I just finished 2 Years on a Bike. Overall I think it was a great dose of wanderlust - a big, hardback book with great print quality. I'd watched the 2-hour long movie on Youtube which was great. My worries about the book having 0 new content were unfounded, there was a lot of excellent extra detail.
Some reviewers noted that the author had maybe "too much" detail around his relationships over the 2 years. I disagreed - while there was a little bit of jealousy on my part that this guy was basically living my dream of biking around and sleeping with various models I think he covered them at an appropriate level without bragging.
The other chief complaint was if he was pure enough in the endeavor. There was plenty of shipping of supplies to the next cities, taking occasional side trips in cars, and long breaks in cosmopolitan cities. I think perhaps some of the folks complaining about that haven't done bikepacking in truly rough terrain over a 2 year period.
There was a lot of honesty about how miserable parts of the trip were, and how by the end he was essentially burned out on natural beauty. When you're stuck in an office for 10 hours at a time it's easy to forget that if you've seen breathtaking mountains continuously for 2 years, by the end you'll just be breathing pretty normally.
Finally from a culture war angle my other concern was that since all the people who get to do this are fucking hippies with trust funds that there'd be a lot of junk in that vein. Not so much! Or at least at a low enough level to be truly benign.
Still reading The Seven: The Lives And Legacies Of The Founding Fathers Of The Irish Republic. Not that I know much about the history of socialism, but it seems like James Connolly had the idea of socialism in one country long before Stalin, square brackets mine:
In deference to the nationalism of those he was trying to convert, [Connolly's 1896 manifesto] also denounced the 'subjection of one nation to another, as of Ireland to the authority of the British Crown', and called for an 'Irish Socialist Republic'. This was a novel idea that Connolly developed in three articles in the ILP's weekly, Labour Leader, designed to persuade British Marxists to abandon their belief that Home Rule for Ireland was a necessary stage before the proletariat took over throughout the British Empire. 'The interests of labour all the world over are identical, it is true,' he said, 'but it is also true that each country had better work out its own salvation on the lines most congenial to its own people.'
Edit: More research has me discovering that this wasn't quite a pre-empting of Stalin, and that Lenin saw Connolly as unobjectionable enough to take inspiration from him.
I've read half of a self-help/pop psychology book called The Four Tendencies. It basically divides people into four groups, and it really feels pretty applicable to real life.
Just finished the Licanius trilogy. Pretty good epic fantasy with some bright moments in the writing. Unfortunately the author set up an amazing plot and didn't quite do it justice. Still worth a read.
Just bought The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas but haven't started it yet. In the middle of Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism
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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, and also flipping through whatever vaguely Christian books happen to be in arm's length.
I have a rant over in the CW thread about Ancillary Justice. In summary - I didn't finish it because it was so bad.
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I just finished 2 Years on a Bike. Overall I think it was a great dose of wanderlust - a big, hardback book with great print quality. I'd watched the 2-hour long movie on Youtube which was great. My worries about the book having 0 new content were unfounded, there was a lot of excellent extra detail.
Some reviewers noted that the author had maybe "too much" detail around his relationships over the 2 years. I disagreed - while there was a little bit of jealousy on my part that this guy was basically living my dream of biking around and sleeping with various models I think he covered them at an appropriate level without bragging.
The other chief complaint was if he was pure enough in the endeavor. There was plenty of shipping of supplies to the next cities, taking occasional side trips in cars, and long breaks in cosmopolitan cities. I think perhaps some of the folks complaining about that haven't done bikepacking in truly rough terrain over a 2 year period.
There was a lot of honesty about how miserable parts of the trip were, and how by the end he was essentially burned out on natural beauty. When you're stuck in an office for 10 hours at a time it's easy to forget that if you've seen breathtaking mountains continuously for 2 years, by the end you'll just be breathing pretty normally.
Finally from a culture war angle my other concern was that since all the people who get to do this are fucking hippies with trust funds that there'd be a lot of junk in that vein. Not so much! Or at least at a low enough level to be truly benign.
Recommend it if you can shelve your jealousy.
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I recently finished Macnamara's Folly too. I appreciated that it was written by an ordinary soldier, as opposed to an academic or policy wonk.
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Still reading The Seven: The Lives And Legacies Of The Founding Fathers Of The Irish Republic. Not that I know much about the history of socialism, but it seems like James Connolly had the idea of socialism in one country long before Stalin, square brackets mine:
Edit: More research has me discovering that this wasn't quite a pre-empting of Stalin, and that Lenin saw Connolly as unobjectionable enough to take inspiration from him.
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I'm currently prepping for Summa Theologica, getting a complete version for Christmas.
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Trying to end the year on an optimistic note so:
Fully Automated Luxury Communism (just finished actually)
Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek
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I've read half of a self-help/pop psychology book called The Four Tendencies. It basically divides people into four groups, and it really feels pretty applicable to real life.
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Just finished the Licanius trilogy. Pretty good epic fantasy with some bright moments in the writing. Unfortunately the author set up an amazing plot and didn't quite do it justice. Still worth a read.
Is that, uh, James Islington? I think I picked it up but haven’t been gotten to read t yet.
Yep you got it! Let me know what you think if you finish it.
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What a contrast!
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Just bought The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas but haven't started it yet. In the middle of Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism
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