en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 18:36:51 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7515142081 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 18:36:51 -0700 /review/show/7515142081 David gave 3 stars to A Fairly Honourable Defeat (Hardcover) by Iris Murdoch
bookshelves: fiction
A strange one. It feels like a stage play: divided into two acts, heavy on dialog.

It has a villain: Many Murdoch novels have a mysterious, powerful, enigmatic, central male character, around whom several more ordinary lives become unexpectedly disturbed. But this time, that character is more deliberately and cruelly provoking the disturbances. Though by the end, Murdoch cranks the ambiguity knob a bit and gives us a character that's a chimerical mixture of Being There's Chauncey Gardiner and Shakespeare's Richard III. ]]> Review7508274784 Wed, 23 Apr 2025 19:54:02 -0700 /review/show/7508274784 David gave 3 stars to Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (Hardcover) by Iris Murdoch
bookshelves: fiction, philosophy
]]> Review7460617258 Thu, 10 Apr 2025 22:22:04 -0700 /review/show/7460617258 David gave 3 stars to Henry And Cato (Paperback) by Iris Murdoch
bookshelves: fiction
]]> Review1112294396 Tue, 01 Apr 2025 19:20:19 -0700 /review/show/1112294396 David gave 2 stars to This Earth of Mankind (Buru #1) by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
bookshelves: fiction
]]> Review7418590249 Fri, 21 Mar 2025 21:24:10 -0700 /review/show/7418590249 David gave 4 stars to Look Who's Back (Paperback) by Timur Vermes
bookshelves: fiction
Hitler somehow survives and awakens in Berlin after 70 years, perplexed but undaunted and relentlessly charging forward on his quest to advance the German volk.

Everybody else thinks he's a dry satirist who refuses to break character. Hilarity ensues.

It's an interesting idea for a gag, I thought, but I was skeptical it would hold up at book-length. But it does. It's witty throughout.

The book was published in Germany in 2012, and some of the gags refer to politicians or pop culture figures of that time and place, and so they went over my head. But even so, I thought the book was sharp and clever and interesting. Everything is told from Hitler's first-person point of view, interspersed with his very Hitlerian opinions and observations on decadent modern society. Meanwhile, that society, used to seeing everything in terms of lulz and irony, cannot recognize Hitler even as he forthrightly and unflinchingly declares himself.

It is both a darker and a funnier Being There. ]]> Review2456204983 Wed, 19 Mar 2025 09:12:24 -0700 /review/show/2456204983 David gave 4 stars to Kolyma Tales (Paperback) by Varlam Shalamov
bookshelves: fiction
]]> Review7386782356 Mon, 10 Mar 2025 19:01:38 -0700 /review/show/7386782356 David gave 3 stars to What the Buddha Never Taught: 20th Anniversary Edition (Paperback) by Tim Ward
bookshelves: buddhism, non-fiction
]]> Review7383324205 Sat, 08 Mar 2025 11:31:44 -0800 /review/show/7383324205 David gave 3 stars to The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition (Hardcover) by James William Coleman
bookshelves: buddhism, non-fiction
]]> Review5967855482 Fri, 07 Mar 2025 07:21:57 -0800 /review/show/5967855482 David gave 4 stars to Virtue Ethics (Oxford Readings in Philosophy) by Roger Crisp
bookshelves: ethics, philosophy, non-fiction
]]> ReadStatus9157770740 Fri, 07 Mar 2025 07:21:51 -0800 /review/show/7383324205 David is currently reading The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition by James William Coleman
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