Books on George's Blog

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:35 -0500

Summary

Mayer initially planned to go to Germany in 1935 to interview Hitler himself. He failed to secure an interview but discovered, to his horror, that the Nazi movement had more mass appeal than he had previously expected. He decided to switch tactics and focus on the experience of the man on the ground. How does a person, who in most other respects would be considered normal or even good, get swept up in a genocidal ideology? After the war he moved to a small town that had strong support for the NSDAP before, during, and after WW2. He made genuine relationships with 10 of the residents and engaged them in extended interviews. The first half of this book is essentially these interviews, organized into a clear timeline. The second half is Mayer attempting to psychoanalyze Germany as a whole based on what he had learned from these interviews.

Balkan Ghosts

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:13 -0500

This is a cursory look at the countries that have been arbitrarily grouped together since before WW1. He focuses mainly on Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and what used to be Yugoslavia. Even though the grouping of “The Balkans” is largely one of convention, Kaplan argues that the suffering and tragic histories act as a glue that makes their stories inseparable from each other. Instead of writing a full review, I’ll relate a story that I found illustrative of the complexities of the region.

Alexander Hamilton

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:24 -0500

After reading biographies of Washington and Jefferson, I was quite excited to read more about Hamilton. I thought he would be a shoo-in for my favorite Founding Father, but the reality of his character proved more complex.

Some of my favorite things about Hamilton:

He was the first Secretary of the Treasury and the genius behind the creation of American banking and foreign credit.
He was a prolific writer, producing the rough equivalent of 70 novels by the time he was 49.

Prisoners of Geography

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:35 -0500

Summary

Are you tired of hearing news stories about Kashmir and wondering why Pakistan and India can’t just get along? Can we ever hear any positive news from Sudan? Why does it seem to be in a constant state of turmoil? Why are the borders of some countries straight lines instead of the usual squiggly ones?

The world of geopolitics is a complicated place, and there are many approaches one can take to understand it. In Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall argues that the most probable route is to look to the land itself for the answers. The main thesis of the book is that there is not enough focus on the ‘geo’ part of ‘geopolitics’. We often spend too much time talking about various ideologies or technologies as driving world events, when reality is often much more affected by land features. For example, on paper it is hard to imagine why the massive empires of China and India have rarely engaged in full-scale conflict—that is until you realize they are separated by the tallest mountain range in the world. This also explains why Tibet is so fiercely contested, as it represents a high ground that neither country is interested in ceding to the other side.

The Dark Tower Series

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:25 -0500

“How does it happen that a writer who’s not even very good—and I can say that, I’ve read four or five of his books—gets to be in charge of the world’s destiny? Or of the entire universe’s?” “If he’s not very good why didn’t you stop at one?”

**Dark Tower VII, Chapter III **

Stephen King is the Lay’s Potato Chip of authors. His omnipresence makes him an easy target for abuse. The above quotation captures it perfectly. King is a bad writer, but an excellent storyteller—in the same way that Lay’s makes bad chips, but the kind you can’t stop eating.

Ghost Wars

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:24 -0500

Summary

The year is 1979, and Brezhnev authorizes a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The USSR had been watching developments there uneasily for years. In 1973, Mohammed Daoud Khan ended the Afghan monarchy. Five years later, on April 27–28, 1978, the Marxist PDPA seized power in the Saur Revolution, launching radical reforms and internal purges that fractured Afghan politics. Moscow was unsettled by the PDPA’s sudden rise, but quickly threw its support behind the new regime. The PDPA’s rule proved unstable, dominated by a radical faction that tried to secularize society and overturn centuries of tradition—sparking a conservative Islamic backlash. This had broader implications for the USSR, which contained its own Muslim-majority regions. Moscow was unwilling to stand by and risk a conservative revolution spreading across its southern flank.

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:32 -0500

Summary

America’s third president was a citizen of the world. An idealist in values, but ruthlessly pragmatic when in the seat of authority. Jefferson was in public service for about fifty years, with his influence lasting directly up to Jackson’s presidency, making him one of the most effective political operatives in American history. Meacham gives a full view of Jefferson’s life from early education to his end-of-life correspondence with Adams. Jefferson cuts one of the most romantic and contradictory figures in early America. To the rest of the world, he displayed a certain sophistication many thought impossible to emerge from the Americas, whereas to history his regressive stance on slavery taints his memory: he at once acknowledged its illegitimacy yet could not bring himself to reject the peculiar institution altogether. Jefferson was the most vocal of the founding fathers in his defense of the individual rights of man (though, of course, definitions of “men” varied), and this manifested in an expressed distrust of strong federal governments. The preference for small government formed the basis for his antagonism with America’s other premier intellect, Alexander Hamilton. This disagreement ended up forming the first political parties in the US, the Federalists (Hamilton’s party) and the Republicans (Jefferson’s party). The founding gets mythologized for obvious reasons, but it is truly remarkable that two such politically fertile minds as Jefferson and Hamilton would be selected to form this country’s first cabinet. It is also a testament to Washington’s leadership that such a cabinet could exist for as long as it did. Always sure that Washington was Hamilton’s puppet, Jefferson would eventually retire to Monticello in a semi-theatrical way. His avowed aim was to put the dirty work of politics behind him, but both Washington and Hamilton suspected that Jefferson was “protesting too much.” Their suspicions turned out to be correct, he would shortly be back in office, serving a single term under the acerbic John Adams as vice president. He would then deftly create the first single-term president in US history, ascending to the highest office in the land. Once in the driver’s seat, strong centralized authority seemed useful, and Jefferson did little to curtail the powers of the executive. In fact, when Napoleon offered Jefferson the Louisiana Purchase, he was worried that the purchase of lands was not within the scope of Federal authority and would require an amendment. He ended up deciding the amendment path would open the purchase up to an extended window of debate and deliberation when decisive and quick action was needed, and so he pushed the purchase straight to Congress. This is not to say that Jefferson’s values were inauthentically held; it was more a testament to his adaptability. After Jefferson served two terms, the presidential office went to his long-term friend and ideological ally Madison. He would keep in close contact with leaders of the Republican Party for the rest of his life.

Washington

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:30 -0500

Fantastic biography.

Washington was absolutely instrumental to the birth of the US. It is hard to imagine the country having survived with any other leader at the helm. Although he was vain, insecure, and not the brightest in the pantheon of the founding fathers, his heroism and commitment to the ideals of liberty more than make up for any personal short comings.

Democracy in America

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:35 -0500

This is a great book to build a functional understanding of the how and why of the U.S. government. The first volume is fantastic; the second one is slightly more speculative but still full of good insights.

Much has changed since the writing of the book in the 1830s, although one of de Tocqueville’s central claims—that Russia and the U.S. were destined to be world powers—has panned out quite nicely. Instead of a full review, which would be insanely long due to the length and breadth of the book, I’ll leave some scattered thoughts:

The Secret of Our Success

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:35 -0500

I had written an extensive review that was erased. Here is a really good one from an expert in the field.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10W5lAhu_QmXTfCjzGwg6-3S_bi05NkGo/view

The short version is ape alone weak, ape together strong!

The secret our success is our ability to leverage the smarts of an entire society instead of relying on individual brilliance. As Henrich says: “We stand on the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits”.

One way to drive this intuition home is to take a minute and try to imagine which objects around you, could you, if stripped of all experience re-invent. Looking around, I think the only thing that made it on my list was a cup, and that is probably being too generous.

Abundance

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:45 -0500

When it comes to politics I’ve never connected with the vision of a single group. When I do find myself leaning towards a party, it is typically only because I am leaning away from its opposite. Part of this is because as humans we are much better at knowing what we don’t want. Yet I would like to think that the other reason is that I try to value substance over partisanship.

The Assassins’ Gate

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:25 -0500

“They’ve been living this way for centuries, are you really gonna change that in a year? All you can do is try.”

Summary

The above words, quoted from an unlucky soldier stationed in Iraq, seem to epitomize the entire endeavor. George Packer does a brilliant job setting the stage and providing an overview of the why’s and how’s of the Iraq war.

When it comes to events as significant as war, there are seldom singular reasons that confidently explain everything. WMDs were a reason the administration gave for invading; September 11th provided the provocation for public support. Beyond that, a menagerie of motivations and political realities were aligning to push America into war. According to Packer, George W. Bush was a principled man but not a leader with vision. As a result, when the catastrophe of 9/11 struck, he fell back on his gut instinct, which told him justice needed to be done, without adequately considering long-term consequences. Meanwhile, a parallel ideology known as neoconservatism, which had a particular vision of America’s role in the world, happened to be ascending. Thus, Bush’s gut feelings found theoretical support, providing the vision he lacked.

Basic Economics- A Citizen's Guide to the Economy

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:20 -0500

Most of us are necessarily ignorant of many complex fields, from botany to brain surgery. As a result, we simply do not attempt to operate in, or comment on, those fields. However, every voter and every politician that they vote for affects economic policies. We cannot opt out of economic issues and decisions. Our only options are to be informed, uninformed, or misinformed…

Summary

Economics touches everyone’s life, often before we even realize it. Most opinions on economic issues emerge from personal experiences rather than formal theory. For instance, you notice higher tomato prices long before contemplating global vegetable markets or thin-inventory economies. Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics provides an insightful primer on economic principles, helping readers understand the broader context behind everyday economic experiences.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:25 -0500

A Year of Magical Thinking is a meditation on grief. Faced with the sudden loss of her husband and the uncertain health of her daughter, Joan Didion tries to hold the pieces of her world together. The book offers a voyeuristic glimpse into an upper-class introvert’s ideal life—Didion and her husband, also a well-known author, had built an insulated existence that, apropos of nothing, ended. Full of anecdotes and disarming vulnerability, the reader can’t help but participate in Didion’s loss.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:29:19 -0500

Summary

As was the fashion in 1759, Adam Smith endeavors to explain what we call right and wrong, as well as why we arrive at these conclusions. The cornerstone of his theory is based on the concept of sympathy. Smith posits that, just as humans are endowed with the sense of sight, they are also equipped with a sense of sympathy. The brief definition of sympathy is the ability for one human to “enter into” the experience of another. This “entering in” does not perfectly mirror the original experience, but critically, it is perceived through the lens of an impartial spectator. This impartiality forms the foundation of all morality.

To Kill a Mocking Bird

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:40 -0500

Deserves its place in classic American literature. It also deserves to be read in high school as it walks the balance of respecting norms and traditions while maintaining a personal responsibility to rise above them when they fall short of our ideals. Thus, the reader is left neither a dupe nor Anarchist, but responsible for their own sphere as well as their ‘place’ in society.

Crash

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:53 -0500

Summary

I remember coming across the Wikipedia summary for this book after Baudrillard did an analysis in his bewildering Simulacra and Simulation, which read:

It follows a group of car-crash fetishists who, inspired by the famous crashes of celebrities, become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents. At the time, I thought it was a strange summary, maybe a typo or something—after all, it doesn’t make any sense! So I, in my naivete, tucked this away in the “read later” list. I’ve read the book and can confirm the above sentence is a valid summary.

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:55 -0500

Summary

McCullough gives a fairly detailed account of the first year of the American Revolution against the British. Focusing largely on George Washington, this book is more interested in the military maneuvers of both sides without getting too bogged down in the political philosophy of the moment. The first year of America’s Revolution was a dark one, but by its end several close calls set the stage for surprise attack by Washington which reinvigorated a fledgling nation’s resistance and would be forever memorialized by the famous “Crossing the Delaware” painting.

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:29:36 -0500

Summary

Adam Smith lays out one of the first exhaustive accounts of how a complex, developed economy functions. Published in 1776 during some “difficulties” in the relationship between Britain and one of its colonies, Smith makes the case for fundamental economic concepts like free markets and the division of labor.

The first book, by far my favorite, presents the fundamentals of Smith’s concepts of value, wages, and labor. One of his key observations concerns the transport of goods. He argues that without the capacity of water to transport heavy items easily, civilization itself would have been greatly hampered. This insight helps explain why civilizations emerged near bodies of water that were easily navigable, most notably in the Mediterranean. It is always fascinating to observe how the limitations imposed by an environment affect the systems that find ways to thrive within those given constraints.

Meditations (Marcus Aurelius Antonius the Roman Emperor)

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:03:00 -0500

Marcus Aurelius, one of the greatest emperors Rome ever produced, wrote a series of notes to himself. It is believed that these notes were never meant to be published but were part of his personal practice of self-improvement and philosophical reflection. Scattered with exhortations to not bend beneath the pressures of life, the reader is presented with a picture of life as something to be endured:

“Be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continually pounds.”

The Ottomans

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I try to review every book I read or listen to, but I have a hard time with these types of books because they are summary style. How would you rate a Wikipedia article? You may be able to, but odds are the rating would have more to do with the facticity of the article versus its writing. I have no knowledge on the topic, so I cannot review that aspect. What I can say is that this did a decent job introducing the Ottomans to a Western reader, although you would do well to get a mental picture of Eastern Europe and Western Asia as there are so many places mentioned. Your eyes will probably glaze over unless you can picture their locations in your head. The reader for this audiobook was not fantastic. I will definitely want to dig more into the Ottomans, but probably after getting a better picture of early European history.

Killing Kennedy

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:32 -0500

Summary

A concise account of one of America’s most popular presidents and his infamous assassination.

Thoughts

The authors’ intent with this book was to write history in a way that was “fun.” They largely succeeded; Killing Kennedy reads similarly to a tabloid, filled with murders, conspiracies, villainous Russian leaders, and, of course, lots of sex. In defense of Bill O’Reilly, if ever there was a presidency that lent itself to this lens of analysis, it was JFK’s. Serving from 1961 to 1963, JFK was at once the most powerful man in the world and nearly the youngest president in US history. In those three short years, America navigated through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, and the inception of the Vietnam War. This book is a quick and easy way to get some context surrounding America’s 35th president, as long as the writing style doesn’t grate too strongly against your sensibilities.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:36 -0500

I enjoyed the book, although I was looking for something a little more Zee Frank, with more interesting anecdotes. Apparently, the fact that wasps can recognize faces just isn’t cool enough for me. The book’s central push is to challenge the assumptions we make about intelligence. We often assume that intelligence has to look like “human intelligence.” This would have been quite controversial fifty years ago, but it seems to be almost common knowledge now. My biggest complaint about this book is that it picks an interesting subject—animal intelligence, or intelligence in general—yet fails to say much meaningful about it. There is a common trope throughout history where someone will say something like “play is what makes humans different from animals,” only for science to eventually realize that animals play too, and therefore “play” isn’t the thing that makes humans different from animals. [a: Frans de Waal|112082|Frans de Waal|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1222704792p2/112082.jpg] dismantles many more of these potential differences between humans and animals to drive home the point that humans aren’t different from animals—which seems both right and wrong to me. Of course, when looking at the evolutionary tree, there isn’t a special branch from which humans came. But this then makes the question around the success of humans even more interesting. If animals engage in all the behaviors that were thought to be exclusive to the human domain, why haven’t they dominated the environment in a way remotely similar to humans?

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:29:39 -0500

Summary

Scottish philosopher David Hume explores various approaches to theism via dialogue, featuring three central figures:

Demea Demea represents pre-Enlightenment theism, which emphasized the difference between man and God. The godhead is unintelligible and must be approached by faith alone. We must make our way through this veil of tears, holding on to the belief that everything will be put to rights in the next world. Cleanthes Cleanthes is a post-Enlightenment scientific Christian who highlights the similarities between the mind of God and human reason. To Cleanthes, man can access God, though imperfectly, through reason. When he looks at the universe, he sees a marvelous machine designed by a benevolent creator. It is the delight of man to learn more about their creator by discovering the mechanisms by which the universe operates. Philo Philo is a theistic skeptic, whose role in the dialogue is to tease out the problems in his friends’ positions. His view is closer to that of Demea but differs in conclusion, believing that it is incredibly unlikely that any human will land on a cosmology that is anywhere near the truth. Therefore, the wisest tactic would be to approach the topic with caution.

Meditations on First Philosophy

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:27:21 -0500

Summary

The first half of this book was nearly flawless. Positioned as a hyper realistic sci-fi similar to books like ‘Martian’, it faithfully, to a layman at least, describes what the experience would be like for people trying to survive in what could be described as a slightly improved international space station. The major thing that stuck out to me from the book was just how easy it was to sympathize with the characters’ predicament. This was in part a product of exemplary writing, but there was also something more. Something hauntingly familiar about the way the explosion of the moon occurred. I could easily imagine the way the story would propagate across our information superhighways. The neuronal synapses it would causes to fire, the horror, but also the detachment that would follow. This fictional series of events felt all too familiar for reasons that are difficult to explain.

Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:53 -0500

Summary

The first in a series of seven books, ‘Swann’s Way’ opens with reflections by a narrator on some of his earliest memories, one of which involves being visited by a man named Charles Swann. After a period of reflection, we begin to follow Swann, a man of society, as he eventually falls in love with a former courtesan named Odette de Crécy. The rest of the book chronicles the rise and fall of their relationship.

Nausea

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:18 -0500

Summary

Antoine Roquentin, an isolated aspiring biographer, inhabits Bouville (mud town) like a ghost. “Nausea” by Sartre is not so much a story as it is an attempt to let the reader have an experience. Roquentin’s alienation provides the space to observe, producing the typical results of social critique. Yet, he goes beyond this to grapple with the existence of things in general.

Thoughts

This book will have a very hit-or-miss reception among readers. It can be easily dismissed as another case of a melancholic Frenchman who needs to spend more time in the sun. When I picture Antoine, he is quite pale, so those readers would probably be correct. However, for my friends who don’t know when to stop asking questions, this book will give you a few more.

A Primate's Memoir- A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:21 -0500

Summary

Sapolsky is a biologist specializing in neurology. Ever since he was a child, he has been obsessed with primates, so shortly after graduating from Harvard, he travels to Kenya to begin his studies on a troop of baboons. His study focused on the effect that stress has on the development and overall well-being of a physical system and eventually spanned around 25 years, where he would spend four months in the field and the rest of the year analyzing his findings in the States. The book is separated into sections that align his own maturity with those of the baboons, such as adolescent, young adult, etc. With this handy narrative device, the reader is able to witness the maturation of the author simultaneously with his subjects.

The Ego and Its Own

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:44 -0500

Summary

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:23 -0500

Summary

Bill Bryson was flying over an ocean one day when he realized just how little he knew about how everything worked. This propelled him into over three years of research, talking to experts in various fields, visiting important museums and visiting some of the most important places on Earth, including Ohio. Bryson was unimpressed with the science books of his youth, feeling that they hinted at the wonders of the world before drowning them in abstruse terms and he set out to change that. Covering everything from Biology to Astrophysics, Bryson flies through the various disciplines giving the reader a brief and exciting overview of how they started as well as where they are currently.

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:31 -0500

Summary

Written in 1921 while WW1 was fresh on his mind, Freud investigates the psychology of groups. Little did he know, one of the most notorious groups in history was just a few years from rising to power, ultimately forcing him to flee to London in 1938, where he would die of cancer. The book starts with a summary and critique of contemporary Gustave Le Bon’s work on group psychology and then investigates past where Le Bon’s work ends.

Fahrenheit 451

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:33 -0500

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.

David Copperfield

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:50 -0500

Summary

David Copperfield unsurprisingly tells the story of a character named David Copperfield. We see him, albeit retrospectively, grow from a very young boy into a middle-aged man. Along the way, we meet a host of characters who fill the structure of Copperfield’s life with color.

Thoughts

I can’t help but view this book through the lens of recently reading Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead.” I realized that Kingsolver’s book was inspired by David Copperfield, but I did not realize just to what extent. In short, “Demon Copperhead” could be considered a retelling of David Copperfield set in modern-day Appalachia. This affected me in a few ways; for one, it made the story less exciting because once you realized just how closely the plots in the two books were connected, the twists and events were spoiled. Secondly, it made for an interesting dynamic where you read, in a sense, to see what was redacted from the new book. As Camus says, “The censor shouts aloud what he proscribes.” Although this is an interesting way to consume a story, it probably isn’t how Dickens would have wanted to be read. With that out of the way, the story itself was good, if not a little long in the tooth at places. The characters were really strong and memorable. It has the optimism of pre-modern literature that is always a breath of fresh air. If you had to pick one to read, I would always default to the original book; this case is no exception. Dickens is a master author on default settings; he will entertain but seldom surprise. I always enjoy my time with him but have yet to be deeply affected by him.

The Fall

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:36 -0500

Long-form essay on Camus’s The Fall—the same piece as under Reviews, listed here as an essay.

The Fall

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:36 -0500

Also available as a long essay.

The Fall- An Account of Modernity by John the Baptist

There is always a space between the thoughts in a writer’s head and those that the reader is receptive to, yet when it came to The Fall, I found that space to be incredibly small. Camus boils down modernity to one thing: “judgement”. This unique framework for viewing our image of self and relation to others illuminates what otherwise would appear to be simple self-aggrandizement with a desperate attempt to avoid the Last Judgement.

Heart of a Dog

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:05 -0500

Summary

This is one of those books where revealing anything is too much. The book opens from the perspective of a scruffy stray dog who encounters a mysterious Dr. Filipp Filippovich. Things get out of hand.

Thoughts

I enjoyed this book. From the author of The Master and Margarita, which I read almost exactly a year ago, Bulgakov offers another incisive satirical take on the Bolshevik Revolution. The book presents a dual critique: on one hand, it addresses the hubris of the revolutionaries, who are overly confident in their understanding of human nature. On the other hand, it highlights that people are indeed different; some are worth listening to, while others should be ignored. This book provides a literary vision of an unfortunately successful bourgeois (which I don’t feel a part of until I can spell the word without looking it up) social architect and portrays an exaggerated, unwashed proletariat wielding newfound power. Beyond any political interpretations, the book is fairly short and entertaining for the most part. The writing is unsurprisingly quiet good and makes for a perfect Halloween season read from the USSR. Onward comrades!

Spiritual Verses

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:21:13 -0500

Summary

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:27:50 -0500

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…

The Guns at Last Light

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:33 -0500

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.

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:27 -0500

Summary

Army at Dawn documents the United States entry into the fight against Germany in North Africa. This picks up after the allies seized the critical port town of Tunis. This allied victory opened the possibility of attacking in the words of Churchill “the Axis’ underbelly” in Italy. Crossing from Tunis to Sicily (the island attached to the toe of the Italy’s boot) the allies began their slow march towards Rome. During and after the capture (or liberation if you prefer) of Tunisia there was a great deal of disagreement between the British and the US over what the next target of attack should be. The Americans favored a cross channel invasion jumping from England to France, but on the other hand, after the Dunkirk debacle the Brits were much keener on the idea of invading Italy. So in a compromise they decided to do both, but since the allied troops were already stationed near Italy it was decided that the cross-channel invasion would occur a year later to allow for planning and logistical difficulties to be sorted out. In the meantime, the allies would use their deployed units to invade Italy and try to take some pressure off of Russia. It sounds good on paper, but as the casualties mounted and progress crawled to a halt in the inhospitable Italian mountain winter, victory was far from certain.

The Origin of Species

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:59 -0500

Summary

1177 B.C.

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:34 -0500

Summary

This book looks into what is known as the Bronze Age collapse. There was an interim between the Bronze and Iron ages where highly connected systems of trade and communication went dark. Cline tries to investigate various theories as to why this happened. Long story short, it was a lot of things. There was a mega drought, or more likely two mega droughts which together spanned 150 years. This was no doubt part of the reason why certain tribes had to migrate escalating tensions. There is some evidence of earthquake storms happening around the same time, which are caused by two tectonic plates who won’t stop dancing. There were signs of internal rebellion, no doubt exacerbated by the famine. All single things that on their own could be survived, combined into a perfect storm causing a complete collapse of the interconnected Mediterranean world. The date picked to represent the culmination of this collapse is 1177, but this is just a neat handle, much like the term Bronze Age. The actual collapse probably took over 50 years.

The Golden Ass

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:02:39 -0500

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I checked this out based on the title alone. Who wouldn’t want to read a book titled “The Golden Ass”?

Summary

The main character Lucius is obsessed with magic. Through a series of events he ends up accidentally being transformed into an ass. Evidently, this is the only entire novel that has survived from ancient Rome. The style is that of a main story with many short stories injected by various devices such as someone retelling a rumor, campfire stories etc.

The Selfish Gene

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:56 -0500

Summary

Dawkins argues that the fundamental unit of natural selection is at a gene level. He then continues to build the world from single genes into what we see today, explaining why many different behaviors that are confusing at first, when examined from the “gene’s eye view” they start to make sense. If you have heard of Darwin, then odds are you’ve heard the phrase “survival of the fittest”, but the question that this statement raises is, survival of what? The fittest claw? The fittest lion? The fittest pride? The fittest species? Dawkins makes the case that what is surviving is the gene and for this to work he defines gene slightly different than a geneticist would. He says a gene is the smallest single or collection of chromosomal material that lasts enough generations to act as a unit of natural selection. An easily understandable example would be the gene for blue eyes. On the face of it this definition seems circular, by definition he can’t be wrong. Genes — segments of chromosomal material — are the smallest trait-carrying units we know of, so if natural selection exists, it must start there. One might be tempted to ask why he didn’t define genes as a group or single quark that exists together long enough to be a unit of natural selection, but he spends a fair bit of time expanding this definition into less of a tautology and more of a theory. One interesting question the comes up is if natural selection is at the gene level and logically therefore all genes are acting selfishly (anthropomorphizing to help us think about the situation), then why would they band together with competing genes to form flesh suits, or elm trees? To answer this he brings in the concepts of replicators and vehicles. Another term he uses throughout the book was survival machines, this was a clever choice as it applies to anything that is alive, plants, animals, etc. Dawkins says that genes are the replicators and survival machines are their vehicles. So since we are already anthropomorphizing, I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to picture a chromosome behind the wheel of a car on a speeding highway trying not to die, the car in this case would anything from single celled amoeba, to a giraffe. When we come back to reality of course this does not work in this way, as a single gene has next to no control over where a bat is going, or over the next word I type. But Dawkins chooses to zoom in on the “next to nothing” influence, because if you put enough next to nothings together, you just might have something!

Empire of the Summer Moon

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:30 -0500

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.

Storm of Steel

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:00 -0500

And if it be objected that we belong to a time of crude force our answer is : We stood with our feet in mud and blood, yet our faces were turned to things of exalted worth. And not one of that countless number who fell in our attacks fell for nothing.

Summary

Storm of Steel is the firsthand account of the German officer Ernst’s Junger’s time in the trenches during WW1.

We Are Electric- Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

Sally Adee, a well-published science and technology journalist, writes her first book about a major shift she has been witnessing in biology, and it all has to do with electricity. She opens the book with a brief history of what we know about electricity and how we discovered what we do know. Spoiler alert: it includes a lot of frogs. The main thing she wanted to highlight was that during the beginning of research into electrical phenomena, the field quickly branched into two directions. One branch focused on what was called animal electricity, while the other focused more on non-animal electricity. At this early stage of research, neither branch had reliable tools to conduct empirical science. There was a high degree of speculation in both fields, but with the breakthrough of the first battery, this quickly changed, at least for non-animal electricity. Suddenly, there was a reliable way to create, measure, and distribute this mysterious energy. When it came to animal electricity, there were no such tools to reliably create results, yet the claims held an intuitive weight and were picked up by many scientists and many more quacks. Eventually, there were so many scandals involving wild, unsubstantiated claims that the whole field of animal electricity was dismissed as pseudoscience. Technology kept improving, and eventually, measurement tools got precise enough to handle the tiny charges created by biological organisms, vindicating much of the early animal electricity scientists. However, their theories about how electricity actually worked in the body were correct only in the broadest sense. Much of the theories had to be thrown out or reworked in the one step forward, two steps back investigation of science. So what does this promising approach to biology offer us? Quite a bit. Scientists have utilized it for a while to stimulate hearts with pacemakers or calm down brains with epilepsy. Beyond this, being able to manipulate our electrome (as Adee calls it) holds tantalizing promises of faster wound healing, limb regeneration, reversing cancer, and slowing aging. The catch is that the system is much more complicated and interconnected than any of man-made electronics. Adee explains that instead of simple positive-negative wires exchanging electricity in our body, we utilize charge differentials in chemicals themselves. Each cell in your body acts like a little battery with the capacity to become more negatively or positively charged than its surroundings. Each cell also has ion channels that allow specific molecules in or out, depending on the state of the overall system. The takeaway here is we have only relatively recently begun to realize the role that electrical charges play in the nervous system. Now, we are discovering that this same mechanism for communication extends through every cell in your body. At this point, we don’t know enough to manipulate these distributed electrical systems precisely, but being able to do so looks like the biggest hurdle between us and a medical revolution.

Goodnight Moon

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:27 -0500

I’ve been reading this a lot recently, for my own pleasure of course, and I can’t help but picture a dark clear night in the deserted streets of Moscow. A homeless Ivan leans back emptying the contents of a clear glass bottle into his bottomless stomach. He trips over a curb and falls, landing on his back. His head cracks against something sharp and solid. Tasting metal in his mouth, he feels something warm start to trickle down his back. Unable to move he stares into the dark sky. He can only see the brightest of stars, the rest, like so many potential futures left unrealized, are hidden by light pollution. In the distance he can hear a train’s lonely call, the walls of the sleeping city echo back their ghostly replies. While nearby, giant smokestacks exhale their black life into this last night of nights. Completely alone, his voice barely above a whisper he says

History of European morals from Augustus to Charlemagne

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:35 -0500

Long-form notes on Lecky’s moral history—the same piece as under Reviews, listed here as an essay.

History of European morals from Augustus to Charlemagne

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:35 -0500

Also available as a long essay.

Thoughts

This book was thoroughly enlightening but quite dry and dense and around 850 pages. This is partially why I have written such an extensive summary hoping to convey some of the themes that I think are important to know without just saying “read the book”. When it comes to topics like morality it is easy to have an axe to grind. Lecky provides what appears to me to have been an even-handed recounting of this slice of history. This book is full of useful information and interesting context that is often lost when trying to understand the events of history. I am sure there are mistakes and misunderstandings, but there is so much else that is of value that what few mistakes there are will be dwarfed by the new perspective given to the reader. I found myself often copying large sections of the text while in other parts leaving surprised questions marks when a new fact that sounded preposterous turned out to be true. If you have the time, this book is worth it.

Hamlet

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:26:41 -0500

So I listened to this as a dramatic reading while driving to and from Cincinnati, and I think this is how I will consume Shakespeare plays from now on. The actors have had to do all the work of translating the archaic language and sentence structure into universal feeling which made the play much easier to digest. I also mostly listened to this so I could really appreciate the hidden subtleties of this skit.

The Catcher in the Rye

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:31 -0500

Summary

This follows the main character, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield, for a couple of days after he is once again kicked out of school for his failing grades. Knowing that he has a couple of days before his parents receive the notice, Holden decides to wander around the town. The story ends up unfolding over a weekend, starting on a Saturday and ending the following Monday afternoon.

Thoughts

First of all, I can’t write this review without talking about the style. From the start of the first paragraph to the end of the last line, Salinger’s style never stopped annoying me. This is because he decided to write it from the subjective viewpoint of Holden, who, as I said, was a teenager in the ’40s. Thus, the story is written in the lingo of a teenager from the ’40s. This means that all the things that you would typically do to write well are thrown out the window in favor of keeping the narration somewhat similar to how a teenager would actually talk. The overall effect is, as one book critic put it, “like mainlining castor oil.”

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:17 -0500

This book sets out to answer the question that most people have thought about once or twice, but quickly dismiss because they are afraid of where their intuitions take them. The question is, why did certain civilizations advance into “civilized” modern cultures while others seemed to have gotten left behind in the stone age. Why does the UN exist in the same timeline as people who are still hunting with stone weapons? What might intuition say? Probably some form of “manifest destiny”. Well, that sort of thinking is thankfully inappropriate in our current discourse, but this self-censorship kills the question before a reasoned and viable alternative is presented. Therefore, due to the fear of your probably racist intuitions, you don’t spend enough time to see how they could possibly be wrong, you just ignore them like your aunt with the bad breath and close hugs. Well, Jared Diamond wants to give you some reasons you can look at that aunt with bad breath and show her the door.

Against Nature

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:24 -0500

There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool (Nature) has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artiface.

So basically, it is this whole thing. Huysmans was a novelist in the 19th century whose early works were part of the naturalistic school which sought out beauty and truth in the mundane, but later in his life this changed. He began to feel cramped and redundant inside the confines of nature and wished to supersede it through artifice. Maybe this would give us a more visceral or concentrated glimpse of beauty? Enter what is known as the “Decadent” literature. This school found its poster child in Dorian Gray, and this is how I came to hear about it. On a reread of the Picture of Dorian Gray, there was this quote:

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:30 -0500

Summary

This book follows the protagonist Julien Sorell in his attempts to make a name for himself. Julien is the son of a carpenter but has dreams of becoming the next Napoleon. During a period known as the Bourbon Restoration, France is experiencing a brief moment of peace after Napoleon had been defeated and monarchs were back in charge. Julien decides that the only possible path to the glory he seeks is through the church now that Napoleon is no longer around. He soon finds out that in order to climb the ranks of the France elite he must first learn to play their games.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:40 -0500

Premise

Modernity is obsessed with individual identity at the cost of destroying culture. The modern self has been reduced almost entirely into the sexual self. Carl Truman takes the reader on a scenic tour from Augustine to Marcuse tracing the way in which the modern conception of the self or “psychological self” has become increasingly disconnected from the physical self and its realities.

Good Parts

This book does a fair job of running through some of the intellectual heavy weights of the western cannon (think Rosseau, Kant, Marx, etc). The mainstream bits from these thinkers will be review for anyone familiar with philosophical history, but with some interesting threads being drawn out. Ironically, this book taught me some things about the LGBT community that I didn’t know like the theoretical difference between “gay” and “lesbian”. One of the most interesting points to me was that some feminist refuse to accept man to woman trans people as being technically women because of the fact that they for the most part become patriarchal stereotypes of women. There is also the more common argument about certain biological realities lacking in a M2W trans experience.

Freud

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:09 -0500

Sigmund Freud A great primer that doesn’t throw the baby out with the repressed infantile sexual instincts.

Civilization and Its Discontents

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:10 -0500

There was a lot packed into this short book, or long essay. Nearing the end of his life, and the end of the period of peace between WW1 and WW2 Freud was still Freuding. This book is ostensibly about the restrictions that civilization imposes on individuals, but probably more importantly in the psychoanalytic field it further sketches out a new primal drive in human nature, namely aggression. For most of his life Freud had looked at human nature through the lens of the “Pleasure principle” which is that all actions humans take can be explained in avoidance to unpleasure. This principle ran into problems, one example is how the mind seems to relive traumatic experiences over and over again. Enter the “death drive”, the main assertion of this book was that our two main drives (pleasure and aggression) are antagonistic to civilization. In that sense, civilization can be conceived of as a mechanism of repression and redirection of those drives towards behaviors that are beneficial to the group. He has called this process “Eros” and the later drive has come to be known as “Thanatos”. Eros is a work of unification at the cost of individual desire, i.e. civilization. The question (or warning) of this book is that Eros doesn’t seem to care about the individual at all, it will sacrifice the individual completely to achieve its goal of unification which will perhaps make living life in wonderful unity not worth it in the end. There is so much more inside this short book, it is widely considered one of Freud’s most important works. I would recommend it to anyone, no matter their views on Freud’s other ideas. This book has also tied in with thoughts I was already having in regard to the exclusivity inherent in inclusivity, the need for Orwell’s two-minute hate, etc etc.

Rethinking School- How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:38 -0500

A clear and concise book that does exactly what the title says it does. Bauer takes issue with the K-12 grading system in the US claiming that it does not make proper contingencies for the individual. Instead, designed much like the factories that were popping up at the same time, the K-12 grading system treats each kid like an identical piece of machinery. This book was helpful to me as it underlined the fact that K-8 grade needn’t be nearly as structured as is popularly believed. These grades in fact will have little to no impact on their futures assuming the time isn’t completely wasted, and the kids are introduced the core material requisite for high school. Bauer also believes in the idea that each subject is its own island, and kids have natural talents in each. Some may be good at math while others excel in history. Allow each kid to benefit from their natural talents, without falling into the trap of too quickly pushing them forward a grade and into a social situation they are not mature enough to handle. Overall, the book was a couple years away from being really useful to me, but it has given me some ideas for when the time comes so I won’t have to start out from scratch.

Candide and Zadig

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:29:27 -0500

Candide

Have you ever been so maddened by a single sentence that you decided to write a book? Leibniz is famous for his claim that we live in “the best of all possible worlds”, after the Lisbon earthquake which killed somewhere between 12,000 to 50,000 people Voltaire rejected this claim. In large part this book is a parody of this optimism. Candide the main character grows up in a sheltered privileged life where his tutor Pangloss teaches him that he lives in the best of all possible worlds. After a series of events our naïve hero is kicked out into the real world and is almost immediately kidnapped by Bulgarians and pressed into service. Leading to one of my favorite scenes where in Voltaire’s dark comedic tone is captured.

Mrs. Dalloway

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:05 -0500

After the first few paragraphs of this book, I was hooked. Amazing writing, beautiful story telling. Mrs. Dalloway follows the events of a random day in June in post WW1 England. There are unmistakable parallels between this and Joyce’s Ulysses, the main difference being that this was enjoyable to read while the other was decidedly not. We get to hear the stream of consciousness of many characters through which we are painted a picture of people, relationships, and events from multiple perspectives. To me the main theme of the book was time and society. We jump forward and backward in the day’s events, but the connecting string is the sound of Big Ben ticking away the hours. In some ways it seems to anchor the experiences, cutting short thoughts, connecting storylines, signaling the inevitable flow of things. The only thing more ever-present than time is society. One of my favorite characters is a man suffering from severe PTSD after losing a friend in the war. He is eventually driven mad, his remarks on “human nature” and its inability to put up with difference were very interesting and I feel like a key, albeit extreme version of what several other characters were experiencing. Identity is often looked at individualistically, but I think more and more that it only exists in relation. It is a nexus of desires comprised of many conflicting aspects, even within our own minds. This is shown nowhere more clearly than with the eponymous Mrs. Dalloway. This book was a great experience. Virginia Woolf

The Master and His Emissary

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:29 -0500

Summary

The Master and his Emissary written by Iain “Right brain so hott right now” McGilchrist is the product of twenty years of research into hemispheric differences in the human brain. He starts out by dismantling the pop psychology version of the hemispheric differences saying that the simple male(left)/ female(right) dichotomy is incorrect because the right is actually good at logic too so now, we can’t find a female part of the brain anywhere. To put the book in a single sentence it would be that the left sees parts while the right sees the whole. Part of the impetus of this book seems to be that the right hemisphere has been neglected by research and considered of lesser importance than the left (which does the talking) according to McGilchrist this is flipped. The “master” in his title is in reference to the right hemisphere and the emissary to the left. His claim is that thought originates in the RH and is sent to the LH but must importantly return to the RH to find its grounding in lived experience. He makes some really broad claims that are bound to ruffle a few feathers. Shots are fired at many folks, like Descartes, everyone’s favorite punching bag, Plato who we are assuming you understand if you are disagreeing with him, and Chomsky the misguided genius of the left. This book is full of interesting anecdotes about the functions of the brain, here are a few that stood out. The LH and RH seem to work in a sort of opponent processing. Where if one side loses some power, the other side will step in to fill the gap. This usually causes undesirable outcomes for example in stroke patients or the like. He claims the singing (RH biased) preceded language (LH biased) due to its simplicity and the way our brains pick up rhythm and some studies that showed that babies tend to pick up words lyrically prior to syntax. [Chomsky shakes his fist in feudal rage] The corpus callosum is the major connector between the LH and RH. This is what was severed in patients with severe epilepsy because it appeared to ease the symptoms creating what we call “split brain” patients. Two things are interesting here, first that for the most part the patients were able to live normal lives after the operation. Secondly, that bridge appears not only as a connector, but a borderline that held the hemispheres at bay. So, after the operation the instances of strange behavior like the left hand reaching for a coat (controlled by the RH) and the right hand (controlled by the LH) reaching out to stop it are caused by this imbalance in opponent processing. One of his major claims in the book is that the western world has become a machine world, the LH preferred way of looking at the world. We moved away from the dynamic world of the RH which is full of curves, circles, and flow into the static world of the left, line segments, n-gons, and timesteps. From art to the written word itself, the world has shifted towards an LH biased mode of operation. Language used to be written vertically and made with pictograms (like hieroglyphs) which meant reading favored the RH, we now use abstracted symbols and read left to right which is exactly the way LH prefers it. The shift to favor the LH has torn us out of an experiential world and placed us into a mechanistic world where we are observers. He makes the case that this perspective is very similar to cases of schizophrenia, which are primarily a malady wherein the LH is overactive. He ends the book by looking at the ways in which this LH bias is not as apparent in eastern cultures and that perhaps this signals a way forward for us.

The Secret History

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:12 -0500

Secret History is a murder mystery told in reverse, where the reader is shown the victims and perpetrators at the beginning. The book is narrated in first person by one of the perpetrators, and the events are revealed through his recollections of them. The story is set in a fictional small college in New England in the 1980s, where a group of six students form an exclusive cohort under the tutelage of a professor of Greek classics. This professor has peculiar practices, such as being very selective about which students he allows in his classes. He only lets a few students in at a time, and takes total control of their schedules, becoming almost their only professor by teaching multiple classes at once. This creates a close-knit group of students who are almost strangers to the rest of the students on campus.

Black Robe

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:05 -0500

Black Robe is a simple story about a 17th century priest trying to make it out to an isolated mission near the Great Lakes. He is to be guided by a small group of Algonquian in exchange for six muskets and a few other items. The main theme that is in the faces of the reader is the clash of cultures. Two ways of thinking so disparate, it is hard to imagine any bridge large enough to span the chasm. Moore avoids the easy trap of making caricatures of either side, but instead presents both the priest and his guides with an even sympathetic hand. An interesting undercurrent to the book was the idea of contingency. While reading the book you get the feeling that you as the reader have as much control over the outcome of events as the characters inside the book. There is a long string of events that leads Father Laforgue to his current mission, stretching all the way back to scenes from his childhood where statues to martyrs have shaped his dreams and life ambitions. Likewise, the Algonquian, uneasy and fully aware of tectonic shifts occurring are grasping at any hand hold they can find to buy some extra time as they slowly slide towards oblivion. The priest relies on his guides, who in turn are at the mercy of autocratic fort captains who in turn bend the knee to the pope. Like a cancerous tumor, trade spreads and starts to erode cultures into a single melting pot of “necessary” relations. Inside this maelstrom of turmoil Father Laforgue attempts to do and be good, but as Moore painstakingly makes clear that is no simple matter. The story is interesting, dark, and at times moving. The Algonquian’s way of speaking in the book is heavily laced with profanity, this (from an author’s note) is supposed to be historically accurate, and it increased the strange juxtaposition between their speech and the speech of a 17th century priest. That being said, at times it was so informal as to be distracting and reminded me a little of the “jive” language from Airplane. Really enjoyed the setting and look forward to reading more stories from around this era.

Condensed Chaos

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:15 -0500

Read this as a book club choice and having read the Kybalion earlier in the year I was somewhat interested in what this book had to say. I also intended on coming into it with an open mind. I read it in two days, so what I will say was that it was not boring, and not “difficult” to understand. I was also intrigued because unlike the Kybalion the author made it quite clear that “sorcery” was not beneath the per view of this book. That being said, I am not sure how anyone could take this sort of thing seriously. There were many parts of the book that were absolutely laughable. There is a phenomenon in many of these types of books where there will be a lot of words and concepts that together make an amazing edifice, but as soon as these ideas come into contact with the real world they oxidize, and you are left with an empty façade. It is as if you are on a foggy pier, and you run into some wizened old sailor missing a leg. He looks up and says “yarg, you want to see Atlantis?” You excitedly say that you do, and he says, “follow me”. You follow the old man into his rickety boat and descend into his dank cabin to find that he has constructed some sort of island city out of LEGOs. He looks at you with his one good eye and says, “yarg, this be Atlantis”.

Dead Souls

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:42 -0500

Gogol is one more of those Russian authors (actually born in Ukraine) that was an inspiration to many other authors (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, etic) I thought it was about time to take the old boy out himself. Dead Souls follows a mysterious character that the reader gets to know as the book unfolds who just as mysteriously wants to buy dead serfs from Russian aristocrats. The writing style was easy to digest, and the book is filled with many charming and ridiculous characters. This book was somewhat unique as the author would break the fourth wall from time to time and give his own views about things. Full of insightful social commentary and awkward predicaments the book was called the Russian Pickwick Papers, but I wouldn’t go that far, I would say this book is a lot less ridiculous and more surreal, which I would guess is why it appealed to Kafka. The book surprisingly ends in mid-sentence leaving scholars to argue whether or not it was supposed to be that way. Whether it was or not it definitely felt like the rug was pulled from under you. Gogol was another one of those Russian authors that seemed to live like a character from his books. A complete chad that wanted to teach Cossack history but instead was offered a job teaching Medieval History at the university of St. Petersburg a subject of which he had no qualifications.

Lifespan- Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:39 -0500

An easy-to-read book that makes a case that aging is at the center of all humanity’s health issues. Before David Sinclair, there had never been a unified aging theory that stood up to scientific scrutiny. Sinclair argues that aging is a disease. Our body is constantly reproducing itself on the micro level. As we exist things cause damage to our bodies (UV radiation, Coca Cola, the mail man etc) these mini disasters cause cells to go into disaster recovery mode where they leave their domestic tasks to address the foreign catastrophe. While they are gone their grass at home gets long, their mailbox gets full and some never make it back home. Overtime these absences stack up like scratches on a DVD. All the sudden a cell that was making sure a certain other cell wasn’t reproducing, never makes it back and you get cancer. Like scratches on a DVD Sinclair is confident that we can and have made progress in interventions that would essentially expose the data underneath the scratches and be able reverse the effects. Sinclair looks at the current medical approach as an ineffectual game of whack a mole that address various symptoms of aging but has never worried about aging itself because it was assumed that aging was an inevitable process that should not/could not be messed with. Sinclair’s grandmother and mother both died in the typical modern way. That is their lifespan was extended, but their quality of life was ignored. Those two events are the cornerstone of his life’s work, which is to extend vitality not just lifespan. He makes some very optimistic predictions about life spans extending in the near future. For example, saying that the first person to live to 150 has already been born. The writing itself is pretty standard for this type of book, engaging but not unique in any way. To me, most of Sinclair’s metaphysics was a breath of fresh air. I am still a maladjusted pig boy that enjoys living, and would enjoy living longer than 80 years, maybe not forever but longer than 80 years. More than that I would like to still be kicking when I’m 80, because what is the point of living 1000 years if you are in an old folk’s home for 900 of those years. This is exactly what Sinclair is saying will happen in the near future. He doesn’t make any predictions for life spans longer than 150, but he does make the claim that there is no biological limit to lifespan, there are only biological entities that experience aging and those that don’t.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:12 -0500

Keeping this review short, I really enjoyed this book. Full of very interesting points and theories, really helped to get a grasp on the story about what happened between big bang and man. Got way more acquainted with monkey sexual practices than I had expected. The things that I didn’t like was that on one hand we have the insistence (correctly I think) that evolution is blind and has no destination in mind, where on the other hand there was still the subtle presence of the idea of “evolving past something”. Most notably xenophobia, this struck me as inconsistent with the previously utilitarian view presented on the universe. The other thing that caused some mental friction was their approach to chimps learning language. This section felt like quite a stretch to me, as I think it misrepresented chimps’ linguistical abilities. In total, I still enjoyed this book quite a bit and it is worth a read if only to see the interesting overlaps between monkey culture and human culture.

Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:01 -0500

This was probably one of the most difficult books I’ve ever read, but at the same time one of the most thought provoking. As the first book I’ve ever read from Baudrillard, this book felt like jumping on a bullet train that was traveling to some unknown destination at top speed. Never pausing to offer his readers any lifelines Baudrillard forges on with twisted logic and esoteric analogies. Steeped in the culture and place of France in the 1980s I found myself often at a loss and not catching the references to geography or pop culture. Even so this book has stuck to my mind like glue, and for the rest of the year I was unable to shake it. His view of the world seeped into mine, and irrevocably changed it. Let’s just say I won’t be going to Disney World anytime soon, I for one am satisfied with the unreality that the rest of America has on offer.

The Cosmic Serpent

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:18 -0500

This book was a wild ride like watching some guy on the history channel talk about something that you have no clue about. Could be classy…. could be demonic, but either way entertaining! I found his points about the complexity of DNA and the stability of animal archetypes after the Cambrian explosion to be quite interesting and something that I will have to keep an eye out for in the future. Big bang debunked?! But seriously, I think we should be able to hold Darwinism as loosely as we hold Mormonism. If something else comes along and replaces it, all the better! I thought the book raised a lot of good questions and gave some pretty shaky answers, not that I have any better theories to sally forth, I shall sit back and let someone braver face the ridicule of the scientific world. As Planck’s principle says, “Science progresses one funeral at a time”. Perhaps our conceptions of soup to cell, needs a snake!

The Gods Themselves

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:52 -0500

Was really interested at the start of the book, but the dialogue seemed canned and eventually the weird melting stuff in the book became laughable. Interesting plot, but the execution in the end did not do it for me.

The Good Earth (House of Earth, #1)

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:11 -0500

The Good Earth tracks the life of a peasant farmer in early 20th century China. Opening with the main character’s (Wang Lung) wedding day and then follows him and his wife through the end of their lives. Famine, Bandits, War, and odious family obligations stand in between Wang Lung and his quest for good farmland. Written (1931) by the child of an American Missionary in China, I was surprised by the lack of judgment and the sympathetic way it presented the Chinese culture. The author definitely demonstrated an intimate understanding of the Chinese culture, but I still think it was written as an outsider when compared to Wild Swans. A very entertaining and moving book, I would recommend this book if you were interested in the topic. I appreciated the fact that the book didn’t have a clear moral or apparent agenda.

The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:29 -0500

There is a phenomenon where a large group of ideas and people are looked at in the academic world with contempt as if they were below consideration. Or perhaps we have progressed past them in some way. But at every turn we see signs of their influence and general acceptance. I feel like Jung, Campbell, and especially Freud with their ideas fit neatly into this category. The influence of a hero with 1000 faces (1949) is insane. Pretty much any story you’ve ever enjoyed either implicitly follows the structure laid out by Campbell or was directly influenced by this book. From Watership Down to Jim Morrison, the Matrix, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. Campbell makes the claim that all of the different mythologies in the world are actually part of a monomyth which emerges from the human psyche. As such a myth in any part of the world will loosely follow a structure, which he calls the Hero’s Journey. One way of thinking about myths are that they are stories that can’t not be told. A dream is a personalized myth, and a myth is a de-personalized dream. Myths in this light are our primary link to metaphysics. After having already read the Power of Myth there won’t be much new in this book other than a more rigorous explanation of the stages of the hero’s journey. Also (my favorite part) many entertaining myths that you’ve probably never heard of. Like all work relating to myth, it is highly speculative and prone to the brain seeing patterns that do not exist. This objection must in some sense be ignored though, due to the resonance this book has had. It seems like there must be something to it even if it is just a glitch in our brains. It doesn’t matter if these ideas are ignored, they seem to seep through the cracks of our psyche anyway. For the average reader I would probably recommend just reading this or Power of Myth if you are looking for something shorter. To read both of them is probably only necessary if you are in need of a double dose of mythological pimping.

The Leopard

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:38 -0500

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.

The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:44 -0500

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.

The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:18 -0500

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

Ubik

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:49 -0500

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.

1984

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:29 -0500

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.

2666

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:24 -0500

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.

A Clockwork Orange

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:42 -0500

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.

A Philosophy of Education (Homeschooler Series)

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:05 -0500

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.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:27 -0500

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.

Edgar Allan Poe

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:49 -0500

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.

Emotional Intelligence

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:15 -0500

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.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:20 -0500

So, in this surprising newsflash, we feature a story about how Ernest Hemingway is actually a really good writer. This story was set in the Spanish civil war where a mix of communists and republicans were fighting an established fascist government. The book follows an American named Robert Jordan who is fighting for the communist resistance. He is employed as a dynamiter and instructed to blow up a bridge behind enemy lines. There were two things that stuck out to me from this book. First is that Hemingway is probably the manliest man I’ve ever read. But in the best way possible. In my opinion this book is a great antidote to “toxic masculinity”. There is no machismo, chest thumping or other forms of “compensation”. Instead, there is a confident determination to carry out one’s responsibilities and to not be found wanting when the key moment arises. The main character is a blueprint of competency without arrogance. He managed to do that as well as write two female characters that seemed complex and layered. Hats off to you sir. The second thing was, it has been a while since I’ve read a book where I felt like I could see exactly what the main character was seeing. Hemingway manages to describe the setting and scenes so well I felt myself in the pine forests in the mountains of Spain. Or as an eyewitness to a massacre perpetrated by victorious rebels. This book makes you feel a full range of emotions.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:37 -0500

I listened to this whole book, then went back and listened to the first half again, to try and cement an understanding of his argument which could be fairly complicated. The goal of the book was to give a convincing explanation of Scientific Materialism. So instead of “A Case for Christ” this would be “A Case for Darwin”. It was pretty nice to hear the best arguments for materialism from a guy who has spent much of his life studying the problem, but it took extra concentration to keep up as the reasoning was so different from the usual hippy pan psychic stuff I’ve been reading of late. Here are some thoughts,

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:25:32 -0500

I did this so you wouldn’t have to, and now you can at least take one book off your list. Gargantua and Pantagruel was written by François Rabelais in the 1500s. While the term “renaissance man” is often over-used it really applies to Rabelais. He was a genius walking contradiction. A Frenchman, a Greek scholar, a learned physician, a monk, a humanist, and is best known for his risqué satirical songs and writing. Whatever box you try to put him in, he seems to pop out of it. His characters have a love for life that flies in the face of the reserved stoicism that we generally associate with the 1500s. Whether it is taking a piss or reading Apollodorus each is treated equally in this book. Appearing in 5 books, the reader follows the adventures of Gargantua who is a giant, and his son Pantagruel who is also a giant. The book is filled to the brim with sex jokes and bathroom humor. Here is my favorite of each, for bathroom humor Gargantua is talking to his father about all the different objects he has used for toilet paper in his search for the perfect wiping sensation. The list includes but is not limited to old hats, slippers and velvet gloves. But his favorite is…

Gone with the Wind

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:16 -0500

Consistently rated as American’s favorite book second only to the Bible, Gone with the Wind has undeniably shaped America’s culture and helped serialize the romantic ethos of ‘The South’. Written in 1936 it was an instant hit, selling more than a million copies before being turned into arguably the first blockbuster film three years later. Gone with the Wind follows the life of Scarlett O’Hara for around 15 years observing the start of the civil war and the tumultuous reconstruction that followed. This book has often courted controversy and how could it not? This is a story of the south, by someone who loved the south. —-Main Characters—- Scarlett The epitome of a southern belle, except that her charms are only skin deep. A beautiful headstrong girl who has always been the center of attention, surrounded by suitors and always pampered. As a main character I have never liked anyone less. The whole book is from her point of view which in the early part of the book is the same as being stuck inside a ditzy 17-year-old girl’s head. Scarlett isn’t stupid per se, but nothing abstract interests her, as such, much of the philosophy of the South is omitted from the book and instead is presented through motifs. Honestly this might be for the best, as because of this the book seldom gets bogged down in preaching for a way of life that we as a society have decidedly rejected. Scarlett may not be stupid in a classical sense, but she is clueless how to live life and to know what she really wants. In many ways she is the most believable of the main characters and while it is often not pleasant to be stuck in her head, I feel the same way about being stuck in my head sometimes.

Good Inside

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I inherently don’t trust people who are named Dr. ‘X’, but they always seem to become popular. In a single sentence I would say that the book is full of BS that probably works. There were things in the book that triggered the Hank Hill “now that’s just asinine” response, but then she would follow it up with an explanation that would end up making a lot of sense. The foundation of this book is the idea that everyone is “Good inside”. She puts an emphasis on the idea that we are not our actions. A what she calls “two things are true” attitude. You did something that you aren’t proud of, but you are good inside. She takes this approach because she believes that people can’t change their behaviors until they believe they are good inside. She is anti-shame, so anything that promotes shame (like thinking you are bad inside) must go. So basically, a childhood completely opposite from the one I had. She promotes viewing everyone, but especially your kids through a “most generous interpretation” lens. The main role of the parent is to create an environment that is safe for the child to learn how to self-regulate emotions. So instead of shutting down kids’ feelings you are supposed to acknowledge them and let the kid feel them, so they know how to deal with their emotions instead of repressing them……sounds demonic. So, an example would be if your child is afraid of the dark, instead of trying to convince them they are not, you should approach things from a “trying to understand” way and ask why questions. Then you would tell your child, that you believe they are afraid, and that it isn’t bad or wrong to feel that way. You could then work together on trying to find solutions to mitigate the fear, instead of just telling your kid to not be “so dramatic”. That’s pretty much it, any feeling your kid has, you tell them that it is okay to feel that way, while holding boundaries. Overall, this book made me realize that I had been thinking through parenting through too much of a “me-centric” viewpoint. Focusing on what I can do instead of thinking through things from the child’s point of view. What is it like to be told what to do all the time? What is it like to have no control over your activities? How can we promote autonomy in such a structured environment? How can we learn to regulate feelings we aren’t allowed to have? So just take a moment, put your hand on your heart, deep breath in, close your eyes and say “I’m good inside”

Heart of Darkness

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:39 -0500

I had heard this book mentioned a couple times and so I had it on my list for a month or so and finished it in one sitting. Very entertaining, the mood was very tense. It reminded me a little of Lovecraft’s style. The story follows a captain of a steamboat for an ivory trading company that goes up a mysterious river in Africa. The plot started to feel familiar to me about halfway through. Turns out it inspired the movie Apocalypse Now which I had just seen for the first time less than a week prior, one of those rando coincidences. So, there are many similar themes between that movie and this book. Here are some notable quotes to summarize the feeling:

Jayber Crow

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:20 -0500

Living in the fictional small town in Kentucky named Port William from shortly before WW1 to the 70s the industrialization and with it, the destruction of small communities in America functions as a backdrop in this story. The main character, Jayber a name the locals gave him converted from his original name Jonah, is sent to the orphanage at 10 years of age. He has vague memories of his parents and images he has seen of the terrible war, he finds himself alone in a situation that is outside his control. This will be a theme in the story, the idea that life often just happens to you and is seldom what one plans. Without spoiling the plot too much, he feels that he is “called” to be a Baptist minister, although deep down he was never quite sure, but he joins a Bible college that convinces him that he was not meant to be a pastor. He decides to “make something of himself” by going to the big city (Lexington in this case) and get a college degree, but much like his biblical namesake he gets vomited back onto the shores of Port William sometime later. He ends up living his life in this small town as a barber and outsider. The writing was beautiful, many of the themes of Unsettling of America are worked out in the narrative by the characters. A swan song to when the farmer was one that “tends” the earth instead of “mining” it. Reminds me of some of the supposed writings of the Indians as they watched in detached depression the once thriving balanced ecosystem they knew get turned into a sex-worker. Apparently, this is just one book of ~50 that Berry has written set in the fictional town of Port William. I guess he really liked that DnD map and didn’t want to leave it. I would recommend this to be added to the reading list but not urgently.

Kinds of Minds

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:16 -0500

Another round from Dennett attempting his best materialistic explanation of the mind. This seems to be his main goal in life. To cut to the chase I would recommend “From Bach to Bacteria and Back” as it is newer and more convincing than this book. The main message of this book is that we should stop anthropomorphizing things, or at least be more self-aware when we do. Specifically, around the experiences of animals. He argues that questions like “what is it like to be a spider, bat, etc” makes a huge assumption, viz that being the creature in question is like anything. He has some interesting thought experiments to feel this out. For example, were your arm to get amputated and you brought it to the doctor to slap it back on you should the doctor give both you and the amputated arm pain killers? Were we to find something so big and complicated in the wild we would probably assume that it would be wrong to dice it up as it would appear to have nerves, etc. etc. Furthermore, if the amputated arm DID feel pain how would it communicate it? The example obviously has gaps, considering that there is “no brain” for the arm, but is the presence of the brain where we assume pain comes from? He then uses the example of rolling over in your sleep to relieve pain or discomfort on your limbs. Do you experience this pain? The big difference between animals and humans (according to Dennett) is language. All creatures receive information through their senses, but his idea is that this information is tokenized in a storable form vis-à-vis words. Consider words to be additional layer on the operating system that allows a system to start labeling nodes in the brain that were just “instinct”. (I’m going into non canon examples here, but I think he would agree) Consider various things we all do out of habit, like driving. Have you ever driven a common route and been so up in your head that you were a little surprised when you pulled into work? You were functioning on a sort of auto pilot, much like your heart, digestive system, and most other functions in your body do 24/7. Is it “like” anything to be your heart? Maybe? but we don’t offer it the same affordances when it is on the surgery table as we would a cat. Now say that as you are driving your ‘attention’ comes back to driving. You experience driving, what is it that you are doing when you are experiencing? Perhaps no more than tokenizing incoming visual/audio/olfactory data from related nodes inside your neural meat case to words that act as a sort of post it note to various states. He isn’t trying to argue that we should treat living things as automata, but his point is there probably won’t be some clean line between organisms that experience human like pain and ones that don’t. In fact, I think he would go so far as to say the evidence is indicating that no animals experience pain “like” we do. Another example from the book was a Rhesus Macaque monkey was observed to have one of its testicles bitten off in a fight, but showed few signs of pain and the next day was observed mating again (what a chad), but does that mean Rhesus monkeys don’t feel pain? Probably not, but they definitely don’t feel pain in that one scenario the same way as humans, which is surprising given their other human like behaviors. He also had a quote in talking about perceptual biases that was worth sharing

Leviathan

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:27:31 -0500

This book has been on my list for a long time, as it could be considered one of the most influential texts in shaping the western world. Written in 1651 Hobbes gives his views on political philosophy and touches on almost everything else along the way. Ghosts, validity of scripture, hell and truth. The central tenant of the book is his view on men in a “state of nature” which is synonymous with the state of “war of all against all”. He famously said that in this state “life of man, (is) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” The book is broken into 4 parts and the first deals with this as well as an overview of Hobbes’ philosophic framework with which he is operating. Hobbes is a materialist and Christian in that way a sort of relic of his time. He discounts all events supernatural excepting a small handful which God did during biblical times. In the first part of the book, he describes man as a machine, tossing the platonic idea of soul out the window as silly. His logic is incisive and leaves little room for grey areas. In some ways it feels like you are indulging a senile old man who still believes that truth can be got at by “precise” definitions and clear statements, but on the other hand, it is hard to knock the man’s models as we live in a world partially built by him. If nothing else, he seemed to have a clear view of human nature. The crux of this book is that he believes (much like Sam Harris) that it is best to start considering political philosophy from the worst-case scenario. To him the worst-case scenario is a state of nature. This means that any government, no matter how tyrannical is preferable to the state of nature and therefore all efforts should tend towards preserving governments. To Hobbes a government at its core is always representational. A group of people agree to give up their right of ruling to a person or group of persons in order to avoid the state of nature. The person or group of persons is the embodiment of the people (book’s cover photo), otherwise known as the commonwealth. This brings about some other interesting conclusions from Hobbes’. Again, viewing the world in black and white terms, he believes you are either part of the commonwealth or not. If you are, then you agree to give up your representation to whoever your leader is. Since you’ve done this, you (and everyone in the commonwealth) could be considered to be the authors of the leader’s actions. This in turn means that the sovereign cannot do anything considered unjust as like God, justice is defined by the sovereign and the sovereign owns the agency of the subjects. To be brief Hobbes feels that the worst thing in the world is to be in a state of anarchy and the best defense against that is a strong united government, otherwise known as the leviathan. Something that everyone works to preserve to make it as difficult as possible to kill. Whatever consequences the ruler imposes the subjects should consider worthy sacrifices to avoid the state of nature. He finishes the book by trying to couch his principles in Biblical terms. He, unperturbed by the millions of scholars before him, wades into the murky depths of exegesis and comes out on the other end with his political philosophy intact. I was quite glad to finish this one as the last half was quite dry and I thought a little pointless as once a person with a brain turns 16, they stop being convinced by other people’s readings of scripture. I will say that his incisive logic did not sleep on religious matters either though as he brought up some really good problems overlooked by many. Like this thought on divine inspiration:

Lost in the Cosmos

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:03 -0500

Lost in the Cosmos is a uniquely styled book. It loosely follows the theme of modern alienation. In most chapters Percy sets up a scene, asks a question, and then provides multiple choice answers leaving it to the reader to decide. I can see how the format could be a turn off for some, but I found the whole exercise very interesting although I admittedly never stopped to formulate my own answers. He also takes a detour into semiotics (the study of signifiers and signified) which never fails to get into the weeds but provides a context for many of his thought experiments. The central thesis of the book is that humans are “naming things”. We live in a world full of objects that we name and put inside boxes. This is all well and good but something uncanny happened when we became self-aware. We found that in a world full of named things we are unable to name ourselves. Everything is something to the subject, but the subject is nothing to itself. The attempt to say who you are is like trying to see the back of your head. This creates alienation in the individual that used to be salved by religion naming you as a creature, brahman, atman, something is better than nothing but now we live in an age where it is extraordinarily difficult to believe in those stories so most jettison the whole thing leaving themselves alone in the cosmos. To further illustrate this idea the book opens with a beautiful quote from Nietzsche:

Man's Search for Himself

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:33 -0500

This book tried to capture the zeitgeist of the 1950s and therefore by necessity over-simplified and added artificial narratives to the decades preceding it. This narrative laid the preamble for the book by arguing that different ages had had different defining psychological hang ups. Whether this is true or similar to a horoscope reading it is up for debate. As a psychologist coming at the problem of identity from an existential viewpoint authentic individuality was the focus of the book. Some points that stuck out to me are:

Man's Search for Meaning

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:39 -0500

The author is a neuroscientist and psychologist who is also a concentration camp survivor. The first half of the book is split between an autobiographical description of his experience in the camps as well as some psychoanalysis on himself and other inmates and guards. After being released he founds a new school of psychology called “logotherapy”. The second half of the book talks more about what this school of psychology is and how it works. To boil down this guy’s philosophy is as follows:

Mythologies

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:37 -0500

At times illuminating, frustrating, thought provoking, unrelatable Roland Barthes has a different understanding of what myth is than most. He feels as if no one is intentionally creating myths anymore but they are being creating all the same via social values. This book is broken into two parts the first part is a collection of essays he wrote where he analyses various events and things in the modern day and explains the modern myth that is attached to them. This branch of study is I guess called semiology, basically it looks at things in the world and looks for things that carry more meaning than their essence. For example, he breaks down different portraits styles of French politicians to explain why they were cropped just so, looked in such and such a direction, wore just such a suit etc. etc. etc. All choices deliberately made to communicate more than just happenstance random choice but instead a specific meaning. He saw myth as an organizational tool used to maintain and justify a given social order. As indicated in this quote:

On the Nature of Things

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The only surviving work of the Roman Poet Lucretius, ‘On the Nature of things’ was written about a hundred years before Christ. The goal of the book was to try and explain Epicureanism to the Romans. I was surprised to learn that Epicurus was born about 300BC. This book explains pretty much every phenomenon you can think of from sweet vs bitter tasting things to why we sleep. Of course, the caveat being that it explains everything from a perspective of a guy two thousand years ago, so he was bound to have made a lot of mistakes. That being said it was impressive some of the things that he got right. For example, he argues that at a tiny level the most abundant thing must be nothing or void. If this was not the case movement would not be allowed. This of course turns out to be true as the closer you look at something the more space you start to see. The temptation is to read something like this from an angle of superiority, but while reading this instead of thinking “how far we’ve come” it kept making me feel like we haven’t come that far. Or rather we still barely know anything. A phrase from Foucault has been in my head for the last few weeks. He basically says that there are certain words that get used in science as definitions that aren’t actually definitions. They act instead as boxes that hide things we don’t understand. This seems very applicable here as many of the things Lucretius talked about, we now have better names and smaller boxes for, but there is still a lot of boxes. Lucretius essentially gives the basis of a mechanical viewpoint of the world that was free from the influence of gods. Where particles interacted with particles and the shapes of particles largely influenced the reaction. For example, he theorized that foods that were sweet had round smooth shaped particles while bitter food must have hooked and rough shaped particles. This viewpoint of bodies effecting bodies for all interactions remained the only answer in science until newton came along 300 years ago (Epicurus to Lucretius is the Same time as Newton to us) and turned everything on its head by introducing the concept of i.e., a box for something we don’t fully understand. As foundational of a text as this is, I wouldn’t necessarily say it needs to be on your must-read list. Probably the most interesting section in this book to me was a section on the mortality of the soul. Where the definition he gives of the soul is pretty much the same one modern science gives. Here modernity has not learned a single new thing since his time. In fact, we’ve probably forgotten some things.

Phaedrus (Hackett Classics)

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When I bought the Symposium, it came in a two pack with Phaedrus as its second. I was glad to find out that this book too revolved around pederasty(sarcasm). Essentially, Phaedrus runs into Socrates walking in the country after hearing a speech by Lysias on reasons why a boy should only lend his favors to a lover (older man) who is not in love with him. The text is lighthearted and has many jokes as Socrates then makes a better speech which agrees with Lysias impressing Phaedrus, but eventually reveals he believed Lysias’ speech to be pretty lame and he didn’t agree with his own. The book finishes with him giving a rebuttal speech and then he focuses on the art of rhetoric and the dangers and pitfalls that are in it. My favorite quote is in regard to (ironically) writing:

The Bell Curve

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:14 -0500

This book was pretty long and mostly interesting. As one might expect it is fairly dense full of charts and diagrams. On the upshot is I now have a concept of what a standard deviation is. This book makes several statements:

Everyone has varied levels of intelligence and this intelligence can be measured by what psychometricians call ‘G’ for general intelligence. G is a subset of IQ, but I’ll just refer to it via IQ.
IQ has a high predictive power on various social outcomes including marriage, illegitimacy, salary, criminality and more.
It is easier to be successful in life with a high IQ than with a low IQ.
IQ is more important than how much money your parents had in predicting outcomes.
Colleges have gotten better at selecting for IQ and therefore Ivy League schools get a much higher percentage of the best and brightest than they did 100 years ago.
There is the emergence of a new class in America that they dub the “Cognitive Elite” these people are separated from the larger subset of the population in ways that were not the case 100 years ago. (i.e., private schools, rich neighborhoods, white collar offices, etc.).
This new cognitive elite wields an extraordinary amount of power over the shape of our culture.
IQ is affected by genetic and environmental factors
IQ is pretty much set by the time you are 6 years old
IQ varies between ethnicities in the following order from top to bottom Asian, White, Latino, Black. (They don’t really say why other than a combination of genetic and environmental factors)
All of our best efforts in education haven’t produced as large of improvements in student’s IQ as most people think.
The top IQ students have been neglected by government funding, which has instead been funneled towards the lowest performing students.
Affirmative action is a disaster After reading this, whether right or wrong this book has been helpful. It was so controversial that it initiated many research groups to be formed to try and ferret out the legitimacy of the claims that the authors make, which is more useful than everyone nodding their heads in agreement. Most of the criticisms of this book center around their statistical methods and their decision to look at the correlation between race and IQ. It is worth noting that (from what I’ve seen) almost none of the conclusions the authors make have been refuted. For example, there is actually an apparent gap between white and black IQs (as of 96) for reasons unknown. My professional(joking) opinion is that the correlations are very compelling and intuitively it makes sense that a “smart” person would be more successful than a “dumb” person ON AVERAGE. That is pretty much the entire book in a single sentence, and I am not sure what is so controversial about that. As for the race difference thing, it makes more sense to me to look at it with open eyes instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. So, if there is a difference, we should do more investigations on trying to figure out how to close the gap. The authors sound defeatist on this point saying that all attempts in the past have failed to produce much change, but that doesn’t seem to be a reasonable conclusion to make from the data to me. In fact, the last section of the book was centered on what they would suggest for political actions based on this data and to me it was the worst part. As they aren’t political scientists it comes as no surprise their suggestions would tend towards the naive and whatever political bent, they brought to the table initially. Overall, I enjoy reading polarizing books because they are typically right at the center of important conversations.

Rating 7.5/10

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:30 -0500

This book sets out to demonstrate how violence over history is on a downward trajectory and that we currently live in the least violent time in history by almost every metric. This is very counter intuitive considering we have gotten so efficient at killing people; indeed, we have invented weapons capable of wiping out the human race, but they have yet to be used. The future is a little more optimistic than it appears at first glance. This book starts by outlining various trends he found of violence that has drastically been reduced. For example, homicide, war, torture, executions, and lynching have all been in decline for some time. In the next section he talks about 5 factors that contribute to these declines. The first factor is “The Leviathan” borrowing the term from Thomas Hobbes who argues that even though governments are somewhat arbitrary they nonetheless decrease violence on the overall. The second factor contributing to peace is the concept of commerce. As they say, “if goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”. Thirdly he attributes the feminization of culture as a cause for the drop in violence. He draws some very interesting correlations between cultures of honor and violence that I hadn’t thought of before. Honor much like a religious ideal can be inflated to infinite proportions leading to tiny insults being cause for a duel to the death. He then draws parallels between the duels of gentlemen from the past and gang violence in the present, showing how the motivation behind the violence is similar, it is just that one had been romanticized more. The ultimate example of this “honor” oriented violence is the era of chivalry. As women stopped being property to be fought over like oil or gold, many of these types of honor-based violence have decreased. Women also tend to be less aggressive on the whole, for example women are less likely to vote for hawkish foreign policy when compared to men. So as their ability to contribute and influence society has grown so too has their more peaceful ideas. The fourth cause in the decrease of violence is cosmopolitanism. He cites the printing press as having an outsized effect on people’s perceptions of other people. Crediting novels as the medium that allowed people for the first time to see the world from a different perspective. Doing this allowed people to feel the pain of others in ways that were not possible before literacy. The final reason he cites is what he labels “The escalator of reason”. He argues that enlightenment and humanist traditions have been the most successful tool in humanity’s arsenal for decreasing violence. To put it simply, if you believe in logic when you ask someone not to hurt you, by extension you also must apply the same logic to see that they themselves don’t want to be hurt. Thusly expanding our circles of consideration and integration. This book is well written, fairly easy to digest. It is full of interesting anecdotes and statistics that Pinker marshals to back his various claims. I enjoyed it, although I feel as if the book could have been shortened by a fair bit without sacrificing on content. There is some controversy as to his way of counting war violence to come away with the results he did, but no one can argue that violence has been restrained quite a bit since the Middle Ages. Especially when you consider the spine-chilling methods of executions and tortures employed and the complete lack of consideration for the welfare of humans that don’t look like you.

The Black Swan

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:27 -0500

Nassim Taleb investigates the improbability baked into the world and the expert’s underestimation of it. A quick synopsis of the title is that for many years it was assumed that all Swans were white. This assumption held true over thousands and thousands of observations. It remained true until Australia was discovered and lo and behold a Black Swan was found and overthrew the “scientific theory” that all swans are white. This anecdote is a reminder that we cannot verify anything, only conduct experiments that either confirm or disconfirm theories. Confirmation of a theory should not be considered verification. This problem is the main focus of the book which is: you can for sure know when you are wrong but will never know when you’re right. Taleb defines a Black Swan event as relates to the book as having the following characteristics:

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:06 -0500

Short review here. Not much to say about this other than it was enjoyable reading. The book contained 18 short stories by H.P. Lovecraft. They seemed to get better and better. My favorites were

The Rats in the Walls
The Call of Cthulhu
The Color Out of Space
The Outsider

Author

Three things of note about the author, one he was reciting poetry by two, reading by three, and writing stories by six years of age. Secondly, his adult life was incredibly unstable. He didn’t ever seem to have much money and reading how he lived, he seemed a little bit like a loser. As in living with his mom, and then with a sugar mamma, and then moved in with his aunt. Makes me realize that maybe getting “Employee of the Year” for 40 years isn’t always the definition of success. Thirdly, he was a very materialistic thinker. It was this that partially attracted him to the strange and weird as a sort of escape from a bland clockwork world.

The Case Against Reality

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This was a really interesting read. The emphasis on the active role the mind plays in constructing reality was thought provoking. Also watching the space time paradigm go out to get milk is rewarding. I think I fundamentally disagree with a few of his main conclusions, but that’s something we’ll have to discuss over tea. It’s funny the more books I read like this; the more overlapping stories/ illustrations pop up. Like Necker cubes, split brain patient stories, etc. It is as if these units of information are virulent. Good read, I love books that help you look at the world differently.

The Case for Christ

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:18 -0500

Lee Strobel earned a law degree from Yale and was a crime reporter back in the 80s. Long story short his wife became a Christian and so he goes on a spiritual quest to see if there is anything to Christianity. Strobel sets the book up by saying he was going to use his hardnosed skeptic journalistic approach that he used on crime to get to the bottom of the evidence, historical or otherwise that supports Christianity. He proceeds to interview a lot of the leading evangelical theologians and historians asking them hard questions and recording their answers. As such this book is a good summary of the state of the art of Christian apologetics. Broken into 3 parts it starts by compiling the best arguments for the historicity and facticity of the gospels. This section sets out to prove the following:

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:31 -0500

At some point during a conversation, I asked a question that was half-joking and half-serious. I asked, “If life is suffering, why is it morally okay to continue bringing more life into this world?” Little did I know, I would soon read a book that asked the same question. This book, published in 2010 by Thomas Ligotti, was an explanation of his own philosophy, which happened to be extremely dark. Ligotti starts by explaining that most people have the assumption that “being alive is alright,” and it is from this assumption that most philosophy is built. Instead, Ligotti starts with the assumption that “being alive is NOT alright,” and proceeds from there. This book could be considered an agreement and expansion of Peter Zapffe’s “The Last Messiah,” in which Zapffe argues that consciousness (mostly a sense of self) is a class A blunder by evolution. Ligotti calls this level of consciousness the “Mother of All Horrors,” as it has given us the ability to realize that we are puppets, turning us into uncanny things that no longer belong in nature. Zapffe concludes that the best course of action is for humanity to implement a two-child limit, causing the gradual extinction of the human race. Ligotti and other philosophers argue that parents have blood on their hands for bringing more uncanny, absurd creatures into this world of suffering. He also points out the similarities between this worldview and Buddhism, in that the destruction of the self is the goal of both, just with different wrapping paper. Ligotti argues that many philosophers have arrived at the same conclusion that he has, but they have made a twist at the end to allow them to tell the same story differently or come to a different conclusion, which is usually the conclusion that “being alive is alright.” There was a quote near the end of the book that has really stuck with me, which captures the isolation communicated in the book. It went something like, “Humans are the only species that, if they were to instantly go extinct, would not be missed.” As a bit of trivia, this book was a primary inspiration for Matthew McConaughey’s character in the first season of True Detective. Overall, this book was difficult to read due to how dark it was. The writing was quite good, but it was the definition of defeatist. It has given me much to think about.

The Demon-Haunted World

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:16 -0500

This book is Sagan’s ode to science. The point of this book is to argue the science is the most reliable way that humans have come up with for making descriptive statements about reality. Not a particularly novel concept but it is deftly laid out in this book. He starts out by destroying the man in the moon with facts and logic. Showing how only simpletons could believe the moon is made out of cheese. He then talks about aliens and draws very interesting links between alien abduction stories and the stories of witches during the 1600s. He draws a causal link between scientific knowledge and economic success and its converse which is the loss of scientific thinking producing poverty. He makes compelling arguments as to how America is largely scientifically illiterate and that more funding should be directed away from defense and towards education and general science. He gives some historical insights for funding general science and not just science for the sake of medicine and technology, arguing that general science is typically the best way to make technological and medicinal breakthroughs. The secondary point of this book was to try and convince everyone to be a skeptic. In line with this he describes what he calls as a “bologna detection kit”. This kit contains several logical fallacies used by politicians and bad actors to trick people into believing something. Shots fired at the authors of the bell curve in this book as well which was unexpected. I was expecting this book to be a lot more condescending than it was. Sagan’s tone was actually fairly polite and made a lot of sense. Definitely a little bit of a wet blanket to have at a party though. A lot of good ideas in here, not mind blowing but definitely helpful to remember when trying to build your worldview.

The Divine Comedy

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:22:00 -0500

I have read Dante’s Inferno a couple times, but it is part one of the trilogy titled the Divine Comedy. The first part is Inferno, then Purgatorio, and lastly Paradiso. So, when I finally got a hard copy that contained all three parts I was excited to check out the other pieces of it. First things first, these books are very difficult to read for two main reasons.

Language The language in this book can be very tricky. That is because the whole book is a poem written in (3-line stanzas) also in Italian. This makes the job of translator especially difficult to try and maintain the rhythm of the poem. On top of that since it is poetic there are many times where a very simple action like: person A asks person B a question can span paragraphs and therefore make it difficult to always keep track of what is going on.

The Double

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:46 -0500

The Double is Dostoyevsky’s second published work and is a definite precursor to much of his later work. Following the life of a low-level bureaucrat named Golyadkin for a couple chaotic days. Golyadkin is a weak and flakey person with crippling anxiety and bordering on psychotic. After attending a party and committing some embarrassing party fouls he is thrown out into the snowy night in St. Petersburg. It is in this state that Golyadkin literally bumps into his double a person that looks just like him and even shares his name. The rest of the book follows the relationship of these two characters as the double is the inverse of the real Golyadkin and has everything the original lacks. This book was also adapted into a movie with Jesse Eisenburg who is a great match for this character. The style is very surreal and also satirical it is much different from anything else I’ve read from Dostoyevsky. It was also the worst book I’ve read from him, in fact I think he says it best

The End of Faith

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:24 -0500

I’ve listened to Sammy boy’s podcast a fair bit so I figured I should check out some of his work. In the End of Faith, he comes out of the gate swinging. This book was written in 2005 while the Twin Towers were still fresh in everyone’s minds. So, while it pulls no punches for any religion there is a special place in Sam’s hell for Islam. He claims that much like we have retired Zeus and Apollo it is time to do the same to Jesus and Mohammed. A central claim of this book is that religion is that last place in society that has managed to remove itself from criticism. It attempts to justify itself from reason while dismissing reason as a valid way to understanding its truths. He then makes some interesting points about religious moderates not really helping things because to those living the letter of the law a religious moderate is a failed fundamentalist who will likely end up in hell. This is a very valid insight in my opinion, moderates have no leg to stand on. To me this has always been my biggest thing against “Jesus loved the gays” viewpoint. Another quip “sacred texts are sacred because they were thought so yesterday”. He then fires some shots at Bill Moyers trying to revivify these traditions. Right or wrong at points in the book Harris feels like an angry parent who wants to tell us: “you’ve been very naughty with your myths and so you’ve lost your privilege to use them! Go to your room and think about what you’ve done.” He also brought up this point (that I haven’t been able to verify) about the impossibility of removing contradictory beliefs from your own head. He said, if there was a computer as large as the universe made up circuits the size of protons running at the speed of light that verified each new belief against all its prior beliefs before continuing, and this computer had been running since the big bang it would still be working on cross referencing its 300th belief. Yikes! Another interesting insight is the concept that belief may be a passive response from the brain while in order to disbelieve something you have to expend mental effort. Good for Tigers in the jungle, bad for Bitcoin taking me to the moon. He then makes the common critique of sacred texts easily being used to justify violence (i.e. stoning an adulterer in the OT or killing infidels in the Koran), indeed he argues that it takes more work most times to sidestep such awkward verses than to accept them. Fair play! He does some minor stanning for the Israel/ Palestine situation, arguing that if Palestine was in power there wouldn’t be a conflict because there wouldn’t be any Israel left. This too seems like a fair point. He criticizes Chomsky for laying the responsibility at the foot of American foreign policy arguing that America’s foreign policy is not the driving factor behind terrorist attacks and that religion is. If you stop and think about it Chomsky’s opinion does seem a little weak, because one would expect many more Vietnamize suicide bombers than Middle Eastern suicide bombers, but to Sam’s point the Vietnamize aren’t Muslim. Chomsky has further made the classic liberal blunder of attributing unequal ethical blame to the actions of those in power. One only has to stop and question the motives of the two sides. The US seems to go out of its way to reduce civilian casualties while the Taliban seems to do the opposite. Cynically you could say that to the Taliban every civilian dead is one less infidel, while to the US every civilian dead is bad PR. He then ends the book making a case for spirituality without un-reason. In particular he singles out how the eastern traditions have largely been able to make a form of spirituality the is based on experience and not faith. Overall, I think that this book, similarly to “The case for Christ” will not convince anyone one way or the other about religion unless they were already halfway there. I found some compelling critiques and ideas to munch on and that is good enough for me. He received a lot of flak in the book for making the statement “There are some ideas that are worth killing someone over”. This is a great statement to vilify someone until further inspection and it becomes patently obvious that this is the only reason, we kill anyone and so the statement is almost pointless. Not a must read, especially if you’ve listened to any of his stuff for very long as you probably already understand most of the ideas put forth in the book. The book itself is well written and entertaining. People/Sam Harris

The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Belknap Press)

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:44 -0500

I had never read any Emerson and was excited to stick my toe in the water. This book was a collection of some of his most famous essays. Written in the mid nineteenth century he is one of those early American intellectuals which seemed to have burned brightly and all but disappeared. Emerson was one of the leaders of the transcendentalist movement which started in the 1820s-1830s. These essays do a lot to outline in vague terms the ideas Emerson had about life. Which are essentially romantic, you as the individual are the orthodox of your life. Heaven is not a place out there somewhere, but something that can be experienced in everyday life given the right mindset. Humans are at their best when they are reliant on themselves for their ideas and beliefs. Man is one thing, that an individual rises out of, this is what gives literature its meaning in the sense that it speaks to that common denominator in all of us. “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” These essays covered a wide range of topics my personal favorites were on friendship and self-reliance. This will definitely be a book I am looking forward to getting a hard copy of, because his writing is so poetic as it is probably best enjoyed a sentence or a paragraph at a time. Very beautifully written. Emerson himself was a Unitarian minister when he was younger but ended up resigning largely because his worldview no longer aligned with what the church’s dogma. I respect that, and that American individualism is everywhere in his texts. As a sad side note in his old age about a decade before his death he started suffering from aphasia. Aphasia is the inability to comprehend or formulate speech. A cruel irony.

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:31 -0500

This was an experience, a probably literal fever dream. This book was never meant to be published as most of it is notes that he had written to himself. As such it isn’t the best most fun read, but it would probably be the most interesting journal you ever read. To me this book has its highs and lows. There are parts of this book that are fascinating, frustrating, redundant, contradictory, brilliant, and insightful. Being a preeminent science fiction writer, his strength is in his original ideas. There is no end to them. This book’s inspiration is based on a series of events that led him to the experience of singular mystical experience that was so life changing to him that he spends the next 8 years theorizing about its source and significance. He only stops theorizing about it because he died. As a reader it makes you want to experience something that significant just once in your life, but then again maybe not. Due to the type of mystical experience that was had, religious terms are best suited to try and describe it, but rest assured this religion of PKD is unlike any you’ve ever heard. I wrote down some of the ideas that stuck out to me, that I will continue to think about for a while.

The Grapes of Wrath

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:19 -0500

I was gifted this book and was completely shocked by how entertaining and well written this was. It was a joy to read but unsurprisingly depressing. The story is about a family of tenant farmers in the dust bowl that get booted off their farm in Oklahoma and travel West in hopes of work. This book to me is the Uncle Tom’s cabin but for sharecroppers. Steinbeck takes no prisoners in his scathing critique of laissez faire capitalism that completely hung the poor people out to dry during the Great Depression. A master class on making interesting and contextualized dialogue, conversations are thought provoking and extremely moving. I wanted to travel back in time to punch those big banks right in the kisser, I’m voting Bernie Sanders next year. What was also unsurprising was that upon publication, this book was immediately considered as communist propaganda, was banned, burned, and censored. Put this on your list in front of “Of Mice and Men” if that book is on your list as I think this one is much better from John. Here are two excerpts to give you a sense of style, both are unrelated to the main plot, so NO SPOILERS

The Iliad

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This book was actually a lot more entertaining than I thought it was going to be. This story is around the legend of the siege of Troy. The story opens with a disagreement between Achilles and Agamemnon, after the siege had been going on for over a decade. Agamemnon had stolen a girl from Achilles that he had “rightfully” won in sacking a city. For this reason Achilles sits out on the fighting and watches as the Achaeans get their asses handed to them by the trojans. This book is full of chads and it reads somewhat like a marvel comic book story where you have 4 main levels of characters that make for some really interesting dynamics.

The Immortality Key

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:40 -0500

A very interesting tale. This book is full of new details I can almost guarantee most people haven’t heard of or thought about. I did have some minor knit picks with the book. I didn’t appreciate how the author constantly presented theories and then always incorporated them into his speech as facts. It works like the following: My theory is that there is life on mars………………so springtime for a Martian is wild, because Martians have to deal with crazy climatic elements unique to Martians and Martian society.

The Island

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:42 -0500

Published in 1962, nine years after his psychedelic experience that he documented in Doors of Perception, Huxley writes the “yang” to Brave New World’s “yin”. This story follows a cynical journalist who is shipwrecked on an island called Pala. These people do things in their own way thanks to the chance encounter between a Scottish doctor and the previous King of Pala about a hundred years prior to the main story in the book. The island represents a utopia imagined by Aldous with the best of east and west. This book started off with a bang then lagged a little in the middle but picked up at the end. Like many utopian ideas there is no shortage of opportunities to pick holes in ideas and explain why they wouldn’t work, but instead of doing that I’ll point out some ideas that seemed really interesting:

The Kybalion

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I read this book because of the article I found on Hermes Trismegistus a character who shows up in the weirdest places. The alleged inspiration behind the Egyptian god Thoth and the later Greek god Hermes, Hermetic philosophy appears to be incredibly influential in world religion yet something I had never really heard of. This is where we get the phrase “Hermetically sealed” from as the process was used in alchemy in attempts to make the philosopher’s stone. Enter the Kybalion, a fairly popular book written by the three initiates which puts the hermetic philosophy into a nice, condensed package.

The Master and Margarita

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:47 -0500

Written by Mikhail Bulgakov(Ukrainian) in the USSR during Stalin’s reign the book was censored and only published in full posthumously. The book is now widely considered to be one of the best novels of the 20th century and with good reason. The novel opens with a conversation between a literary editor and a poet. The editor had just commissioned the poet to write a satirical poem belittling Jesus and was upset with the poet’s creation. According to the editor, the poet’s approach was all wrong because he admitted that Jesus existed in the first place and was not a completely mythological creation. With great erudition he points out the similarity between different mystery religions and Christianity, and also the parallels between the dying and rising gods category of mythology. While the poet listens deeply impressed by these new facts a mysterious tall stranger sits on a bench next to them. Overhearing their conversation, he breaks in asking what they were talking about. The stranger then relates a captivating account of the conversation between Pontius Pilate and Jesus. He then predicts that the literary editor will be beheaded…. I will say no more of the plot as I would highly recommend this book makes its way onto your read list. The writing is superb, the story is engrossing, sags a little in the middle but picks up again at the end. I also guarantee whatever ideas about the plot you have, given the introduction I gave are pleasantly mistaken. Say what you will about Stalin and the rough Russian climate, but the images of hope, forgiveness, and love that the area produced seem to be unparalleled.

The Myth of Sisyphus

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:22 -0500

Synopsis

Published in 1942 Camus began writing this book as France (his home country) was collapsing under the pressure of the German advance. Let’s just say it was probably a pretty dark time to be a Frenchmen. This book starts off by Camus asking what he considers to be the most important question in philosophy. Which is: does the realization that life is meaningless and absurd necessarily require suicide? He then begins by defining exactly what he means by absurd. According to Camus the absurd emerges when man’s passionate and ceaseless desire for an answer from the universe is, and forever will be met by silence. He asserts that many philosophers have started from this realization but have in the end taken a leap to get around or alleviate the discomfort of this conclusion. Either by turning to a God or elevating reason until it essentially serves the function of God. He labels this leap “philosophical suicide”. He says that suicide in general is admission that either life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. The same could be said of this philosophical leap. His approach is rooted in acceptance of the absurd without hope, but a perpetual revolt in spite of this fact. He uses the story of Sisyphus (the guy who is cursed to roll a rock up a hill only to see it roll back down again) as a guide to how to live in this absurd world. He says, “there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” This is the attitude of revolt that the absurd hero must adopt. To at once be fully conscious of the meaninglessness of your life while at the same time transcending this conclusion by acceptance. As the famous quote from this essay states “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”. The point is that you can choose to find freedom in a universe that does not have a predefined path.

The Naked Truth of Jesusism From Oriental Manuscripts (Classic Reprint)

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:35 -0500

This book was complete trash. This wins the worst book I’ve read since I can remember. There weren’t any redeeming factors in this book. The author was a strong proponent of the “Jesus went to India” theory, which is literally based on one book by some random Russian dude who may or may not have gotten rich from the story. No modern-day scholars put any merit in this theory. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong necessarily, but it does mean you can get a show on the History channel if you believe in it. For some unknown reason the author tried to write the story in a sort of prose, which if you ever have heard spoken world then you know exactly the style this book was written in. The author’s views were an infusion of eastern mysticism with Marxist overtones. This by itself is great, but why not write in a normal format. Also why try to foist your views onto a 1st century Palestinian? This book would have been more convincing and enjoyable had it been written like a normal book instead of in Goodwill prose, also if he could have cited sources, for further research that would have been much appreciated.

The Noise of Time

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:36 -0500

Julian Barnes wrote my favorite book of 2020 (The History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters) so I was looking forward to reading a newer book from him. This one was published in 2016 and is not quite a historical fiction and not a true autobiography but more like a story that follows the life of a Russian composer (Dmitri Shostakovich) under Stalin shortly after WWII. Barnes then fills in some missing pieces, drawing out a psychological portrait of a neurotic and somewhat spineless composer under the iron fist of the USSR. All in all, this book had some really good moments but came nowhere near the mastery (IMO) of what I was expecting from Barnes. Where Solzhenitsyn approaches the USSR regime as a prisoner in a gulag this is from the perspective of Russia’s most popular composer who was also in constant fear of the gulag. This helps to paint a picture of what life was like to those who were “lucky” enough to be outside the gulag. I really like Barnes’ writing style, but I would not put this is on a must-read list.

The Perennial Philosophy

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:25 -0500

The Perennial Philosophy was Aldous Huxley’s attempt to unify the major world religions. The premise of the book is that they are all talking about the same thing and the differences are illusory. He relies heavily on mystics from some of the main traditions (Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Zen). It is clear that Huxley has done an immense amount of research into all these traditions and is able to pull out some fascinating quotes from each. Here are some interesting thoughts:

The Pickwick Papers

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:37 -0500

A witty read that follows a gullible but beneficent aristocrat (Samuel Pickwick) and his friends that form the Pickwick Club around as they galivant around the English countryside. Eating, drinking and getting into trouble. A brilliant writer, Dickens manages to convey the frivolity of life with an irresistible charm that makes you want to join in, even though it is all very silly. Filled with adventures as well as short stories told by various characters the plot is only loosely attended to, allowing the reader to hear many stories in one. is one of my favorite short stories. I will say that there are many stories where the characters get in trouble in somewhat stressful ways. Not sure what the name of this troupe is, but for example the main character gets lost in a hotel in the middle of the night. Returns to a room that looks just like his and starts to settle down but as the reader you are pretty sure that it isn’t his room. He is nearly asleep when a woman walks in, but due to the lighting he only sees the shape of a person and hides behind some drapes thinking it was a thief before realizing it was a woman, and that he must be in her room. This puts him in a very awkward position of course and as the reader you also happen to know that he was just hanging out with a guy who had come to that hotel to propose to a woman and naturally the woman in the room ends up being the same woman who was to be proposed to the next day and on and on. So if you don’t find that stuff entertaining than this isn’t for you, but I much enjoy. I guess a little similar to Naked Gun or something, but the protagonist isn’t quite so bumbling. All in all, good

The Plague

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:27 -0500

The Plague is a fictional story about a cousin of the Bubonic plague reappearing in the town of Oran in Algeria on the North coast of Africa. As an aside the stranger also took place mostly in Algeria but in a different city. Really well written but quite dark, reading the plague was maybe a little too soon after COVID, but it was a great reminder that we are incredibly lucky that things weren’t as bad as they could have been. The story follows the doomed efforts of a doctor to treat the untreatable or in the doctor’s words “an endless defeat”. Yet with dogged persistence and help of a friend they organize a small crew inside the cutoff city to do what they can to stem the tide of the disease. As Camus was also a part of the French resistance in WW2 there are obvious parallels to the feelings of hopelessness but rebellion in the face of it

The Power of Myth

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:08 -0500

I love myths, so this book was really interesting in that regard. It goes well beyond the common ones that you’ve heard. Definitely made me want to read more about myths from North America. Campbell and Peterson seem like two peas in a pod although it seems like one pea (Peterson) has spent more time looking into the abyss than the other, for better or worse. This book is very staccato, an idea broached, a story told and then moved past to the next. What was at first a conversation between Campbell and Moyers was transcribed into the power of myth. In this sense it made for a poor book seeing as a book is the best medium we have for long form thought, but a conversation unless purely one sided can never truly be long form. The silver lining was that you were able to witness a huge breadth of Campbell’s beliefs instead of a narrow but deep vein. It made for a good overview of his position so that if you ever were to read one of his books in the future you won’t be starting from scratch. The connections made in this book were very interesting and food for more research. I am especially interested in the connection of the rise and fall of goddesses and the beginning of agriculture. Simone de Beauvoir pointed out essentially the same thing and for the similar reasons. Campbell seems places the chain of causality to be:

The Second Sex

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:29 -0500

And upon completion of this book, I would like to please receive a paper certificate that indicates my commitment to the advance of woman’s equality in society. Furthermore, I would like to be acknowledged as being a forerunner in the movement to bring about a peaceful conclusion to the war between the sexes. To put it shortly I feel as though I have solved all issues based on sex and am equipped to fully exercise my god given authority over women now that I have a complete understanding of them. Jokes aside this was a very dense book, but had many valuable insights nestled in there. Published in 1949 the information, descriptions, and approach of this book are unavoidably dated, due to the fact that it has been so influential in shaping modern conceptions of “the plight of womankind”. That being said I feel as though our upbringing and indoctrination created similar expectations about women as those widely held in the 50s. So, this book was ‘convicting’ more so for me than it probably would be for most people in our modern culture. Split into two volumes the first volume discusses what “woman” is. Looking first at biological examples from various insects, animals and eventually humans. Then with this foundation she transitions from the physiological to the psychological. While critical of most thinkers (like Freud and Adler) that had attempted to analysis woman’s condition it is easy to tell that she was heavily influenced by their form of analysis. I’ve seen/heard many people talk about how she completely disagreed with these thinkers, but that is not how I read it. For example, the Freudian concept about women suffering from penis envy, is rebaptized in her thought as the fact that women are envious of the privileges that come along with having a penis. This is a long and interesting (to me) conversation but long story short, I don’t see this view as a complete contradiction, but more of a reformation. She ends volume 1 with an in depth look at the various mythical styling that are given to women. In particular focusing on a handful of author’s depictions as a case study. Noting that each of these different types of mythologies make heavy use of mystery when describing woman. This mystery is largely responsible for creating this idea of the “other” where woman isn’t another subjective free acting human, but something else. Volume 2 then describes woman’s experience from infancy to old age. This section was actually very interesting to me, and I feel like I learned a fair bit that I was not aware of previously. To summarize, the distance between the starting line and the finish line of becoming a unified self is much longer and more confusing for women than it is for men. There are many more opportunities for women to stop halfway on the path to individualization than there are for men thanks in large part (but not entirely) to the path society has set out for them. She then cycles through many stereotypes of women and provides a psychoanalysis of each case which would always start off with me thinking she was insane, or overstating things and by the end, everything she said started making sense. The book concludes with her talking about why there haven’t been very many great women authors, artists, etc. Put simply (do not strike me dead Simone) women have to first convince themselves and the world that they are competent individuals. This initial effort takes so much energy and time that they are left with little energy to go further. This “going further” is essential in becoming great. Few men achieve it even with having a head start, which explains why even fewer women achieve it, and why “Wuthering Heights, in spite of its stature, does not have the scope of Brothers Karamazov” (Had to sneak in a Dostoevsky plug in there). You cannot expect a black slave to write a transcendent epic like Moby Dick, because the experiences that allowed the author to create the epic are not open to the slave. This book was, as I said dense. Some parts were slow, others interesting. But most modern ideas about birth control, abortion and economic equality of the sexes, and objectification have their birthplace in this book. I could definitely see re-reading some of these sections again to be reminded of some of the insights she presented. Great stuff

The Secret Sharer

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:50 -0500

This is another short story that came with the hard copy i bought of “heart of darkness” so i read it this week. Very entertaining read, probably pretty easy to finish in one sitting under normal circumstances. It is about a new ship captain that is a “stranger to the ship and its crew” but makes an unexpected connection with a stowaway that he must hide from the rest of the ship’s crew. As with the heart of darkness, Conrad is able to produce a tense, and mysterious atmosphere that makes you feel present in the action, while keeping things dark and primal feeling. Very fun quick read.

The Social Contract

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:29:22 -0500

Length: 6hrs

Summary Written in 1767 ten years before America’s independence Rousseau give’s his version of the social contract theory. Social contract theory in a nutshell is that individuals give up certain rights to attain a higher level of security than they could have in a state of nature. Rosseau is probably most famous for his optimistic view of this “state of nature” in opposition to his predecessor Hobbes who described it as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. The focus of this book was on what types of governments make for the best quality of life when you are past the state of nature. As you probably guessed the answer is “it’s complicated”. He starts by attempting to demonstrate that even though governments and institutions are man-made and thus arbitrary they can have some legitimacy and should be followed excepting certain circumstances. Another difference from Hobbes is that he argues that the freedom that men give up in order to enter a social contract is returned with interest in the form of civil freedoms. So while the social contract removes natural liberty which gives unlimited ownership to what you can take by force, it replaces it with civil liberty in which ownership is decided via convention and enforced via an entire group. This is a neat trick we human’s played because unlike the rest of the animal kingdom we seem to like fighting to the death over the smallest things. In Rosseau’s view the social contract aims to equalize nature’s inequalities. He interestingly observes that almost all governments require a god in their formation as an anchor point that gives a leader authority initially, but after the government is well underway the authority of god can fade into obscurity. He then talks about different types of governments. An important distinction he makes is that between the sovereign and the legislature. Like church and state these two should be kept separate. To Rousseau the sovereign is every citizen in a state (or body politic, a new term to me, thanks Jacque) together that form this magical thing called the general will. The legislature on the other hand is the people, one or many that implement the general will. A legislature made of one would be a monarchy a legislature of many approaches a direct democracy. These two branches should be kept separate because if the sovereign (the people) attempt to implement particular things they lose their generality (general will poofs out of existence). This separation also allows for the sovereign to overthrow the legislature if it is not following the general will. He argues that smaller the state is the bigger the government should be, and the larger the state is the smaller the government should be. Because small governments are efficient and large governments are slow (think bureaucracy). He says that small states with big governments (like Geneva where he was living) allow freedom to flourish the most of any type of government. He argues (mistakenly as I think the following 200 years has shown) that states should be self-sufficient and not reliant on other countries for trade.

The Stranger

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:22 -0500

This was a short story about a man who seemed to float through life mostly detached. You could almost say a stoic not by philosophy but by personality. Most things that attach people to this life didn’t seem to be there for him. A French man living in colonialized Algiers. Meursault is like Dostoevsky’s Idiot. He tells the truth, but instead of having a good heart, Meursault’s heart seems indifferent. Written by Albert Camus while Hitler occupied France, this book places the character in the most extreme of human situations. Meursault and the reader are forced to realize they are condemned to death and to try to find a way to enjoy the time they have in the face of absurdity and meaninglessness. I liked this book because just when you think you have a handle on it you remember a new detail that makes you look at it from a different angle. It is similar to no country for old men in that sense and in the fact that the ending leaves it up to the reader to write the conclusion. This book was not written from a place of answers, the character is just as clueless as the reader. That is valuable and leaves it open to many interpretations. Camus had this one sentence summary:

The Trial

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:05 -0500

This is about a guy named Joseph K. who wakes up one morning to find out that he is under arrest. But no one can tell him why. This is a very surrealist novel in which everything in the world seems to operate by complex systems that are hidden both to the character and the reader. One of the most interesting parts of the book is that it really gives you no one to relate to. Out of habit you initial attach your view to the main character, but the way in which he navigates the world quickly becomes somewhat alien and hard to understand. In its own way his actions are just as confusing as the court system’s. This book does a great job of making the reader uneasy and never sure of what will happen next as the connection between action and consequence is hard to decipher. I read this because of Camus’ recommendation, and I can see why he liked it as one could imagine the book ‘The Outsider’ as being a descendant of ‘The Trial’. The last words of Joseph K. “like a dog” have stuck in my head ever since. People/Franz Kafka Albert Camus

The Unsettling of America

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:57 -0500

I had been meaning to read Wendell Berry for a while as he lives less than 30 minutes away. Without much research I chose ‘The Unsettling of America’ which is his critique of modern agricultural and its effects on society. Written in 1977 it seems like not much has changed. To me Wendell Berry sounds like a modern-day Jeremiah. It was really coincidental to have read Grapes of Wrath just prior to starting this book, as it deals with similar content. The central theme of the book is that modernity has up-ended the natural patterns and cycles and replaced them with destructive and exploitative practices. The book opens with:

Totem and Taboo

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:53 -0500

Someone let Freud loose in the field of Anthropology! Spurred on by works from his rival Jung, Freud investigates the connections of totems, exogamy, taboos, religious and neurotic thoughts. A collection of four essays Freud initially investigates (or attempts to) the origins of “Incest Dread”, that is to say why incest became a taboo to begin with. From there he considers the correlation between Taboo and emotional conflict. He demonstrates this with some fascinating deconstructions of certain ceremonies to honor a king which required severe austerities that (in the school of psychoanalysis) demonstrates the peoples wish to honor but also torture the king. To prevent harm from coming to the king, but also prevent the king from harming. The subtitle of the book is Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. This is looked at in depth in the third essay investigating the similar power that animist and neurotics both attribute to thought. In many cases elaborate rituals are created to propitiate themselves of actions that were only committed in the psychic and perhaps subconscious realm. The fourth and final essays is a sort of climax where he attempts to tie everything together and put a Freudian bow on it. In this brilliant essay he argues that our entire society is built off of a real or imaginary event that has given us generational guilt (i.e., original sin). This guilt is the origin of all religion. Drawing from one of Darwin’s speculations about human society possibly being constructed similarly to gorilla’s social structure, that is one alpha male with a harem. The original act then was the brothers (whom the alpha male kicked out) united to murder their father. The father that they loved, feared, and respected. At the end of the day, you gotta go back to Oedipus.

Ulysses

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:02 -0500

Man, this book was an experience. Not altogether pleasant either. I’ve never read a book before where I felt like the author almost wanted you to quit reading it. Really, I’ve just never read a book like this one before. Published in 1922 banned by censorship panels in various countries for around a decade, this book is a groundbreaking work to be sure. In short, this book describes events that take place on June 16, 1904, in Dublin, mostly focused on two characters Leopold Bloom and Stephen Deadalus. There is nothing special about the day it could have been written about 2 other characters in a different place in a different time and had the same effect. It seems to be a meditation on how everyday contains the entire range of human experience. Like every day is a universe onto itself or something like that. The best way I can explain the experience is to imagine being trapped inside someone’s brain where you could hear every thought they had but could not experience the world in any other way. So, you never hear anything you instead hear the processed thought the sound triggers. You never see anything, you instead piece together the outside world through flashes of objects and impressions. This style produces two effects. The first one is that I’ve never felt so intimately connected with a character in a book before. By the end of the book, you literally know Leopold Bloom better than his closest friends and maybe even himself. One example of this is that I’ve never read a book where you live through someone taking a shit. It was described so well you feel like you are actually sitting inside a dude’s head while he is sitting on a toilet reading a book and making a big mud pie. The second effect is confusion. There is no explanation in this book. Everything just “is”. A character has a memory of so and so doing this and that, but I have never heard of so and so and I don’t have any context for why them doing this and that is important. This confusion is unavoidable for the style though, as you would be this confused being jacked into someone’s stream of conscious. The other thing is that this book is deeply rooted into Dublin. Joyce plotted out each character’s movements in a map and calculated their positions based on average walking speed, etc. So again, you are almost required to know Dublin to not get overwhelmed with a long list of roads, landmarks and other geographically accurate markers. On top of all this everything can shift from episode to episode. You may be at one place in time at the end of one episode and without warning start in a completely new place and time in the next with no explanation, or sometimes actually go back in time. The writing styles also shift as Joyce seemed determined to flex on Shakespeare. In fact, there is one episode where he parodies every single writing style in western literature from Herodotus to Dickens. Then there is also the fact that the line between a character imagining an event taking place and an event actually taking place isn’t demarked by anything. Again, remember that you aren’t seeing anything, you are hearing about what someone saw, or in some cases imagined. Finally, this book was written to be read and re-read. So, there are many things that don’t really make sense at all in the beginning that you are “supposed to know” but you don’t until later on. Overall, this was not a fun read. I wouldn’t recommend it to most people. I ended up finding a helpful companion guide because some episodes were so confusing that I really had no idea what was going on. Check out website where someone plotted out all the characters movement/places in the real world in a single episode to see the complexity Joyce was working with. That being said I’m glad I read it. It was incredibly written and unbelievable complex. I know if I was smarter, I would appreciate it more. I’ll come back to it someday and maybe enjoy it more on the second read. The most unique book I’ve read in a while, so if you’re interested in novel styles I’d recommend it, but you’d have to be REALLY interested. I’ll leave this review with a quote that was memorable and seems like a good example of the overall tone.

Utopia

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:25:16 -0500

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:

Walden

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:54 -0500

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.”

War and Peace

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:07 -0500

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.

Wild Swans

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:11 -0500

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

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:47 -0500

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.

Homo Deus

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:35 -0500

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.

Macbeth

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:27:03 -0500

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.

The Alchemist

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:08 -0500

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.

The Death of Ivan Ilych

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:26 -0500

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:

The Souls of Black Folk

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:43 -0500

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.

American Holocaust

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:12 -0500

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.

Animal Farm

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:25 -0500

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.

Beyond Good and Evil

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:26 -0500

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.

Catch-22

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:41 -0500

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

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:26:45 -0500

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.

Fear and Trembling

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:43 -0500

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:

Heaven and Hell

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:40 -0500

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.

Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:51 -0500

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.

Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:11 -0500

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.

Rashomon and Other Stories

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:55 -0500

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.

Sapiens

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:31 -0500

This was a sort of rando pick I made but was definitely the best book I’ve read this year. There is a well-known guy in the computer science community who coined this idea that code quality can be judged by the “number of WTFs/minute” the person coming behind that code has. Well, I’d like to say that when it comes to a book like this, the quality of it can be judged by how many times your mind gets blown by a unique thought or viewpoint that I haven’t had. This book has hundreds of those. In a nutshell this book outlines science’s best “story” about the development of man in the following stages

Siddartha

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:02 -0500

Finished this, this weekend. Still processing it. I think the moral of the story is you can’t teach wisdom, the only way to learn that is through personal experience. Especially being aware enough to know when you are fighting a useless battle trying to “teach” someone wisdom when they aren’t ready. While this is somewhat of a common idea, being able to graciously accept that is not common at all. I’ve often found it frustrating trying to impart my “wisdom” on people who clearly just aren’t ready. Why can’t they see I’m always right?

The Bhagavad Gita

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I first listened to the Bhagavad-Gita in its entirety. I found it somewhat interesting but ultimately a dud because it felt like every other word was either a Sanskrit deity that i was supposed to already know about or a Sanskrit word that represented an entire doctrine like the word “transubstantiation”. It felt like watching marvel’s avengers end game with a Spanish voice over without any context. Probably similar feeling to someone who has never read the bible reading a book like Hebrews or something. That being said there were some interesting things in there that made me want to dig a little further. I then washed down the Bhagavad-Gita with a book by Jack Hawley. He basically walks through every verse in the Gita and translates it into more modern western terms, adding a couple clarifying sentences to those pesky single word Sanskrit ideas. The idea that was most novel to me in the Gita was that Krishna and also (luckily) other Hindu philosophies break people and actions into 3 categories. Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas. Sattva being the highest representing balance, harmony and goodness. Rajas representing energy and motion and Tamas representing lethargy and darkness. The idea being that each person and action has all three of these present at all times but in differing proportions. This was an interesting choice and makes for a more dynamic categorization of actions than the dichotomies of the west. I will have to think more about this in the future. Another question this book brought up for me was wondering why the particular virtues of “Grace, gentleness, self-control, and humility” to name a few appear to be somewhat universal in religions? The Gita did overlap a lot with ideas of the New Testament. One of the biggest differences I recognized was that Krishna did not call for evangelizing his ideas. All in all, worth the read and has opened up new frontiers to think over. Also don’t let your wives become corrupted or they will ruin this whole caste system we have set up. That is all.

The Bhagavad Gita

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I found it somewhat interesting but ultimately a dud because it felt like every other word was either a Sanskrit deity that I was supposed to already know about or a Sanskrit word that represented an entire doctrine like the word “transubstantiation”. It felt like watching marvel’s avengers end game with a Spanish voice over without any context. Probably similar feeling to someone who has never read the bible reading a book like Hebrews or something. That being said there were some interesting things in there that made me want to dig in a little more.

The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:36 -0500

This is essay was written documenting Huxley’s psychedelic experience while being given Mescaline (the active ingredient in peyote). Huxley’s theory was that the ego acts a “reducer valve” on consciousness and by taking a psychoactive drug he could thereby sidestep this valve and widen his experience of reality. According to the essay this is exactly what happened. He was administered the drug by a psychiatrist who had been studying the drug for some time before this event. This psychiatrist and Huxley’s wife accompanied him for the 8hr trip with a tape recorder and some questions to help document the effects of the drug. While high Huxley looks at some fine art paintings and suddenly understands that the artist could see things the way he currently was seeing things and that he could tell his consciousness had been brought up to the level of “visionary”. Among other things he later makes an argument that the relationship of alcohol and Christianity should be abandoned and replaced with Mescaline. I feel like if you were to have that conversation the response would just be laughter, but to me it was an interesting argument. People/Aldous Huxley

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is the oldest work of fiction in the history of the world. Read it! The oldest copies date around 2100BC. For reference the oldest copies of the Bible we have on hand are from the dead sea scrolls which date to 200-300 BC. That’s not to say that the dead sea scrolls are the first copies of the bible but they are the oldest we have while the rest are probably lost due to the writing material of choice, so we’ll never really know when the first copy of the Bible was written. The reason this survived for so long was that it was inscribed on a clay tablet. Going into this story I expected it to be dull. I was wrong, probably in part thanks to the particular translation I used, but on the whole this book is a must read. I think the most striking and controversial thing is that in the book there is an account of the flood. Now I know what you picture in your head when I say that, but literally when a character in the book started recounting the flood, it was totally shocking. The similarities and details couched in such exotic settings made for an incredible mind-bending experience. I won’t go over the similarities to save them for those who read. The story was then followed by an essay by the translator who explained where the text came from and how it was translated. This too was helpful to get more of an understanding of its place in history. At any rate I’d definitely put this one on your reading list.

The Great Divorce

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:26 -0500

I read this book after seeing it tangentially referenced in the “Doors of Perspective”. Written as the forward states in response to the short story by William Blake, C.S Lewis sets out to refute the idea of Hell and Heaven being made of the same stuff. Or put in more general terms this is his refutation of the concept of non-duality. Instead of using arguments he chooses to use story as a device to get his points across. In this story the main character takes a bus ride from what turns out to be hell to a place that turns out to be heaven, or more accurately a place of transition to heaven. Upon arrival he eventually runs into George MacDonald, and MacDonald acts much like Virgil did in Dante’s inferno and guides the main character through this new and foreign place. What unfolds is a series of vignettes where the residents of heaven would interact with old friends from hell and try to convince them in various ways to “see the light”. The main points of these small exchanges are that each person chooses to keep themselves in hell and out of “eternal joy”. Like other C.S Lewis stories I’ve read his strongest talent is his ability to spot and succinctly point out deficiencies in character. Especially of the self-righteous. Every time I read any of his stories, I feel self-conscious of some way in which I am acting selfishly or harming others with my choices. If you ever read any of his works, you’ll know exactly what I mean. This is a weak point in secular philosophy (IMO) because it is difficult to justify telling someone to alter their behavior without the authority of a metaphysic behind you. Lewis continually manages to thread the needle between intellect and faith in a compelling way that is difficult to ignore. That being said I don’t really feel like this book did much in the way of addressing some of the more difficult questions about hell and heaven. It did a fantastic job of shedding a light on how even good things like love and pity can be twisted into bad things. But in the stories people continually chose hell and their own misery over the joy they were created to experience, but the question of whether or not there was actually a “choice” to begin with is a slippery slope which leads to a lot of other complications. That being said this is a short read and does give the reader plenty of things to think about and is definitely worth the read.

The Great Gatsby

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:05 -0500

Not sure what it was, but I wasn’t really taken in by this book. It was well written and not boring per se. But failed to capture my imagination as much as I expected it to. It did give an interesting glimpse into high American society in the 20s which was somewhat interesting, but the plot moved slowly IMO which is impressive seeing at how short this book was. To me it just seemed like a reader’s digest book. I’ll pass no thanks Mr. Fitzgerald.

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918 - 1956

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:53 -0500

I was not man enough to take on the full work, which was about 3 times this length, maybe I will come back when I need more instances of cruelty in my life. This book walks through the stages of life in the archipelago.

Arrest
Interrogation
Transport to prison
Life in prison
Banishment after prison Although this book had unmistakable political undertones it comes more from the point of view of a moralist and not a political scientist. The atrocities in this book are examined at a human level and communism is the backdrop that made the examination possible. The opening dedication sets the tone for the entire book “I dedicate this book to all those who did not live to tell it, and may they please forgive me for not having seen it all, or remembered it all…for not having divined it all” There is a tragedy in human death, but a greater tragedy still is humans that die without profundity or acknowledgement. These camps existed out of sight, and the millions they killed are forgotten… and being forgotten is the worst offense of all.

The Symposium

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I put this on the list because I had heard that in this book there was a conversation between Socrates and Diotima about love. The book is set where a group of friends get together and throw a party for a friend that had won an award for a play that he had written. At this party they all decide that they should go around in a circle and give a speech praising the god Eros (God of love). So, they go around in a circle and each character gives their speeches. On the whole speeches were mostly unenlightening although they raised very interesting realizations about homosexual relationships between older men and younger “boys” (re: modern authors believe that they were all over the age of 18 of course crossed fingers). This side of the story I did not expect. Yet another time when history sneaks up on you from “behind”. One of the speeches contained a story about how in the beginning hermaphrodites were running around doing crazy stuff and the gods got mad and split them in half to make male and female. As a result, men and women roam the earth in search of their “other half”. Socrates’ speech was pretty interesting. i.e., Plato) makes the argument that love happens in stages. One first learns to love details about a specific person. Then realizes that these details exist in many people. They then begin to love many people. Then they begin to love the details in and of themselves abstracted from people. In this final stage if they are lucky, they will get a glimpse of beauty (the thing which they have desired all along) un-encumbered by humanity’s “fleshiness”. This fits in with Plato’s idea of a world of “Forms” pretty well. Where basically everything we see and interact with is an imperfect clone of something perfect that exists only in this world of forms. I.E the world in which a perfect triangle exists, which for now can only be accessed by thought.

What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy)

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:35 -0500

In this book Noam Chomsky tries to answer the question the title poses. Being a linguist, he attempts to answer this question from a linguist’s perspective. Taking a deep dive into the meanings and relationship between language and thought Chomsky tries to summarize years of linguistic research and some conclusions he has come to in his experience. One of the most interesting conclusions is that to him it appears as if instead of the ancient idea that “language is sound with meaning” Chomsky believes that phrase should be reversed to say that “language is meaning with sound”. He attempts to demonstrate how language is actually a couple layers deeper into the structure of the brain than previously thought. In fact, we may in some ways “think” in a language. So perhaps without language we could not “think” at all?? This feels intuitively true to me. The book then addresses a line of thinking that could be called “mysterianism”. Put simply it is that we face two types of problems. The first type are problems we can solve. The second type are problems we will never solve. Otherwise known as mysteries. This second type of problem Chomsky claims we are not the right type of creatures to solve. Similarly, to how rats are not the right kind of creatures to solves for prime numbers. To support this argument, he brings up the story of how Newton not only fundamentally changed physics but changed science entirely when he introduced the concept of “Force”. Newton himself could not wrap his mind around what this force was only, how it worked. From then on strict materialism was out. No one could explain in strictly mechanical terms how the universe worked. This book contains some interesting anecdotes as well as compelling theories. At points the writing can get a little long in the tooth for a non-linguist but over all very interesting.

A Gentleman in Moscow

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:36 -0500

This is a story that takes place entirely inside a hotel in Moscow from just after the Bolshevik revolution to just after World War 2. The main character is a man who was part of the bourgeoisie, a count. He is spared summary execution by the red army because he had penned a poem that helped start the revolution. For this reason, instead of being executed he was sentenced to live the rest of his life inside an iconic hotel that is a block away from the Kremlin. The story is told from his perspective. That is to say from someone that is watching his entire world be turned upside down. Reading this book will make you nostalgic for an Era that can never be recreated. Whereas you could argue that the bourgeoisie still exists the gentlemen that used to occupy it (at least in our imagination) have been replaced with people named Chad who drive their daddy’s BMW. I also had watched a couple episodes of the show “The Great” around the same time (which is very loosely based on Catherine the great) which cemented this idea. The show is set largely in a palace, with fancy ball parties and what not. But it was upsetting me to watch because the language of the show is modern and casual. Littered with penis jokes and modern curse words. Which was in keeping with the shows aesthetic but annoyed me for some reason. I think that reason is after reading this book the main character is an example of best-case scenario of nobility. He is well read, charming, respectful, and honest. So, when those folks are given wealth, it seems natural like fish in water. But when we see people like the characters in “The Great” it reminds one of a pearl necklace on a pig. Of course, the latter is probably more common, but the former is what we like to remember.

Biocentrism

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:29 -0500

Finally checked this one of the list, of course that raises the question of what I mean by “finally”. The word obviously indicates a sequence of events and sequence indicates time and time indicates a required conscious observer. So, in a sense I’ve read this book both before, after and not yet. Jokes aside this book raises a lot of interesting questions, making you think about things a little differently than you had before. And that is the most and best that you can ask from a book. The writing in the book is kind of poor and a little self-aggrandizing at points but the ideas are original enough to make that not too difficult to look past. This book also made me want to read Emerson. While some of his conclusions and observations have in recent years been “proven” wrong (most notably the experiment of being able to read someone’s intentions up to 10 seconds before they actually make a decision) there still seems to be plenty of latitude in the field of consciousness to allow for his ideas to have value. Good suggestion has given me a lot to think about.

Inspired

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:38 -0500

Rachel Evans has done all the research on the bible that you probably meant to do but never got around to. Like researching the canonization of the Bible, comparing different types of those canonizations. Researching the similarities to other older religions and the Bible generally trying to figure out what its deal is and why people still give a fluff about it. The author comes from a similar-ish background to what I did, but since she is a woman the things that made her start questioning the stories she was told were different than the ones that caused me to question. Her’s I would guess started with the treatment of women in the Bible. So, she tries her best, like we all do to honestly question what we are supposed to do with the “good book” in the year of our lord 2020. She has some interesting insights and gives me plenty to think about. It is always really weird to me to hear from someone who has such a completely new translation of what the bible means to them as opposed to what we were raised in. When you hear the same thing in the same way for so many hours you get the idea that there is only one way to read something. And even though you know that is not true you don’t know how else to read it. At any rate this is a decent book. It seems pretty fairly written with manageable biases here and there.

Just Mercy

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:34 -0500

This book is easy reading and goes by fast. It’s about a lawyer who represents death row inmates as well as other mostly poor black folks and children. The stories contained in this book are enough to make anyone’s blood boil and want to start a civil war against the Alabama court system. The book is more than just the complaints of a black lawyer though. Bryan Stevenson has a lot to say about the death penalty and the way we enforce crime in general. This book at times was profound, at other times sad. Most of the time it provided a fairly even take on mass incarceration. I do think the book in general is similar to listening to an emergency room doctor in New York talking about covid, or a general in Iraq talking about the Taliban. What he is saying is definitely true, but also definitely not the case for everyone everywhere IMO. I’ll end this review with a compelling quote on the death penalty which is probably old news for you folks but was the first time I’ve heard it put so succinctly. This quote comes after he personally witnesses the execution of a convicted criminal “We would never think it was human to pay someone to rape people convicted of rape or assault and abuse someone guilty of assault or abuse. Yet we were comfortable killing people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity, the way that raping or abusing someone would. I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.”

The Book of Why

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:38 -0500

Judea Pearl is one of the fathers of modern Bayesian Networks which are pretty much used everywhere these days. So, in my pursuit to find a book talking about AI, I stumbled across this book. This book explains Judea’s latest contribution to computer science which is a mathematical approach to modeling causality. In the book he starts by explaining where the phrase “correlation does not equal causality” comes from. His argument is that with statistics you will never be able to define causation, because statistics does not have the language or framework to make such statements. As such statistics and big data can only go so far in their abilities to provide answers for our questions. Instead of approaching problems with the esoteric methods of regression, data stratification and trying to control for various values based on intuition, he proposes that we should try to approach problems more like human beings. He breaks the idea of causality into three rungs on a ladder. He proceeded to explain a sort of calculus that quantifies the effects that different causal relations have on the outcome of a situation.

The Idiot

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:09 -0500

This book was published after Crime and Punishment. Pretty good, definitely not my favorite of Dostoevsky. This book is I think his first iteration on the idea of a beautiful soul. The main character (Prince Myshkin) is a man who is guileless and deeply compassionate. As a result, everyone he comes in contact with assumes he is an idiot. The simple soul is dropped into the current of crazy Russians and you are left to watch what happens and where the soul ends up. While personally I feel like the character of the prince was perfected in story the brothers Karamazov, some of the transcendent goodness of father Zosima and Alyosha can be seen here. Enough of it is visible to make you wish you were a little more like the prince even though the consequences would be unbearable. Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:33 -0500

Man, I don’t even know where to begin with this book. I had started this book last spring but took a break for a couple months. Even during the sabbatical, thoughts from this book would recur in my head until I eventually picked it back up about a month ago. Written towards the end of Tolstoy’s life it was banned from Russia so initially it was printed in Germany. This book comes at a very interesting point in history. About 30 years after Das Kapital, and only 20 years prior to a world war that the book predicts without intending to, but almost as an inevitability. While people were arguing and continue to argue the virtues of Communism over Capitalism or vice versa, Tolstoy presents a possible third choice… neither. Tolstoy’s fundamental belief springs from the nonresistance taught in the sermon on the mount. As a result, he draws striking conclusions about governments and the people who support them. He draws a consistent line from this single doctrine to show that a government of any kind is incompatible with this belief. When I say to anti capital punishment people something like “if you are against the death penalty, then disband the army”. Tolstoy would say yes, absolutely and also defundThePolice. As such his ideas were inherently anarchistic, but in the most compelling and consistent of ways. He makes his argument that human’s moral development is in stages. The first stage is that of a savage where one only cares about themselves. The second stage is that of a citizen where one only thinks of the group they belong to (family, nation, etc.) the third and final stage is that of divinity when one cares for the entire world. Whereas this might sound cliche, he backs it up with brilliant reasons, and allegories to elaborate his thinking. It is a very interesting pairing to read this book directly after Just Mercy. The two of these books have me again questioning crime and punishment, death penalty etc. I will be thinking about points in this book for some time to come.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:41 -0500

This is the book that I think the idea of Freudian slips comes from. It is an investigation into brain farts basically. He investigates various mental mistakes like not being able to remember a person’s name and the circumstances that cause these mistakes. This book was surprisingly practical for the most part, especially when compared to the psychology of dreams. I found that a lot of his explanations for things made sense in a logical way and didn’t seem to be too much of a reach. The format of this book is he would basically dedicate a chapter to a particular mistake, take misplacing things for example. He would then explain what he thought the reason for this was and then he would offer between 10 and 20 anecdotal stories that helped to solidify his point. Overall, a pretty interesting read that will make you stop and ask yourself next time you stub your toe: “was this just an accident? Or did I secretly not want to have kids and gave expression to this wish by kicking that wall”

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:26 -0500

Another suggested book that I probably wouldn’t have stumbled across normaly. Provided a decent break from the last book I read. The three-body problem refers to the difficult mathematical problem of predicting the orbit of a 3-planet system. It turns out there are very few stable configurations of these, and predicting their orbit is difficult because of all the variables that go into their movement. This ambitious sci-fi book is the first of a trilogy. It starts in China during communist revolutions in the 70s and progresses to modern day where the fate of humanity is threatened by disenfranchised humans and a dispassionate race of advanced ETs whose home planet is about to be destroyed. The author seems to be very familiar with quantum physics, computer science and basic radio wave theory. This knowledge imbues the book with a believable “almost within reach feel”. Where you could imagine some of the inventions described being created in our lifetimes. All in all, very light reading but pretty entertaining.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:23 -0500

My first foray into Nietzche I did not find this book to be super enjoyable. It is about Zarathustra who is a spokesman for Nietzche’s new vision. He declares that God is dead and presents the idea of the over-man (or superman) as what should replace him. This super man should be a warrior and have a personal sense of pride and above all should not be driven by pity. For as one of the most interesting quotes of the book says, “Thus spoke the devil to me, once on a time: “Even God has his hell: it is his love for man”. And lately did I hear him say these words: “God is dead: of his pity for man has God died”. So, Zarathustra comes down from a mountain and teaches some disciples about his ideas but then they try to couple his idea with some ideas of Christianity. This will not do because this is the thing that led to the death of God in the first place. So, after teaching these disciples Zarathustra starts to become overwhelmed with pity for man as well. So, he retreats back to his mountain and reconnects with nature to “find himself”. He thus returns to his enlightened state of supreme joy and happiness. After some time, some “higher men” of various types come to visit him. He thinks that they may be a sort of mantle carrier for him after he passes. But long story short, although better than most they are no superman. The story ends with him deciding to come down from the mountain again in an attempt to find some men that would live up to his standards. As far as writing goes it was pretty well written (obvious) I feel like as with most poetic type of literature it was hard to follow from time to time due to the over-floweryness of the language. Overall, I did not really like the tone very much because the “enlightened” character seemed to mirror Nietzsche’s own character too closely. It seemed a little like a long high five to himself for being so awesome and better than everyone else.

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:09 -0500

This is a book I literally stumbled on because of the title. It ended up being probably my favorite book I have read all year long. It is a collection of short stories each based around a central theme. Stories range from Noah to astronauts. I must say after the first story I was only halfway on board, but by the end of the second story the author had won me over. I have not been as challenged mentally by a book in a long time. Delightfully dark and depressing with just enough humor and love to keep you from giving up. Which could be an allegory for life I suppose, either way I highly recommend this book. Get it in audio-book form, each story is about an hour long and will give you something to think about while you are stuck in traffic.

Das Kapital - Capital

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:07 -0500

This was one of the densest and most abstract books I’ve read. The first section was Karl Marx breaking down his view of economy down to first principles. Answering questions like where money comes from, how are babies made and what’s the difference between the commodity form of gold and the money form of gold. Descriptions of the relationships between supply and demand in the simplest and in my view unnecessarily dry way. This discussion turned to how capital breeds capital. The book is full of references to the terrible working conditions for people during the industrial revolution. Really makes you glad that you live in an era of 40-hour work weeks and PTO. It seems like in some sick twisted way a pinko commie might have been what was necessary to get the people riled up enough to push the glacial pace of change in the right direction. Part of me wonders if Marx was alive today if he would still be as anti-capitalist (I know, I know, put your sickles down) as he was. I feel like the answer would be yes and I would be disappointed. It seems to me that many of his complaints about capitalism, while still inherent in our economy, have been addressed. Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Overall Marx was a brilliant thinker, and I can see why he thought the way he did. It would be hard not to agree with him back in the day when six-year-olds were forced to work 17-hour shifts.

Different Seasons

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:02 -0500

This is a collection of four short /ish stories by the king of Steve. It was all in all very entertaining. I can see why people like the guy. A little pedestrian at points but always in a diverting way. His characters are always believable and easy (for me at least) to relate to.

Educated

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:38 -0500

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.

Ethics

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:27:57 -0500

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.

I Sing the Body Electric! & Other Stories

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:49 -0500

This is a collection of short stories written by Ray Bradbury. The stories varied in length from a half hour to a little over an hour. The stories are a sort of anthology. Some really brilliant stuff in here. Very much like good black mirror/ twilight zone episodes. In fact, I want to send a copy of it to the black mirror studios so they can make good stories again. Not every story was a homerun but there were quite a few that were brilliant. The “title track” story actually was turned into a twilight zone episode. So, if you don’t read the book, you can at least watch that episode to get a taste of what the book was like. A lot of robots.

Lord of the Flies

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:34 -0500

Premise : group of boys 13 and under get stranded on a desert island. Chaos ensues as they try to build a society with immature minds. Gets dark pretty fast. Interesting implications about the origin of religion and the effect of personality on political tendencies. Definitely more of a Hobbes take on men in the state of nature. Very entertaining and not hard to follow

Leviathan

Mein Kampf

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:05 -0500

This is pretty much a handbook on how to start a successful anti-establishment movement. It has been used to great affect by a handful of dictators including Saddam Hussein to help organize movements. So, it is full of actually brilliant ideas on how to present/ manage an insurgency. Probably most notably how to produce effective propaganda. It touches on many big ideas about group mindsets including but not limited to, who you should target your revolution too, how you should handle other revolutionary groups with similar ideas, and how to select proper targets to keep your mini revolution energized. Aside from that he had some interesting ideas about education, compelling anti-democracy arguments, and an unexpected view about morality of the state. That being said obviously he has some less than flattering things to say about people of Jewish heritage and others. To be honest I was surprised to see how weak his racial arguments were. There wasn’t much proof to any statements that he made about races. It was mostly just true because he said it was. I could see that if you were a German living in post WW1 Germany where you had probably lost several family members to the war and had got less than nothing in return that assertions that Hitler makes might be attractive. But to an outside observer it mostly just seemed convenient. This was probably one of my least favorite books I have read this year because of the length. It seemed to drag on unnecessarily long for the subjects that were covered in it. I was happy to put this book behind me and move on to hopefully greener pastures.

Notes from the Underground

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:04 -0500

In 1864, Russia and the Western world was experiencing a philosophical reversal with reverberations that can still be felt almost two hundred years later. One by one “unquestionable” truths were being placed in the dust bin by a cold rationality. The attack on humanity’s placement of itself in the universe started over three hundred years earlier, when a polymath named Copernicus rediscovered the forgotten truth that we are not the center of the universe. Ever since then, the more scientific details that are catalogued about the world, the further man is pushed from that once prized and secure position. There are two main ideas that the underground man (UM) simultaneously seems to prove by his actions and disapprove of by his words. First is man as nature, the second is man as automata, and by extension nature as automata. It had only been five years since Charles Darwin had written ‘On the Origin of Species’ and already Dostoyevsky has incorporated his theory and worked out what he sees as its possible ramifications. Chiefly that of an alienated human that is horrified to look in the mirror and see no-thing looking back. In an opening note to the book Dostoevsky makes clear that the UM is an inevitable product of the spread of these two ideologies. The book opens with the memorable…

Of Mice and Men

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:17 -0500

Written by the same guy who wrote grapes of wrath, this book was written in the late 1930s right near the end of the great depression and as a result this book is greatly depressing. It covers the story of two main characters named George and Lenny. Both of them had been traveling together for quite some time and the book opens with them heading to their next short-term gig. George is a scrawny scrappy guy and Lenny is a giant fella who has the intellect of a child. This unlikely pair stick together because of a shared common goal. They both want to get a farm and have some land to call their own. Set in an idyllic countryside there are plenty of foreboding details that Steinbeck gives to the reader throughout the book hinting at the ending. All and all a very interesting but depressing story. Great writing

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:42 -0500

I feel like this probably could be considered a primer for the much longer gulag archipelago. This story covers as the title says a fictional character (Ivan) for a day. Although the story is fiction, the experiences described in the book were definitely not. If you decide to read this book prepare to feel hungry and cold for approximately four and a half hours. The book is written from the perspective of Ivan Denisovich who is doing a ten-year sentence on fake charges. Provides a window into the mindset required (or at least according to Ivan) to survive in a Russian gulag. The story is well written easy to understand and a page turner.

Rights of Man

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:29:51 -0500

This book was largely a response to a response to the French Revolution by Edmund Burke. The French Revolution started in 1789. The aristocracy of England was starting to see the writing on the wall and the French Revolution made them that much more uneasy. So, one of monarchy’s most vocal proponents (Edmund Burke) wrote a book entitled “Reflections on the Revolution of France”. If that book was a Facebook status a good chunk of this book was a comment on Burke’s Facebook status. Paine rips the idea of monarchy to shreds. To summarize his argument in a couple sentences I would say Paine’s main point was this: Government should be formed to protect the existing rights of man and not be looked to as a definition of human rights. Furthermore, that any formal document that is written in order to form a government is a limitation on those rights of man. Therefore, it should be the individuals themselves that define the contract that does so limit each man’s individual freedom. The book itself is a little rant-y hence my Facebook reference. But it would probably be one of the best, and most informed Facebook responses you will ever read. I did not realize that the French revolution was in such close proximity to our own. This makes me interested to contrast the two. One seemed very ‘gentlemanly’ and the other seemed sort of ‘barbaric’. Not sure if this is due to my own ignorance or not.

The Communist Manifesto

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:48 -0500

This is America Don’t catch you slippin’ now Don’t catch you slippin’ now Look what I’m whippin’ now 0/10

On first read through though I thought this book was difficult to understand and made a lot of HUGE assumptions that the readers are just supposed to agree with. It doesn’t seem like this book is a good primer into communism but more like a good closer if you are already leaning in that direction. The book included a chapter of excerpts from various Engles/Marx’s writings which was more helpful to understand why they said what they said. I’ll definitely be doing so more research.

The Essays

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:31 -0500

I enjoyed this reread a lot more than the first time through. There were some points where he takes tangents and side roads which left me at times bored at other times frustrated. Yet the author is well aware of this tendency and warns the reader that it will happen from time to time, so I don’t really have anyone to blame but myself. There were so many parts of this book where it would feel as if I was reading my own journal, had I been a better writer. Several overlapping points of personality made a lot of his views relatable. I very much liked his humble approach to knowledge and latitude when it came to accepting other’s customs. His love for life as it is, not in concept but in embodied reality was refreshing. Everything in moderation, this goes for thought as well as action. I am sure the older I get, the more I will appreciate and understand from this humorous and likeable man.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1)

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:59 -0500

Really well written in a cheeky way. An easily digestible book. Great allegories in there. I liked the way that the book portrayed the whole universe in a very relatable but strange way. I would like to try a pan galactic gargleblaster sometime. Clever explanation of the simulation idea. Well worth the read, now I can finally watch the movie without feeling bad.

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:31 -0500

This book caught me off guard. For one I know the Disney movie made from the book so that set certain expectations. Also, this is written by the same dude who wrote Les Misérables. Which made me think he was probably just another rom-com author (joking). But in all seriousness this book started out a little slow for me. Victor Hugo was exiled from France, and it was apparent that he loved France as much as he hated Napoleon (fun fact in looking up how to spell Napoleon to make sure I was doing it right, it turns out napoleon dynamite is more popular on google than Napoleon Bonaparte). He spends about two hours describing the city of Paris as it was back in the 1500s. Frankly, I found this dry as it was hard to visualize because I am an idiot who doesn’t know very much about architecture. But as the book went on the tension kept growing. There is this scene in the book where a priest is in a room that overlooks Notre Dame, and he points at a book, and he says “This will destroy that” pointing at Notre Dame. This launches Victor Hugo into an hour-long discussion of how the invention of the printing press signaled the end of architecture. This was fascinating. As I said the book started off a little slow but like a good Tarantino movie by the end all these unrelated(ish) characters find themselves tangled in destiny like a fly in a spider web(imagery from the book). I don’t think I have read a book that had as much tragic irony as this one had. For the last 20% of the book, you really did feel like you really were watching a fly in a spider web.

The Kite Runner

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:23 -0500

This is a book a little out of my wheelhouse, but I am glad I read it. The author is an Afghan American who does a brilliant job of describing the life of a privileged Afghan in pre-war Afghanistan. By far the best part about this book was the perspective it gave on life, or at least one life in the middle east. It was also interesting to hear Islam talked about from a neutral point of view instead of either fearmongering or blind acceptance. The book richly describes the culture through food, family and the center of the book kite flying. The book reads as a biography but is in fact a fiction. As for the criticisms of the book there were several literary devices the author overused and some plot choices that seemed a little predictable, but believable. Overall, a very entertaining book.