This book sets out to answer the question that most people have thought about once or twice, but quickly dismiss because they are afraid of where their intuitions take them. The question is, why did certain civilizations advance into “civilized” modern cultures while others seemed to have gotten left behind in the stone age. Why does the UN exist in the same timeline as people who are still hunting with stone weapons? What might intuition say? Probably some form of “manifest destiny”. Well, that sort of thinking is thankfully inappropriate in our current discourse, but this self-censorship kills the question before a reasoned and viable alternative is presented. Therefore, due to the fear of your probably racist intuitions, you don’t spend enough time to see how they could possibly be wrong, you just ignore them like your aunt with the bad breath and close hugs. Well, Jared Diamond wants to give you some reasons you can look at that aunt with bad breath and show her the door. ...

There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool (Nature) has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artiface. So basically, it is this whole thing. Huysmans was a novelist in the 19th century whose early works were part of the naturalistic school which sought out beauty and truth in the mundane, but later in his life this changed. He began to feel cramped and redundant inside the confines of nature and wished to supersede it through artifice. Maybe this would give us a more visceral or concentrated glimpse of beauty? Enter what is known as the “Decadent” literature. This school found its poster child in Dorian Gray, and this is how I came to hear about it. On a reread of the Picture of Dorian Gray, there was this quote: ...

Summary All the Pretty Horses follows the story of John Grady Cole and his best friend Lacey Rawlins. Cole, sixteen years old, was raised on a ranch his entire life. His grandfather has just died and he discovers the ranch is about to be sold. He convinces Rawlins to join him and they both take off to Mexico hoping to find cowboy work. Thoughts My initial summation of this book was going to be “Hemmingway meets Coen brother’s No Country for Old Men”, but then I found out that Cormac McCarthy wrote No Country for Old Men. So now I guess the summation should be “Hemmingway meets McCarthy”. Sidebar This impression is created by a writing style called Polysyndeton. Going down this rabbit hole a little, it turns out that this is the style that gives the King James Bible and Shakespeare their distinctive cadence. From what I can tell it is a fancy name for run on sentences that would get red lined on English exams. ...

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end. Summary A recently released prisoner named Shadow is on a return flight home when there is a mix up and his seat gets upgraded to first class. Waiting for him is a mysterious stranger with a job offer. Thoughts Unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed this book. A book that almost lives up to the hype, but would have been slightly better to have stumbled on without knowing anything about it. Neil Gaiman draws out scenes and situations so vividly that they became almost scars in my memory. In the age of pictures, it is difficult to make people see with just words. That is not a problem in this book, you will see what is happening, even if sometimes you didn’t want to. ...

Happiness or freedom, which would you choose? Summary Levin tells a story about a community known as “the family” which is comprised of a group of members who are sedated and regulated by a computer known as “uni”. Uni knows all, plans all, and grants from each according to his ability to each according to his need. One member starts having doubts about the entire enterprise. Thoughts It is hard to judge books like this one in the year of our lord 2023, as so much of what we now read and see draw their inspiration from seminal works such as this one. A side effect of this is that when read in the present the story feels redundant, is this Levin’s fault or a consequence of passing time? This book at a surface level has some obvious critiques against Communism and in our times against the encroachment of AI into public decision making. The message of the book did seem at times to be too transparent, too in the readers face, damaging the experience for me. On a deeper level this book asks us what it is we are striving for? This is actually a very interesting question especially in terms of equality. We strive to create a world where everyone is treated the same, but is that possible when people are so diverse? Will we need to sacrifice individuality for equality? To me this is still an open question, and thanks to my recent reading of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents I find it hard not to see the hand of Eros in this movement towards oneness. Another takeaway from this book was that of further critiquing Utopia’s in general. The main character Chip agrees with Dostoyevsky’s underground man, Utopias are inhuman because they are not built for humans, but for machines. They are built for things that always act according to rules that are tabulated in cold sterile databanks. In order for humans to act in this way they must forfeit the thing that makes them human. ...

Summary This book follows the protagonist Julien Sorell in his attempts to make a name for himself. Julien is the son of a carpenter but has dreams of becoming the next Napoleon. During a period known as the Bourbon Restoration, France is experiencing a brief moment of peace after Napoleon had been defeated and monarchs were back in charge. Julien decides that the only possible path to the glory he seeks is through the church now that Napoleon is no longer around. He soon finds out that in order to climb the ranks of the France elite he must first learn to play their games. ...

Premise Modernity is obsessed with individual identity at the cost of destroying culture. The modern self has been reduced almost entirely into the sexual self. Carl Truman takes the reader on a scenic tour from Augustine to Marcuse tracing the way in which the modern conception of the self or “psychological self” has become increasingly disconnected from the physical self and its realities. Good Parts This book does a fair job of running through some of the intellectual heavy weights of the western cannon (think Rosseau, Kant, Marx, etc). The mainstream bits from these thinkers will be review for anyone familiar with philosophical history, but with some interesting threads being drawn out. Ironically, this book taught me some things about the LGBT community that I didn’t know like the theoretical difference between “gay” and “lesbian”. One of the most interesting points to me was that some feminist refuse to accept man to woman trans people as being technically women because of the fact that they for the most part become patriarchal stereotypes of women. There is also the more common argument about certain biological realities lacking in a M2W trans experience. ...

Sigmund Freud A great primer that doesn’t throw the baby out with the repressed infantile sexual instincts.

There was a lot packed into this short book, or long essay. Nearing the end of his life, and the end of the period of peace between WW1 and WW2 Freud was still Freuding. This book is ostensibly about the restrictions that civilization imposes on individuals, but probably more importantly in the psychoanalytic field it further sketches out a new primal drive in human nature, namely aggression. For most of his life Freud had looked at human nature through the lens of the “Pleasure principle” which is that all actions humans take can be explained in avoidance to unpleasure. This principle ran into problems, one example is how the mind seems to relive traumatic experiences over and over again. Enter the “death drive”, the main assertion of this book was that our two main drives (pleasure and aggression) are antagonistic to civilization. In that sense, civilization can be conceived of as a mechanism of repression and redirection of those drives towards behaviors that are beneficial to the group. He has called this process “Eros” and the later drive has come to be known as “Thanatos”. Eros is a work of unification at the cost of individual desire, i.e. civilization. The question (or warning) of this book is that Eros doesn’t seem to care about the individual at all, it will sacrifice the individual completely to achieve its goal of unification which will perhaps make living life in wonderful unity not worth it in the end. There is so much more inside this short book, it is widely considered one of Freud’s most important works. I would recommend it to anyone, no matter their views on Freud’s other ideas. This book has also tied in with thoughts I was already having in regard to the exclusivity inherent in inclusivity, the need for Orwell’s two-minute hate, etc etc. ...

A clear and concise book that does exactly what the title says it does. Bauer takes issue with the K-12 grading system in the US claiming that it does not make proper contingencies for the individual. Instead, designed much like the factories that were popping up at the same time, the K-12 grading system treats each kid like an identical piece of machinery. This book was helpful to me as it underlined the fact that K-8 grade needn’t be nearly as structured as is popularly believed. These grades in fact will have little to no impact on their futures assuming the time isn’t completely wasted, and the kids are introduced the core material requisite for high school. Bauer also believes in the idea that each subject is its own island, and kids have natural talents in each. Some may be good at math while others excel in history. Allow each kid to benefit from their natural talents, without falling into the trap of too quickly pushing them forward a grade and into a social situation they are not mature enough to handle. Overall, the book was a couple years away from being really useful to me, but it has given me some ideas for when the time comes so I won’t have to start out from scratch.