Books

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.

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. ...

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: ...

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

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: ...

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. ...

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. ...

Another short book that has been on my list for a while. Utopia was published in 1516 and while preceded by several utopian style books before it (most notably Plato’s Republic) it was one of the earliest utopian novels created after the printing press had been invented (1436). Partly serious, partly satirical it seems to be a pretty gutsy book to have been written when it was considering the Spanish Inquisition started in 1478. This book describes a fictional island called “Utopia”. The island had the following interesting attributes: ...

This book was a treat. Essentially picture Marc-Andre Leclerc (from the Alpinist) with an education and it will put you in the right head space. Thoreau lives in a 10X15 cabin he built with just the bare essentials, eating what he grows and seldom going into town. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.” ...

I don’t get paid enough to do a proper review of this book, so here’s an improper review for ya. War and Peace covers about 8 years of history from 1805-1813. This is the part of history where Napoleon invades Europe and makes it all the way to Russia, culminating in the war of 1812. It is a realist novel, as Tolstoy did an unbelievable amount of research into the war and paints an incredibly detailed picture of the invasion. The central theme of this book (to me) is history, and the way people relate to it. ...