Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
I really enjoy the current reading for my Russia After…
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I really enjoy the current reading for my Russia After Politics class. I actually got excited at the suspense of the following excerpt:
"An important question is how different the reform process under Khrushchev was from that initiated by Gorbachev, and why the one ended with the entrenchment of the existing system, the other with its collapse. We shall come to this in the final chapter..."
--Mary McAuley, Soviet Politics 1917-1991
Last night Leonard and I tried some product that had been ambivalently labelled "Hot 'n Spicy Cajun Pilaf." Practically the entire three paragraphs of copy on the back of the box tried to reconcile the concepts of "Cajun" and "Pilaf," which, let's face it, are pretty dissonant. I felt sorry for them, but not after I tasted the stuff. Neither Cajun nor pilaf, really. Just sort of soggy yellow rice.
Jeana writes of some film, "though most of the characters bordered on unlikeable because they were just so normal and realistic. *shudder*" All kidding aside, this tells you a lot about Jeana's taste in entertainment! Although you could much more easily derive that same information from other entries in her journal, where she talks about RennFayre and so on.
Speaking of unlikeable characters, I've paused reading David Wong Louie's The Barbarians Are Coming (a gift from Anirvan) for the same reason that I stopped reading The Kitchen God's Wife or The Hundred Secret Senses, one of those Amy Tan novels that isn't The Joy Luck Club, six or seven years ago. I can't stand the protagonist! Louie has expended the attention capital he got from me by having his main character be a misunderstood child of Asian immigrants. Seeing as I'm not the IMF, I'm hesitating on loaning him more.
