p0ssum

I thought I was a goner when I hit the Y-combinator, but I pulled through and blasted through the last chapter. It’s tempting to follow up with SICP, or The Seasoned Schemer, but I have other projects on my plate with a higher priority….

I’ve been using the online “Daily Lit” service to get a page per day from this book. I should have finished up around the end of October, but I couldn’t wait to see how it turned out. Now I definitely need to re-watch Apocalypse Now, then re-read HoD.

I’d recommend reading Chinua Achebe’s critique of HoD—I don’t agree with it 100% (and Achebe’s critique contains at least one factual error), but it does add an interesting dimension to the experience of the book.

This might be more interesting to someone more interested in the gory (pun intended) details of the Vietnam War experience. However I am not that man, so I settled for skimming the book. I read the first and last sections of each chapter, the introduction and the epilogue, plus a smattering of other stuff—random paragraphs and footnotes.

There was an interesting bit early on in the book about the Bay of Pigs, particularly the idea that Castro new all about it from a security leak days before the event itself. Certainly the way it turned out is consistent with this view.

Anyhow, I’m calling myself done with this. I think I took away as much as I am capable of from the experience.