Reviews

Man, this book was an experience. Not altogether pleasant either. I’ve never read a book before where I felt like the author almost wanted you to quit reading it. Really, I’ve just never read a book like this one before. Published in 1922 banned by censorship panels in various countries for around a decade, this book is a groundbreaking work to be sure. In short, this book describes events that take place on June 16, 1904, in Dublin, mostly focused on two characters Leopold Bloom and Stephen Deadalus. There is nothing special about the day it could have been written about 2 other characters in a different place in a different time and had the same effect. It seems to be a meditation on how everyday contains the entire range of human experience. Like every day is a universe onto itself or something like that. The best way I can explain the experience is to imagine being trapped inside someone’s brain where you could hear every thought they had but could not experience the world in any other way. So, you never hear anything you instead hear the processed thought the sound triggers. You never see anything, you instead piece together the outside world through flashes of objects and impressions. This style produces two effects. The first one is that I’ve never felt so intimately connected with a character in a book before. By the end of the book, you literally know Leopold Bloom better than his closest friends and maybe even himself. One example of this is that I’ve never read a book where you live through someone taking a shit. It was described so well you feel like you are actually sitting inside a dude’s head while he is sitting on a toilet reading a book and making a big mud pie. The second effect is confusion. There is no explanation in this book. Everything just “is”. A character has a memory of so and so doing this and that, but I have never heard of so and so and I don’t have any context for why them doing this and that is important. This confusion is unavoidable for the style though, as you would be this confused being jacked into someone’s stream of conscious. The other thing is that this book is deeply rooted into Dublin. Joyce plotted out each character’s movements in a map and calculated their positions based on average walking speed, etc. So again, you are almost required to know Dublin to not get overwhelmed with a long list of roads, landmarks and other geographically accurate markers. On top of all this everything can shift from episode to episode. You may be at one place in time at the end of one episode and without warning start in a completely new place and time in the next with no explanation, or sometimes actually go back in time. The writing styles also shift as Joyce seemed determined to flex on Shakespeare. In fact, there is one episode where he parodies every single writing style in western literature from Herodotus to Dickens. Then there is also the fact that the line between a character imagining an event taking place and an event actually taking place isn’t demarked by anything. Again, remember that you aren’t seeing anything, you are hearing about what someone saw, or in some cases imagined. Finally, this book was written to be read and re-read. So, there are many things that don’t really make sense at all in the beginning that you are “supposed to know” but you don’t until later on. Overall, this was not a fun read. I wouldn’t recommend it to most people. I ended up finding a helpful companion guide because some episodes were so confusing that I really had no idea what was going on. Check out website where someone plotted out all the characters movement/places in the real world in a single episode to see the complexity Joyce was working with. That being said I’m glad I read it. It was incredibly written and unbelievable complex. I know if I was smarter, I would appreciate it more. I’ll come back to it someday and maybe enjoy it more on the second read. The most unique book I’ve read in a while, so if you’re interested in novel styles I’d recommend it, but you’d have to be REALLY interested. I’ll leave this review with a quote that was memorable and seems like a good example of the overall tone. ...

Another short book that has been on my list for a while. Utopia was published in 1516 and while preceded by several utopian style books before it (most notably Plato’s Republic) it was one of the earliest utopian novels created after the printing press had been invented (1436). Partly serious, partly satirical it seems to be a pretty gutsy book to have been written when it was considering the Spanish Inquisition started in 1478. This book describes a fictional island called “Utopia”. The island had the following interesting attributes: ...

This book was a treat. Essentially picture Marc-Andre Leclerc (from the Alpinist) with an education and it will put you in the right head space. Thoreau lives in a 10X15 cabin he built with just the bare essentials, eating what he grows and seldom going into town. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.” ...

I don’t get paid enough to do a proper review of this book, so here’s an improper review for ya. War and Peace covers about 8 years of history from 1805-1813. This is the part of history where Napoleon invades Europe and makes it all the way to Russia, culminating in the war of 1812. It is a realist novel, as Tolstoy did an unbelievable amount of research into the war and paints an incredibly detailed picture of the invasion. The central theme of this book (to me) is history, and the way people relate to it. ...

Fantastic biography. Washington was absolutely instrumental to the birth of the US. It is hard to imagine the country having survived with any other leader at the helm. Although he was vain, insecure, and not the brightest in the pantheon of the founding fathers, his heroism and commitment to the ideals of liberty more than make up for any personal short comings.

Summary Sally Adee, a well-published science and technology journalist, writes her first book about a major shift she has been witnessing in biology, and it all has to do with electricity. She opens the book with a brief history of what we know about electricity and how we discovered what we do know. Spoiler alert: it includes a lot of frogs. The main thing she wanted to highlight was that during the beginning of research into electrical phenomena, the field quickly branched into two directions. One branch focused on what was called animal electricity, while the other focused more on non-animal electricity. At this early stage of research, neither branch had reliable tools to conduct empirical science. There was a high degree of speculation in both fields, but with the breakthrough of the first battery, this quickly changed, at least for non-animal electricity. Suddenly, there was a reliable way to create, measure, and distribute this mysterious energy. When it came to animal electricity, there were no such tools to reliably create results, yet the claims held an intuitive weight and were picked up by many scientists and many more quacks. Eventually, there were so many scandals involving wild, unsubstantiated claims that the whole field of animal electricity was dismissed as pseudoscience. Technology kept improving, and eventually, measurement tools got precise enough to handle the tiny charges created by biological organisms, vindicating much of the early animal electricity scientists. However, their theories about how electricity actually worked in the body were correct only in the broadest sense. Much of the theories had to be thrown out or reworked in the one step forward, two steps back investigation of science. So what does this promising approach to biology offer us? Quite a bit. Scientists have utilized it for a while to stimulate hearts with pacemakers or calm down brains with epilepsy. Beyond this, being able to manipulate our electrome (as Adee calls it) holds tantalizing promises of faster wound healing, limb regeneration, reversing cancer, and slowing aging. The catch is that the system is much more complicated and interconnected than any of man-made electronics. Adee explains that instead of simple positive-negative wires exchanging electricity in our body, we utilize charge differentials in chemicals themselves. Each cell in your body acts like a little battery with the capacity to become more negatively or positively charged than its surroundings. Each cell also has ion channels that allow specific molecules in or out, depending on the state of the overall system. The takeaway here is we have only relatively recently begun to realize the role that electrical charges play in the nervous system. Now, we are discovering that this same mechanism for communication extends through every cell in your body. At this point, we don’t know enough to manipulate these distributed electrical systems precisely, but being able to do so looks like the biggest hurdle between us and a medical revolution. ...

In this book Noam Chomsky tries to answer the question the title poses. Being a linguist, he attempts to answer this question from a linguist’s perspective. Taking a deep dive into the meanings and relationship between language and thought Chomsky tries to summarize years of linguistic research and some conclusions he has come to in his experience. One of the most interesting conclusions is that to him it appears as if instead of the ancient idea that “language is sound with meaning” Chomsky believes that phrase should be reversed to say that “language is meaning with sound”. He attempts to demonstrate how language is actually a couple layers deeper into the structure of the brain than previously thought. In fact, we may in some ways “think” in a language. So perhaps without language we could not “think” at all?? This feels intuitively true to me. The book then addresses a line of thinking that could be called “mysterianism”. Put simply it is that we face two types of problems. The first type are problems we can solve. The second type are problems we will never solve. Otherwise known as mysteries. This second type of problem Chomsky claims we are not the right type of creatures to solve. Similarly, to how rats are not the right kind of creatures to solves for prime numbers. To support this argument, he brings up the story of how Newton not only fundamentally changed physics but changed science entirely when he introduced the concept of “Force”. Newton himself could not wrap his mind around what this force was only, how it worked. From then on strict materialism was out. No one could explain in strictly mechanical terms how the universe worked. This book contains some interesting anecdotes as well as compelling theories. At points the writing can get a little long in the tooth for a non-linguist but over all very interesting. ...

You could fill a post-it note with what I don’t know about Chinese history. Wild Swans follows 3 generations of Chinese women in the 1900s-1990. The grandmother is part of the last generation of Chinese to endure the foot-binding craze. She had her feet bound starting ate age 2. As a brief reminder, bound feet were supposed to be less than 4 inches and would require the toes to be curled in under the feet until they broke. The foot would then stretched straight down until the arch broke. The foot would then be tightly bandaged to keep the bones from ever healing correctly. On top of this, the process was usually done by the girl’s mom. The grandmother was born into a poor family and ends up becoming a general’s concubine. She has a daughter (author’s mother) this daughter joins the Communist party shortly after WW2 and marries a high ranking communist party member. They have several children one named Jung Chang(the author) who outlines the experience of going through Mao’s famine and his cultural revolution. It’s a very interesting story and I don’t want to give away too many details, but the parallels to 1984 were striking. ...

Wuthering Heights is a novel published in 1847 that follows the lives and interactions of two families centered around a large estate called “Wuthering Heights”. The only book written by Emily Bronte published a year before she died (aged 30) it was received with mixed reviews initially but by the time the 20th century came around it was canonized as one of the greatest novels of all time. The story itself is full of brutally selfish and vindictive characters that the reader ends up despising by the end of the book. While this book was entertaining and well written it failed to take me in because it was a little too soapy. The characters are all complex and well-conceived, but I am a sucker for hearing thought processes. I like hearing the “why” a person did this or that. The story was told from the perspective of someone observing the action and relaying it to you, so there wasn’t much of a window into the heads of the characters. Overall good book, that I can imagine others enjoying greatly but not quite my style.