Reviewing someone’s first novel, it is customary to be polite about it, to find things to praise in it. So let me say straight away that James Thackara’s The Book Of Kings is printed on very nice paper; the typeface is clear and readable, and Samantha Nundy’s photograph of the author is in focus. And, given that it’s 773 pages long, the author has shown a commendable degree of application and spent a great deal of time on the project.

That, as it turns out, is the literary-London story of the book; that he’s been writing it for years and years, and was writing the Story of the Twentieth Century. This, we were promised, was going to be the great novel of the European experience, covering continents in its magisterial stride. Now, at last, here it is and we can judge for ourselves.

when you dig deeper, liberal melancholy hangs not so much on substantive objections but on something more inchoate and emotional: a general feeling that Obama is not Ronald Reagan. Obama invited the contrast with Reagan himself when he noted during the campaign, “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” And yet so far at least, this country does not feel fundamentally, systemically changed by Obama in the way that it is remembered to have been by Reagan.

But here again, memory is problematic. Reagan, you’ll recall, spent most of his administration raising taxes, signing arms-control treaties, and otherwise betraying right-wing dogma. Yes, his accomplishments were more substantive than Nixon’s or Clinton’s, but they were not quite the sweeping, nation-transforming stuff liberals enjoy recalling in horror. In terms of lasting change, Obama probably has matched Reagan—or, at least, he will if he can win reelection and consolidate health-care reform and financial regulation and tilt the Supreme Court further left than he already has.

And yet Obama will never match among Democrats Reagan’s place in the psyche of his own party, as reflected in the endless propaganda campaign to give him full credit for the end of stagflation and communism, the dogmatic insistence that everything the great hero said offers the One True Path for all time, and the project to name every possible piece of American property after him. Republican Reagan-worship is a product of a pro-authority mind-set that liberals, who inflate past heroes only to criticize their contemporaries, cannot match. If recent history is any guide, they are simply not capable of having that kind of relationship with a president. They are going to question their leader, not deify him, and search for signs of betrayal in any act of compromise he or she may commit. This exhausting psychological torment is no way to live. Then again, the current state of the Republican Party suggests it may be healthier than the alternative.

Up to now, I haven’t felt the need to “share” with the world what I eat, where I walk, what I listen to or read, on what point of the Earth I stand or sit. It’s nothing personal; as a journalist, I just seem to have this inner feeling that you don’t actually care. One of the skills that comes with journalism is filtering out unimportant information. If I were to write an article about my music listening habits on a day-to-day basis (“On Monday starting at 11:28 a.m. I listened to Joe Bonamassa, followed by Chris Smither, then Diana Krall…”) you would not stick around to read the complete list. You would rightly ask, what kind of conceited maniac shares everything short of his own bowel movements with the general public?

Well, if you would rather I not “share” this information with you in a blog post, then under whose content quota am I obligated to “share” it with you through some social channel? Of course, as Facebook reminds us, “in most cases” other people with more sense than I will share with “friends only.” Explain to me how that makes sense, that the outgoing data feed I would filter for my regular readers’ benefit should remain unfiltered for my friends’.

Google, despite neglecting Reader for over 2 years, making basically no updates or improvements, nonetheless still managed to completely dominate the market for RSS readers; as we users of Google Reader are now discovering, looking around to realise, in surprise, that there is no comparable alternative product. So much so that some users are now rebuilding it from the ground up.

That’s an insane level of loyalty. That’s a sticking-with-Apple-in-the-late-90’s level of loyalty. And if Larry Page really wants to be Steve Jobs, that’s what he should be cultivating, and then he should figure out a way to sell it to the other 99% of the population. Because that’s what Steve would do.

But comments? COMMENTS FROM MY FRIENDS ABOUT THINGS I’VE SHARED OR OTHER FRIENDS HAVE SHARED ARE REMARKABLE. EVERY TIME. EVERY. TIME. I will drop what I’m doing to read new comments in Reader.

Plus, Facebook, Twitter? It could give a shit less about what my friends say about other things. It wants me to know what they said about themselves, what they did today, what their relationship status is, what games they played today.

It’d rather ask me why I haven’t posted a photo of my cat to the internet lately, so Plus can get those usage numbers up and boast how much “content” people are creating. It’d rather ask what I ate for breakfast or if I’d like to tag something about #whattrendingstupidshita19yearoldwrotetoday so I can get REAL-TIME FIREHOSE OF UNCURATABLE RANDOMIZED SHIT UPDATES about it so it doesn’t have to make an effort to deal with content from which Google might not exclusively profit.
Fuck that! My friends are trying to have a goddamned discussion and you’re standing between us showing us photos of ourselves and trying to get us to talk about trending topics!

I COULD GIVE A SHIT LESS. MY FRIEND IS TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING I’M INTERESTED IN. SHUT THE FUCK UP.

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One of the funny ha ha great things we say about the few dozen people who make up our group of friends on Reader is that we’re the Google Reader Party. But that’s a misnomer. A party is what Google Reader is. It’s us talking about awesome stuff.

“OH! OH WAIT! Plus has this Hangouts thing where” no you shut the fuck up right now.

I am old in internet terms. I am thirty years old. My friends are older. We work too much and decompress in weird ways, at weird times. I have trouble waking up before 9 a.m. Christine gets up at like 5 fucking o’clock a.m. Ashley goes to bed at 9 p.m. We don’t Hangout. We need something asynch.

We need something like… email.

Hey, my original point, there you are.

Google Reader is was the best asynchronous social network ever made. It’s the closest thing to a party that 25 people, all on totally different schedules, can swing.

“Now” didn’t matter. “Who” barely mattered. Sharing 3,000 items a month or 30? Didn’t matter.

Reader, somehow, some way, became the best possible way for people who can’t stand talking about themselves to communicate with each other.

Even if every Reader feature made it to Plus — and shit no they haven’t, and it doesn’t look like they will — the entire concept, culture and process is completely different. You can’t remotely replicate the closed, tight, context- and content-first communities of Reader in Plus. You can’t efficiently or effectively share, excerpt, annotate or discuss a 3,500-word longform news article on Plus alone without opening at least two other tabs.

You can’t sit back with a drink and catch up on discussions that don’t have to be carried on right fucking now or they’re gone forever in Plus.

Reader did it so, so well. It was an ugly motherfucker. It broke early and often, it never joined the API craze even as its never-documented and barely acknowledged reverse-engineered API went on to power who only knows how many web and mobile apps. It was held together for months, if not years, by one or two developers whose names are maybe even lost to history now.

Somebody else can swing in here and grab this niche now that Google’s flushed it. Not rolled it into Plus, but flushed it gone.

Or maybe everything will be perfect and fantastic! In which case someone at Google FOR GOD’S SAKE *WOULD YOU FUCKING HIRE SOMEONE TO COMMUNICATE THIS SHIT TO US WHO IS NOT A GODDAMNED DEVELOPER AND CAN SAY “PAGE WITH YOUR SHARED ITEMS ON IT” INSTEAD OF “LINK BLOG” I MEAN SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK IS A “LINK BLOG” *