Books

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!

Summary This book is supposedly the longest single-authored mystical poem in the world. Coming in at a little over twenty-five thousand Persian couplets which are the equivalent of fifty thousand European lines, the Spiritual Verses are twice as long as Dante’s Divine Comedy. Rumi, a Sufi mystic from the 13th century, puts together a group of fables that are connected by metaphor and style as opposed to any plot. Many stories turn out to be like a Russian nesting doll, containing many smaller, distantly related stories to further enhance the author’s ideas. Rumi, at points, floats above time and place to speak of universal experiences, while at other times he is firmly rooted in his Islamic perspective. ...

Summary Victor Davis Hanson tells the story of the Peloponnesian war which is the war where Sparta and Athens fought for close to 30 years. This war starts shortly after Sparta and Athens had united to repel a Persian invasion, partially depicted in the movie 300. Ironically, this war was ultimately decided by Persia backing Sparta which broke the Athenians. For many, this war marks the end of the Greek Golden age. Taking place shortly before Alexander the Great’s campaigns, it included many Western superstars like Socrates, who participated in the early part of the war, Hippocrates, the father of medicine, and some of the eminent Greek tragedians like Sophocles and Euripides. Hanson recasts the Peloponnesian War as a Greek Civil War, because much like the American Civil War both sides shared language, culture, and many other inherited traditions, but they differed on governmental strategies. The Spartans are portrayed as being conservative oligarchs, while the Athenians were depicted as radical proponents of democracy. This difference in governing styles is often emphasized by Hanson, who uses it to explain the distinctive reactions of the two nation states to the challenges each in turn faced. ...

Summary After writing several books targeted at specialists Stephen Hawking tries to write a book targeted at the everyman. In the book he lays out where our conceptions of the universe and time came from, and how and why they’ve been updated as more and more discoveries have been made. Thoughts I don’t know if this book was a waste of Hawking’s time, but it was fairly clear after reading the book that the talent for mass communication that other popular science writers have is somewhat lacking here. As one of the most intelligent and acclaimed scientists of our time it is not that surprising that the average layman may have difficulties keeping up. I in part blame Einstein for this because up until his general theory of relativity it seemed to me that the basic ideas of physics could be conveyed in a way that most people could understand, but once you start talking about gravity bending time and space, I think the allegories have to be dumbed down so much that they essentially represent nothing to the non-specialist and are quickly misunderstood by the masses. That being said there were some gems in the book, specifically the anthropic principle which we’ve all thought about many times in one direction. That is, we often have heard or thought “what are the chances that this universe unfolded in such and such a way. It’s impossible for that to have been purely chance”. What this observation neglects are that in order to make the observation in the first place the universe had to have unfolded in such and such a way. Every long string of events looks improbable in retrospect, yet any outcome of a sufficiently long string of events looks improbable. I guess this is similar to the idea that if something odd DOESN’T happen in your day, that would be a truly odd day. Hawking is also of course famous for his work on radiation observed around black holes, and so he goes into how black holes work which didn’t help me to sleep any better at night. In fact, I am now convinced that no one believes in black holes. The fact that the universe spawns these giant mouths that consume everything they come into contact with is something that I will continue to ignore.

Summary Frankenstein wants to create life, he does, and the results may surprise you. Thoughts A really great read with exceptional prose. Ironically the most articulate character is the monster himself, his description of coming to consciousness is one of the most touching moments of the book. Heavily inspired by Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, Shelley tells one of the most memorable stories of the 19th century. As with all great works of art, after they are created, they in some sense no longer belong to their creator but become part of the collective consciousness. I would be interested to see what she would think of its place in culture now. The story itself of course is provocative in that there are so many different ways of reading it. There are of course the social critiques of the time in it, such as the treatment of servants, mob mentality etc. There is also the commonly understood moral that Dr. Frankenstein’s creation should remind us that we should be careful when playing God. This moral is interesting in itself, but subversive when reversed, that is God should be careful when playing us. The monster kills people, and therefore Dr. Frankenstein feels that he is in some way culpable, in some ways more so than the Monster, so much so that all he wants to do is kill the monster and die himself. Of course, this makes sense in line with the usual moral, but what does it mean for the inverse? Another fascinating layer to this whole quandary is that the Monster himself has a virtuous heart but is driven to violence by his complete and absolute isolation. ...

Summary A collaborative autobiography by the man the myth the legend C.G. Jung. As an additional note, after reading this, I then listened to one of the “Very short introduction” books on Jung which was largely unnecessary after reading this book except that it put a little more meat on the bones of his theories. Thoughts It is difficult to review books sometimes because books have so many different uses. Some books are for fun, some are works of art, others are descriptive. So should you rate on how much you enjoyed a book? How well it was written? I think I prefer to review a book on how well it did what it set out to do, and this book did really well. Jung’s memory of his life is incredible. From his ability to recall a dream he had when he was three, to his structured accounts of his various travels, one thing this book did was made me realize how little of my life I could retell if I was forced to. There is no way I could discuss all the ideas this book brought up, so I’ll just give a few impressions. The first one is that if Jung had been born a couple hundred years early, or in a different part of the world, he most definitely would have become a shaman. His unique psyche revealed things to him that I think most people would never be able to experience. The second thing I noticed was that the parallels between priests and psychologists also include the fact that when it comes to both, your mileage may vary. When it comes to allowing myself to be psychoanalyzed, it seems like I would want an extended character reference…. an autobiography perhaps? People/C.G. Jung ...

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

Summary I am not going to write a summary for Dracula. I do pointless things all the time, but not THIS time. Thoughts Very entertaining, I never really got creeped out or tense because all the characters were just so upbeat about everything all the time. The best parallel I can think of is something like reading a King Arthur adventure where every character has their character stats maxed out. The people on the good team are the best most honorable loving and supportive people of all time, while the people on the bad team are the most despicable of all time. The setting and atmosphere of the book was fantastic. Some very memorable scenes involving castle climbing and armies of rats. My only gripe was that the book is written as a series of journal entries and various article clippings. This makes a lot of sense in the beginning of the book when the characters are physically separated but by the end when they are all in the same room it feels cumbersome. Also, because I love nicknames, I am dubbing the author as Bram ‘I’m so glad Mina isn’t involved’ Stoker. Good times!

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

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