The Authenticity Project

Posted on March 30, 2026 by smellincoffee

Imagine, dear reader, that you encountered an obviously abandoned composition notebook in a cafe or library, and picked it up to find an invitation to tell your darkest secrets and fears. What would you say? That’s the premise of The Authenticity Project, in which an aging artist’s idea to confess his loneliness starts a chain reaction and creates a tight community from a group of relative strangers: the book passes from hand to hand, moving as far as Thailand before returning to England’s green and pleasant hills. The result is a book that’s a wonderfully sweet story about human connection, but not one that’s saccarine: the book brings people together, but it also creates its own drama, and even without it people are good causing drama all on their own. This was my introduction to Clare Pooley, and I suspect she may be for me a Rachel Joyce-like author on whom I binge.

Although the cast of this book increases steadily as the months wear on, our principle characters are Julian and Monica, both of whom live in the same neighborhood of London. Julian is an aging artist who used to consort with all the high-fashion creators of the day, and has a house filled with outrageous outfits: Monica is an accomplished but frustrated cafe owner, a woman with a background in law and business who instead chose to create a place for people to enjoy good coffee and company in a homey cafe with its own library. Julian confesses his loneliness, and Monica her desire for a husband and family despite being raised to be an archfeminist: she cites the Pankhursts as readily as Christians do Jesus. When Julian leaves the notebook with his confessions about being a poor husband to his late wife, Monica is inspired: she approaches him and asks if he would be willing to teach art classes in her cafe on a weekly basis. This is the nucleus of a community that grows throughout the book; each character brings their own failures and dashed hopes, but they also bring with them a desire to help the other lives they encounter in the book. There are complications, however; two people begin drawing close, but then the woman recoils when she realizes the man knows ‘all about her’ through the book, and another man has deep-seated addictions that he’s not quite finished battling. They will affect both him and the people who have grown attached to him as the book wears on.

This is an incredibly sweet story about found-family and community, and the author nicely balances stress and drama as she tells it. The only fly in the soup is that it might not have happened if people hadn’t so readily provided their real names; the London neighborhood this is set in is cozy enough that people can figure out who the writer are with context. However, Pooley is still able to maintain the tension between reality and appearances even within that context — most tellingly, in one scene where a frustrated young mother spies a couple dancing in a cafe, and yearns for what they want. In reality, the situation is far more complicated, and it makes the tension even more interesting for the reader who is growing to realize that even what’s confessed in the notebook may not be the True Story. I shall definitely be reading more of Ms. Pooley!

Quotations

Julian didn’t avoid the bad memories. If anything, he encouraged them. They were his penance.

Sometimes, Riley wished he’d never found The Authenticity Project. He didn’t like knowing other people’s secrets—it felt like prying. Yet, once he’d read their stories, he hadn’t been able to forget about Julian, Monica, and Hazard. It was like being partway through a novel, becoming invested in the characters, then leaving it on a train before you reached the end.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Paradise Lost

Posted on March 28, 2026 by smellincoffee
Govern well thy appetite, lest Sin surprise thee, and her black attendant, Death!

Like Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost is a key bit of Christian literature which has shaped people’s understanding of Bible stories in an indirect way; that is, Milton and Dante’s interpretation of Biblical events and places has become our understanding of said events and places, even though they’re extra-biblical. I’ve frequently encountered choice quotes from it over the years and have wanted to properly dig in to it. I should note that this will be a mixed-media review: while I did read the physical book, I also listened to the BBC-4 dramatization of it which gave certain characters powerful expression (Ian McDiarmid as Satan is perfect casting) and others….not. Jesus and Adam sounded rather dainty. God, thankfully, is not: as a matter of fact, when I was lying in bed and listening, I could definitely see his lines being delivered by Aslan.)

Paradise Lost is an English poem which recounts both Satan’s exile from Heaven and Man’s fall from Grace. As we learn, the two are related: the book opens with Satan’s rebellion against the Son, and his and his followers’ subsequent falling from Heaven into Hell, where Satan vows to make a kingdom. The creation of Earth allows him opportunity for greater empire, and the temptation is particularly sweet given that God has created new creatures in His own image, creatures whose fall Satan would dearly loved to effect. Although the Son volunteers to leave heaven to frustrate Satan’s plans, readers are subsequently treated to Satan’s frustrated attempts to get into the garden, finally having to possess the body of a snake — a hateful choice, but one made in spite — in order to access the couple. Milton’s narrative adds a lot to the story, because the archangel Raphael explicitly goes to the garden, tells him the account of Creation, and warns Adam that there’s something rotten in the state of Eden. (Then they discuss heliocentrism, which frankly I was not expecting, but Milton evidently met Galileo.) Alas, Eve has the idea of splitting up to get more done, and Satan is able to use his ability to “speak” as a serpent to convince her — amid enormous flattery — that eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil will similarly uplift her. (Given that I first experienced this while listening to McDiarmid, I couldn’t help but think of Palpatine’s similar seduction of Anakin into the Dark Side with the “Have you heard the tale of Darth Plageius the Wise?” scene.) Then she and Adam prove that codependency has a long pedigree and go down together rather than be separated.

This was an impressive work: Milton’s reputation as as an English stylist is well deserved. There were numerous phrases like “devils to adore for deities” that I immediately had to scribble down and think about. Having read CS Lewis’ Preface to Paradise Lost, I knew already Milton is slightly heterodox, especially in his views on the Trinity: I thought it was interesting that he never refers to Jesus, but rather The Son, placing emphasis on that character’s subordinate relationship to The Father. That connects directly to the text, because Satan is resentful that another creature besides himself is being exalted. Ultimately, Satan’s observation that “myself am hell” proves true: his self-obsession drives him from being chief of the angels to being a petty and spiteful spirit possessing a snake crawling in the dirt.

This is also a challenging book to read for a modern reader, rather like Dante, because there’s a lot of culture we may not be familiar with: Milton drinks deeply from classical culture, with allusions a-plenty, and properly understanding what’s going on relies on knowledge of that (or at least, annotations) and some help with medieval cosmology, as there are lots of astrological connections as well. I wound up making use of three versions of the book to find annotations sufficient, and listened to a lecture from Tony Esolen to boot. (He can perform large portions of the poem from memory, and I say perform rather than recite for a reason.) I definitely enjoyed this, but I think the BBC adaptation went a long way to giving it more life: even when I was reading sections rather than listening to them, I could hear Palpatine-Satan.

Posted in Classics and Literary, General, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Eleanor Oliphant is Per *hic* Perfect *hic* SHE’S FINE

Posted on March 28, 2026 by smellincoffee

Eleanor Oliphant  has worked at the same firm every year since she graduated college, and she has an unvarying routine of going home and watching tv while eating packaged meals. On weekends, she drinks vodka by the liter, staying  pleasantly  drunk until she wakes up Monday morning for another week at the firm. She keeps to herself and finds her coworkers as strange as she suspects they find her. One day, though, an old man crumples to the ground while she’s walking outside, and when she’s called over to help by one of her coworkers, she unwittingly sets on a course that will begin recalling her to life from her prison of routine and isolation. So begins a novel with a fascinating lead character who the reader will quickly realize is hiding some serious trauma — from herself and from those around her. Ultimately it’s a story of a woman facing her demons with a little help from her friends.

Because of my fondness for odd characters like Ove and Arthur Entwhistle,   this book has become highly recommended to me.  There are some faint similarities, in that this is partially a story of a socially withdrawn and introverted personality being drawn out of herself and into the world again. This struck me from the beginning as a more serious read than any of my previous curmudgeon/Sheldon-esque characters, however — in part because Eleanor is very obviously an alcoholic, and she maintains ties with an emotionally abusive mother, with hints of a very bad history between them. The humor is here in abundance, of course; Eleanor not grasping basic social cues, and being so disconnected from ordinary society that she finds it strange and acts as an alien observer. Both this and A Man Called Ove have mentally troubled characters with tragedy weighing on them, but in Eleanor Oliphant the tragedy weighed heavier on me because the character has closed herself off to everything but a few bad habits. Ove at least had his memories of his wife to dwell in.

This was an interesting novel: I didn’t take it to it as enthusiastically as I have others in this ‘genre’, if it can be called a genre; I think part of that was that I hadn’t expected the trauma along with the weird and whimsy.

Quotations:


If [Jane Eyre] has one failing, it’s that there’s insufficient mention of Pilot. You simply can’t have enough dog in a book.

“Can I get you drink?” the man yelled over the top of the next song. […]
“No thank you,” I said. “I don’t want to accept a drink from you, because then I would be obliged to purchase one for you in return, and I’m simply not interested in spending two drinks’ worth of time with you.”

A semi-human bath sponge with protruding front teeth! On sale as if it were something completely unremarkable. For my entire life, people have said I’m strange, but really, when I see things like this, I realize I’m actually relatively normal.

Related:
Rachel’s Holiday. Substance abuse & unreliable narrator.
The Rosie Project. Presumably-on-the-spectrum character begins a project to find a girlfriend.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Sam Grant

Posted on March 27, 2026 by smellincoffee

Ulysses Grant opens with Josiah Bunting III’s rueful observation that Grant is almost always thought of “General Grant”, never president — despite being the only man between Lincoln and Wilson to serve two consecutive terms. Bunting attributes this to both Grant’s military successes, his modest upbringing and demeanor, and the issues that flecked his presidency. By way of repair, Bunting’s own biography focuses the majority of its attention on Grant’s presidency: the Civil War is over and done before the reader has even gotten halfway through. Grant is an easy president to read about, largely because of his modest stillness and humility: his virtues were ordinary and plain, not dramatic. He did not have the charisma and zeal of a Jackson — with their attendant problems — and does not appear to have been a psychologically complex figure like Nixon. He simply was, “Sam Grant”: son of a tanner, a good soldier, a hard worker, and a dedicated servant of his country. As with a few others in this series, Bunting writes with no neutral pen: he plainly admires Grant and refers to him as truly noble.

I have read the memoirs of Grant before, so I was largely familiar with the tracks of Grant’s life. He was a son of the Midwest, growing up along the Ohio. Only a generation before, this area had been the frontier, and even now it was still being developed. Grant shared the spirit of industriousness the age demanded, launching a livery service even as a young lad. Per his father’s wishes, he entered into West Point and proved himself a superb horseman, but despite this was shunted into the infantry. He did well for himself in Mexico, but found serving as a quartermaster in peace interminably dull. After some head-butting with his superiors, Grant resigned to work his and his wife’s farm in a cabin they built together, but struggled and was effectively rescued by the outbreak of war. Grant had a good mind for logistics and a willingness to attack — two factors that served him well. He rose rapidly as the war developed, and by the time General Lee surrendered, had managed to achieve admiration on both sides. After the acrimony of the Johnson presidency, in which the president and Congress sparred over who had authority to conduct Reconstruction and how it should be achieved — Grant was seen as a unifying force. Despite the scandals that men in high office got up to, Bunting views Grant as a man of unimpeachable character, wholly admirable — especially given his commitment to safeguard the rights of freedmen and to enact better policies in regards to Native Americans. This drew fire from the blackguard Sherman, who regarded his old boss as having gone soft. Nothing is said of more prickly issues in Grant’s history, like his order evicting all Jews from Kentucky. (The order, composed to help squelch supplies flowing to the Confederacy through Kentucky merchants, was later countermanded by Lincoln.) Still, it’s hard not to sympathize with a man who did so much, and yet suffered with cancer in his terminal years and still worked through his constant pain in hopes of providing for his family even as poor investments left him nearly penniless.

Bunting is an interesting author who delights in allusions and quotations — World War 2, Korea, and Vietnam are all mentioned — and clearly delights in writing, sometimes striking Fosses into florid territory. As much as I enjoyed reading this, though, it’s hagiographic in tone and I can see myself looking for something more balanced and substantial, like Chernow’s beefy treatment.

Grant had an amused contempt for book learning in soldiers; such people, he said, “always knew what Frederick the Great did at one place, and Napoleon at another. Unfortunately for their plans, the rebels were always thinking of something else.

Posted in General, history, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Losing the Signal

Posted on March 25, 2026 by smellincoffee

Despite coming of age as cellphones were becoming ubiquitous, I developed an immediate dislike for them on arrival; I grudgingly bought one in 2005 when I began working, purely to keep in the car for emergencies, and but was not until 2018 when planning a trip to the Grand Canyon that I bought my first ever smartphone, a Galaxy S7. I therefore missed the BlackBerry age, but have retained a curiosity about them and their role in the ‘history of the future’. Losing the Signal was an interesting history of BlackBerry’s rise and fall, one that shed a lot of light on an era I technically lived through, but was largely oblivious to. The author generally includes all parts of the story, from BlackBerry’s personnel, to tech challenges and struggles with telecom carriers.

To the extent that I was aware of BlackBerries in the mid-2000s, it was as cellphones with internet, or at least email. Not until reading this did I appreciate how wildly inaccurate to BlackBerry’s total story that was: BlackBerry originated as a Research in Motion project that wanted to shake up the pager market by introducing two-way paging, or messaging between devices. In a market cluttered by personal assistant devices, BlackBerry succeeded by optimizing one thing very well: portable, secure, emailing. Only later did the BlackBerry begin operating as a cellphone! As someone who is not familiar at all with the high-tech business world of the late 1990s (my idea of high-tech was a GameBoy Pocket), I was amazed that email alone made the BlackBerry its fortune. True, there was an incredible amount of thought given to the user experience, from the aesthetically-pleasing clicky keyboard to the software the devices used. Designers experimented and guessed as to how first-time users might try to navigate a new tool, and the paths that people groped for were readily provided. A lot of the features implemented into the proto-Blackberry’s software, like automatically capitalizing the first words of sentences or anticipating when new sentences might be beginning, were first implemented here. (As was a ‘wheel’ access tool, borrowed from VCRs and more famously adopted by iPods.) Another aspect that BlackBerry managed to bake in was addiction: even when the device was still in development, executives who were equipped with products to test-drive found them too compelling not to look at every few minutes. Mind, this was before social media or YouTube; here the draw was simply email, and yet it was so compelling to have instant information that companies were forced to ask for phone-free meetings, and families began ‘phubbing’ one another when the BlackBerry invaded consumer markets instead of remaining a business-oriented product.

Unfortunately for BlackBerry, when its great challenger and ultimately successor arrived, the company’s CEOs were distracted — by a patent lawsuit, by an SEC investigation, and by one exec’s obsession with buying a hockey team. Perhaps if attention and money hadn’t been tied up in these matters, they would have taken the threat that Apple posed more seriously. After all, RIM’s chief owner-engineer Mike Lazaridis had opened up an iPhone to discover that it was a full-fledged Mac: BlackBerry wasn’t competing against PDAs and ordinary cellphones anymore, it was sailing into new waters entirely. Customers, too, were surprising: they evidently didn’t care that the battery in these iPhones didn’t even last a full working day; they didn’t care that it operated on a previous gen’s network. They could listen to music, and watch grainy videos, and even use a full browser online instead of a stripped-down mobile one. Unfortunately, as optimized as BlackBerries were for the early 2000s — with a minimalist operating system — in the post iPhone world they were past tense. BlackBerry needed to completely overhaul not only its technology and software, but the entire way they thought about the product — and they were too resistant. The iPhone was a toy, surely? Its text messages weren’t even secure! BlackBerry was the only communication service standing during the chaos of 9/11, it wasn’t going anywhere! ….and yet BlackBerry hemorrhaged marketshare and eventually disappeared. Even as they began grudgingly making devices that were more like iPhones, they kept dragging the past with them — from a ‘clickable’ touchscreen to their very last phone still having a physical keyboard.

This proved an interesting book on multiple levels, both in itself and as a comparison against the BlackBerry movie, which is very loosely based on this. (Very loosely: when asked to compare the two, the author Jacquie McNish replied, ‘Well, the facts are very different.’) It’s a fascinating case study in how people and companies can be absolute trail-blazers, and yet for one reason or another — personal biases, the technologies or partnerships they’ve been locked into — plateau and fade even as newcomers continue down a road that was opened for them.

Related:
The One Device, on the origin of the iPhone

Quotes

“At a focus group in Sunnyvale, California, one participant grew antagonistic when shown a device announcing emails with a buzzing noise. ‘If this thing buzzes every time I get an email, you’d better ship it with a hammer,’ he warned.”

    “‘Remove think points,’ was one of his favorite phrases. ‘I liked teaching people to put themselves in the minds of the users,’ Lazaridis says. ‘I wanted to get to the point where users prefer to use [the device] to send messages than actually power their computers.’ He believed that using the Leapfrog for email should be so instinctive that users would never have to interrupt their train of thought to hunt for a command.”

    “On this day, Lexicon’s staff was assigned to test commuter attitudes about mobile devices. When the questions turned to emails, the results surprised them. Email wasn’t a convenience; it was a stress point. Mentioning the word inspired dread about work piling up in inboxes.”

    “The point was driven home in Atlanta, where BellSouth executives, including CEO Duane Ackerman, were among the first users to receive free Blackberries. Before long, they were so addicted that Ackerman forced them to place their devices on the desk during meetings to ensure nobody was distracted. ‘I think that was kind of the closer,’ says Hightower.”

    “BlackBerry messages traveled through RIM’s in-house network, which was plugged directly into the carriers. The unique connection gave RIM a back door to sneak in services carriers wouldn’t allow. In the mid-2000s, RIM began shipping Blackberries secretly loaded with sleeper applications. Carriers and customers had no idea the applications existed until RIM sent an alert to BlackBerry users about a software upgrade. Hidden within the digital transmission was a file that unlocked the applications on the device—a web browser and links to popular instant messaging services. Icons immediately popped onto BlackBerry home screens around the world. By the time carriers realized what was happening, millions of customers were using the internet and exchanging instant messages on their Blackberries.”

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

WWW Wednesday, and Reading More Genre Fiction

Posted on March 25, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews is: what genre do you want to read more of in 2026? My science fiction and historical fiction reading last year were both fairly dismal, so….both.

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Treacherous Alliance, Trita Parsi. A history of Israel, Iranian, and American relations.

WHAT are you reading now? Paradise Lost, John Milton, and Losing the Signal, a history of BlackBerry’s rise and fall.

WHAT are you reading next? After The Confessions, Treacherous Alliance, and Paradise Lost, I think I need something fun. I might commit to Summer of 49 by Robert Halberstam, a baseball history about when DiMaggio and Williams were king. Edit: after getting halfway through and wondering what book I’d read so many of these stories in before, I checked RF and lo! I’ve read this one before.

Posted in General | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Top Ten Books on my Alleged Spring TBR

Posted on March 24, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is books on our spring TBR. As is my custom, I’m going to look back at my previous quarterly TBR to see how I did. I batted .500, which is great by my standards: I read five of the listed titles. Two of the remainder turned out to be monstrously big, and two of them suffered from my subject obsession (the road to Civil War in 1850s America) finally burning itself out.

Teaser Tuesday

“At a focus group in Sunnyvale, California, one participant grew antagonistic when showed a device announcing e-mails with a buzzing noise. ‘If this thing buzzes every time I get an e-mail, you’d better ship it with a hammer,’ he warned. LOSING THE SIGNAL

So, Spring TBR!

(1) Paradise Lost, John Milton. I am currently a third of the way through this, and sometimes distracting myself by listening to the BBC adaptation which has Ian McDiarmid as Satan. Imagine, if you will, Palpatine growling “All is not Lost — the Unconquerable Will, the study of revenge, immortal hate!“. It’s chilling. I’m enjoying Milton’s writing — “Devils to adore for Deities” is a phrase that has stuck with me all week.

(2) Losing the Signal, a history of the rise and fall of BlackBerry. I’ve had this for a few years, but recently watching a very loose film adaptation of it prompted me to finally begin reading it.

(3) I need to circle back and finish a book Cory Doctorow wrote on why the internet has become progressively worse over the last decade or so.

(4) Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier. April means English Literature month here at RF, and I need to address the two EL titles on my Classics Club list. Mansfield Park is on there, as well…..I keep eying its girth and walking away glum.

(5) Backstage at the Ford Theater, an interesting history that focuses on the actors and stagehands who were present when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. I was making serious progress on this one before getting interrupted.

(6) Black Baseball in Alabama. A new release I’ve not gotten to read yet, despite trying to help the author when he was doing local research. (Turns out a Selma son played for a Harvard team and was nearly recruited by a Boston pro club: in an alternate universe, perhaps people know the name William Clarence Matthews as readily as they know Jackie Robinson in ours.)

(7) GIRLS: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything, Freya India. One of my favorite substack authors, Freya India of GIRLS, writes on the digital world and the female Gen-Z experience.

(8) Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, Walter Borneman

(9) When the Earth Had Two Moons. It’s closing on the end of March, I really need to get moving on my science reading for this year. O_O

(10) Something by Annie Jacobsen. She’s written books on nuclear war, the CIA, Area 51, and other topics that, if you brought them up at a dinner party, you would be received with a ‘Oh, would you mind if I stepped to the bathroom for a minute’ and then promptly ghosted.


Posted in General | Tagged , | 17 Comments

Iran & Israel: A Lovers to Enemies Story

Posted on March 23, 2026 by smellincoffee

Trita Parsi’s Treacherous Alliance is a history of relations between the United States, Israel, and Iran from 1947 on. It principally argues that Iran and Israel’s relationship has become poisoned not because of Iranian ideology — specifically, that of the Muslim clerics who control Iran — but through each power pursuing geopolitical interests that sometimes included one another, but increasingly did not. Specifically, Parsi argues that the Israeli-Iranian animosity that exists at present owes to Israel changing its priorities: rather than court Iran as an ally against the Arab nations that surrounded it, in the 1990s Israel began courting its Arab neighbors and using Iran as a common enemy. This was partially entangled with DC’s decision to abandon its mission of balancing Iraq and Iran against one another, and instead settling on the more ambitious and imperial cause of “dual containment”, a cause enabled by the sudden folding of the Soviet Union and the fleeting establishment of the unipolar world. Treacherous Alliance is dense but informative, covering every step of the constant dance between Israel, Iran, and DC — a dance that has more than a few surprises.

A key point in Treacherous Alliance is that Iran and Israel both view themselves as regional outsiders: Israel is a quasi-western and Jewish outpost planted in a largely Arab world, and the Iranians have both ethnic and religious differences with their own Arab neighbors. These are not insignificant differences, but Iran has tried to overcome them from time to time — positioning itself as a regional leader through different means, first its connections with the west and then its status as an Islamist state. Parsi’s deep history shows how Iran has tried different tacks at different times — depending on how the geopolitical winds were blowing — but how realpolitik and not ideological fixation has always been the ultimate driver for Iran. The Shah, who was far more open to working with Israel than the bigbeards who followed him, still kept them at a bit of a distance: they were largely useful as a means of connecting more readily with the west, and as an ally against Arab (principally Iraqi) or Soviet aggression.

Events like the Iraq War or the collapse of the Soviet Union would change the dynamics — and the respective party’s priorities. Realpolitik is king: even when DC was inveighing against Iran, and Iran against Israel, in back rooms deals were cut to allow information and war material to flow as each state pursued its respective interests. (The Iran-Contra affair comes readily to mind.) While the mullahs might harangue Israel rather than offer terse depreciation of them the way the Shah did, both regimes were still willing to deal. In the 1990s, though, Highlander politics started to dominate each nation’s rulers’ more: in terms of regional hegemony, There Can Only Be One. Both Israel and Iran had the potential to dominate the area’s politics, but only if they could marginalize the other. This was especially true when Israel began making traction with the PLO, and Iran — which had made support of the PLO one of its planks for authority in the region — felt further isolated. DC was frequently complicit in this, think tanks declaring Iran a chief sponsor of terrorism even as the house of Saud funded wahhabist schools who would give us virtually all of the 9/11 hijackers. DC’s dismissal of the Iranians was partially fueled by lobbying groups like AIPAC, which also pushed the Clinton admin to ending trade between America and Iran.

But lest readers think “Ah, okay, now we’re at more or less present relations” — oh, no. At this point Netanyahu was a voice for moderation, pushing to preserve the relationship between Tel Aviv and Tehran. He viewed the PLO as a far more pressing threat. Another fly in the soup, though, is that Israel and Iran both viewed the United States in the context of their own struggle for power; neither power wanted the other to draw too close to DC for fear of being isolated. So, when DC and Tehran had golden opportunities to work together destroying the Taliban regime — foes of both governments — the Israeli lobby in DC kicked into overdrive, helped by Israel’s discovery of a ship full of weapons manufactured in Iran enroute to Arafat. Plans that were developing for DC and Tehran to stabilize Afghanistan together — complete with a jointly-trained army — disappeared, and the conduit for talks closed when Bush declared Iran to be part of the ‘axis of evil’. Clinton and Bush’s previous progress with the PLO was also undermined, as Bush’s team wrote Arafat off as untrustworthy. Ultimately, Tel Aviv appears to have been far better at navigating the particular tug-of-war, as our present circumstances (the 2026 – ? Iran War) prove.

The last section of the book, “Looking Ahead”, is now sadly moot. I appear to have a bad habit of reading Parsi books after Trump’s gunboat approach to Iranian diplomacy has rendered them somewhat irrelevant. Parsi comments that DC could benefit by leaning more on Iran as a potential ally, cultivating it as a guardian against Chinese encroachments into the region: instead, Bush, Obama, and Trump’s continued aggression against Iran (including funding al-queda in Syria to undermine Iran’s ally Assad) have pushed the regime deep into partnership with China and Russia, and the present war may have the perverse effect of rallying Iranians around the flag in addition to deep-sixing the global economy. Still, as far as understanding what’s gone before, this is an extremely detailed and generally fair-minded approach.

Okay, this is the actual cover:

I like mine better

Posted in General, history, World Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Harry Potter and the Teenage Angst

Posted on March 19, 2026 by smellincoffee

Although I’ve frequently re-read some Harry Potter books over the years, I’ve tended to avoid Phoenix after my second read.I found it depressing and irritating my first rounds, and had no desire to ever revisit it. The full cast audio edition, coupled with the fact that I am nearly twenty years older now, went a long way toward making the story come alive again, though they also drove home the reason I dislike Phoenix. Specifically, Dolores Umbridge, who is so excruciatingly hateable that she inspires violent desires that may involve her face and repeated Bludger assaults. For the uninitiated, The Order of the Phoenix is the first novel of Voldemort’s “comeback”: he was revived at the end of Goblet of Fire, casually murdering one of Harry’s classmates in the process, and now he and his followers are gaining power and disappearing people. The Ministry of Magic, rather than sounding the hue and cry, is turning a blind eye and repressing those who try to sound the alarm. That includes at Hogwarts, as Minister for Magic Cornelius Starmer has inflicted a vile woman — Dolores Umbridge — as the new Defense against the Dark Arts “teacher”. Her idea of teaching is just having the students read from some insipid book about theory, however: she spends most of her time building cases for sacking Dumbledore’s allies at the school and being a hateful, smug, sicky-sweet bureaucratic bully who thoroughly deserves the Cruciatus curse being inflicted on her over and and over.

I have strong feelings in re: Umbridge. I think she works as well as she does because she’s the most believable villain in the entire series: readers can pretend to be worried about dragons or dark lords or dementors, but our odds of encountering such creatures outside of a schizophrenic episode are fairly minimal. Running into a smug bureaucrat who enjoys abusing power and being legally barred from strangling them or tying them to a train track is completely plausible. She makes it worse by being so disingenuous and ‘sweet’: I have never met a character in literature I hate more.

Another aspect of the book that’s aged well for me is the ‘teenage angst’; I commented on it in my first read , but reading as an adult I can take Harry’s emotionalism more seriously. Reading it as a lad scarcely into my twenties, I found Harry’s emotionalism irritating — but reading it as a more thoughtful adult, who has drifted into positions of quasi–mentorship with teenage cousins and coworkers and such, I took his trauma more seriously. In the span of two months, Harry went from seeing a classmate murdered before his eyes, to being ignored by his mentor, talked down to by others who wanted to protect him, and then relentlessly bullied by a new teacher. This teacher’s bullying was not the petty and spiteful bullying of Snape’s, either, but purposeful and cruel torture by a woman who wanted to destroy Harry’s life. She even bans him from playing Quidditch and tries to destroy the Gryffindor Quidditch team. Worse, there is no remedy: she’s been granted authority from Herr Fudge himself, and even Hogwarts’ teachers are suppressed by her. Meanwhile, Harry is increasingly isolated: Dumbledore is inexplicably ignoring him, and Harry is subject to frequent visions from Voldemort that he tries in vain to shield himself against, and continues to be hectored by friends and mentors alike for not shielding himself better. Ultimately, Harry will rebel with some of the other students and take action rather than wait for the adults to do so, and….well, things escalate.

So, this being a full-cast audio edition I should comment on the audio. The new voices are excellent as always, and I’m even getting used to the FCA’s voice artist for Snape. Umbridge, performed by Kiera Knightly, is perfect at being sicky-sweet, and the atmospherics are as usual top-shelf stuff. I only found them irritating in one scene, in which Harry and Hermione have gone to see Hagrid in his hut: while they’re having an intense conversation about important stuff, Fang keeps barking in the background and it’s just as irritating as it might’ve been in real life. The sound balancing was especially well done during the big Quidditch match, with kids singing and shouting providing immersion but not disrupting the narration. The Battle within the Department of Mysteries was another strong moment, with the sounds of spells being shouted, the shouts themselves, and Bellatrix LeStrange’s mad cackling mixed expertly. Given the emotional heaviness of this book — Harry’s trauma, the Weasley children learning their father has been critically injured, the stakes of the battle in the Department of Mysteries — the voice acting performs a lot of work. Some of the new casting is perfect: I could recognize Bellatrix LesStrange and Luna Lovegood without their characters even being introduced.

This was another stellar entry in the series, though it’s strange; as much as I enjoy the execution of the story, I still don’t like the story itself — Umbridge just brings out far too much rage in me. There were a lot of elements about the story I’d simply forgotten and enjoyed re-experiencing, like Harry getting a dressing-down from a headmaster portrait for being too self-consumed and not admitting that Dumbledore could very well have his reasons for behaving the way he was. (Ron adding unexpected comic relief during the intense Battle of the Department of Mysteries by getting hit with a ‘drunk’ spell was also something I’d forgotten entirely.) The quality was such that I spent a few lunch breaks simply sitting and listening to it, rather than reading; typically, audiobooks are car and casual gaming fare for me.

“Well, obviously, she’s feeling very sad, because of Cedric dying. Then I expect she’s feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry, and she can’t work out who she likes best. Then she’ll be feeling guilty, thinking it’s an insult to Cedric’s memory to be kissing Harry at all, and she’ll be worrying about what everyone else might say about her if she starts going out with Harry. And she probably can’t work out what her feelings toward Harry are anyway, because he was the one who was with Cedric when Cedric died, so that’s all very mixed up and painful. Oh, and she’s afraid she’s going to be thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch team because she’s been flying so badly.”
A slightly stunned silence greeted the end of this speech, then Ron said, “One person can’t feel all that at once, they’d explode.”
“Just because you’ve got the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn’t mean we all have,” said Hermione nastily, picking up her quill again.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

WWW Wednesday + Audiobooks We Have Loved

Posted on March 18, 2026 by smellincoffee
I gotta say, reading about Dolores Umbridge inspires a LOT of #7

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Robert Parker’s Blind Spot. Meh.

WHAT are you reading now? I’m listening to the full cast audio of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and reading Eleanor Oiliphant is Completely Fine along with Treacherous Alliance for my serious read. The latter is a history of Israeli, Iranian, and American relations.

WHAT are you reading now? I need to start Paradise Lost by Milton.

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is Audiobooks We’ve Loved, which….should be easy.

1-4: Harry Potter and the Full Cast Audio Editions. These are wonderful.

5. Fan Fiction, Brent Spiner and the cast of Star Trek TNG. Fan Fiction is a silly novel ‘inspired’ by Brent Spiner’s experiences with overzealous fans, but the audiobook version of this actually brings in his TNG castmates to voice their past selves, and it’s brilliant. Reading the book when you can hear Patrick Stewart and Martina Sirtis is a travesty.

6. “A Christmas Carol” read by Sir Patrick Stewart. He even makes Christmas bell noises.

7. Woke Up this Morning, Michael Imperioli & Steve Schrippa. An oral history of The Sopranoes. Oh!

8. The Glory of their Times, Paul Ritter. Interviews with guys who played baseball professionally in the 1920s and 1930s.

9. Cold as Hell. Roger Clark, the mocap and voice actor for Arthur Morgan in RDR2, here does the voice artisty for a cowboy who died too nasty to go to heaven but too good to go to the other place. So, he’s given a black badge and told to rid the earth of nasty nephilim like vampires. Fun dark western fantasy.

10. Anything Wil Wheaton does, but especially Redshirts, Masters of Doom, and Ready Player One.

Posted in General | Tagged , | 15 Comments