Reviews

Don Quixote is hailed by many as the best work of fiction ever written. While I’m not sure I’d go that far, it is impressive that a book written in the 1600s can still be funny, entertaining, and not terribly dated 400 years later. This book was a lot of fun to read. Don Quixote of La Mancha and his trusty squire, Sancho Panza, get into all sorts of hijinks as they travel around the Spanish countryside. Don Quixote is convinced he is a knight errant, and that all the stories about knight errantry that were told previously actually happened. This leads him into some very interesting and ironic situations. One of the most interesting things about this book is that, while everyone he comes into contact with almost immediately recognizes that he is insane, there is still some magnetic quality about the nobility of his character that causes people to like him. Additionally, even though he was insane, to some extent his madness created the reality that he believed in and gave him meaningful experiences that he would have missed out on if he hadn’t believed in knight errantry. This was a long book, maybe a touch too long, but was never dry.

Summary I am not going to write a summary for Dracula. I do pointless things all the time, but not THIS time. Thoughts Very entertaining, I never really got creeped out or tense because all the characters were just so upbeat about everything all the time. The best parallel I can think of is something like reading a King Arthur adventure where every character has their character stats maxed out. The people on the good team are the best most honorable loving and supportive people of all time, while the people on the bad team are the most despicable of all time. The setting and atmosphere of the book was fantastic. Some very memorable scenes involving castle climbing and armies of rats. My only gripe was that the book is written as a series of journal entries and various article clippings. This makes a lot of sense in the beginning of the book when the characters are physically separated but by the end when they are all in the same room it feels cumbersome. Also, because I love nicknames, I am dubbing the author as Bram ‘I’m so glad Mina isn’t involved’ Stoker. Good times!

Thoughts Frank ‘Arrakis is a planet with not very much water, seriously its crazy how little water there is, have you considered how much we take water for granted on earth but how difficult it would be to have little water, you know like Arrakis because it’s a desert planet that has almost no water’ Herbert tells a very entertaining story on a very dry planet. Jokes aside this was a very good book with excellent world building. It made me realize how important names are in Sci-fi books. They can make the difference between your sci-fi book just being another run of the mill DnD group meet-up versus a really entertaining novel. Herbert must play the role of Adam in naming things that do not exist, but in a way that elicits the correct conscious and subconscious reactions from his western readers. He does a great job, for example nobody has to tell me that the Harkonnens are evil I can tell by their name. Bene Gesserits are obviously a religious order and Mentats a logistical one. The Fremens are interesting, the name to me conjures images of rats, vermin or rodents. This in part makes sense because the Fremen lived in holes in the ground and were like pests to the Harkonnens. They are also set up to become an invasive species. I’ll be interested to see where that goes. The role religion plays in the book is interesting and tied into Dune’s vision of time and determinism. Religion gives us a potential future, but we have to work to bring that potential future into existence. The warning is also that the vision and process of creation does not bring with it control over that future when it comes. Dune does a great job of maintaining the experienced paradox of self-aware agents in a complex system. In some ways the book could be recast as Paul being some Calvinistic hero attempting to slay the Arminian dragon of predestination. He seeks to control a future that is already cast. Another theme throughout the book is the idea that opulent civilizations grow lazy and soft. They are then replaced by civilizations that are sharpened by adversity. I wonder if we as a species have surpassed this point? The idea that decadence leads to decay which leads to collapse seems more plausible for the Roman empire than for a modern society. It seems hard to imagine what a modern-day Visigoth invasion force would look like, but then again, the average Roman may have felt the same way. The Fremens are also interesting because they are cast as a sort of noble savage, like we think of the Comanche for example, where they are brutal but honorable people. But what sets this apart from other troupes is that they also produce sophisticated technology. This made me wonder if it would be possible for an advanced technological society to adhere to old time-y eye for eye moral codes or if there is requirement that aggression must be repressed in a society to allow sophisticated technology to emerge.

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. ...

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.

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.

Summary Follows the back-and-forth progress of “civilization” in the wild west, with an emphasis on the role Comanches played in that drama. Thoughts The strength of this book lies in the larger-than-life characters that this little bit of history provides. You have the tough as nails Mackenzie, who tenaciously chases the Comanches as they manage to outmaneuver every force the US government sends their way. You have Cythia Ann Parker, who was kidnapped by the Comanches and raised as one of their own and of course her son, Quanah, who is depicted as a fearless military genius. These characters will stay with me for a while. I am too illiterate to make comments about the historical voracity of the authors claims, but to a layman it seemed like he was even handed in his treatment of both sides. In our current cultural moment, he might have been too even handed. There are of course many things that struck me while going through this experience. One of the craziest things to me was the apparent mutation of Comanche culture when introduced to the horse. It was as if they had this latent superpower that was waiting around to be unlocked. From what Gwynne describes it sounds like their skills in horsemanship were only rivaled by the renowned riders of the Steppe. This book also made me realize that hidden in the “ugly duckling” troupe is a lie, and a somewhat insidious one at that. So you have a character that is somehow different from the group. Due to these differences that character gets mercilessly mocked and ostracized. A moment of transformation happens, not to the ugly duckling but to the ones viewing the ugly duckling. They realize that the ugly duckling is actually a swan, and as swan, in some senses their superior. The moral of the story of course is that differences are beautiful and should be embraced. Live your truth and others will eventually follow. Everyone has something that makes them special etc. etc. What I never realized is that there is a slight of hand in these stories that undercuts the moral. The real message of these stories is that group values are sacrosanct, immutable. The ugly duckling is now accepted, not because of some group realization, but from a re-categorization, that is to say that he was actually a beautiful swan the whole time. But what of the real ugly duckling? The ugly Betty that can’t take off her glasses. Herein lies the truth, to the group there is no rebirth, no accommodation. This was tragically played out in the life of Cythia Ann Parker; she is the true ugly duckling. Adopted by the same Comanches who orphaned her, she transforms into a Comanche, but when forcibly “rescued” by whites she cannot or will not transition back. As such she continues to her dying day to be a true oddity. Her son on the other hand, makes the transition into the whites’ expected vision of him. He is accepted inasmuch as he can manage to become white. This book was a really interesting read and has my recommendation.

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.

Summary Evgenni Onegin, pronounced as best as I can tell yev-gainy on-yay-gen is a Russian aristocrat, that seems to be the only stories from Russia I read. Onegin evidently falls into a literary category known as “superfluous men”, Onegin has drank the glass to the bottom and is bored. Bored of the fancy balls, the gossip, the incessant conversation, of everything. Inheriting his uncle’s estate he moves there with no real hopes or ambitions but is surprised to run into a young poet named Vladimir Lensky. This young poet is still full of life and hope much like Onegin’s younger self and helps to lift the boredom and bring color back into Onegin’s life. The poet falls in love with a pretty coquettish girl named Olga, but we ignore her in favor of her more interesting sister Tatyana. Olga had the looks and Tatyana the brains, unfortunately for her she falls in love, the way that only a sixteen-year-old can, with Onegin. She writes him a letter declaring her love and putting herself at his mercy. He replies in what is now known as “Onegin’s Sermon” the essence of which is that Onegin felt like the marriage would be a disaster because he would become bored with her, and eventually her with him. The tone of his reply was polite but also condescending. This of course completely devastates Tatyana who retires into the background of the novel for a time. Shortly thereafter the poet Lensky tricks Onegin into coming to a country ball. This upsets Onegin, who hates the society and finds nothing diverting there. He chooses quite unaccountably to start flirting with the poet’s fiancé Olga, they dance, and she appears to be attracted by Onegin’s studied advances. This causes the poet to callout Onegin and demand satisfaction by a duel. The once friends now face off, with Onegin surviving he is of course distraught by his friend’s death and decides to travel to take his mind off of it. The novel then jumps forward a couple years, Onegin back from his travels goes to a St. Petersburg ball and is surprised to find the innocent 16-year-old transformed into a lady of high society, and now married to a older general. Immediately smitten he does everything he can think of to rekindle their relationship but in an epic turnabout Tatyana gives him her own sermon. She essentially says that she is going to remain faithful to her husband and the novel ends with Onegin yet again in turmoil. ...

Summary In the future, firemen are not necessary because, thanks to technology, houses never accidentally catch on fire. So, you might ask, when do they catch on fire? Only when these new firemen set them ablaze, naturally. Why would they do that? They would burn houses if the owners were found harboring books. “Fahrenheit 451” (which is the temperature at which paper combusts) opens with the character Guy Montag, a fireman who relishes watching things burn. Suddenly, a chance meeting makes him question his role as a fireman. ...