I prefer this heavily to the idiot. Most of this is because Selin is no longer yearning after Ivan, who is just such an obnoxious love interest, but also because she comes a lot more into her own body and mind throughout the story. This novel is much more centered on literature circulating between Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin," Sorgegard's titular "Ether or," "The Portrait of a Lady," as well as "Against Nature." I admire deeply how Selin is able to find traces of herself in all these books, as well as the types of questions she asks when reading. It's a lovely way to live life, through books and movies and music, something I want to do and something that for Batuman is clearly so natural, a love letter to all the forms of art itself. A deeply engrained passion for story and seeing life as story. It’s indulgent to be a writer and reader loving books about writers and readers but sometimes you just have to indulge.

You do have to read the first book to read this one, unfortunately, because every character has a lot of context from the prequel. But I loved seeing all the characters grow up, some enter and some leave Selin’s life, it truly does feel like coming back from the summer after freshman year, moving into an upperclassman dorm, and just the transition into coming into your own vs. fearing and discovering. I had totally forgotten about "Let's Go," which hires students to write a travel book and pays them a very thin budget to actually go there. I really enjoyed Selin’s travels in Turkey and seeing it through her eyes, the feeling of going somewhere that is home but not home at the same time and discovering it through the eyes of a very intellectualized, privileged Westerner. It’s bittersweet, all these things I never got to do in college because I was so focused on one career path, now living vicariously through someone who while feeling so constrained simultaneously felt more free. Perhaps I was similarly free and just not realized of it. Big questions of agency and pathway building.

Baudrillard is always interesting but not incredibly applicable. I thought the framework of virtual war was interesting but not that much novel to Cold War deterrence. Like his “simulacra and simulation”, doesn’t feel like he has thought through the conclusion piece, which is understandably the hardest. Felt at times like he was diminishing real lives lost as play / fake war (because you need to be equal opponents with the possibility of fighting w/o destruction to have “real war”) and even calling for a return to romanticized battle, placing the loss of passion on par with the loss of lives. Read as a very outsider, looking down opinion from someone who will never have to experience this. Highly relevant to Venezuela

Everything fell a little flat for me, though the premise was one I was initially super excited about. I wasn’t a fan of any of the characters, and they were so explicitly described with no showing, all telling — basically, “he is a people pleaser”. There were too many POVs to flip back and forth between so all felt a bit caricaturized, typecast, hard to remember details from or really picture. Nothing ever surprised me and the ending wasn’t satisfying imo, and I thought the catch to the cult would’ve more peculiar than just “nothing is what it seems”, didn’t take it to the next level. The nature stuff felt super hippie kumbayah vs profound. Prose was quite elementary, especially with the random mid-sentence switches to poetry and vertiginous jumps between first and third person. Felt incredibly contemporary, like a novel fittingly produced in our current age — semblance of depth without really having any, pointed political topics without actually unpacking.