Reviews

A witty read that follows a gullible but beneficent aristocrat (Samuel Pickwick) and his friends that form the Pickwick Club around as they galivant around the English countryside. Eating, drinking and getting into trouble. A brilliant writer, Dickens manages to convey the frivolity of life with an irresistible charm that makes you want to join in, even though it is all very silly. Filled with adventures as well as short stories told by various characters the plot is only loosely attended to, allowing the reader to hear many stories in one. is one of my favorite short stories. I will say that there are many stories where the characters get in trouble in somewhat stressful ways. Not sure what the name of this troupe is, but for example the main character gets lost in a hotel in the middle of the night. Returns to a room that looks just like his and starts to settle down but as the reader you are pretty sure that it isn’t his room. He is nearly asleep when a woman walks in, but due to the lighting he only sees the shape of a person and hides behind some drapes thinking it was a thief before realizing it was a woman, and that he must be in her room. This puts him in a very awkward position of course and as the reader you also happen to know that he was just hanging out with a guy who had come to that hotel to propose to a woman and naturally the woman in the room ends up being the same woman who was to be proposed to the next day and on and on. So if you don’t find that stuff entertaining than this isn’t for you, but I much enjoy. I guess a little similar to Naked Gun or something, but the protagonist isn’t quite so bumbling. All in all, good

The Plague is a fictional story about a cousin of the Bubonic plague reappearing in the town of Oran in Algeria on the North coast of Africa. As an aside the stranger also took place mostly in Algeria but in a different city. Really well written but quite dark, reading the plague was maybe a little too soon after COVID, but it was a great reminder that we are incredibly lucky that things weren’t as bad as they could have been. The story follows the doomed efforts of a doctor to treat the untreatable or in the doctor’s words “an endless defeat”. Yet with dogged persistence and help of a friend they organize a small crew inside the cutoff city to do what they can to stem the tide of the disease. As Camus was also a part of the French resistance in WW2 there are obvious parallels to the feelings of hopelessness but rebellion in the face of it ...

I love myths, so this book was really interesting in that regard. It goes well beyond the common ones that you’ve heard. Definitely made me want to read more about myths from North America. Campbell and Peterson seem like two peas in a pod although it seems like one pea (Peterson) has spent more time looking into the abyss than the other, for better or worse. This book is very staccato, an idea broached, a story told and then moved past to the next. What was at first a conversation between Campbell and Moyers was transcribed into the power of myth. In this sense it made for a poor book seeing as a book is the best medium we have for long form thought, but a conversation unless purely one sided can never truly be long form. The silver lining was that you were able to witness a huge breadth of Campbell’s beliefs instead of a narrow but deep vein. It made for a good overview of his position so that if you ever were to read one of his books in the future you won’t be starting from scratch. The connections made in this book were very interesting and food for more research. I am especially interested in the connection of the rise and fall of goddesses and the beginning of agriculture. Simone de Beauvoir pointed out essentially the same thing and for the similar reasons. Campbell seems places the chain of causality to be: ...

This is the book that I think the idea of Freudian slips comes from. It is an investigation into brain farts basically. He investigates various mental mistakes like not being able to remember a person’s name and the circumstances that cause these mistakes. This book was surprisingly practical for the most part, especially when compared to the psychology of dreams. I found that a lot of his explanations for things made sense in a logical way and didn’t seem to be too much of a reach. The format of this book is he would basically dedicate a chapter to a particular mistake, take misplacing things for example. He would then explain what he thought the reason for this was and then he would offer between 10 and 20 anecdotal stories that helped to solidify his point. Overall, a pretty interesting read that will make you stop and ask yourself next time you stub your toe: “was this just an accident? Or did I secretly not want to have kids and gave expression to this wish by kicking that wall” ...

Summary Matt Ridley sets out to explain why, despite how it may feel, we live in the brightest point in history and the future is likely to be even brighter. Homo Sapiens are an incredible species, which always raises the question of how we got to be this way. What set us on this path that allowed us to specialize in ways unique in our known universe. Ridley wants to argue that the distinguishing feature was trade. Trade allows for specialization, and we should think of specialization as skill storage. You learn how to make an axe, I’ll learn how to grow corn etc. etc. In this way the amount of knowledge available continues to grow the more trading connections we enter into. For a few ears of corn, I can make use of years of R&D that you’ve committed to making the axe. From a game theory point of view this is a win win. As you can make axes better than me, and I can grow corn better than you. The result is a net increase in material wealth. As the community grows and more nodes in the form of human brains join the network, the amount of specialized knowledge grows combinatorically because although the skills are siloed the results are not. For example, if you make a better axe, I can clear forests easier to make more corn than before and so on. This is a fundamental argument for free and global trade, as there seems to be no upper limit to idea storage in the universe. ...

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. ...

Summary Haidt argues that morality is an emergent property from the neurological equivalent of taste buds and that different types of people have different tastes. He also makes the case that our moral judgements are gut feelings justified by post hoc rationalizations. Haidt also takes a dualistic approach to mind, comparing it to an elephant with a rider. The elephant represents inarticulate passions while the rider represents the part of the brain that reasons. From here he uses the divide between liberal (using the American definition meaning those on the left side of politics) and conservative to highlight the different moral taste buds that each political party activates. ...

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. ...

Summary A nameless father with his nameless boy tries to survive in a world that has been destroyed by a nameless catastrophe. Whatever it was that destroyed the earth left its surface coated in ashes and its skies so perpetually cloudy that nothing can survive. There is no life save a few scattered bands of humans slowly dying off by starvation or violence. Thoughts McCarthy does a great job of world building, or I should say withering. It turns out he can describe dilapidated cityscapes just as well as western prairies. This book has been lauded as being a champion for climate change, but I think that is incidental. The main question is as Camus says, “why not commit suicide?”. McCarthy destroys the world and all the creeping things that crawl along its face just to put this question in sharper relief. This book also made me realize that all post-apocalyptic stories are actually just visions of who humans are without society. There are many mini apocalypses in history we can use for inspiration, like the siege of Leningrad or countless other sieges that remove the mask of society to expose the truth that lies beneath, the earth is not a symphony of symbiosis, but a network of mouths and teeth. Even your own body will eat itself if you can’t find something else to sacrifice. ...

And upon completion of this book, I would like to please receive a paper certificate that indicates my commitment to the advance of woman’s equality in society. Furthermore, I would like to be acknowledged as being a forerunner in the movement to bring about a peaceful conclusion to the war between the sexes. To put it shortly I feel as though I have solved all issues based on sex and am equipped to fully exercise my god given authority over women now that I have a complete understanding of them. Jokes aside this was a very dense book, but had many valuable insights nestled in there. Published in 1949 the information, descriptions, and approach of this book are unavoidably dated, due to the fact that it has been so influential in shaping modern conceptions of “the plight of womankind”. That being said I feel as though our upbringing and indoctrination created similar expectations about women as those widely held in the 50s. So, this book was ‘convicting’ more so for me than it probably would be for most people in our modern culture. Split into two volumes the first volume discusses what “woman” is. Looking first at biological examples from various insects, animals and eventually humans. Then with this foundation she transitions from the physiological to the psychological. While critical of most thinkers (like Freud and Adler) that had attempted to analysis woman’s condition it is easy to tell that she was heavily influenced by their form of analysis. I’ve seen/heard many people talk about how she completely disagreed with these thinkers, but that is not how I read it. For example, the Freudian concept about women suffering from penis envy, is rebaptized in her thought as the fact that women are envious of the privileges that come along with having a penis. This is a long and interesting (to me) conversation but long story short, I don’t see this view as a complete contradiction, but more of a reformation. She ends volume 1 with an in depth look at the various mythical styling that are given to women. In particular focusing on a handful of author’s depictions as a case study. Noting that each of these different types of mythologies make heavy use of mystery when describing woman. This mystery is largely responsible for creating this idea of the “other” where woman isn’t another subjective free acting human, but something else. Volume 2 then describes woman’s experience from infancy to old age. This section was actually very interesting to me, and I feel like I learned a fair bit that I was not aware of previously. To summarize, the distance between the starting line and the finish line of becoming a unified self is much longer and more confusing for women than it is for men. There are many more opportunities for women to stop halfway on the path to individualization than there are for men thanks in large part (but not entirely) to the path society has set out for them. She then cycles through many stereotypes of women and provides a psychoanalysis of each case which would always start off with me thinking she was insane, or overstating things and by the end, everything she said started making sense. The book concludes with her talking about why there haven’t been very many great women authors, artists, etc. Put simply (do not strike me dead Simone) women have to first convince themselves and the world that they are competent individuals. This initial effort takes so much energy and time that they are left with little energy to go further. This “going further” is essential in becoming great. Few men achieve it even with having a head start, which explains why even fewer women achieve it, and why “Wuthering Heights, in spite of its stature, does not have the scope of Brothers Karamazov” (Had to sneak in a Dostoevsky plug in there). You cannot expect a black slave to write a transcendent epic like Moby Dick, because the experiences that allowed the author to create the epic are not open to the slave. This book was, as I said dense. Some parts were slow, others interesting. But most modern ideas about birth control, abortion and economic equality of the sexes, and objectification have their birthplace in this book. I could definitely see re-reading some of these sections again to be reminded of some of the insights she presented. Great stuff