Book

In this book David Stannard sets out to explain how the conquest of the Americas was the worst genocide in history. This book tells the story of pre-America in a much different light than how our history book explained it. Full of new information and insights overturning old, preconceived notions. For example, many thought that the population of both north and south America was around 20ish million pre-Columbus. New figures put that number at closer to 100 million. In addition, the common theory is that homo sapiens crossed into America via a now submerged land bridge that connects Asia and Alaska. Initially thinking was that this would put people in the Americas around 12,000BC, but newer evidence dates some artifacts in Mexico to 20,000 years prior to that. Which means there were already civilizations in place prior to the agricultural revolution. This and many more interesting facts are found in this overall depressing book. I will say the author is high atop his horse as he lays out all the atrocities committed by the conquistadors and early American settlers. Overall seeming to show a complete lack of understanding of human nature in a given context. This led to the writing style being unnecessarily preachy at times. The overall value and interest of the book made up for this though so I would still recommend it. It is easy to judge the past instead of learning from it. ...

This book has been on my list for a long time. A very entertaining short story written by the same guy who wrote 1984. The story takes place on a farm where a pig, shortly before his death, prophesied about a day when the animals would unite and overthrow their human farmer overlords and run the farm themselves. This prophecy comes to pass a couple years after the prophet’s death. The story then follows the conditions and developments that take place at the newly “freed” farm. The story on the whole is very well written and carries a similar sense of despair as 1984 did. Written shortly after WW2 it was Orwell’s unpopular (at the time) critique of the Bolshevik revolution and the new USSR. I feel like this book as well as 1984 gets taken out of context and applied to all types of movements to greater and lesser degrees of accuracy. While this book was written critiquing communists, I don’t think the point was a critique of communism per se, but more a critique of censorship and ideologies. Overall great/ easy read.

This book was pretty interesting definitely full of things that make you think, but honestly, I feel like I understood less than half. Nietzsche’s writing style seems to take for granted that you understand what a lot of loaded words mean when he says them. So before i read this I did an overview of his ideas and also this being the second book of his i read it helped to make somethings be clearer, but many of his thoughts seem too internalized for me to understand at this stage. They are also so wrapped up in responses to various other ideas I don’t know much about, that they come off often as riddles. But it is funny in reading through a book like this where you read riddle after riddle, to then come across something that you’ve experienced in your own life and immediately get exactly what he is saying. “The reader ready for the writer”. That being said this book is very aggressive against pretty much every prior philosopher on the grounds that many of them without their own knowledge were propounding a sort of “slave morality”. The theme of slave vs master morality is really the central theme of this book. The idea of going beyond good and evil is to understand them not as opposites but different routes to the same thing. What is this thing? Nietzsche would say it is “the will to power”. I won’t go into exactly what he means by that but oversimplified it’d probably be better understood as “the will to self-expression/realization”. This book covers a lot of ground but has a sort of interlude in it which was my favorite part. It’s a sort of shower thoughts channel for Nietzsche, just full of great one-liners. So, I imagine this book will get better the more that the reader understands and has experienced. I look forward to re-reading at some point in the future.

This book is where the phrase Catch-22 came from. A friend of mine recommended the TV show and I got it all twisted for a book recommendation, so I listened to the book. This book is set in an island in the Mediterranean nearing the end of World War 2. Centered around a group of bomber pilots who are pretty much over fighting and just want to go home but their superior officer keeps moving the goal lines on how many combat missions they have to fly before they can go home. There is this a way in which the pilots can go home early. They have to be declared crazy by the base doctor. If they are declared crazy by the doctor, they can go home. The doctor asks you one simple question. “Do you want to get out of combat duty?” This question is the catch 22. Because if you say you do want to get out of duty then that proves that you are sane because you are worried about your safety. Whereas if you say you do not want to get out of combat, they never turn down volunteers, so they send you into combat. To be honest this book was equal parts stressful and funny to me. Picture this book being set in the “greatest generation” setting with more of a “Vietnam” attitude. There are no heroes in this book just mindless bureaucrats and people who incredibly adept at getting out of work. Whereas this is comical it also reminds me too much of real-life people getting out of work which stresses me out.

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.

Umph old baby Kierkegaard really stops you in your tracks and makes you look closely at a story you’ve heard a million times but points out that you’ve never actually understood it. As you can probably tell from the cover the story is of Abraham and Isaac. The main question of the book is what makes Abraham the “Father of Faith” and not a murderer? That question is so obvious but why has it never been talked about in any sermon other than the cursory “God said so?”. Kierkegaard wonders this as well. He spends the first section of the book elaborating on the insanity of request. He then describes his version of what faith is and why he’s never found anyone (including himself) that has it. Clearly, I can’t convey an accurate picture of what he was trying to explain in a couple lines but the gist of it (as I understood it) is that true faith requires a dual movement of the soul. The first movement is that of infinite resignation. That is to say releasing attachments that you have. The second movement is the infinite expectation by means of the absurd. This sort of reminds me of Schrodinger’s cat situation. In which one has given something up but at the same time has complete confidence that they will get it back, but that expectation never gets old or inhibits the resignation. Needless to say, it’s a complex idea which I am sure that I am bungling. The book then continues in a short investigation on the ethics of what Abraham did. In the epilogue of the book, he wraps up things nicely where he is talking about his belief that faith is “the highest passion of man” and that perhaps like love is an end to itself. Thus moving past faith, he thinks is part of the human tendency to always ask “what’s next?”. He illustrates this with this story at the very end of the book that has really stuck in my head: ...

This book was pretty interesting. Especially since probably the last couple years I noticed that the idea of heaven and hell don’t seem to show up in the Old Testament very much at all. Which makes for some very interesting questions. Written by an historian of early Christian religion, this book makes some startling claims. The goal of the book was to walk through recorded history (in the western world) and take note of what was said about the afterlife that indicates what beliefs were popular at the time. The cornerstone thesis of this book is that the historical Jesus did not believe in a heaven and hell in the now traditional sense, but a different conception that is based on a tradition of Jewish apocalyptical ideas. Ehrman starts with what is probably the oldest fiction we have the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and works his way up to the Greek authors Virgil, Homer and eventually Socrates examining how the idea of the afterlife was expressed at each stage. He then turns his attention to the Bible and works his way chronologically through the Bible stating pretty categorically that the main idea of the afterlife presented in the Old Testament was that there wasn’t one. After looking at the OT he spends some time in a couple apocryphal books written in between the OT and NT which shed some light on how the idea of afterlife was evolving. He then comes to the clickbait part of the book where he explains that he believes the historical Jesus believed that God was going to come back and set things right in the world and rebuild Jerusalem and have a physical Kingdom on this earth that believers would be part of. He also believed that Jesus thought this was happening soon (Matt 16:28). As for non-believers they would be annihilated into nonexistence. From there he continues through history into the early 300AD time period up through the conception of purgatory and ends the book with the idea of universalism that is the idea that all eventually make it into heaven. This was surprisingly a view of one of the early church theologians, Origen who lived around 200AD. This book was well written and pretty easy to follow. It is another book that at the end of the day you read it and realize, that you just have to go back to the bible because everyone has always agreed about what it had to say about things.

This was fun. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Melville does a great job of giving you a sense of place and feeling. This book made me want to be a sailor, maybe i’ll buy a sailor outfit at least. Who knows. It exposes various human foibles, like Quaker whalers who are fundamentally anti violence while spending large portions of their time inflicting violence on the largest creature on earth or the animal rights person who writes their edicts in the light of a whale oil lamp. The book teaches its reader a lot about the anatomy of a whale and engenders a respect for an animal and then proceeds to graphically describe the exciting whale hunt that ultimately causes much pain and suffering to the animal you just learned about. I wonder if the point is that we are all walking contradictions in our own way? Maybe we need to give each other some slack…Who knows either way great book.

Written by Jordan Peterson’s daddy himself this book was really quite enjoyable. I preferred it over some of the books I’ve read from Freud. It is a collection of 11 essays that cover various topics from dreams to metaphysics. Opening the book, the reader is asked to make two assumptions. Assumption one, the subconscious exists. While this doesn’t seem like a big deal in a post Freud world (which Jung is post Freud) there is still some debate. The second assumption is that there exists in humans a soul. This is still up for heated debate today, but if you accept these two assumptions daddy Jung takes you on a ride, explaining his approach to psychoanalysis, modern man vs primitive man and the overlap between the two. The waning effectiveness of the church to treat psychoses due to the approach of the education system. This is one of those books like a C.S Lewis book where everything he says just makes sense. Made for an enjoyable read but I also know whenever I am feeling that comfortable with what someone is saying it means that I have not been educated enough in contra-ideas. Overall, I’d highly recommend, it’s given me much to think about and I will definitely be returning to re-read later on. ...

This set of short stories was recommended to me by a friend. Each story takes about 5-10 minutes to read. Akutagawa published these stories in 1915 and the six stories included have some really interesting psychology in them investigating honor, revenge, humiliation, and morality in subtle ways. Impress your friends and buy a copy of this to put on your toilets good bathroom reading.