Books

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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