This was a very enjoyable fast paced novel. Would definitely recommend, brilliant! The thing that I loved in this book the most was his attention to little details. These details really helped to complete the feel of the sci-fi world his characters inhabited. The story was great and loved the ending except for the very last chapter. This one felt too much like a concession to leave the door open for an “Ubik 2”. Other than that, a fantastic book. ...

Finished this book UNABRIDGED, double plus good. Hated how believable it was. This should be required reading. The main new idea I got this time through was that the party doctrine sounded a little bit like biocentrism. They had just swapped the party for consciousness. Biocentrism says reality exists only by conscious observation. Winston said reality only has true existence by the party’s doctrine. He who owns the present owns the past. Winston’s point about immortality through the party is also the same point that people have made about the “I” continuing to exist through the other “I"s that succeed it. In Winston’s case he believed he was immortal because the party would never die. I think this is a great insight by Orwell, because it would seem that it is impossible to set up a society without bringing along metaphysical baggage. The desire (need?) for metaphysics is like a sexuality that if repressed just comes through the cracks in very disturbing ways.

I had bought this monstrosity of a book shortly before moving to Africa. I had heard an interview about it on NPR which piqued my interest. I had planned to read it in my down time and on flights but I was a beta reader back then and only got a couple hundred pages in before getting distracted. One of my pacts I’ve made with myself is not to have a book on my bookshelf that I haven’t read and this one had been staring at me for half a decade. I picked it back up and was surprised how interesting it was. It is actually 5 novels in one book that are tied together by common thematic elements. There is an obscure German author who goes by the pseudonym Archomboldi and the book opens with 4 literary professors from different parts of Europe who are obsessed by this obscure author. The author’s real name is unknown, but they spend many years trying to glean personal details about him from his publisher and anyone else who has ever heard of him. They end up in the small town of Santa Teresa Mexico where they had gotten a tip he was hiding. This small Mexican town plays as the second key thematic element and becomes a focal point that shows up again and again in the other novels. There is a rash of women being killed in Santa Teresa, over 200, and the police can’t seem to do anything about it. This is the backdrop for the lives of the next several novel’s main characters. We follow a washed-out professor, a detective, a journalist from Brooklyn, and many many more characters who are somehow all drawn to the town in one way or another. I guess Bolano was a good short story author, and this is his magnum opus where he writes his longest book. I didn’t realize this while reading, but it makes sense because really this book is group of short stories that are linked together loosely by various details. I definitely had to shift into low gear on this book, as you must be prepared to get sidetracked by anyone’s life story at any point. Also, there isn’t always a neat ending to the novels. Many are left feeling a little unfinished. If you are ok with that and are not in a rush, the book takes you many strange and interesting places. From Chile with a struggling film crew that is trying to make a raunchy B movie into the head of an aging black man who is the last member of his communist cell in Boston. The magnitude of detail in this book is mind boggling. Just thinking about the amount of imagination it took to create these many backstories is overwhelming. I started to become more and more worried as I came to the end that things would not be tied up, but in the last 30 pages he pulls it out a sort of No Country for Old Men ending. An ending that is not complete but is still satisfying in its own way.

After talking about it yesterday oh my brothers, I got curious, and your humble narrator checked out the book. Overall, I couldn’t believe how much of the book was fit into the Kubrick movie. It made me respect the movie that much more. To me, it seemed to perfectly communicate the ideas of the book without much loss in translation. Anthony Burgess wrote it in 3 weeks. He originally wrote it with 21 chapters to signify 21 years, the age of an adult, but when trying to get it published in New York the publisher wanted to cut the last chapter. Needing the money, he agreed, and this is the version that the film was based on. Naturally this burned the author’s beans and he thought that this was a huge mistake. Inevitably, this book ended up becoming his most influential as well as his least liked book that he authored. ...

I find myself questioning how things are typically done to see if there are any better ways out there. Currently my interest is focused on education. This book is widely recommended by overanxious parents everywhere. If I remember correctly Alethea was founded on some classical principles that were most likely inspired by Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) and Sayers is a contemporary of Mason (1842-1923). Most likely influenced by her. Their methods have a lot of overlap but some differences as well. Charlotte Mason thought that all kids should have the right to an education and not just the rich ones. She came up with her own method of education which minimized the amount of time talking by the teacher and replaced it with the students “narrating” what they had just read. This narration is a cornerstone to her method as she believes it cements what the student has learned in their minds and helps the student to incorporate the new knowledge into their brains. I sure hope this is true as this is the main reason I write these reviews. She also believed that children did not need to be trained how to think but instead should be exposed to the best thinkers and use their innate reasoning to process the best kinds of information. She believed that every subject (excluding math) should be taught in a literary form as story is the best way to learn. The younger children would narrate paragraph by paragraph, then chapter by chapter and then finally an entire book at a time. This narration would start out in verbal form but would eventually become written. In short starting from around age 6 children should be exposed to the best art, literature, music the world has to offer and this “mind stuff” will be good food for a growing brain. This nutritive aspect of learning is also prominent in Mason’s thinking. For the postmodern push back, Mason assumed everyone would be on the same page when she said “best stuff” i.e. Dickens, Rembrandt, Mozart etc. But why not Peterson, Heffner, and Cardie B? I tended to agree with her approach as I feel like kids often underachieve because they aren’t asked to achieve anything worth achieving. The other thing about her method which was interesting was she didn’t like tests, or homework, but structured her curriculum to be consumed (dependent on stellar focus, which may be a relic by now) at high speed in the morning and then in the afternoon to work on handicrafts or learn out in nature. Give the children beautiful things to think about and they will become beautiful thinkers. Overall, I enjoyed the book, and it gave me some valuable perspective from a very experienced and well-read person. The downside of this is that I don’t know how realistic it was as a lot of it sounded insane in a modern context, but I would love to be wrong on that point.

I’ll keep this one short. As the cover says, this book was written by the guy who also wrote kite runner, which was a very good book. This being my second book of his the appeal wasn’t there as much for me this time around. This story was also centered in Afghanistan (I started reading before the US troop pull-out and subsequent Taliban takeover in 2021, so it was synchronistic) and follows the life story of two women who end up living in the same house because one of them was forced to marry this dude as a child and the other was kind of forced due to the ongoing war. Similar to Kite Runner its cool to get a glimpse into the life of folks where you have no clue how they do what they do. This book was really entertaining and easy to read. The story itself was very dark. I enjoyed reading this book but wouldn’t label it as a “must read” especially if you get your hands on any of his other stuff first. Good stuff, prepare for despair.

Poe isn’t my favorite author, but I bought his complete works by accident (can’t’ remember why) and so my rule is that everything on the shelf has to have been read. The book presents his works in three stages. His poems, his short fiction and essays and one long from essay and one short novel at the end of the book. I must say I was not a huge fan of his poetry (not that I am any authority) either from confirmation bias or some other mechanism his more popular poems like the Raven and the bells seem to stand head and shoulders over the other works, like a band that made that really good song once upon a time. That isn’t to say there wasn’t anything worthwhile in this section, here is one of my favorites. ...

Enjoyed, a few points that stuck out to me. If people with high IQs learn to practice emotional intelligence or EQ then we are all screwed -Unlike IQ there is no test (author claims there might never be) to measure EQ. -The way your brain works against itself will never stop being interesting. -EQ seems like the alpha version to something that better quantifies the right brains responsibilities.

So, in this surprising newsflash, we feature a story about how Ernest Hemingway is actually a really good writer. This story was set in the Spanish civil war where a mix of communists and republicans were fighting an established fascist government. The book follows an American named Robert Jordan who is fighting for the communist resistance. He is employed as a dynamiter and instructed to blow up a bridge behind enemy lines. There were two things that stuck out to me from this book. First is that Hemingway is probably the manliest man I’ve ever read. But in the best way possible. In my opinion this book is a great antidote to “toxic masculinity”. There is no machismo, chest thumping or other forms of “compensation”. Instead, there is a confident determination to carry out one’s responsibilities and to not be found wanting when the key moment arises. The main character is a blueprint of competency without arrogance. He managed to do that as well as write two female characters that seemed complex and layered. Hats off to you sir. The second thing was, it has been a while since I’ve read a book where I felt like I could see exactly what the main character was seeing. Hemingway manages to describe the setting and scenes so well I felt myself in the pine forests in the mountains of Spain. Or as an eyewitness to a massacre perpetrated by victorious rebels. This book makes you feel a full range of emotions.

I listened to this whole book, then went back and listened to the first half again, to try and cement an understanding of his argument which could be fairly complicated. The goal of the book was to give a convincing explanation of Scientific Materialism. So instead of “A Case for Christ” this would be “A Case for Darwin”. It was pretty nice to hear the best arguments for materialism from a guy who has spent much of his life studying the problem, but it took extra concentration to keep up as the reasoning was so different from the usual hippy pan psychic stuff I’ve been reading of late. Here are some thoughts, ...