Reading Update

[jaggedwolf]

It Never Rains On National Day by Jeremy Tiang

Another Singapore short-story collection. My favorite story was “Schwellenangst”, where a Singaporean teacher on a history trip in northern Germany gets a night away from her charges, hanging out with a Swedish couple she met at a rave. Think I’ve learned that civil servants either get a lot of PTO or really put off using it.

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

Long novel set in Mumbai, covering the dual narratives of a Sikh police inspector and the Hindu gangster who’s motives he’s trying to uncover. Really dense, enjoyed the prose, even if I had to stop myself from excessive googling of terms. Looking up a map of India was useful.

Very dude-PoV. Did not mind that much with our divorced cop Sartaj Singh. I actually quite liked seeing him solve smaller crimes and live his day-to-day while the large investigation unfolded, his enmeshment within and navigation of the constant corruption that comes with his career. The way he tries to cope with revelation of a latter part of the narrative made all those details even more worth it, and I wouldn’t mind reading another story with Sartaj. That section and the very beginning of his narrative made me think of Disco Elysium a little, and perhaps itch for another replay.

I very much minded the dude PoV with our gang leader Ganesh Gaitonde towards the last quarter of his storyline, where I got bored with his thoughts and times with sex workers (And also sick of the plot thing he was obsessing over then!) The book tries to flip it around on him at the end, with Jojo getting the last word, but not enough.

Maybe it’s just also that the mundane details and moments and pains of the novel are far more compelling to me than the criminal games and high stakes once Gaitonde expands his reach.

Enjoyed the various chapters from other characters’ PoVs. Sartaj’s mom gets a chapter about her childhood during partition, and much later in the book there’s a chapter titled “Two Deaths, in Cities Far From Home”, where the second of those deaths fucking gutted me.

Assessment Of Men: Selection Of Personnel for the Office Of Strategic Services

The Office Of Strategic Services (OSS) was the US’s intelligence agency during WW2, engaging in espionage, propaganda, and the like on the front.

Candidates for the OSS ranged from military men to civilians, Americans to war refugees, some recommended by their branches/other contacts and some interested themselves. With the aid of clinical psychologists, the OSS had a go at attempting to assess these candidates on various traits, in order to either approve/deny their suitability for their proposed role and to send a description of them and their abilities to their future superiors.

This book covers that assessment process in incredible detail - the actual questionnaires are reproduced wherever possible, instructions for every test put to the candidates, the candidates’ schedules in the various assessments centers, a comparison of the assessment’s ratings of the candidates vs how they actually did in their jobs.

I found this a really interesting read, turns out trying to assess people for jobs before they do them is really hard even when the job isn’t high-stakes wartime spying. A bunch of random tidbits from the book:

• The candidates all had to come up with fake names and histories for the duration of the assessment, with the staff noting how well they concealed their true names and backgrounds throughouth the day(s).
• The OSS positions the candidates were being assessed for weren’t purely saboteurs and intelligence-gatherers, but also propagandists, instructors, technicians, and secretaries.
• “A sense of humor about himself” was a trait consistently searched for in the first assessment centre - could a man be okay with being the butt of an improv skit, how did he react when faced with an impossible task and truculent subordinates, did they get angry at their own failures, etc.
• The assessment was also done overseas for non-Americans the US had recruited for spywork, with centres in Sri Lanka and China
• Hard to tell if your assessment process has false negatives if all negatives are denied OSS Assignments, also hard if the uh, actual war going on constrains how many people you can reject

Been posting various excerpts from the book here.