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There's an excellent book in here. An engaging story about individual and collective self-delusion and amnesia, with some very clear political messages and a grim humour to it. But at times, especially in the second quarter or so of the book, the author seems unclear whether he's writing a novel or a NY Review Of Books essay about individual dementia, collective amnesia, and the selective remembering of nostalgia. It's clear that he could write a fine essay and I'd enjoy reading that too, but the hybrid is clunky. From the POV of a novel reader the essay portions make the plot drag slowly enough that I started to lose interest. From the POV of a creative nonfiction reader, the actually fiction parts are jarring and confusing.

#SFFBookClub

Aha! I finally got around to working out how to actually link things properly instead of just pasting URLs in the text. I should have known it would be just a simple subset of Markdown but I wish Bookwyrm had either a prompt about that in the UI or a post preview mode like GitHub does.

Many signs are telling me that this has to be the year I finally read some Mann, and this book in particular. My German is far too rusty to read the original, but I found this apparently highly regarded translation at my local bookshop. The signs:

• Project 1933 using Mann's diaries as a source in most or all episodes so far.
• Time Shelter making a lot of explicit references to The Magic Mountain in its early sections.
• The Empusium which I'm hearing some raving about is apparently a modern take on the same story.

So... this won't be the next book I read because I need something lighter after Time Shelter (and have one in mind), but soon.

In the in-Bulgaria section of the book, it mentions a Czech film called "Lemonade Joe". I found the file online at easterneuropeanmovies.com/lemonade-joe/ (not free to watch, but a 24-hour membership is reasonably cheap). It's weird and delightful - in parts a loving satire of the Western genre (think Blazing Saddles or The Three Amigos but a decade or two earlier), in parts a slightly clunky but on-point critique of product placement / sponsorship culture, and in parts just fun slapstick comedy. Plot definitely drags in the middle, and there's a blackface scene (as unconvincing disguise, not minstrelry at least) that has aged very poorly, but worth a watch.

Everything I felt about outside.ofa.dog/book/168034/s/showa-19261939 applies here too. I learned a lot from this volume about how different WW2 looked from a Japanese perspective than from the Euro/USian ones I'm used to, and it makes a lot of things make more sense. Both why Japan wanted to expand the regional war it was already embroiled in, and how close it came to winning the battle for the Pacific.

I read this over the course of about 6 months as a group read. 5-10 of us would meet for an hour a week and take turns reading chapters. It's a very enjoyable experience that way, and at the same time I don't think I'd even have finished the book if I'd tried to read it alone.

Apart from being notoriously long, it's full of meandering digressions many of which would probably have lost me. And the tone of the writing is dominated by the pomposity of the narrator, which at times is used for great effect but at others just grates. It's also extremely wordily heavy. I realise that some of this is just the literary English of the time, but Melville was well capable of using that style to dramatic effect, like in Bartleby which I found a total page-turner, or some of my favourite individual chapters of Moby-Dick which would have been great stand-alone novellas. And while I suspect it was racially progressive for a novel written by a white USian back then, from any other perspective it's infuriatingly racist.

So why still a classic? Well, it does manage to conjure up a world, in which it tells a story that's simultaneously very small (one boat hunting one whale) and huge (an epic journey for that crew; a microcosm of whaling as a whole), with some very vividly rendered characters along the way, and much more comedy than I expected from the way people talk about this book.

Doing an import from previous bookwyrm instances + LibraryThing + Goodreads is a very strange kind of time warp. Past-me liked some books that today-me feels the Suck Fairy has visited, and put lots of things in to-read that I'm much less interested in today. But there are also some things that have shifted the other way.

Never Let Me Go is one of them: in hindsight, I like it much better than I did at the time. Enough so that I'm curious about re-reading it and seeing what I think. Is it that the aspects which frustrated me 6 years ago have shrunk in my recollection, or is it that the brilliant aspects of it mean more to me today?

The author is a geography professor at the University of Victoria, who I have got to know a bit through a shared interest in watersheds and water management. I knew she was also a published poet, but had filed that away in the back of my mind until seeing this volume at a bookstore and wondering why the poet's name sounded familiar.