Book

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. ...

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.

Another book by my homie Yuval. In Sapiens he retold the story of the past in Homo Deus he investigates possibilities for the future. Yuval makes the claim that since the cognitive revolution 70,000 years ago humans have been dominated by 3 things. War, Famine, and Disease. He then proceeds to layout some convincing evidence as to why the tide has turned on those three problems in the past hundred years. What used to look like impossible tasks are now tantalizingly close. In fact in many ways, we have already achieved these goals in one form or another. This raises the question “what’s next?”. This is what the rest of the book about. His guesses are that immortality, divinity, and the secret of happiness will be the next items on the agenda. But with each of these innocuous sounding goals comes all sorts of problems that may indeed make things worse. As crazy as this sounds you don’t have to look far for proof of this, just consider that suicide rates are higher in first world countries as opposed to the developing world. So maybe whatever goals we’ve had in the past have not contributed much to overall human happiness. He then examines how these goals are based largely on humanism and that technology poses a major threat to the tenants of humanism. Humanism proclaims that humans are the most precious thing in the universe. We are the peak of creation, and this is reinforced by our domination of the objective world. This stance may become more difficult to maintain once we find ourselves outsmarted by machines and artificial intelligence. Our creations may end up casting us out of the garden. This book was really good, full of more interesting insights that Harari has a knack for pulling out of his hat. I would suggest that more space be given between the reading of Sapiens and Homo Deus than what I gave though because there are some overlaps of ideas. This book was fantastic but not as good as sapiens, as one deals with history (or our best guess at the time) of the world, while interesting as this book is guesses about the future are seldom close to what ends up happening.

Read this while on vacation. Luckily this particular edition came with definitions for most arcane words and phrases used. If I had not have had this the book would have been fairly unintelligible. Overall, even with definitions this book was just “pretty good”. This might be because it is not written as a book but as a play. So much of the weight of what is happening is only as heavy as your imagination can make it. Living in the TV era I can hardly imagine anything, it left me mostly in the dark. With that being said I was still able to piece together that action and character development of the story. The language and metaphors in the book are truly Shakespearian (pause for chuckles). But really the word play is masterful and renders emotions in high dynamic range. The thing that struck me most about this story was that it had many parallels to the movie Scarface. I was not expecting that connection. Some great quotes in this book to be sure.

Not much to say about this one. I picked it because I wanted to read something lighter. Published in 1988 by a Brazilian author this is a short story about a shepherd boy in Spain that has a dream that recurs to him about a treasure near the pyramids. This launches the boy into a quest to find it where he encounters many interesting characters and learns “life lessons”. The two main points of this book are that each person has their own “personal legend” (or dharma) and that the secret to happiness is in pursuit of your personal legend. The second point is “when you really want something to happen, the whole universe will conspire so that your wish comes true”. Overall, it was pretty good, I wanted something lighter and maybe overshot. This would probably be very interesting reading for a small little, tiny man child.

This book is a short story that focuses mostly on the last few days of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan is a judge in high court. Tolstoy briefly gives a bird’s eye view of his life by describing it as neither as cold and formal as his elder brother nor as wild as the younger, but was a happy mean between them an intelligent, polished, lively, and agreeable man. Ivan took great pains to structure his life to be described just in that way. The Radiohead song “everything in its right place” comes to mind. Climbing the social ladder and making all his decisions based on what was most “decorous”, Ivan is struck down by an unforeseen terminal illness and spends his last days introspectively considering the life he’s lived. He feels like he doesn’t deserve sickness he has been afflicted with because he views his life as being lived well. This book articulates most people’s worst fear, which is living your entire life but only at the end of it having the clarity to see it was mostly a sham. I think everyone considers their own life. Some people more than others, but no matter how much you do consider it one thing is true. You will never be able to manufacture the clarity of the final which you will be faced with on your death bed. This book, like other Russian books, places emphasis on living truthfully. The alternative is spiritual death. This book has really funked with the headspace for which I am thankful. This book was written later in Tolstoy’s life, and many translate it as his own struggle with the reality of death which can be summed up in this quote: ...

Written in 1903 the book opens with W.E.B Du Bois central thesis that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” This book is a collection of essays that lays out Du Bois’ views on race relations. Poetically written and very moving at times. The essays cover a variety of topics ranging from black farmers in a post-civil war south, the death of his first child and his views on education. What is most surprising to me about reading this book is that although many of the things he fought for (i.e allowing black people in universities, general equal rights) have been accomplished many of his issues with race relation still remain unmoved. This is also interesting because in an early chapter he likened the bill of emancipation to a “promise land” or “second coming” for the black folk who had been waiting on it for so long. But when they got it, it didn’t solve the problem. They instead realized that the power to be free lied in being able to vote. So, then they pushed towards that goal. Achieving that and still finding themselves not free. It seems like you are only as “free” as everyone that is around you thinks. Du Bois describes his experience as living in a veil with whites on one side and blacks on the other. Himself having been able to go to university and having overcome the three temptations of a black life (hate, despair, and doubt) had given him a unique vantage point. He uses this point of view to write the book to in his words “Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses, the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.” Overall, a very interesting, well written and balanced take on the current standing of the race problem in 1903 and still seems very relevant today. ...