Category: Reviews

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Kerouac’s tales detail a type of freedom that has been lost in modern America.  He hitchhikes around the country (now illegal), stows away in train cars (already illegal, but accepted), and sleeps outside or on whatever couch/bed he can find.  People living simpler lives are respected for the hardships they endure. People who don’t fit into the system can at least live unaccosted in the margins.  Now we denigrate them.  Some may read this book as the chronicles of a homeless cretin, but I really think we should use it to reflect on some of the choices we’ve made as a society in the past 60 years and ask if we really like the direction we’ve moved in.

The Martian by Andy Weir

An enjoyable sci-fi novel based on realistic real-world science.  The main character is amusingly snarky and has an inhuman composure in the face of the unlikely odds of survival.   I wouldn’t say this was amazing or revolutionary, but it was a fun read.  I still need to go watch the movie…

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

A writer finds the diary of a young Japanese-American girl, living in Japan, washed up on the beach and becomes invested in her story.  This well-written novel takes a critical look at some aspects of modern Japanese culture, and plays with conceptions of time, both within a single culture and with our expectations as readers.  The author doesn’t shy away from difficult topics like sex work and suicide and tells a very moving and compelling story.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin

A truly amazing fantasy series!  Very inventive writing and storytelling with an interesting world and magic system (if you like to nerd out about that kind of thing).  Without giving too much away, this world is very geologically unstable and the characters are frequently struggling just to  survive the wrath of the earth itself.  This book, written by a woman of color, does a great job of centering female characters in a way that male writers often  fail to.  Also, +1 for bisexual and poly characters.  And as a bonus, it’s actually a finished series!

Dharma bums by Jack Kerouac

I was reading The Way of Zen in a park at the beginning of this year, and a man there mentioned this book to me.  That’s actually what initially prompted me to read On the Road earlier in the year after researching Kerouac.  I finally made it to this one, and it appealed to me in much the same way as On the Road.  This one details Kerouac’s friendship with Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder), a much more centered character than Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) from On the Road.  With that comes a bit more of Kerouac’s relationship with Buddhism and a bit less of the loose cannon nihilism of Cassady. 

If I were going to recommend where to start with Kerouac, I’d probably say On the Road, but I enjoyed this one quite a bit as well.

The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts

Alan Watts delves into some basic Zen metaphysics, stripping away much of the Zen trappings.  Being comfortable with insecurity, with chaos and change, leads to an ironically more secure position than someone who focuses solely on bringing security to their lives.  I would recommend this in the same way I’d recommend The Power of Now.  Stop grasping, be in touch with the world around you and don’t get lost in your fears and anxieties about change.

The Way of Zen by Alan Watts

I wrote about this one when I read it last year.  I chose to reread it as I was thinking a lot about the ideas of Zen in the context of my own mental health this year.  A bit harder to get through than The Wisdom of Insecurity, it still has some applicable insights.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Another reread, I took this one pretty slowly, reading just a chapter here and there in an effort to digest the material a bit more fully.  I think this is going to be a book I return to again and again as intimacy and social anxiety are things I often struggle with.  This just has so many good lessons on how to be a friendly and charming person that it feels like refreshing myself from time to time will always be beneficial.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography

This is probably the (auto)biography I’ve heard recommended the most when people talk about biographies.  Franklin was a civic-minded, industrious man, who truly worked from first principles when approaching the question of how to live one’s life. 

When reading the sections where he introduces public services, I was struck by how detached our taxes have become from a sense of the common good.  Franklin repeatedly sees a concrete problem in his city/neighborhood, then goes to the people affected by the problem and shows them the advantages to be gained from addressing the problem and convinces them to pay a tax to solve it.  This is how our government should function, but clearly doesn’t hold up at scale. 

When people imagine the “protestant work ethic” as a positive thing, I think they must be talking about his life.  But really he just approached his life in a systematic way and had a strong drive to improve himself and the community in which he lived.  I think our modern society has been perverted into forgetting about the importance of the community-mindedness of work. We’re divorced from the meaning of work and do so simply for corporate profits.  We’ve forgotten that it’s the small, concrete changes we can make that make the biggest difference.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

A book on the art of writing, Lamott delivers advice and mindsets meant to help writers who struggle to get their words down on the page.  She is extremely funny and gives the good advice of taking things in small bits.  Don’t sit down to write your whole novel, just sit down to describe what could fit in one “picture frame.”  I’ve struggled recently to make time for my own writing, and I think rereading this might be a good way to motivate myself to create that time.

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

This is a strange one.  Mentioned in a youtube video by Contrapoints, this is a short collection of both written and pictorial essays that make a variety of points about how we see the world.  From the way that photography has fundamentally altered our society’s conception of reality, to the way art views women, to the strange similarities between the representation of women and food in advertising, this collection makes us think about the medium of the visual and the ways in which art creates or is created by our reality.

The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida

I’ve been looking for a book for men about how to make romantic and sexual connections with women that doesn’t have any of the trappings of patriarchy or misogyny.  I’m working on a writing project to this effect myself, and I wanted to make sure that I was doing the proper research into existing books on this or related topics.  This probably comes the closest I’ve seen thus far, though it has a kind of different focus than my own project.

Deida takes a spiritual approach to sexual attraction: speaking of attraction coming from the polarity of masculine & feminine energies.  Much of the advice that springs from this point of view will be helpful to many men: dropping neediness, being comfortable with your own energy, recognizing the kind of support your lover needs may be different from what you need, etc. , but I think it also lacks a certain social awareness.  Men following this advice could become excellent, confident lovers, but they could also fall into some toxic patterns.  I think the spirituality aspect probably does shield many men from falling into those traps, but I think a number could also slip through.

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Started reading this one along with How to Win Friends and Influence People in an attempt to be thinking about the rules/dynamics of human interaction.  I was happily surprised that this book lives up to its hype.  Under the guise of being a guide to principles of power dynamics, it contains a treasure trove of historical and fictional stories about human engagements and interactions.  I really enjoyed reading this and would recommend it to people just from the writing and storytelling alone.

I will say that I had my reservations about the ethical values of this book.  The author makes an argument that, essentially, one can never truly sit apart from the games of power in human relations as it is simply in our nature.  From that premise, it is always better to be able to deftly handle power than to be inept and bungle it.  I sort of half-accept this argument.  Some of the examples, I think, are obviously unethical, but I believe that the author is at least right that it is important to understand how others might be attempting to attain power even if you decline to use all of the strategies yourself.

The Game by Neil Strauss

Another piece of research for my own writing, I had a lot of preconceptions about this book that did not turn out to be accurate.  Back when it was first released, there was a lot of controversy around it.  This book brought the frequently misogynistic Pick-Up Artist community into the limelight, and it was condemned for doing so.  But the book itself doesn’t exactly espouse these misogynistic views as I’d heard.  Strauss sees many of the problems his new mindsets cause him and those around him and actively dislikes the more misogynistic, manipulative characters in the community around him.

Strauss’s book is more important than ever in this age of MGTOW, Incels, and Red Pills.  Many men in the modern age live in sexual, emotional, and intimate scarcity and only by talking honestly about these issues and bringing these things to light will we be able to heal.

Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley

Huxley writes about his experiences with Mescaline and other psychedelics.  He talks about their ability to allow us to access parts of our brains which are normally locked away, and he talks about them in the context of understanding spirituality, madness, and religious experience.  Very well-written and short: these were incredibly influential essays when they were written and once again are becoming relevant with the reemergence of psychedelic research for therapeutic purposes.  Required reading for anyone interested in psychedelics or psychology.