thejdizzler
12hr ago
Just want to thank @TowardsPanna for the recommendation to read This is Natto. Completely changed my relationship to sleep and wakefulness and I've been sleeping much better since.
The big shift has been one of mindset. Rather than obsessively think about numbers, I just give myself ample opportunity to sleep, remove all trackers/watches from the room and sleep and wake up when my body feels like it. If I wake up in the middle of the night or "too early", no biggie, I just do stuff I want to do until sleepiness returns or I think it's time to just get up.
thejdizzler
12hr ago
I've just bought an index fund that's supposed to track copper futures. CPER is the ticker name. I believe it is a basket of futures up to a year out.
thejdizzler
13hr ago
I’ve struggled to find a good commodity fund for gold that isn’t really expensive per unit or isn’t just a gold mining ETF. I’ll look into this in the New Year more.
thejdizzler
15hr ago
lol when you put it that way I sound pretty crazy.
thejdizzler
1d ago
I don’t know, I don’t think it makes me a very cynical person. I enjoy my life a fair bit as you can maybe see from other posts on here. I think it just makes me a bit less naive about tying my future plans to economic growth. I’m still invested in the stock market, but have been trying to avoid the AI boom for example. I’m still going to finish my PhD, but maybe not work in academia when the whole system is going to fall part because of demographics and lack of surplus to pay for basic research. I’m thinking about how to continue to live my life without buying a car so I don’t have to worry rising fuel and associated costs. The future is going to be what it’s going to be: one of us will be right, and there’s very little either of us can do about it as individuals, which I think is what depresses many doomers. They see the doom and gloom as taking away things, I see it as freedom. Guess what can’t happen in a declining energy environment: woke police states, AI takeover (either through what we’re seeing now or AGI), or continued global homogenization. All the atomization, hyper stimulation and specialization that modernity has brought will have to be scaled back and I think that’s a good thing. By trying to build my life around those things, even if you are right about energy/material abundance, I think will end up happy.
Anyway, happy to debate this more another time. I will make a top level post on a culture war thread in a few weeks with my thoughts better laid out with more data and we can debate there.
Ehh communists were just one faction within the Republican umbrella. With all the infighting that happened during the war, doubt a communist regime would have lasted long. Especially if WW2 happens as if in our timeline. No way in hell Hitler lets communist Spain exist. Which now that you mention it is probably pretty ass for Spain. So I guess Franco saved Spain from even more war/ Nazi occupation, which is something. In fact, if the coup didn’t happen, Republican Spain probably tries to join up against the Nazis and gets bodied then too.
I don’t have the energy to debate the earlier parts because I’m frankly getting a little tired of the snark and lack of real argument. Give me a couple actual claims that we can debate rather than just telling me my argument suck.
However, one the last part I will disagree. My theory does not state this because neither the Romans tbr 19th century English had access to oil reserves with crazy EROIs of 1:100. It’s only in the 20th century that we got that and only really after world war 2. I will go to bat for a higher standard of living between ~1950-1970 in America than now in America.
Paging @FirmWeird on nuclear.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Copper is up 20% this year and S&P is only up ~17%. I only got into the copper futures around Feb.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Let me try and lay it out how I see it. The extraction of every nonrenewable resource is defined by a tailed Gaussian curve, where the easy to harvest resources are mined/harvested first. The really easy sources of fossil fuels and minerals were harvested a long time ago because they didn't require large expenditures of energy. High grade ore and high-pressure oil deposits are no longer readily discovered as those have been exploited and exhausted by lower tech civilizations (the Romans for example exhausted much of the easy to access mineral resources of Europe). With better technology lower grade sources of these resources can be accessed, but these usually require more of an input of energy. To go from PA or Texas gushers to fracking for example requires a higher input of energy because you need to pump water into rock at high pressure to get the oil out, refine it more, etc. Same with copper and other minerals: more energy is required to get copper out of lower grade ores than higher grade ores.
This would not be a problem if we had unlimited energy. We literally could filter seawater to get the copper we need. The problem is that we are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels for pretty much all our energy, and they have been getting more expensive to extract since about 1970 due to declines in easy to access oil/coalfields. You can see this in the behavior of oil prices: steady if declining real price until 1970, and then consistent if ragged increase in price since then. This increase in the cost of energy is one reason why mining companies don't want to invest in exploration: the energy cost of extraction is continuing to rise, meaning any new mine with low ore grades may not be worth the investment because of associated high-energy costs.
To answer your last question: I don't think now is special. I think we've been in a slow decline since the 1970s. Real assets (houses, cars, most real foods) have had a real increase in price over the last 50 years, reflecting a real chipping away at living standards here in the west. I think this reflects increasing costs of energy, the fundamental basis for human society. Of course there are other explanations for this phenomena on the forum, many of which may contribute as well. But I think energy is primary. The "peak" I think will merely be the point where it gets difficult to deny this.
Of course if we successfully invent fusion power, I will be wrong about this. Then we can access effectively unlimited materials here on earth. In that case pollution will be a more limiting factor, which we can theoretically solve with unlimited energy as well.
I don't know man, I think my way of looking at the world has pretty good predictive value. My copper futures outperformed the S&P500 this year. I also would predict real global increases in the cost of material goods: which also has happened over the last 50 years, with notable exceptions in electronics. In addition, the increased energy expenditure required to get these resources is having terrible effects on the biosphere: global warming, ocean acidification, and loss of wild animal biomass. All of these graphs are going in the direction that my view of the world would predict.
Of course if we invent fusion this all could be moot, but even then, given the history of how human society has dealt with increased energy availability, its doesn't seem likely to me that we would actually solve our ecological problems.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Yea dude, copper has been way outperforming the SP500 for the past few years. I'm long on copper futures and my portfolio has been doing excellent.
thejdizzler
1d ago
IDK man, copper is pretty convincingly in decline. We basically haven't found any new large scale copper discoveries in the last 15 years. Grades are continually declining. We're currently mining ores that are 0.6% copper!!! And this is only going to continue to get worse. Unless we find an extremely large easy to exploit source of copper approximately ~now, copper production is guranteed to fall in the next 10 years.
thejdizzler
1d ago
I think material limits will hit us far before we can even get to harnessing all the energy available on the planet. I, like the original limits to growth study, think that we are pretty close to material limits right now. We are basically already at peak oil and we hit peak copper this year. Global warming (really global climatic instability) is worsening, as well as microplastic/endocrine disruptor pollution that is making it more difficult to reproduce. AI, short-form media, and other opiates are deskilling the population at a time when genuine scientific advances require more and more resources to achieve. There's a perfect storm of bad shit looming down on the line go up narrative, meaning it is not long for this world.
I too agree that the limits are in some part social and psychological. If we weren't so obsessed with consumerism and pointless travel we could have shepherded our resources better and got a little further, or maintained a pretty solid standard of living for a long while. But things like space colonization are a largely foolish endeavor and this is because of fundamental physical and biological limits, which will prevent us from leaving this planet, or even ever fully consuming its resources.
I would challenge you to read two resources in the New Year: Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works (yes I did write a really negative review of this on Goodreads, but the first few chapters about material resources are fundamentally solid), and Tom Murphy's Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet. I think many people on this forum (and in wider society) are energy and materials blind, which lead to extrapolations from the past two centuries of economic and technological growth that I find to be fanciful.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Did he though? 40 years after his death Spain is just and gay and trans as the rest of Europe and leftists control the main levers of power.
thejdizzler
2d ago
We are so diametrically opposite on this I don’t even know where to start! Kudos to theMotte for bringing these viewpoints together!
thejdizzler
2d ago
Do you think Sadly, Porn is worth reading in its totality?
thejdizzler
2d ago
Limits to growth. If the line go up forever/space colonization crowd is right almost all my beliefs fall apart.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Well Pinochet basically did for no reason at all. Guy literally pulled an illegal military coup on a democratically elected government, bombing the presidential palace and then rounding up everyone who had been involved in leftist politics. The government doing a mediocre job at governing is not sufficient reason to violently execute all your opponents. Franco maybe had more justification (the republicans in the civil war also did some bad shit) but he took it too far.
I don’t know man, every Spaniard I’ve talked to hates his guts. Maybe that’s just selection bias on my part, but the government’s actions (voting to exhume him 179-1 and also voting to exclude him from other military cemeteries by the same margin) speak to a pretty universal dislike of the man and his regime.
If I were to shit on Lenin, Stalin, or Mao who did similar shit I would get no pushback on this forum, but because these guys are right wing and traditionalist, they get defended here. This is why leftists don’t usually frequent this place.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Yea thanks let me edit out the full names. Copied this from my substack.
Franco and Pinochet both committed large scale mass murder. Franco was exhumed from his tomb because of how much the Spanish hate him now. Pinochet has received similar, if not as extreme treatment. The fact is that both dictators failed to actually halt the tide of rising leftism in their countries.
Uhhh that first part sounds like dogma. Labor unions and strikes were vital for raising wages and working conditions in the Industrial Revolution.
thejdizzler
3d ago
New England and Mid-Atlantic are the only regions I feel qualified to speak on.
Madrid Trip Report
All it took was one week and I'm ready to convert to being a Euro
As many of you know, I’ve been studying Spanish for over five years using the Refold method. I took the B2 test and passed back in May, but wanted to test my skills out in the real world. My parents wanted to do family Christmas in the UK this year, so I thought I would take advantage of needing to be in Europe to travel to Spain and use my Spanish and see many of the sights I had been reading about in books or hearing about from my tutor Rafa. I had planned to go with a girl I was dating in the spring, but we stopped seeing each other, so this ended up being a solo adventure which is not usually my thing. However, I had a blast in Madrid (and Toledo) because of how friendly everyone was here and because of how satisfying it was to put something I have worked so long and hard at into practice. I also learned a lot about myself during this trip: I’m much more extroverted than I thought and I don’t enjoy traveling just to travel.
What I did (roughly)
Monday: Arrive, ate a tortilla at a bar, slept 13 hours
Tuesday: Easy run through Retiro Park, history museum, vegan restaurant #1 (Mad, Mad Vegan)
Wednesday: Easy run casa del campo, paella class, language exchange, cocktails with Anna Landler (college friend)
Thursday: River run with Anna, romanticism museum, cheese shop, walked around university and read a book, vegan restaurant #2 (Musgo)
Friday: Toledo + dinner with Zack
Saturday: Exploration run + Prado + vegan restaurant #3 (Oveja Negra)
Sunday: Retiro Run Club+ vegan meetup + chilling/writing this post
Los Lugares
Madrid and Toledo were both extremely beautiful cities. Madrid has a historic core (from ~1600) that is surrounded by successive layers of development: the center feels like a medieval or Renaissance labyrinth, the zones a little bit to the north or south have wide boulevards and apartment buildings that reminded me a little of Paris or Washington DC, and even further out you have something that feels like an American suburb. I spent most of my time in the city center: all the museums, restaurants, and even supermarkets were within walking or metro distance. There was absolutely no need for a car. I was especially impressed with the metro: it felt clean, safe, and had extremely high usage. From about 2pm-10pm it was pretty much cheek to cheek, at least on the lines that I took. The only American metro system that compares favorably is Boston, which I think is pretty embarrassing for us. Of course there were also plenty of cars on the roads, but the city is designed in such a way to funnel most of the car traffic onto specific busy streets and keep most of the city center for pedestrians only. Madrid unfortunately did not seem very bike friendly: not a whole lot of bike lanes and those that I did see were not protected from traffic. Bike infrastructure is probably unnecessary in the city center here: walking and metro are fast enough, especially as there are supermarkets on almost every block. I didn’t spent enough time on the periphery to know what the situation was like there. All in all, it seems like the center of Madrid is a pretty positive model for American cities to potentially follow: high-density, mixed zoning with key roads for cars, and the rest for pedestrians.
I was also really impressed by the number and quality of parks in the city. The two big famous parks, Retiro and Casa del campo, felt like Central Park and Van Cortlandt Park respectively. In addition to these two big ones, there were a ton of smaller parks dotted along the rivers that run through the city that made for some really good running.
In terms of museums, I was not super impressed. The art museums were great, but even the Prado I think is a little overrated. It felt like half the museum was just royal portraits by Goya and Velazquez. The history museum concentrated on Madrid itself, but stopped before the super interesting (to me) era of its history: the Civil War. The museum of Romanticism was terrible and I do not recommend going.
Toledo was much more sleepy and provincial, although there were a ton of cool historical sites to see, including the Toledo Cathedral, Alcazar, and the reconstructed workshop of El Greco, one of Spain’s most famous painters. The Cathedral was very impressive, but I unfortunately found it a bit boring. For whatever reason, I'm struggling to find the narratives in the New Testament compelling at all any more, which makes most of the church paintings dull as bricks.
La Gente
My favorite part of Madrid by far was the people I met there. I managed to arrange one meetup via HelloTalk for language exchange. It was with a Venezuelan woman Nath, and we got churros and went book shopping together. Because of Strava I realized that a college teammate, Anna had been living in Madrid for three months and we got drinks and ran together. On Friday I had dinner with Hank and Ryan’s old college roommate Zack. Today I did a few miles with the Retiro runners, and went to a vegan meetup arranged by a girl I met on Bumble!
Throughout the whole week I was impressed again and again by how kind and open the Spaniards I interacted with were. Yet another thing that Americans could learn from.
I was surprised by the level of open-carry by the police and Guardia civil. I saw a lot of submachine guns this week, which is not something one expects coming from supposedly “gun-crazy” America.
La Comida
I tried to eat vegan as much as possible during this trip, but decided to make exceptions for Spanish tortilla and paella. The paella that I had I made in class and was very good, and the tortilla that I ate from Pez tortilla was also amazing, but honestly it was not necessary to make these exceptions in Madrid, especially after I found the local vegan scene through a girl Marta, that I matched with on Bumble. My favorite of the three vegan restaurants I went to was probably Musgo.
La Lengua
I’ve studying Spanish for five years, but this is the first time I’ve really spoken with natives outside of learning context. The first day was really bad: jet-lag made me feel really dumb, and I tried to avoid interacting with natives as much as possible. However, things got much better after that first day and I got some extra sleep, and I was able to turn things around. For almost all one-on-one conversations I was able to understand 100% of what was being said to me, and reply with relatively few mistakes. Group conversations were more difficult, and I especially had trouble understanding this one madrileño at our vegan meetup when he was speaking to the whole group. I had no problem understanding the signs at the museums, but I found after hours of being immersed in the language, it was very difficult to concentrate on even the simplest reading. Still have further to go with Spanish it seems, and unfortunately that improvement I think will only come easily if I live in Spanish speaking country.
Lecciones Personales
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I’m much more extroverted than I thought. My best days on this trip (today and Wednesday) were when I had a shit ton of social interaction. Next time I go solo traveling, I think I should plan on staying in a hostel where by nature there will be far more social interaction. When I get back to Baltimore I think I should also make more of an effort to fill my week with social activities.
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I don’t like being a tourist. While here I found myself gravitating towards activities that Madrid natives would do: run clubs, meet ups, bookshops, etc. I think meeting new people and seeing new things are really valuable, but if they’re done in a consumptive, touristy manner, it actually takes away value. When we come at travel from this manner, rather from that of openness and a desire to learn, we end up changing the place we are visiting rather than that place changing us. I saw a lot of this in Madrid: English absolutely everywhere, and it made me quite sad. This New Yorker piece explains my travel skepticism better than I ever could. I think I will be limiting vacation travel to visiting friends in the future, and if I really want to experience a foreign culture try and live there for a few years. This requires a lot more investment than people usually put into their vacations.
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Walkability really makes your life so much more pleasant. Even though I am car-free in America, getting around Baltimore on my bike is light years worse than walking and metro-ing around Madrid. The walkability really facilitated social interactions: you can just do things so much more easily. As much as I love Baltimore, the walkability in Europe is just so nice that I might have to leave.
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I’m really inspired to continue my foreign language study! It was so rewarding to be able to communicate with Spaniards in their native language. I can’t wait to keep improving and to lock in on Italian next year5.
thejdizzler
3d ago
It's a quick read. Took me a few days.
thejdizzler
3d ago
This is what I wrote about it
The Children of Men is a book about a world with ultra-low fertility, in other words, an extreme version of a world that we already live in. I had a friend's birthday party at the park a couple weeks ago (I'm getting close to 30 unfortunately), and I noticed that out of the 20 or so couples there, only one had a child. And I think this is becoming increasingly true over the whole entire world. Many of the downstream aspects of this fact also seem to be shared between James' novel and reality: the prevalence of pet parents, the lack of interest in the future of society (but a fixation on the past), and an obsession with health and safety at all costs.
Beyond the social commentary, the actual plot of the novel is a little lackluster. It centers on an Oxford Professor of History, Theo, who happens to be the cousin of the dictator of England. Theo lives a pretty unremarkable and utterly selfish life (even before the "Omega" where most men suddenly become infertile), until he becomes involved with a rebel group that wants to enact some minor changes in the governmental system, but more importantly, is sheltering a woman who happens to be pregnant. Theo's time with this group changes his inner and outer lives almost completely: it's amazing what hope for the future does to an individual, although I was left wondering at the end how much would really change in England after the birth of this child.
Having children is no basis for a moral system in of itself (this was Chesterton's critique of H.G. Wells), but it sure as hell makes constructing a society a hell of a lot easier. Unfortunately I think our world is headed to a future more similar to what James envisioned in the 1990s. People simply aren't having children: I'm guilty of this too: it's not like I'm close to being married even. And that, I think, means that this society isn't very long for this world.
The movie is pretty faithful but plays up the immigration (there are migrant laborers from poor countries to help with labor shortages) aspect a bit more for woke points.
thejdizzler
3d ago
This year I've read 62 books (so far). I hope to read a few more before the new year, but it won't be more than 65. Quite a bit less than the 89 I read last year, but I think as @FiveHourMarathon has said, there are other things to do with one's time besides read. I didn't do as good of a job reflecting on these books as I did last year, so that's something to work on in the new year. 32 of these books were in English, 28 in Spanish and 2 in Italian. Some favorites below.
Best Fiction Book: Niccoló Rising by Dorothy Dunnett
You know it’s good when you find extra time to listen to it via audiobook: I’m not usually an audiobook person!
I’ve been wanting to read Dorothy Dunnett for a long time. One of my other favorite historical fiction writers, Guy Gavriel Kay, wrote a poem about her work that I connected when I was a teenager, and I found the fourth book in the Niccolò series in a used bookstore in England in 2023 and had been meaning to start the series ever since.
Niccolò rising follows the most unlikely of heroes, the dyers apprentice Claes, on the first stages of his meteoric rise from artisan to prominent businessman. Claes (who eventually comes to be known as Niccolò or Nicholas) is a genius who initially uses his intelligence to perform outrageous pranks in his home city of Bruges, but after a few chance encounters with two Scottish noblemen who are out for his blood, he decides to change his ways and use his mind to make his way in the world.
Dunnett really makes Bruges, Milan, and Geneva feel alive, and the research that must have went into this book is immense in scale. Certainly puts Kay, and every other historical fiction author I’ve read to shame.
Best Non-fiction Book: Mi pais inventado by Isabelle Allende
I've read a lot of Isabelle Allende's fiction, and I enjoyed this much more. Allende has an annoying habit of masking her ideology and philosophy behind characters and situations that make you feel like a villain for disagreeing with, despite those actions sometimes being very wrong. This book is much more honest and tells both Allende's personal story, of why she left Chile, and of the recent history of the country as she understands it.
Most Subversive Book: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
This book managed to do both the thriller and the critique of science, which I don't think I've seen done before. The info-dumps served both to show us how this crazy island works, and to be used as action-fodder in the second half of the book when the whole system starts breaking down. Crichton did a great job with the characters too: I found myself being really annoyed at John Hammond and Lexie, and wanting to spend more time with Dr. Grant and Ellie. Getting your reader to root for the protagonist is surprisingly hard to do in thrillers a lot of the time.
Although the prognosis about genetic engineering hasn't aged that well (turns out it's really hard to do genetically engineer Eukaryotes on a large scale), the general prognosis about the scientific worldview has not. The park largely fails because of human hubris and inability to recognize the interests of other beings (humans or not). The inciting incident is directly caused by John Hammond being a dick, but as the ending shows, even if the dramatic events of the novel hadn't occurred, the park was already out of control. Trying to fight against nature is like trying to drink the ocean with a spoon. You ain't going to win, and you'll probably get very wet.
Best Book with Philosophy Book Club: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
I had been thinking about Kant to some degree or another since 2019 because one of my college teammates and friends, Matt Kearney, was really into his philosophy. I watched a couple YouTube videos on him at the time (one about Kingdom of Heaven, which I still remember), and remember loving the idea of the categorical imperative, but not understanding the motivation behind it.
Reading this for philosophy book club helped to clarify the motivation for why Kant formulated the categorical imperative in the first place. Kant’s whole philosophy is really about moral freedom. This is not really freedom in the colloquial sense, because the categorical imperative is pretty restrictive, but freedom from particular life circumstances that may bias or impede your moral judgement. In order to be a truly moral law, according to Kant, a law has to be universal, which means it cannot be affected by interest that may come from particular circumstances.
I can’t say I really understood the whole chain of reasoning clearly, but I find this philosophy admirable in certain sense, but very foolish in another. It’s pretty impossible to live like Kant would want us to: reason is not the pure and unbiased master that Kant seems to think it is, and I also unfortunately think that a lot of morality is extremely contingent, and would be difficult to writer a moral law describing (a very Buddhist idea perhaps).
Best Book Originally Written in Spanish: El matrimonio de los peces rojos by Guadalupe Nettel
This is a collection of short stories where Nettel uses an animal to reflect the personal relationships of the principles characters. It's a pretty small collection, only 5 stories, all of which are good. My favorite was "guerra en los basureros" which is about a boy living with his higher-class uncle and aunt who starts to identify with the cockroaches the family is insistent on eradicating.
Best Reread: Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson
This was my fourth re-read of this book: I’ve read it every year since 2021 except for 2022. I’m getting loads out of revisiting this book every year. Figures and battles are becoming a lot clearer in my mind, and I think I can start to talk about a lot of the issues of the time with nuance and perspective. McPherson tells a narrative history: focusing on the evolution of key players and key ideas in the struggle which made it easier for me to follow the course of the war. Of course I've had to use other resources to dig deeper into specific battles and theaters. There's also nothing here about the trans-Mississippi theater for example.
Best “Normie” Book: Searching for Caleb by Anne Tyler
I picked this book up at the ‘Book Thing’ for free because the girl I was dating at the time recommended I read some Anne Tyler due to the fact that she sets her books in Baltimore, and I had said earlier I was starving for some fiction were set in this city in which I live that has such a negative reputation in fiction. Partially because I stopped seeing that girl, partially because this book is not my usual cup of tea, it took me nearly three months to finish this book. Searching for Caleb is a very slow book in which not much explicit plot really happens, but rather the family relations between the dysfunctional Pecks are explored in-depth. The plot which does happen is centered on the search for the eldest Peck’s younger brother Caleb, who ran away from Baltimore nearly fifty years ago, and the chaotic marriage of Justine and Duncan, who are cousins and both Pecks. I got what I wanted out of the book: an exploration of the Roland Park/JHU neighborhood of Baltimore as it was 50 years ago. In terms of theme, I got a bit more than I had hoped for as well. The advantage of Slice of Life is that we get to spend a lot of time with characters doing fairly normal things, without earth-shattering events that would tell us unrealistic things about their character. Much of the dsyfunction in the Peck family seems to stem from an inability to healthily grapple with change, but rather to run away at the first sign of difficulty. We see this quite literally in the character of Duncan, who can’t seem to stay put, causing his wife and daughter quite a bit of suffering. But the other Pecks suffer from this as well, the titular Caleb, but also the family as a whole, who by the novels end, seem to have retreated from the world, rather than confront the fact that they don’t live in the Belle Epoque anymore. Not sure if I will be reading more Anne Tyler but this was worth a read.
Most Disappointing Book: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
I reviewed this book in-depth earlier in the year after giving it a chance based on rave review from many friends. While Sanderson does some things extremely well: really cool vistas, excellent character set-up, and consistent book delivery, I found this book to be both plodding and shallow which is impressive given its thousand plus pages. There’s a decent, entertaining story hiding underneath all this bloat and superficiality, but it’s just not worth the time investment. Which is a shame, as I was expecting another First Law or A Song of Ice and Fire out of this.
Worst Book: Persona normal by Benito Taibo
We read this for Refold Spanish book club, and I think everyone who read it (just Nick and myself I think) had the same problems with it. The book starts well enough: Sebastian is a young Mexican kid who uses heavy amounts of magical realism to cope with the death of his parents while he’s living with his uncle Paco. Paco encourages this, and the two develop a very close friendship. Unfortunately, despite the great premise, the book quickly devolves into literary wanking and moral scolding: Taibo feels the need to constantly remind us how many Spanish greats he’s read, and how liberalism is the only sensible way of seeing the world. I had an extremely hard time getting through the last hundred pages of this, especially as the last 50 pages contain chapters about the COVID pandemic, which have aged really badly.
ouch yea I didn't do enough research! This is a problem for 2026!
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