This book is Sagan’s ode to science. The point of this book is to argue the science is the most reliable way that humans have come up with for making descriptive statements about reality. Not a particularly novel concept but it is deftly laid out in this book. He starts out by destroying the man in the moon with facts and logic. Showing how only simpletons could believe the moon is made out of cheese. He then talks about aliens and draws very interesting links between alien abduction stories and the stories of witches during the 1600s. He draws a causal link between scientific knowledge and economic success and its converse which is the loss of scientific thinking producing poverty. He makes compelling arguments as to how America is largely scientifically illiterate and that more funding should be directed away from defense and towards education and general science. He gives some historical insights for funding general science and not just science for the sake of medicine and technology, arguing that general science is typically the best way to make technological and medicinal breakthroughs. The secondary point of this book was to try and convince everyone to be a skeptic. In line with this he describes what he calls as a “bologna detection kit”. This kit contains several logical fallacies used by politicians and bad actors to trick people into believing something. Shots fired at the authors of the bell curve in this book as well which was unexpected. I was expecting this book to be a lot more condescending than it was. Sagan’s tone was actually fairly polite and made a lot of sense. Definitely a little bit of a wet blanket to have at a party though. A lot of good ideas in here, not mind blowing but definitely helpful to remember when trying to build your worldview. ...

I have read Dante’s Inferno a couple times, but it is part one of the trilogy titled the Divine Comedy. The first part is Inferno, then Purgatorio, and lastly Paradiso. So, when I finally got a hard copy that contained all three parts I was excited to check out the other pieces of it. First things first, these books are very difficult to read for two main reasons. Language The language in this book can be very tricky. That is because the whole book is a poem written in (3-line stanzas) also in Italian. This makes the job of translator especially difficult to try and maintain the rhythm of the poem. On top of that since it is poetic there are many times where a very simple action like: person A asks person B a question can span paragraphs and therefore make it difficult to always keep track of what is going on. ...

The Double is Dostoyevsky’s second published work and is a definite precursor to much of his later work. Following the life of a low-level bureaucrat named Golyadkin for a couple chaotic days. Golyadkin is a weak and flakey person with crippling anxiety and bordering on psychotic. After attending a party and committing some embarrassing party fouls he is thrown out into the snowy night in St. Petersburg. It is in this state that Golyadkin literally bumps into his double a person that looks just like him and even shares his name. The rest of the book follows the relationship of these two characters as the double is the inverse of the real Golyadkin and has everything the original lacks. This book was also adapted into a movie with Jesse Eisenburg who is a great match for this character. The style is very surreal and also satirical it is much different from anything else I’ve read from Dostoyevsky. It was also the worst book I’ve read from him, in fact I think he says it best ...

I’ve listened to Sammy boy’s podcast a fair bit so I figured I should check out some of his work. In the End of Faith, he comes out of the gate swinging. This book was written in 2005 while the Twin Towers were still fresh in everyone’s minds. So, while it pulls no punches for any religion there is a special place in Sam’s hell for Islam. He claims that much like we have retired Zeus and Apollo it is time to do the same to Jesus and Mohammed. A central claim of this book is that religion is that last place in society that has managed to remove itself from criticism. It attempts to justify itself from reason while dismissing reason as a valid way to understanding its truths. He then makes some interesting points about religious moderates not really helping things because to those living the letter of the law a religious moderate is a failed fundamentalist who will likely end up in hell. This is a very valid insight in my opinion, moderates have no leg to stand on. To me this has always been my biggest thing against “Jesus loved the gays” viewpoint. Another quip “sacred texts are sacred because they were thought so yesterday”. He then fires some shots at Bill Moyers trying to revivify these traditions. Right or wrong at points in the book Harris feels like an angry parent who wants to tell us: “you’ve been very naughty with your myths and so you’ve lost your privilege to use them! Go to your room and think about what you’ve done.” He also brought up this point (that I haven’t been able to verify) about the impossibility of removing contradictory beliefs from your own head. He said, if there was a computer as large as the universe made up circuits the size of protons running at the speed of light that verified each new belief against all its prior beliefs before continuing, and this computer had been running since the big bang it would still be working on cross referencing its 300th belief. Yikes! Another interesting insight is the concept that belief may be a passive response from the brain while in order to disbelieve something you have to expend mental effort. Good for Tigers in the jungle, bad for Bitcoin taking me to the moon. He then makes the common critique of sacred texts easily being used to justify violence (i.e. stoning an adulterer in the OT or killing infidels in the Koran), indeed he argues that it takes more work most times to sidestep such awkward verses than to accept them. Fair play! He does some minor stanning for the Israel/ Palestine situation, arguing that if Palestine was in power there wouldn’t be a conflict because there wouldn’t be any Israel left. This too seems like a fair point. He criticizes Chomsky for laying the responsibility at the foot of American foreign policy arguing that America’s foreign policy is not the driving factor behind terrorist attacks and that religion is. If you stop and think about it Chomsky’s opinion does seem a little weak, because one would expect many more Vietnamize suicide bombers than Middle Eastern suicide bombers, but to Sam’s point the Vietnamize aren’t Muslim. Chomsky has further made the classic liberal blunder of attributing unequal ethical blame to the actions of those in power. One only has to stop and question the motives of the two sides. The US seems to go out of its way to reduce civilian casualties while the Taliban seems to do the opposite. Cynically you could say that to the Taliban every civilian dead is one less infidel, while to the US every civilian dead is bad PR. He then ends the book making a case for spirituality without un-reason. In particular he singles out how the eastern traditions have largely been able to make a form of spirituality the is based on experience and not faith. Overall, I think that this book, similarly to “The case for Christ” will not convince anyone one way or the other about religion unless they were already halfway there. I found some compelling critiques and ideas to munch on and that is good enough for me. He received a lot of flak in the book for making the statement “There are some ideas that are worth killing someone over”. This is a great statement to vilify someone until further inspection and it becomes patently obvious that this is the only reason, we kill anyone and so the statement is almost pointless. Not a must read, especially if you’ve listened to any of his stuff for very long as you probably already understand most of the ideas put forth in the book. The book itself is well written and entertaining. People/Sam Harris

I had never read any Emerson and was excited to stick my toe in the water. This book was a collection of some of his most famous essays. Written in the mid nineteenth century he is one of those early American intellectuals which seemed to have burned brightly and all but disappeared. Emerson was one of the leaders of the transcendentalist movement which started in the 1820s-1830s. These essays do a lot to outline in vague terms the ideas Emerson had about life. Which are essentially romantic, you as the individual are the orthodox of your life. Heaven is not a place out there somewhere, but something that can be experienced in everyday life given the right mindset. Humans are at their best when they are reliant on themselves for their ideas and beliefs. Man is one thing, that an individual rises out of, this is what gives literature its meaning in the sense that it speaks to that common denominator in all of us. “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” These essays covered a wide range of topics my personal favorites were on friendship and self-reliance. This will definitely be a book I am looking forward to getting a hard copy of, because his writing is so poetic as it is probably best enjoyed a sentence or a paragraph at a time. Very beautifully written. Emerson himself was a Unitarian minister when he was younger but ended up resigning largely because his worldview no longer aligned with what the church’s dogma. I respect that, and that American individualism is everywhere in his texts. As a sad side note in his old age about a decade before his death he started suffering from aphasia. Aphasia is the inability to comprehend or formulate speech. A cruel irony.

This was an experience, a probably literal fever dream. This book was never meant to be published as most of it is notes that he had written to himself. As such it isn’t the best most fun read, but it would probably be the most interesting journal you ever read. To me this book has its highs and lows. There are parts of this book that are fascinating, frustrating, redundant, contradictory, brilliant, and insightful. Being a preeminent science fiction writer, his strength is in his original ideas. There is no end to them. This book’s inspiration is based on a series of events that led him to the experience of singular mystical experience that was so life changing to him that he spends the next 8 years theorizing about its source and significance. He only stops theorizing about it because he died. As a reader it makes you want to experience something that significant just once in your life, but then again maybe not. Due to the type of mystical experience that was had, religious terms are best suited to try and describe it, but rest assured this religion of PKD is unlike any you’ve ever heard. I wrote down some of the ideas that stuck out to me, that I will continue to think about for a while. ...

I was gifted this book and was completely shocked by how entertaining and well written this was. It was a joy to read but unsurprisingly depressing. The story is about a family of tenant farmers in the dust bowl that get booted off their farm in Oklahoma and travel West in hopes of work. This book to me is the Uncle Tom’s cabin but for sharecroppers. Steinbeck takes no prisoners in his scathing critique of laissez faire capitalism that completely hung the poor people out to dry during the Great Depression. A master class on making interesting and contextualized dialogue, conversations are thought provoking and extremely moving. I wanted to travel back in time to punch those big banks right in the kisser, I’m voting Bernie Sanders next year. What was also unsurprising was that upon publication, this book was immediately considered as communist propaganda, was banned, burned, and censored. Put this on your list in front of “Of Mice and Men” if that book is on your list as I think this one is much better from John. Here are two excerpts to give you a sense of style, both are unrelated to the main plot, so NO SPOILERS ...

This book was actually a lot more entertaining than I thought it was going to be. This story is around the legend of the siege of Troy. The story opens with a disagreement between Achilles and Agamemnon, after the siege had been going on for over a decade. Agamemnon had stolen a girl from Achilles that he had “rightfully” won in sacking a city. For this reason Achilles sits out on the fighting and watches as the Achaeans get their asses handed to them by the trojans. This book is full of chads and it reads somewhat like a marvel comic book story where you have 4 main levels of characters that make for some really interesting dynamics. ...

A very interesting tale. This book is full of new details I can almost guarantee most people haven’t heard of or thought about. I did have some minor knit picks with the book. I didn’t appreciate how the author constantly presented theories and then always incorporated them into his speech as facts. It works like the following: My theory is that there is life on mars………………so springtime for a Martian is wild, because Martians have to deal with crazy climatic elements unique to Martians and Martian society. ...

Published in 1962, nine years after his psychedelic experience that he documented in Doors of Perception, Huxley writes the “yang” to Brave New World’s “yin”. This story follows a cynical journalist who is shipwrecked on an island called Pala. These people do things in their own way thanks to the chance encounter between a Scottish doctor and the previous King of Pala about a hundred years prior to the main story in the book. The island represents a utopia imagined by Aldous with the best of east and west. This book started off with a bang then lagged a little in the middle but picked up at the end. Like many utopian ideas there is no shortage of opportunities to pick holes in ideas and explain why they wouldn’t work, but instead of doing that I’ll point out some ideas that seemed really interesting: ...