Attempted John Brown: Queen Victoria's Highland Servant by Raymond Lamont-Brown, but gave up after a few chapters. I realise that you can't tell the story of John Brown without also covering the relevant bits of the story of Queen Victoria's relationship with Scotland, but it felt like the author really wanted to talk about Victoria - in great detail - and occasionally remembered that John Brown was also there. Maybe the balance is redressed in the later chapters, but I ran out of patience to stick around and find out.
So I've put aside the "Book beginning with J" reading challenge for now, and I'm reading Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle for a different challenge. It's set in Stalinist Russia, and is about the inmates of a special prison where all the scientists and technicians have been sent and set to work on phone scramblers and things.
I recently got to a bit describing how the current big project is in trouble because the Minister (who doesn't understand the technical challenges) made wildly unrealistic promises to Stalin about when it would be ready, and all the middle managers were either equally ignorant or too afraid to contradict him, so now the technicians are stuck trying to do a job in a month that would take years to do properly, even if they had up-to-date and well-maintained equipment which of course they don't. Apart from the bit where they'll all be shot if the client isn't satisfied, it reminds me of several tech projects I've worked on.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2025-06-05 02:48 am (UTC)So I've put aside the "Book beginning with J" reading challenge for now, and I'm reading Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle for a different challenge. It's set in Stalinist Russia, and is about the inmates of a special prison where all the scientists and technicians have been sent and set to work on phone scramblers and things.
I recently got to a bit describing how the current big project is in trouble because the Minister (who doesn't understand the technical challenges) made wildly unrealistic promises to Stalin about when it would be ready, and all the middle managers were either equally ignorant or too afraid to contradict him, so now the technicians are stuck trying to do a job in a month that would take years to do properly, even if they had up-to-date and well-maintained equipment which of course they don't. Apart from the bit where they'll all be shot if the client isn't satisfied, it reminds me of several tech projects I've worked on.