#books

I was on a train to Edinburgh for a short break and rapidly running out of pages of Zoe Schiffer's book Extremely Hardcore. Not wanting to carry two large hardbacks with me, I'd left my copy of Character Limit by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac back home; now I was going to need something else to feed my appetite for Twitter meltdown reading material over the next few days. There was a book I'd remembered reading a particular review of citing its lack of any sort of insight but at least it was about the Twitter buyout. And it was long enough ago that I figured there was a good chance by now I'd be able to pick up a cheap paperback of it to fill the void. That book was Ben Mezrich's Breaking Twitter and, now having finished it, I wanted to write a cautionary warning to anyone else tempted to buy it.

Before tackling the main issue of the author being generally sympathetic to Musk, there is another major stumbling block with this book. Despite the numerous Amazon reviews praising it as well-written, it didn't take long for the alarm bells to start ringing about the style of writing. Already in the second paragraph of the prologue, Esther Crawford is introduced with the sentence, "Esther had her laptop open in the front of her, the screen casting a cone of light across her porcelain skin." This is maybe an improvement on her later being described as, "a beautiful implement, like a high-quality torque wrench or an elegantly tuned slide rule," but immediately I could tell I might struggle reading this after all. And sure enough the book is full of this overwrought, tortured prose - often each chapter starts with some laboured, unnecessary description of a character or scene (and is usually completely imagined by the author rather than being based on the actual truth) but at least sometimes, over the course of the chapter, he thankfully runs out of steam with this writing style. He also at times tries to suggest a half metaphor without actually giving it any meaning - there's a chapter where he goes on and on about squares within squares within squares but without any sort of significance or meaning. Or another chapter where he's seemingly so amazed by Musk's mother being a model that it jams his caps lock key and causes him to list out celebrity names in all caps for a couple of pages for no reason.

Maybe Mezrich's opinion of Musk at least slightly falters over the course of book (at one point he counters the suggestion that Musk is afraid of the FCC by saying that he definitely seems scared of something by the way he surrounds himself with bodyguards and his general paranoia about (and treatment of) Twitter employees) but his general admiration and repeated references to his "genius" are a bit difficult to stomach. When Musk went off on a monologue about buying Twitter to improve society and further civilisation and even talking about aliens at his first all-hands meeting, Zoe Schiffer reported engineers responding with, "what the hell is going on? I thought this guy was meant to be a genius?" Mezrich's take on the same meeting seems to be that Musk genuinely bought Twitter with intent to further civilisation and the belief that he could. Early in the book he states that Musk "knows how to tweet" yet one of his biggest meltdowns comes when he fails to grasp why his banal Super Bowl tweet ("GO EAGLES") garners less attention than the US president's which includes not only a photo but also a playful message about being deferential to his wife. We're also unfortunately subjected to a load of Musk's tweets from a World Cup match which fail to offer much more interest than the incredible insight of "GO EAGLES".

Perhaps the most egregious example of fawning comes when describing a video call where he says Musk, if he wanted to, could the see the code of the video-streaming software for the webcam flowing down the screen as if he were a character in The Matrix (no, seriously). And in the chapter about the stalker following Grimes, he forgets to mention that there was no evidence of @ElonJet@mastodon.social being used by this person and Mezrich seems to think that all the action taken (banning Jack Sweeney, journalists critical of Musk/Tesla, links to Mastodon etc) was done out of genuine fear for his son's safety rather than it rather obviously being an excuse to silence people and accounts he didn't like. Hilariously, at the end of the book, there is a tweet from 20 Dec 2022 saying Musk will "just run the software & servers teams" after the appointment of Linda Yaccarino as CEO. This paperback was published in June 2024 but it was probably already apparent even when the hardback was published in November 2023 that the new CEO was just for show and that Musk was still fully focused on using Twitter as his own plaything rather than running the "software & servers teams."

The only saving grace of this book is that it's hilariously bad enough to at least be entertaining ironically. If you are looking to spend money on a book about the Twitter takeover that is actually well-written and insightful then I'd highly recommend reading Extremely Hardcore instead.

#BenMezrich #BreakingTwitter #books #bookReviews

Fathers and Sons by Turgenev (Richard Freeborn translation) is an interesting character study of Bazarov, a self-proclaimed nihilist in the backdrop of the ideological differences between the “fathers” and “sons”. The “fathers” and “sons” in the title refer to the two different generations of the liberals and the nihilists, respectively. The ideological differences between the two generations, as depicted through the clash between Bazarov and Pavel, constitutes one of the major themes of the novel. It also looks at the inevitability of the generational gap between the sons (Bazarov and Arkady) and their respective fathers, and the futility of trying to reject emotions.

The book is short and has a very simple plot. It opens with Nikolai Petrovich awaiting his son Arkady's return from university, whom he receives accompanied by his friend, Bazarov who aspires to be a country doctor. It soon becomes clear that both youngsters subscribe to the philosophy of nihilism, in which Arkady considers himself to be Bazarov’s “pupil”. According to them “nihilist” is: “‘He is a nihilist,’ repeated Arkady. ‘A nihilist,’ said Nikolai Petrovich. ‘That’s from the Latin nihil, nothing, so far as I can judge. Therefore, the word denotes a man who … who doesn’t recognize anything?’ ‘Say, rather, who doesn’t respect anything,’ added Pavel Petrovich and once more busied himself with the butter. ‘Who approaches everything from a critical point of view,’ remarked Arkady.....nihilist is a man who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith, no matter how much that principle may be surrounded by respect.’" Frequent clashes ensue, especially between Bazarov and Arkady’s uncle, Pavel Petrovich, who finds Bazarov’s rejection of principles absolutely loathsome. Their exchanges regarding their philosophical differences were quite interesting to read. I especially found one of their exchanges, in which Bazarov was forced into a corner, quite thought-provoking:

""I see,’ interrupted Pavel Petrovich, ‘I see. Meaning you’re convinced of all this and have decided for yourselves not to do anything serious about anything.’ ‘And we’ve decided not to do anything about anything,’ Bazarov repeated sombrely. He had suddenly grown annoyed with himself for having talked so much in front of this lordly gentleman. ‘And just swear at everything?’ ‘And swear at everything.’ ‘And that’s called nihilism?’ ‘And that’s called nihilism,’ "

Bazarov rejects any form of emotions, art and philosophy as “romanticism” and hence just nonsense. Strangely, someone supposedly accepting only cold hard facts had this to say about science: "I’ve already told you that I don’t believe in anything. And what’s this thing called science, science in general? There are sciences as there are trades and vocations. But science in general doesn’t exist at all.’" About love and romance: “.... And what’s all this about the mysterious relationships between a man and a woman? We physiologists know all about these relationships. Just you study the anatomy of the eye—where’s all this enigmatic look, as you call it, come from? It’s all romanticism, nonsense, rubbish, artiness…” In this quarter, he is brought to his knees by Anna Sargeevna Odintsova, whom they first meet at a ball. Odintsova is a beautiful, self-possessed, intelligent woman, previously acquainted with Arkady’s parents, that Bazarov ends up falling in love with. According to Bazarov, "If you like a woman’, he was fond of saying, ‘then try and get what you can. If you can’t, well, no matter, give her up—there are plenty of fish in the sea.’ but then, “....he found he hadn’t the strength to ‘give her up’. His blood was set on fire as soon as he thought about her." He felt disgusted to recognise such romantic feelings in himself. In my opinion, Bazarov is just a very young man gifted with intelligence but afflicted with extreme intellectual arrogance. The characters of both Bazarov and Odintsova are quite well-drawn. Arkady initially comes across as Bazarov’s sidekick, looking up to and almost blindly following his teacher's philosophy. However, as the story progresses, he starts to think for himself. He also starts to see Bazarov’s self-conceit more clearly and moreover why he likes to keep Arkady around: "‘Look, mate, I see you’re still bloody silly. We need Sitnikovs. I—know what I mean?—I need such cretins. It’s not for the Gods, in fact, to bake the pots!’ Aha! thought Arkady—and it was only at this moment that the entire limitless depth of Bazarov’s conceit was revealed to him—So you and I are the Gods, are we? That’s to say, you’re the God and maybe I’m the cretin?"

One of the things I really liked about this book was how beautifully the father-son relationship from the father’s POV was depicted, in the case of Nikolai Petrovich and Arkady. This was Nikolai contemplating the generational gap he was observing between him and his son: "For the first time he was clearly aware of the rift between him and his son. He had a foreboding that with each passing day it would become greater and greater. It turned out that he’d spent days on end one winter in St Petersburg reading away at the latest works of fiction all for nothing; all for nothing had he listened to the conversations of the young men; all for nothing had he been overjoyed when he’d succeeded in inserting his own word into their bubbling talk…..He walked to and fro a great deal, almost to the point of exhaustion, but the sense of peril within him, a kind of searching, indefinite, melancholy disquiet, would not lessen. Oh, how Bazarov would have laughed at him if he’d known what was going on inside him at that moment! Arkady himself would have condemned him. Tears, pointless tears were forming in his eyes, in the eyes of a man of forty-four, an agronomist and landowner—and that was a hundred times worse than playing the cello!"

On the whole, this was a quick and pleasant read featuring interesting characters. My only gripe was not getting to read the internal monologues of characters in typical POV style because of which they felt more distant. #books #bookreview #russianliterature #turgenev #fathersandsons