and Sabina, as opposed to the part of the book about Tomas and Tereza. I really fell in love with the character of Tereza - meek, desperate to be loved, constantly blaming herself for everything in her life. She was the most real character in the book to me - the other three feeling slightly more like abstract ideas, concepts meant to drive home a philosophical point.

Kundera is a masterful writer. The structure of the book is innovative and non-linear. The ultimate fate of the characters is divulged somewhere in the middle of the novel, yet I still found myself almost in tears near the end of the story - one of the most powerful, haunting scenes I've ever read.

I'll remember a few things about this book - the constant discussion and interplay of polar opposites (heaviness/lightness, strength/weakness, light/dark, freedom/slavery, body/soul, kitsch/shit, God/atheism), the lengthy, eye-opening section on how different our perceptions can be about the same concepts, and the constant drive to understand the meaning and purpose of love and passion.

I wish I had a book group to discuss this with! Or that I took notes and wrote down questions while reading it. There's a lot of philosophy going on here - a lot to think about. I suspect I'll give this another read someday; I almost want to read parts of it again right now, but there's a bookstore across the street calling my name.

I read “The Joke” by Kundera a few years ago, and now I want to reread it. Another reason for only giving this novel 4 stars is that I remember liking “The Joke” better - it felt more tightly constructed, dug at my emotions more than this did. Or maybe it was just more accessible on the first read.

I picked this book up thinking it would be a somewhat ambitious read; possibly I would get lost in the “epistolary” format and a lot of the historical context would be lost on me. In fact, it was the opposite; the book is a rich, loving character study with (I think) universal appeal. One of the points the book makes is that a man is the product of his environment; he is always in struggle with it to determine how much his environment will define him and, vice versa, how much he will define his environment. The formal writing style and historical details in the book deepen our understanding of the environment so that we can better appreciate the place of this man in history.

The book is tightly constructed, with a well-defined schema. I don't wish to give too much away, but I loved how we only hear from Augustus in a single long letter at the very end of the novel. Throughout the rest of the book, he is defined by the words of others. We hear from his friends, his enemies, his lovers, and his children, and they often paint contradictory pictures. But when we finally hear from Augustus himself, in his own words, we feel that we know him deeply, that all these depictions have already come together to paint a remarkably accurate portrait of the man. I think this is one of the book's greatest triumphs.

There was an interesting meta-theme running through this book about how difficult it is to capture someone's life in words. This is, after all, a work of fiction, and much of it is imagined based on what little surviving historical evidence we have. And how can you really know a man through these documents? Augustus meditates on this in the final pages of the book.

To be honest, I do wish I had known a little bit more about Roman history and the life of Caesar Augustus according to scholars, as I think it would have enhanced my enjoyment, but I never felt like I was hindered by it.

This is a hard book to write about. As I was reading it, I felt genuine empathy for the people whose stories were told in its pages, the people who were left behind as industries changed and wealth was concentrated in the hands of the few, as institutions which were once the pillars of American society were hollowed out and our politics became little more than shouting at each other. But I also felt guilt creeping in - knowing that I would read these stories, then return to the liberal, well-educated, well-paid bubble of Silicon Valley, without taking any action other than “informing my world view”.

If you've read the newspapers or magazines in the past six years, trying to figure out what the hell happened since the 50's that brought us to where we are now - there's nothing new here. The difference is in the delivery - Packer shows us these changes, rather than distilling them down into a New York Times editorial. We see the effect the loss of industrialization has on a black family in Youngstown, Ohio, read story after story of the families in Tampa that were utterly devastated when the real estate market crashed, watch a political operative grow more and more disillusioned during his career in national politics. These stories are interwoven with short biographical sketches to present a rich, nuanced picture of all the contrasting forces in society that combined to bring us here.

This is a story about a few of the people that lived in America over the past four decades. It is about the radicalization and hollowness of our politics. It is about the dismantling of financial regulations. It is about huge national corporations sucking money out of small communities. It is about the lack of well-paying jobs for the middle class as wages have stagnated and the country has stopped making “things”. It is about bubbles - real estate, stocks, bonds - and how they affect those caught on the wrong side of them. It is about the growing influence of money on politics. It is about the loss of reasonable discourse in society, and the growth of fringe segments, helped by the Internet. It is a book about the transformation of our economy - the loss of industry and farming, and the growth of technology. It is about energy - the good days when it was cheap, and the struggles now that it's not. It is about the enormous, widening gulf between elites and everyone else.

At 27, I don't really feel like I've lived long enough to put “right now” in perspective. Are things really broken, or do they just seem that way? In 20 years, what will we think of the state of our society as it was in 2014?

This was a really fascinating, entertaining (again, tinges of guilt), and thought-provoking read. I hope it will inform how I think about money, the economy, and politics in the future.

The author seems like a giant tool, but there are a lot of interesting ideas in here. The perfect book for me to read right now, as I am trying to figure out where my life is headed.

The book spends a lot of time talking about money as related to time and health, and how to balance those three to achieve an optimal life (which the author defines as having great experiences and memories).

I'll definitely download the app and play around with it.

Pretty good for what it is I suppose. Somewhat repetitive from story to story, and certainly far from profound, but it made me laugh. The situations that Bertie and Bingo and Jeeves got tangled up in were fairly creative and funny. The writing had a good tempo, the stories moved along at a good pace. I loved the tone of Bertie, the narrator, and the fact that he's a bit of a bumbler - rich enough where he doesn't have to worry about real problems, but always relying on Jeeves to get him out of the social tension he gets mixed up in. He speaks with the easy fluidity of the upper class, but with enough naiveté that you don't hate him for it.

A courageous memoir, but deeply flawed. The jumbled structure, which in Part I was a back and forth, and in Part II started to move in circles, made the book seem both longer than necessary and unnecessarily confusing. And his writing style, so overly descriptive, so much useless prose obscuring the words that actually matter.

Most memoirs are rich in events and scenes, this one took place in the author's head more than anywhere else. He ruminates constantly on his relationship with God, and the clash between his upbringing and the way he felt as a young adult. While sometimes this was moving, and actually described feelings I could identify with, at other times it felt repetitive and overwrought. I wish the whole book had been written more in the plain style of the epilogue.

The movie (which wasn't perfect either) was actually much better than the book, I felt, with all these jumbled events (diary entries?) coalesced into a narrative that was easier to follow.

My favorite part was perhaps the passages where he described coming to terms with himself, loving himself. Worried that if he were to change, he would lose the parts of himself he actually realized he loved. Not wanting ex-gay therapy to “erase” his personality. That was such a powerful message.

Thanks to the author for his courage in writing down and trying to make sense of such painful memories. I hope he was able to eventually work through them with his parents.

I loved “A Little History of the World” (by a different author) but this book didn't measure up. I think that Philosophy doesn't necessarily lend itself well to being presented in a “history” format: forty important philosophers and their views, one per chapter. This book would have been more interesting and better structured if it had been organized around ideas, rather than people. Trying to cover so much, so piecemeal, in such a small volume, led to me feeling like the book glossed over the truly important ideas and never went deep enough to get me actually pondering. That being said, I did learn a lot and come away wanting to dive in a little bit deeper, so it wasn't a total waste. One other random thing I didn't like about the book is the author's subtle bias against religion - when a huge portion of the book was devoted to thinking about religion and Christianity, it was off-putting not to have the material presented in an unbiased way.

This book should be required reading for anyone who lives in San Francisco. Gary Kamiya writes lovingly about the “Cool Gray City of Love” in a way that makes it feel both familiar and mysterious. After finishing each chapter, you'll be dying to put the book down and go explore a part of the city you've never been to, or look with fresh eyes at a neighborhood you thought you knew. Kamiya joins San Francisco's past and present, weaving together hilarious historical anecdotes with lush, descriptive writing of his travels through the city in his many decades living here. As a wanderer myself, my favorite line in the book was about the unique San Francisco climate: “Cool and fresh, constantly cleansed by the sea, it is walking weather, thinking weather, alert weather.” See the city through Kamiya's eyes and you'll walk around with a new understanding and appreciation for this incredible place.

I didn't love this as much as I thought I would, or as much as reading the novel. The flow of Proust's sublime sentences was broken up by the graphic novel format, and I found it difficult to get into the rhythm of his words, distracted by the pictures and needing to figure out which panel came next. In addition, the abridgment lacked the depth of the original story.

Swann's Way is about memory and imagination and the nature of childhood to endow ordinary scenes with special meaning. Reading it is a very personal, mysterious experience. The provided images took away from that, preventing communion with my own mind and my own memories, and from reflecting more deeply on the nature of Proust's ideas.

Five stars for the novel, three for this incarnation.

“Corporate elites said they needed free-trade agreements, so they got them. Manufacturers said that they needed tax breaks and public-money incentives in order to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them. Banks and financiers needed looser regulations, so they got them. Employers said they needed weaker unions–or no unions at all–so they got them. Private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them. Everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them. What did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? Job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs.”

This is the right book for right now, America 2017, divided, angry, fearful, grossly unequal. This is the book that everyone should have been talking about last year, when instead we were reading [b:Hillbilly Elegy 27161156 Hillbilly Elegy A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis J.D. Vance http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1463569814s/27161156.jpg 47200486], a far inferior explanation of the “Trump phenomenon”, limited by the age and wisdom of its author and its inherent scope as a memoir.

Brian Alexander, native son, chronicles the history of Lancaster, OH and its once-largest employer, Anchor Hocking, maker of glassware. He begins in the 1950's: town and company are both strong, prospering in a symbiotic relationship. Lancaster is a happy place to be: kids growing up and going to state schools, pride in local sports and events, a sense of growth and moving forward. Anchor Hocking's management lives in Lancaster and is invested in the community. Globalization and macroeconomics creep up on Anchor, however, and then it's blindsided by the vulture capitalism of the 1980's, full-tilt Friedmanism, the pursuit of shareholder value above all. The company is tossed between private equity (also known as “leveraged buyout”) firms, its assets gutted, its long-term value hollowed out to provide cash flow to its managers, sitting in towers in New York City, who will rid themselves of the company after a few years. This continues up until the late present day, where Anchor's most recent owners (post-bankruptcy creditors) have finally realized their asset's latent value and are tentatively investing in growing its equity.

Through this tale he weaves this narrative with the political and social themes that recur ad nauseam in our fractured society: guns, drugs, racism, “welfare queens” and “Obama phones”, health care, joblessness, inequality and the divide between “coastal elites” and “backwards small towns”, labor unions, churches, Republicans vs. Democrats, the new service/knowledge economy, and immigration. Hanging over the narrative is the unspoken conclusion, Donald Trump's unlikely ascendancy to power, as the consequence of the last 50 years of economic and social policy.

I have rarely been sadder or more angry reading a book. Reading about the unfettered greed of the last 40 years, the total disregard for communities and human lives practiced by the private equity firms and financiers involved in gutting so many of America's legendary brands (built up over decades) in the pursuit of short-term cash flow was sickening. These financial engineers came in and said that they could find business efficiencies, when in reality they knew nothing about the business or industry. Instead, they ran the companies into the ground, saddled by massive debt.

Furthermore, the Republican Party, which is unabashedly pro-business, blamed these problems on every scapegoat in sight - immigrants, regulation, globalization, etc. And they managed to blind their constituents to the real culprit: big business, and Wall Street financial firms. Democrats are hardly immune from criticism either, but not to the same extent. The massive fraud perpetrated on the American working class in the name of economic growth has instead led to robbing small communities of all their wealth, and concentrating it in the hands of the very few. And we will be paying for it, in the form of social instability, for many decades to come.

Glass House doesn't have the smooth lyricism of “The Unwinding” but perhaps that contributes to its power. The rawness of its words, the barely-contained frustration, will cause me to remember this story for a long time. The writing suffers at points, but it isn't by any means bad. At times the author is wistful, yet avoids easy nostalgia and sentimentality. I couldn't keep all the characters straight - some of their stories were just too similar.

I would have liked to know more about the conditions that made Anchor Hocking weak leading up to the 1980's - the rise of Walmart, the fluctuations in fuel prices overseas, amongst other things - which the author glosses over in a few paragraphs. But on the whole this book is meticulously researched and reported. I'd recommend it to anyone searching for answers, who is not content with the “personal responsibility” narrative, or the “globalization” narrative, or any of the other hollow-sounding reasons why we have a country that's so messed up.

“Why didn't they just move away?” ask elites of all stripes. Woven throughout the book is a strong defense of community, of history, of ties to family, friends, acquaintances, a group of people supporting each other through good and bad times. It's hard to leave that support system behind, regardless of whether or not you can afford to. We need better answers from our economy, from our elected officials, on how to make America work for everyone in the 21st century.

I didn't really enjoy it at all. What a slog.

I can appreciate that the author was trying to experiment with form and text, but it comes off as gimmicky to me. Certainly nothing id want to see adapted in other books. Using form to create experience and emotion dulls the power of the bare words to do that

I also didn't really think the book was scary. It's basically a long-winded tone about anxiety, plumbing the deep depths of your mind. If you don't allow that to get to you, and remain detached, then you can kind of just watch it go by. Maybe doing that made me miss an opportunity to engage more deeply, but I don't really need any more anxiety in my life.

I also didn't really like the parodying of academic writing, I appreciate truth and the search for meaning, and making it all seem meaningless was deflating. Because it's not meaningless

3.5 stars, guess I'll round up. J.K. Rowling really, really needs an editor - there was so much unnecessary fluff to this book. At times, reading it felt like a chore. But the end pulled things together really nicely, and I am definitely still excited to see where the series goes.

The sexual tension between the two main characters is starting to feel tired. I empathize with Rowling's plight, if they actually get together than we lose a key factor keeping readers interested, a key motivating device for the plot. But the constant references to how much each of them would like to make a move yet continue to tiptoe around each other just felt repetitive –– we get it already!

Interesting currents continue to recur in Rowling's writing: - A fascination with, and seeming relish to depict, various British accents or tics of speech (lisps) - Poor families living in squalid conditions, mental illness / retardation (think of the Gaunts in Harry Potter, serving a very similar narrative purpose as the Athorns) - Feminism, sexual assault, the difficult choices women must make on a daily basis to succeed in a male-dominated world - The tendency of evil to hide in plain sight, disguised (think of Barty Crouch Jr. as Mad Eye Moody) - The nature of parent-child love, and what happens when it is absent, or replaced with cruelty. Lifelong effects of childhood trauma. - Birthdays - Fate, destiny, things which are “written in the stars”