Book

Heard this book referenced in a podcast as one of the best historical novels ever. I’m not sure I would go that far, but it was a very entertaining read. The writing and setting were beautiful. It follows the last in a long line of Sicilian nobility while Sicily and Italy as a whole is experiencing revolution and political turmoil during the unification of Italy that was happening ~1870s. This novel further cemented my views on the inevitability of history and the material blow to culture from the extinction of the noble class. Any remnants of the nobility left today are mere SIMULACRA of the originals.

This book was fairly interesting if somewhat opaque to me due to my ignorance around Buddhism. There were some interesting ideas put forth in the book, I really liked the following quote The traveler who finds his road blocked by a river will use a raft to reach the opposite shore, but, his shore once reached, he will not carry the raft on his shoulders while continuing his journey. He will abandon it as something which has become useless. ...

Schopenhauer has been on my radar for a while because like Donald Trump, Schopenhauer was a Kantian. To better understand how Trump will complete German idealism, one must first wrestle with this great thinker. While some philosophers content themselves with attempting to explain a single concept Schopenhauer decides he would rather explain everything from magnets to women ☕. Combining Kant’s distinction between idea of a thing vs thing in itself (in short, your idea of a car is not the car) and Platonic Idea (there is a single tree in a realm of forms which all trees in our world are representations of) he comes up with his own spin on things stating that the world presents itself to our experience as individuations of a single thing. That thing is Will. So hypothetically the process could go something like this Will encounters a subject and gets objectified into a Platonic idea. This platonic idea then encounters space and time where it is objectified once more into a perception, like a tree for example. So, what exactly is Will? Will is actually very similar to the Buddhist concept of desire. This is no coincidence as Schopenhauer calls the translation of the Vedas one of the greatest gifts of the 19th century. Will can be considered the universal principle that animates the universe. A blind insatiable striving. One outcome of this is that everything that wills, suffers. And since everything that exists is a manifestation of will it means that everything suffers. This plants Schopenhauer squarely in the school of pessimists. To Schopenhauer life can be broken into two experiences. One is either striving after something or bored (read depressed). Schopenhauer would say that the happiness we feel when accomplishing a goal isn’t actually happiness it is merely the cessation of suffering that was caused by the desire. Once this desire is gone a new one almost instantaneously takes its place. He also has some interesting ideas about art that somewhat resonated specifically that good art lifts a person out of their subject-ness for brief periods of time. It opens them up to look at the world more universally. For example, you hear a sad song and can join in not with particular sadness, but sadness at a universal level. He ends the book by talking about ethics ...

This was a very enjoyable fast paced novel. Would definitely recommend, brilliant! The thing that I loved in this book the most was his attention to little details. These details really helped to complete the feel of the sci-fi world his characters inhabited. The story was great and loved the ending except for the very last chapter. This one felt too much like a concession to leave the door open for an “Ubik 2”. Other than that, a fantastic book. ...

Finished this book UNABRIDGED, double plus good. Hated how believable it was. This should be required reading. The main new idea I got this time through was that the party doctrine sounded a little bit like biocentrism. They had just swapped the party for consciousness. Biocentrism says reality exists only by conscious observation. Winston said reality only has true existence by the party’s doctrine. He who owns the present owns the past. Winston’s point about immortality through the party is also the same point that people have made about the “I” continuing to exist through the other “I"s that succeed it. In Winston’s case he believed he was immortal because the party would never die. I think this is a great insight by Orwell, because it would seem that it is impossible to set up a society without bringing along metaphysical baggage. The desire (need?) for metaphysics is like a sexuality that if repressed just comes through the cracks in very disturbing ways.

I had bought this monstrosity of a book shortly before moving to Africa. I had heard an interview about it on NPR which piqued my interest. I had planned to read it in my down time and on flights but I was a beta reader back then and only got a couple hundred pages in before getting distracted. One of my pacts I’ve made with myself is not to have a book on my bookshelf that I haven’t read and this one had been staring at me for half a decade. I picked it back up and was surprised how interesting it was. It is actually 5 novels in one book that are tied together by common thematic elements. There is an obscure German author who goes by the pseudonym Archomboldi and the book opens with 4 literary professors from different parts of Europe who are obsessed by this obscure author. The author’s real name is unknown, but they spend many years trying to glean personal details about him from his publisher and anyone else who has ever heard of him. They end up in the small town of Santa Teresa Mexico where they had gotten a tip he was hiding. This small Mexican town plays as the second key thematic element and becomes a focal point that shows up again and again in the other novels. There is a rash of women being killed in Santa Teresa, over 200, and the police can’t seem to do anything about it. This is the backdrop for the lives of the next several novel’s main characters. We follow a washed-out professor, a detective, a journalist from Brooklyn, and many many more characters who are somehow all drawn to the town in one way or another. I guess Bolano was a good short story author, and this is his magnum opus where he writes his longest book. I didn’t realize this while reading, but it makes sense because really this book is group of short stories that are linked together loosely by various details. I definitely had to shift into low gear on this book, as you must be prepared to get sidetracked by anyone’s life story at any point. Also, there isn’t always a neat ending to the novels. Many are left feeling a little unfinished. If you are ok with that and are not in a rush, the book takes you many strange and interesting places. From Chile with a struggling film crew that is trying to make a raunchy B movie into the head of an aging black man who is the last member of his communist cell in Boston. The magnitude of detail in this book is mind boggling. Just thinking about the amount of imagination it took to create these many backstories is overwhelming. I started to become more and more worried as I came to the end that things would not be tied up, but in the last 30 pages he pulls it out a sort of No Country for Old Men ending. An ending that is not complete but is still satisfying in its own way.

After talking about it yesterday oh my brothers, I got curious, and your humble narrator checked out the book. Overall, I couldn’t believe how much of the book was fit into the Kubrick movie. It made me respect the movie that much more. To me, it seemed to perfectly communicate the ideas of the book without much loss in translation. Anthony Burgess wrote it in 3 weeks. He originally wrote it with 21 chapters to signify 21 years, the age of an adult, but when trying to get it published in New York the publisher wanted to cut the last chapter. Needing the money, he agreed, and this is the version that the film was based on. Naturally this burned the author’s beans and he thought that this was a huge mistake. Inevitably, this book ended up becoming his most influential as well as his least liked book that he authored. ...

I find myself questioning how things are typically done to see if there are any better ways out there. Currently my interest is focused on education. This book is widely recommended by overanxious parents everywhere. If I remember correctly Alethea was founded on some classical principles that were most likely inspired by Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) and Sayers is a contemporary of Mason (1842-1923). Most likely influenced by her. Their methods have a lot of overlap but some differences as well. Charlotte Mason thought that all kids should have the right to an education and not just the rich ones. She came up with her own method of education which minimized the amount of time talking by the teacher and replaced it with the students “narrating” what they had just read. This narration is a cornerstone to her method as she believes it cements what the student has learned in their minds and helps the student to incorporate the new knowledge into their brains. I sure hope this is true as this is the main reason I write these reviews. She also believed that children did not need to be trained how to think but instead should be exposed to the best thinkers and use their innate reasoning to process the best kinds of information. She believed that every subject (excluding math) should be taught in a literary form as story is the best way to learn. The younger children would narrate paragraph by paragraph, then chapter by chapter and then finally an entire book at a time. This narration would start out in verbal form but would eventually become written. In short starting from around age 6 children should be exposed to the best art, literature, music the world has to offer and this “mind stuff” will be good food for a growing brain. This nutritive aspect of learning is also prominent in Mason’s thinking. For the postmodern push back, Mason assumed everyone would be on the same page when she said “best stuff” i.e. Dickens, Rembrandt, Mozart etc. But why not Peterson, Heffner, and Cardie B? I tended to agree with her approach as I feel like kids often underachieve because they aren’t asked to achieve anything worth achieving. The other thing about her method which was interesting was she didn’t like tests, or homework, but structured her curriculum to be consumed (dependent on stellar focus, which may be a relic by now) at high speed in the morning and then in the afternoon to work on handicrafts or learn out in nature. Give the children beautiful things to think about and they will become beautiful thinkers. Overall, I enjoyed the book, and it gave me some valuable perspective from a very experienced and well-read person. The downside of this is that I don’t know how realistic it was as a lot of it sounded insane in a modern context, but I would love to be wrong on that point.

I’ll keep this one short. As the cover says, this book was written by the guy who also wrote kite runner, which was a very good book. This being my second book of his the appeal wasn’t there as much for me this time around. This story was also centered in Afghanistan (I started reading before the US troop pull-out and subsequent Taliban takeover in 2021, so it was synchronistic) and follows the life story of two women who end up living in the same house because one of them was forced to marry this dude as a child and the other was kind of forced due to the ongoing war. Similar to Kite Runner its cool to get a glimpse into the life of folks where you have no clue how they do what they do. This book was really entertaining and easy to read. The story itself was very dark. I enjoyed reading this book but wouldn’t label it as a “must read” especially if you get your hands on any of his other stuff first. Good stuff, prepare for despair.

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. ...