Paul's Updates en-US Fri, 02 May 2025 19:19:07 -0700 60 Paul's Updates 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7516992522 Fri, 02 May 2025 19:19:07 -0700 <![CDATA[Paul added 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb']]> /review/show/7516992522 The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes Paul gave 4 stars to The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Paperback) by Richard Rhodes
bookshelves: reviewed, history, non-fine-art, completed-2025, cpl
So this one took a while, lol. Making of the Atomic Bomb is a very good book; it is not, however, without serious flaws. I have zero problem with endlessly detailed books, with very long books, with dense books, etc.; e.g., I finished von Balthasar's 9,000-page Trilogy last year and am a fan. The problem is that Rhodes has added so much unnecessary detail.

Filling a chapter with minutiae on the physics of uranium atoms? Great. Adding multiple unilluminating anecdotes about the early life of a C-tier physicist who is mentioned a couple times in the opening chapters and then never brought up again . . . not great.

Rhodes has a chapter on the travails of Jewish scientists who fled Germany and Austria in the 1930s -- a notable and interesting topic which is clearly relevant to the history of the atomic bomb! -- but he starts the chapter with a rambling and unhelpful four-page summary of anti-Semitism in Europe going back to literally the time of Christ (?!).

I'm not sure if Rhodes's editors were drunk or whatever?, but this book is 886 pages long and could have easily been 550 pages without losing any depth or relevant detail. And even this 550-page book would have some weaker sections; e.g., I get that Szilard is important to the story of the atomic bomb, but there were times that I wondered if Rhodes had lost a bet and thus was forced to shoehorn Szilard into literally every chapter.

With all that said, despite the plodding and overstuffed chapters, I never considered abandoning Making of the Atomic Bomb -- recommended if you have any interest whatsoever in physics or twentieth-century history . . . the historical research is impeccable and certainly I don't think there's a more authoritative account of the topic. ]]> Comment289565071 Wed, 16 Apr 2025 14:07:07 -0700 <![CDATA[Paul commented on Stetson's review of Rejection]]> /review/show/6940427913 Stetson's review of Rejection
by Tony Tulathimutte

"He is extensively aware of the problems that the culturally dominant politics create for everyday people. These values are incongruent with default human preferences. It is unclear how pessimistic Tulathimutte is about these realities despite his willingness to recognize them. It seems he's able to let these resentments go."

Right, this is something I probably should have mentioned in my review -- Tony is very sharp about the unhealthy and problematic nature of these politics and ideologies, but it's not clear what he actually thinks about them? Is this a cultural critique, or is he just in it for the LOLs, etc.? Maybe it's like that line from Chekhov: "The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.� ]]> Review7476541439 Fri, 11 Apr 2025 16:55:22 -0700 <![CDATA[Paul added 'Rejection']]> /review/show/7476541439 Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte Paul gave 4 stars to Rejection (Hardcover) by Tony Tulathimutte
bookshelves: completed-2025, cpl, reviewed, lit-post-2000, literature, non-fine-art, top-100-in-2000s, reviewed-longer
(3.5 stars). Man, this book . . . addictive and truly un-put-down-able, but also a tough read. Tulathimutte is very sharp, very self-aware, and very acerbic (for better or worse), but Rejection is a little too 'surface-level', too MFA-ish, too meta by half, too n+1-ish, too soon-to-be-dated . . . he creates that Franzen-esque effect of the 'uncanny valley literary novel,' where yes, the writing is very fluid and impressive and smart and trenchant and observant, but it feels like an AI agent writing a novel, almost? A super-talented AI agent? There's somehow a vague patina of falsity or unreality about it; perhaps intentional in Tulathimutte's case, given the subject matter. In terms of recent novels, Rejection is maybe closest thematically to the first half of Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This, as filtered through DFW's 1990s output.

And yeah, DFW . . . the main thought that kept occurring to me, over and over and over while reading Rejection, was just marveling at the absolute strangehold that DFW's style has had on all American literary fiction since 1996. He's like the event horizon of all later fiction; clearly influential on McSwys and Eggers and Zadie Smith and De La Pava and dozens of other authors, and tangentially influential on basically everyone else, but with Tulathimutte the influence is truly something to behold. I use the word 'literally' too often in reviews, but it is literally impossible to imagine Rejection existing without DFW's IJ and Brief Interviews. (You can say that Tulathimutte's style is maybe closer to Franzen, and sure, but Franzen's post-1996 output is also unimaginable without DFW, of course; as I've mentioned in another review somewhere, the shift in Franzen's writing after he read IJ in draft form in 1995 is unmistakable).

In its authorial vibes, voice, and endless meta-self-conscious spiraling into meta-meta-fiction, Rejection apes DFW so thoroughly that it comes very close to thematic plagiarism: for most stories in this collection, Tulathimutte has taken DFW's "The Depressed Person," aggressively updated it with the most depraved bits of Internet/pornography/identity culture, and then removed all of the joy, humor, love, etc. To be clear, this is indeed the point -- you're meant to be trapped in the harrowing, lonely, confusing, and recursively abstract mental world of these traumatized characters -- but I'm not sure that the effect works, precisely, beyond causing vague metaphysical trauma for the reader.

The first two stories -- "The Feminist" (originally published in n+1, of course, lol) and "Pics" -- are clearly the best, and then "Ahegao" mostly succeeds, except for the weirdly overwritten BDSM instructions, which go on for far too long; "Our Dope Future" is so badly written that it made me question the author's talent, while "Main Character" was overlong and just a mess thematically, but I think still worth reading. The overreliance on DFW's rhetorical authorial moves becomes painfully obvious in the metafictional "Re: Rejection" epilogue . . . DFW's meta-fourth-wall stuff was already dated and mildly annoying in 1997, and I just don't know that Tulathimutte has done enough to escape DFW's authorial influence, here.

(Finally, as always, Lee Klein has already eloquently summarized most of my other thoughts on the book; his review, which I highly recommend, is here.) ]]> Review2008469160 Fri, 11 Apr 2025 16:17:48 -0700 <![CDATA[Paul added 'The Road']]> /review/show/2008469160 The Road by Cormac McCarthy Paul gave 4 stars to The Road (Hardcover) by Cormac McCarthy
bookshelves: completed-2015, literature, cpl, non-fine-art, lit-post-2000, top-100-in-2000s, rereads, completed-2025, rerereads, reviewed-longer, reviewed
So I rarely do rereads (or rarely did, before 2024), but I'm in a curious situation with Cormac in that I've always loved his work a great deal, since first running across it in college, and thus, last month, I completed my third reading of both No Country and The Road.

I think it's fair to group these two novels together as the third 'phase' of Cormac's work. (You may have heard rumors about a two-part novel released in 2022, but don't worry, those novels aren't real, or at least they don't 'exist' in any meaningful sense.) First we have Orchard Keeper through Suttree, all set in Appalachia (usually near Knoxville), pure southern Gothic, dark humor, charmingly plotless, employing overwrought but extremely good prose, and comprising the best four-novel run of any American author.

Blood Meridian is the hinge/transition into the second phase, which correlates with Cormac personally relocating to the American West, where we have a series of historical novels set on the Texas/Mexico border (from 1849 in Blood Meridian to 1952 in Cities of the Plain). In this phase, the prose remains compelling but becomes mildly self-parodic and faintly ridiculous, and then also the plotting loses the dark humor/drollness of the early novels and becomes vaguely gnomic and Gnostic and Old-Testament-ish, evoking both Melville and Faulkner but not quite sticking the landing; these four novels are very, very good (especially The Crossing) but are arguably a step down from the first phase of his work.

In Cormac's brief third phase we have No Country and The Road, which strongly resemble each other in terms of cadence, prose style, and plotting, and ultimately comprise a curious sort of sublation of his earlier two phases: we have the humor of the Appalachia novels, the melodrama of the Sonora novels, but stripped down to an almost Elmore Leonard-esque accessible 'pop' version. (I was unsurprised to learn that Cormac wrote his first original Hollywood screenplay, The Counselor, immediately after completing The Road). The clearest weakness of Cormac's third phase is that it is, arguably, 'pop' in a bad way, a bit too 'easy' and cheaply satisfying.

No Country and The Road serve, I think, as a two-part sequel to the Sonora novels, where The Road in particular also serves as a coda to ALL of Cormac's work; on page 26 of The Road, our protagonists walk over the bridge that is the setting for Cormac's longest and best novel, Suttree, after which they also walk through the apple orchard (around page 120) that is the subject of Cormac's first novel. The Road is a world of Chigurhs, a future where Sheriff Bell (from No Country) has been proven correct, he's the final prophet; the first page of The Road follows quite naturally from the (overall imperfect) ending of No Country.

While the quality is very high overall, The Road's key shortcomings are (1) all of the po-faced melodramatic bits of dialogue, 'carrying the fire,' etc., which, when paired with Cormac's jaundiced and vaguely Gnostic worldview, become exhausting, and (2) the completely unearned ending, where after the darkest 285 pages in the history of the universe, suddenly we have: "The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you . . . She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time." I lack the words to adequately describe just how mystifyingly 'wrong' this passage is for the book's themes, where it became clear that Cormac was unable to give the protagonist's son (based on his own son) the dark ending that the plot required.

Finally, as a fan of both literary and non-literary post-apocalyptic fiction, I found myself becoming curious about the precise details of Cormac's particular vision of end of the world. Obviously the novel is firmly ensconsed in the airy heights of metaphor and arguably it doesn't 'matter' how the apocalypse happened, but I actually don't think this is quite true -- whether or not mankind caused its own destruction is actually quite relevant for the themes of the novel. Cormac stated that he had no special cause in mind, but an astronomer friend stated in an interview that Cormac had asked him (a few months before starting The Road) about the environmental effects of an asteroid or comet collision, and this seems to be the most likely candidate (along with a supervolcanic eruption; Cormac mentioned Yellowstone during a couple interviews in the 2000s). Humanity having no hand in its own destruction seems to fit with Cormac's gnostic mythology -- the end of the world is metaphysically meaningless, a cosmic version of Chigurh's coin being flipped. ]]> Review6236415957 Fri, 11 Apr 2025 15:54:46 -0700 <![CDATA[Paul added 'End Zone']]> /review/show/6236415957 End Zone by Don DeLillo Paul gave 3 stars to End Zone (Paperback) by Don DeLillo
bookshelves: literature, non-fine-art, reviewed
Minor DeLillo at best, but some great lines: "Beyond the window was that other world, unsyllabled, snow lifted in the wind, swirling up, massing within the lightless white day, falling toward the sky" (189). ]]> Comment289349286 Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:16:54 -0700 <![CDATA[Paul made a comment on Josh’s status]]> /read_statuses/9291031439 Paul made a comment on Josh’s status

Indeed, I waited like 15 years for The Passenger, and then was quite disappointed, alas.

I'm just hoping we don't get another Bleeding Edge (not a fan), but I would love another Inherent Vice, or even a mini-Against the Day (my real dream!) ]]> Comment288672361 Mon, 24 Mar 2025 07:45:36 -0700 <![CDATA[Paul commented on Paul's review of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church]]> /review/show/2009149564 Paul's review of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church
by Vladimir Lossky

very long story, but imo the filioque is a legitimate theological opinion that is not misaligned with the shared tradition ]]> UserFollowing322615388 Tue, 25 Feb 2025 16:40:17 -0800 <![CDATA[Paul H. is now following Evan Smith]]> /user/show/136904550-evan-smith Paul H. is now following Evan Smith ]]> Comment286834484 Fri, 07 Feb 2025 09:10:44 -0800 <![CDATA[Paul made a comment on Alex’s status]]> /user_status/show/1003064862 Paul made a comment on Alex’s status

continental philosophy is complete garbage about 70% of the time, yeah. plenty of good work out there though! ]]> Rating822182506 Wed, 05 Feb 2025 09:09:32 -0800 <![CDATA[Paul H. liked a userstatus]]> /
Paul H. liked derris's status update
derris
derris is on page 165 of 420 of Cosmic Liturgy: I quite like this so far. Seems to make sense of Maximus to me. His main idea seems to be to applying chalcedionian christology to metaphysics which is quite fruitful. Will have to read this book a few times to really understand it though. Some truly beautiful ideas in here.
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