This was one of the densest and most abstract books I’ve read. The first section was Karl Marx breaking down his view of economy down to first principles. Answering questions like where money comes from, how are babies made and what’s the difference between the commodity form of gold and the money form of gold. Descriptions of the relationships between supply and demand in the simplest and in my view unnecessarily dry way. This discussion turned to how capital breeds capital. The book is full of references to the terrible working conditions for people during the industrial revolution. Really makes you glad that you live in an era of 40-hour work weeks and PTO. It seems like in some sick twisted way a pinko commie might have been what was necessary to get the people riled up enough to push the glacial pace of change in the right direction. Part of me wonders if Marx was alive today if he would still be as anti-capitalist (I know, I know, put your sickles down) as he was. I feel like the answer would be yes and I would be disappointed. It seems to me that many of his complaints about capitalism, while still inherent in our economy, have been addressed. Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Overall Marx was a brilliant thinker, and I can see why he thought the way he did. It would be hard not to agree with him back in the day when six-year-olds were forced to work 17-hour shifts. ...

This is a collection of four short /ish stories by the king of Steve. It was all in all very entertaining. I can see why people like the guy. A little pedestrian at points but always in a diverting way. His characters are always believable and easy (for me at least) to relate to.

This is a memoir of a girl raised in a strict Mormon household by a dad who had bipolar. It was recommended to me by sister which is why I checked it out. Basically, the dad has a lot of weird convictions that span from not having any dairy products in the house to not enrolling their kids in public school. The story heavily documents what it’s like to be trapped in a life where you have no control. Many parallels to our own childhood could be drawn from the book although our childhood was better in many ways. The stories she tells are very interesting and sad but by the end of the book I had grown a little tired of her tone. You can only listen to someone explain how someone else has mistreated them for so long before you start to not care. The author is a pretty impressive. In spite of it all she able to earn a doctorate at a prestigious college. All in all, not upset I read it but I didn’t feel like I gained a lot from it. Although I will say there is a sort of attractive form to feminism that is posed in the book that I found interesting.

So, Spinoza is an interesting guy. He was brought up Jewish but ended up coming up with his own philosophy of God which didn’t really agree with anyone that was around him at the time. This book wasn’t published during his life but shortly after his death by his friends. He did this because there were a lot of “burn the witch” things going on so I guess he didn’t want his beans burned. The book itself reads like a mathematical book of proofs where he lays out his Axioms, Propositions, Lemmas and proofs. Due to this it was sometimes difficult to keep up, but there were still many interesting ideas picked up. His two cornerstone ideas (IMO) were his definition of “Substance” and his idea of “God”. To him substance was something that can be explained independent of anything else. With this definition it is really difficult to figure out even one thing that can have this label. (This is a fun mental exercise). His definition of God is linked to his idea of substance in that God is absolute infinite substance. He expands on this idea throughout the whole book as a foundation to his ethics. This could be viewed as a form or inspiration for the following transcendentalism movement.

This is a collection of short stories written by Ray Bradbury. The stories varied in length from a half hour to a little over an hour. The stories are a sort of anthology. Some really brilliant stuff in here. Very much like good black mirror/ twilight zone episodes. In fact, I want to send a copy of it to the black mirror studios so they can make good stories again. Not every story was a homerun but there were quite a few that were brilliant. The “title track” story actually was turned into a twilight zone episode. So, if you don’t read the book, you can at least watch that episode to get a taste of what the book was like. A lot of robots.

Premise : group of boys 13 and under get stranded on a desert island. Chaos ensues as they try to build a society with immature minds. Gets dark pretty fast. Interesting implications about the origin of religion and the effect of personality on political tendencies. Definitely more of a Hobbes take on men in the state of nature. Very entertaining and not hard to follow Leviathan

This is pretty much a handbook on how to start a successful anti-establishment movement. It has been used to great affect by a handful of dictators including Saddam Hussein to help organize movements. So, it is full of actually brilliant ideas on how to present/ manage an insurgency. Probably most notably how to produce effective propaganda. It touches on many big ideas about group mindsets including but not limited to, who you should target your revolution too, how you should handle other revolutionary groups with similar ideas, and how to select proper targets to keep your mini revolution energized. Aside from that he had some interesting ideas about education, compelling anti-democracy arguments, and an unexpected view about morality of the state. That being said obviously he has some less than flattering things to say about people of Jewish heritage and others. To be honest I was surprised to see how weak his racial arguments were. There wasn’t much proof to any statements that he made about races. It was mostly just true because he said it was. I could see that if you were a German living in post WW1 Germany where you had probably lost several family members to the war and had got less than nothing in return that assertions that Hitler makes might be attractive. But to an outside observer it mostly just seemed convenient. This was probably one of my least favorite books I have read this year because of the length. It seemed to drag on unnecessarily long for the subjects that were covered in it. I was happy to put this book behind me and move on to hopefully greener pastures.

In 1864, Russia and the Western world was experiencing a philosophical reversal with reverberations that can still be felt almost two hundred years later. One by one “unquestionable” truths were being placed in the dust bin by a cold rationality. The attack on humanity’s placement of itself in the universe started over three hundred years earlier, when a polymath named Copernicus rediscovered the forgotten truth that we are not the center of the universe. Ever since then, the more scientific details that are catalogued about the world, the further man is pushed from that once prized and secure position. There are two main ideas that the underground man (UM) simultaneously seems to prove by his actions and disapprove of by his words. First is man as nature, the second is man as automata, and by extension nature as automata. It had only been five years since Charles Darwin had written ‘On the Origin of Species’ and already Dostoyevsky has incorporated his theory and worked out what he sees as its possible ramifications. Chiefly that of an alienated human that is horrified to look in the mirror and see no-thing looking back. In an opening note to the book Dostoevsky makes clear that the UM is an inevitable product of the spread of these two ideologies. The book opens with the memorable… ...

Written by the same guy who wrote grapes of wrath, this book was written in the late 1930s right near the end of the great depression and as a result this book is greatly depressing. It covers the story of two main characters named George and Lenny. Both of them had been traveling together for quite some time and the book opens with them heading to their next short-term gig. George is a scrawny scrappy guy and Lenny is a giant fella who has the intellect of a child. This unlikely pair stick together because of a shared common goal. They both want to get a farm and have some land to call their own. Set in an idyllic countryside there are plenty of foreboding details that Steinbeck gives to the reader throughout the book hinting at the ending. All and all a very interesting but depressing story. Great writing

I feel like this probably could be considered a primer for the much longer gulag archipelago. This story covers as the title says a fictional character (Ivan) for a day. Although the story is fiction, the experiences described in the book were definitely not. If you decide to read this book prepare to feel hungry and cold for approximately four and a half hours. The book is written from the perspective of Ivan Denisovich who is doing a ten-year sentence on fake charges. Provides a window into the mindset required (or at least according to Ivan) to survive in a Russian gulag. The story is well written easy to understand and a page turner.