Books

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. ...

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 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.

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.

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.