H2'2024 Book Reviews
Books read: 14 (10 Fiction, 4 Non-Fiction)
Unique Authors: 14 (10 Men, 4 Women)
Average Rating: 4.04 (3.85 Fiction, 4.25 Non-Fiction)
warning: some spoilers may be contained in the following reviews
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
This is a series of seven short stories, some of which are related. Kundera explores love, sex, bodies, and expression in a characteristically psychological way. They also have the classic Kundera-esque commentary about the ways communism influenced the collective Czech psyche. The way he writes about the Czech zeitgeist reminds me of a statue I once stumbled upon when visiting Prague. It’s of a crawling baby with no face - it’s supposed to represent the generation that grew up in the communist Czechia that emerged after the Prague Spring, a generation that struggled to create an identity for itself as it was suppressed by the equality of the Soviet dogma.
Kundera is absolutely brilliant at the sentence level (I was constantly highlighting passages that blew me away), but pretty mid at the story level. Deducting a star because I got bored with the plot of most of the stories. 4/5
South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami
I’ve probably read close to a dozen Murakami works at this point. Murakami is the reading equivalent of comfort food for me - curry and naan, or ramen and beer. The same type of semi-autobiographical loner protagonist, mysterious women, and classical music, all steeped in nostalgia. This is another one of his rare novels that is not particularly Murakami-esque with his patented magical realism, which is ironically the novels of his I like the most (e.g. Norwegian Wood, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. ) 4.5/5
The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver
Solid book about how we err when making predictions, and how we can get better at doing so by thinking probabilistically. Silver extolls the virtues of Bayes’ theorem throughout, and each chapter focuses on a different topic (e.g. meteorology, sabermetrics, chess, poker) that gives us more insight into the art of making forecasts. Felt a bit repetitive though, could have been 100 pages shorter. 4/5
Intermezzo - Sally Rooney
I was so excited for Rooney’s latest that I tried to use a VPN to change my IP address to a later time zone so I could get the Kindle copy delivered to me earlier (unfortunately to no avail).
The story follows two brothers: Ivan (a 22 year old chess prodigy) and Peter (a 32 year old lawyer) who are navigating their respective romantic relationships as well as their complicated relationship with each other in the wake of their father’s death.
Rooney explores a different stream of consciousness style, particularly in Peter’s chapters, that induce in the reader the same type of frenetic anxiety and maddening overanalyzing that is going on in his head (it’s pretty funny how my personal life currently has some loose resemblance to his).
I’m obsessed with the way Rooney writes dialogue and inner monologues. There’s a James Baldwin line as follows:
“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky."
Rooney is one of the authors who makes me feel “seen” and it’s beautiful to know this random Irish woman who I would have otherwise never interacted with can relate to my lived experience so much (and actually has the talent to articulate it, and in doing so, enriches my life and makes me feel less alone).
Five stars and much love. 5/5
Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher - Clayton Atreus
Discovered this book because a review of it won Scott Alexander’s book review contest so I figured the underlying material must be pretty interesting (now that I’ve finished I’m going to go back and read the review)
A young and active man with an insatiable joie de vivre is paralyzed from the nipples down after a motorcycle accident. He paints us the sorry picture of his disabled life (physiological and psychological ruin) and then explains to us why he’s going to kill himself. It’s written in a 1st person stream of consciousness, and through this meditation on his life, Atreus explores the ideas of Nietzsche, Camus, Frankl, Shakespeare, C.S. Lewis, etc. He also spends a lot of time disparaging the dominant discourse around disabilities (e.g. “you can live almost as rich of a life as able-bodied people”)
The kicker is that this is a true story. It’s effectively an extended suicide note. Clayton Atreus is a pseudonym for Clayton Schwartz, and all of this happened to him in real life. The book ends with him stabbing himself in the abdomen with a knife and bleeding out. It’s a harrowing account. It’s situations like this that make me wish physician assisted suicide was legal in more places. This isn’t a book you can find in bookstores or get a clean version on your Kindle. It’s simply text on this website. Was a bit repetitive and had some typos, but hey, he wrote this without the assistance of friends or an editor so will have to give him some leeway there. 4.5/5
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World - Cal Newport
I have a tricky relationship with my phone. I was recently going through a period where I felt like a slave to it, so I picked this up. I’ve read some of Newport’s writing in the New Yorker, and he tends to have interesting things to say about technology.
He makes the argument (like many others have) that our attention is being increasingly mediated by the apps on our smartphones, and that we should be intentional about our usage of them. He stresses the importance of solitude for a healthy mind, and how our modern lives have way less of it. He suggests a digital detox of 30 days as a reset to start. Then to only add back technology that adds significant value, while cultivating a life of high quality leisure with moments for quiet contemplation. Good book, but not much new information for me in it. Always good to have a reminder though. 4/5
The Vegetarian - Han Kang
This is a weird book. I decided to pick it up because Kang won the Nobel prize this year and this is her most well known work. It’s broken up into three parts, each with a different POV. It’s about a woman who has a dream that compels her to stop eating meat and slowly descends into madness. I thought the first two parts were horrific and gripping while the third didn’t really provide much of a resolution. I’m still kind of confused about what exactly she was trying to say in this, but I liked her prose. Also for some reason most of the Korean media I’ve consumed is dark (e.g. Parasite, Oldboy) and I don’t know if that’s reflective of their culture or if I just need to increase my sample size. 4/5
The Machine Stops - E.M. Forster
A novella in which a machine takes care of all of humanity’s needs, but then things start to go awry. Pretty crazy that it was written in 1909 yet it’s so prescient about our relationship to technology. Do humans control the machine or does the machine control us? 4.5/5
Rejection - Tony Tulathimutte
These are a series of vignettes around dating in the modern world. The protagonists in the story are various flavors of those on the fringes - e.g. incels. He shows you how the extreme versions of philosophies like progressive identity politics can result in these horrid, maladjusted worldviews. Wasn’t the biggest fan of his prose and there were portions that were way too vulgar and graphic. 3/5
How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia - Mohsin Hamid
Classic rags to riches story. Easy read. Didn’t enjoy the 2nd person storytelling it got annoying after a while and didn’t think it was as profound as it thought it was. 3/5
Earthlings - Sayaka Murata
Saw a Reddit thread asking for a disturbing book rec and this was one of the top comments. Did not disappoint in that regard. It’s about a girl who thinks she’s an alien that has magic powers and gets close to a couple of guys who resonate with her anti-establishment ideologies but she has some trauma from her childhood that persists with and catches up to her as an adult. Interesting metaphor but Murata went for so much shock value the story stopped being horrifying and instead ventured into the realm of humor. 3.5/5
The Wedding People -Alison Espach
Middle aged recently divorced woman at rock bottom stumbles upon a wedding at a hotel in Rhode Island that saves her from the brink. Solid time pass. 4/5
Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation - Bryne Hobart and Tobias Huber
We have been experiencing a Great Stagnation over the last 50 years. Median wage growth has slowed, inequality and income concentration are on the rise, political polarization has intensified, rates of debt and leverage have exploded, startup formation has decelerated, and geographic mobility has declined. Progress in the world of atoms, not bits, is in free fall.
This has been triggered by hyper financialization (starting with the end of Bretton Woods), an aging population, and over-bureaucratization. Total factor productivity improvements have started to slow down and there’s a disconnect between real GDP growth and the growth in financial markets.
The stagnation is not just localized to the economy; it permeates into other facets of society, including scientific research and the collective human spirit.
Science has seen increased funding, but due to hyper-specialization, bureaucratization and regulation in academia, and risk aversion, not much “real” scientific progress has been made, and the efficiency of spend in academia continues to get worse
Humans are considerably more nihilistic now. The lack of progress in the material world has been supplanted with technologies of simulation, which has led to a turn to interiority - an age of spirituality without religiosity where we strive for an intensification and enhancement of experience bereft of the sacred.
We need a return to collective risk taking to move humanity forward
Bubbles have the potential to be innovation accelerators
Create a definite vision of the future that align ambitious groups of people and capital at a given point in time which supercharges them
They have positive spillover effects
types of bubbles - speculative and filter; the former is better. They can also be mean-reversion or inflection; latter is better. 2x2 matrix - speculative inflection bubbles are the best e.g. the dot com bubble
The remainder of the book discusses historical examples that support this thesis - the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions, Bitcoin, and then goes into a discussion of what future bubbles may look like and how they will change humanity.
Ultimately, “technological innovation is more driven by excess, exuberance, and irrationality than by cost-benefit analyses, rational calculation, and careful and deliberate planning.” Maybe Masa Son is on to something lol 4.5/5
Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card
For the longest time I bucketed ender’s game in the youth scifi category - wasn’t sure if it would be good if I read it as an adult, but I decided to finally pick it up and while it is a little kiddie it’s pretty damn entertaining. I zoomed through it over the course of a cross-country flight. Lots of fun stuff in here like zero gravity fighting, intergalactic warfare against biologically divergent aliens, a perilous geopolitical backdrop, and insane plot twists. You have to suspend belief a few times for certain plot points to make sense, but hey I’m not reading this for its airtight logical system. 4/5