User Profile

A motley group of people makes a pilgrimage to Rome. The book is the story of the group told through the first-person voice of many of its participants. We learn of individuals' backstories and reasons for making the journey, while the group itself faces challenges and drama, adding and losing members along the way.

This never took off for me, and I almost DNF'd it. It sounds perfect for me, and I like ensemble novels that pull on multiple individual stories to create something larger, but it just felt very redundant and tedious after a while.

100% might have been where my brain was while reading, but this never clicked, and I was glad to finish it and put it away.

Not great... in fact, would not recommend.

One or two comments in a thread here: techhub.social/@NearerAndFarther/113574151142389262

Mastodon threads during reading techhub.social/@NearerAndFarther/113532911821493285 techhub.social/@NearerAndFarther/113507027771928782

Have by no means read all of Morrison's work but this is easily my favorite of hers so far.

In many ways, it's a book about stories, and just about every page or two packs an evocative, tightly-wound passage that one could imagine spinning off as an entirely separate story. Equally important, it's just a masterclass in style: Morrison's language feels both familiar and absolutely unique. Characters just jump off the page, and settings feel vivid and immediate.

It was a joy to read, though heavy at times, and I'm almost mad I rushed through it. Will likely return in the next year or two and take it a bit slower.

Link for short Mastodon thread with a few comments: techhub.social/@NearerAndFarther/113453091083307885

I am needing to clear out my Bookwyrm stuff a bit (have one or two DNFs and one or two updates), but I just started this as my first post-semester read... Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.

(And I'm not even fully done grading, lol.)

Burns is doing one of the AHA Washington seminars on the 13th (or thereabouts) and this has been on my list, so I thought I'd check it out from the library and see if it sticks. So far, so good!

Well-written and thoughtful narrative of the last few years of cryptomania, through the collapse and arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried. I don't know enough about this stuff to vouch for its authoritativeness, but some of the profiles of key crypto figures are wild.

This was fantastic even if the tightness of the writing and story got a bit fuzzy toward the last third or so. (By that point, however, pretty much everyone from Moctezuma to Cortes is high on hallucinogenics, so maybe fuzzy writing mirrors fuzzy turns in the story, lol...)

This was a library checkout and I didn't have a lot of time to jot notes... but one of the best things here is the author's revival of what Tenochtitlan and surrounds might have felt, looked, sounded, smelled like -- and his recasting of the conquistadors as pretty hapless, foolish in their courage when they have it but largely dwarfed and a bit cowed by what they find. There are a few passages I could see using in a survey course; would actually be fun to teach the novel as a whole as a way into re-thinking about the period of "conquest."