Book

Summary One of Czech’s most popular novels, it follows Svejk as his simplicity gets him into all sorts of hijinks during the start of the first world war. Thoughts Reminded me of ‘No Time for Sergeants’ a farce where the main character is an “idiot” but is always honest, and his simplicity is used to set off the stupidity of the society he is embedded in. Some fairly decent laughs throughout, could not say I was thoroughly entertained, but if you are in the mood for this sort of thing, then it will do the job!

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!

Summary Chesterton wrote this as a companion piece to his early work ‘Heretic’. He wishes to document his own views and how he got to them. I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy. Chesterton reminds me of a Churchill or Benjamin Franklin in the way in which his ratio of memorable sentences per page asymptotically approaches 1. Every paragraph has gems that beg to be plastered on some living room wall in garish curly-q font: ...

Summary It is the distant future, the year 2000 and we have managed to bully suffering right out of the human experience. But were the sacrifices worth it? Thoughts The only scarier thing than the unknown is the mundane. This tension shows lurks in a Brave New World where the reader is left to decide on their own which world they would prefer. Huxley is firmly against this “Brave New World” full of shallow vapid people but doesn’t seem to provide a really convincing alternative. One of the most interesting themes to me was the anxiety around having a complete mechanistic understanding of the ‘human machine’. This fear is embodied by the unseen character Ford or Freud. Homages to Henry Ford and of course my golden ziggy, the former mechanized production and the latter the mind. Huxley envisions a world where humans are seen as machines and treated as machines. Machines with complicated maintenance schedules, one missed appointment might just cause a piston to misfire or a belt to break. This human machine world is further exaggerated by the very lack of machines. Instead of what now seems a plausible future where robots outnumber humans by several magnitudes, Huxley has a caste system of humans in place to supply labor. So in the place a mechanical butler would stand, you have a human that was baked to love his chains. The gauntlet being thrown, so to speak, if you really believe humans are soulless automatons, then why would you object to creating them in such a way that they have no ambition? The transcendence of course is revolt, even with such a finely tuned system there are still a few homo-sapiens that slip through the cracks and aren’t entirely integrated. The reader again is left to wonder if this is true transcendence or maybe just a bug. Maybe, as some characters suggested, they didn’t receive proper doses during incubation, at any rate they are dissatisfied with the status quo. This is the typical awakening archetype, where a character transitions from the unconscious to the conscious. The modern twist is the uncertainty that follows the awakening, don’t jump to the conclusion that to see your position in the world is an unalloyed good. This book is a really good object for contemplation and clearly has been a cornerstone of the dystopian utopia genre. One thing I didn’t care for was the overcompensation used when discussing families. It seemed naïve or like a cheap shot to have the characters react so strongly to the ideas fathers and mothers. Almost like Huxley was wanting to really show how scary the techno-optimist future would be. These guys will make it so everyone thinks mom and dad are DISGUSTING.

Summary The title being a play on Dicken’s David Copperfield, Kingsolver instead writes about a boy growing up as a foster child in Appalachia. Surrounded by drugs and poverty, what kind of life can a kid expect? Spoiler: not a great one. Thoughts The Good The book is entertaining, and you easily become attached to the main character and are invested in how he turns out. The book is really good at making you feel like you are a dirty, poor, uneducated, overlooked teen. So, if that’s what you’re in the mood for this book delivers. Also, Kingsolver makes decent points about the acceptable and prevalence of racism versus rednecks or hillbillies. She also makes some interesting, yet less convincing, arguments around this discrimination being fueled by the fat cats who want everyone to be part of the money economy (i.e., get everything by paying money) which can be taxed versus land economy (i.e., produce goods like food and clothing off the land) which cannot be taxed. The goal of the book was to enlighten urbanites to the suffering of the poor whites, and to shine a light on the damage caused by pharmaceutical companies which knowingly got entire counties hooked on cheap opiates. ...

Summary A nameless father with his nameless boy tries to survive in a world that has been destroyed by a nameless catastrophe. Whatever it was that destroyed the earth left its surface coated in ashes and its skies so perpetually cloudy that nothing can survive. There is no life save a few scattered bands of humans slowly dying off by starvation or violence. Thoughts McCarthy does a great job of world building, or I should say withering. It turns out he can describe dilapidated cityscapes just as well as western prairies. This book has been lauded as being a champion for climate change, but I think that is incidental. The main question is as Camus says, “why not commit suicide?”. McCarthy destroys the world and all the creeping things that crawl along its face just to put this question in sharper relief. This book also made me realize that all post-apocalyptic stories are actually just visions of who humans are without society. There are many mini apocalypses in history we can use for inspiration, like the siege of Leningrad or countless other sieges that remove the mask of society to expose the truth that lies beneath, the earth is not a symphony of symbiosis, but a network of mouths and teeth. Even your own body will eat itself if you can’t find something else to sacrifice. ...

Summary Blaise Pascal was a philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Just another run of the mill renaissance man. Pensées, or ‘Thoughts’ are a collection of loosely collected writings put together posthumously. What starts as a series of somewhat disconnected thoughts ends in a fairly coherent apologetic for faith in general and Christian faith in particular. Thoughts I did not research this book before reading it. I saw this quote: The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… ...

Summary The final installation in Atkinson’s WW2 trilogy, which follows the allies from D-day to V-day from 1944-45 in the European theater. Thoughts Leading up to D-day there was a lot of uncertainty in the outcome of the war, but with the success of D-day allied victory over Germany seemed like a given, it was only a matter of time. This reminds me of playing the game Age of Empires, ( which is a real time strategy game where players control an empire and try to destroy the other players’ empires) there comes a point in the game where the balance falls so far to one side that, outside of miraculous intervention, the outcome is decided, from here on out it is up to the losers to decide how long to prolong the fight before surrendering. This was essentially the Axis’ position post D-day, Hitler just refused to give up and intended on doing everything in his power to make a miracle happen. This caused the war to drag on for nearly another year incurring another two hundred thousand casualties in the already battered German army. On top of that you had the absolutely brutal allied bombings that laid to waste many of Germany’s large cities inflicting another estimated five hundred thousand civilian casualties. This feeling of how unnecessary this conflict was tinged the book for me, it wasn’t as ’enjoyable’ as the other books because nothing seemed in to hang in the balance anymore, but still you had to watch people die anyway for a decision that had already been made. The single most important lesson I took from this book was never underestimate the power of production and logistics.

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.

Summary H.G. Wells writes his own version of Plato’s Republic laying out the process required to make humanity 2.0 otherwise known as the ‘New Republican’. Abandoning hope of finding absolute answers on any questions social, political or ethical, Wells decides to view life in its essence as a succession of births. If this be so, then how might we improve this succession and make it the best process possible? Wells has a plan, and he spends the next 10 chapters walking the reader through how a new republican would be welcomed into life, early education and eventually seated into the greater world of society. His ideas touch on many areas of life, sex, literature, and parenting styles. ...