Category: Books
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Not To Spend It, But To Have It
Paul Auster, who died earlier this year, on his father, but actually on money: It was not so much the money itself he wanted, but what it represented: not merely success in the eyes of the world, but a way of making himself untouchable. Having money means more than being able…
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Brutal Journey
The Narváez expedition departed Spain in 1527 to explore Florida. Things went wrong and only four out of 600 men made it back to Europe after trekking through what today is Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Mexico for eight years, much of it while being enslaved by Indian tribes. Paul Schneider’s…
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On Two Planets
On Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz (or Laßwitz) may be the first science fiction novel to imagine an alien invasion. Published in 1897, it’s about Martians travelling to Earth aboard sophisticated spaceships to study humanity. They have superior technology and a more enlightened culture than Earth, but even so, they…
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All That Is Sacred
We go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms. F. Scott Fitzgerald This quote must’ve been popular in 1970s Key West. Thomas McGuane uses it in an interview about the period and Jim Harrison discusses it in a movie about fly fishing in the Florida Keys. Circa 1973, Key…
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Gangerl
Off the dirt track crossing a deserted mountain pass in northwestern Namibia, we encountered an ancient Land Rover stuck in the sand. Next to it stood its three passengers, desperate for someone to find and rescue them. Even before I was born, my father had taken every opportunity to go…
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Paradise Now
Is the way we organize our society – capitalism, the nation state, individualism – the only way to set up a modern society, or could there be others? Paradise Now by Chris Jennings describes some high-profile examples of 19th century experimentation with alternative ways of living together, including the Shakers,…
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Solzhenitsyn’s Letter
On Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 letter to the Soviet leadership. Maybe Solzhenitsyn’s and Putin’s view of the world are not so incompatible.
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Ultralight
The amount of time I spend researching backpacking gear, reading blogs and reviews and watching YouTube videos about tarps, camping stoves, backpacks, sleeping quilts and footwear is comparable to the time I actually spend using the gears outdoors. I find this embarrassing. I also know I’m not the only one.…
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A Really Big Lunch
A collection of Jim Harrison’s food writing. The introduction is by Harrison’s friend, celebrity chef, gifted writer and harasser of women Mario Batali. Some of Harrison’s best insights compare the pleasures of the flesh and of the mind: As a mediocre student I wasn’t in the least interested in critical…
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The Brotherhood of Mt Shasta
As you hike the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, for many days you catch glimpses of Mt Shasta between the trees. As you drive through the empty plains of Northern California, it beckons on the horizon. As you take a flight into San Francisco crossing the Sierra Nevada,…
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Project Hail Mary
The only novel by Andy Weir I’ve read besides Project Hail Mary is The Martian, which deservedly has become one of the best-known science fiction novels of recent times even before it was turned into a movie starring Matt Damon. This kind of success should be hard to replicate. But…
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Two Very Good Movies
A Man Called Otto: This is an example of a genre I enjoy. The genre is Grumpy old man with new neighbors. Other examples of GOMWNN are St Vincent (starring Bill Murray as GOM) and Gran Torino (GOM: Clint Eastwood). The story is that a grumpy man has lost his…
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Animals in Translation
Our senses continuously collect data including sounds, smells and visual input, but at any given time we’re consciously aware of only a tiny and heavily filtered fraction. Why is that? Why can’t our consciousness deal with a larger proportion of the input data? Why can’t we pay attention to many…
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Alice Munro Has Died
Alice Munro is dead. There are fragments from her short stories that I sometimes remember without any trigger I’m aware of, like the deception in Corrie. Since March, Paul Auster, Daniel Dennett and Vernor Vinge have died too. It’s enough now.
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The Gospel of Nature
John Burroughs published Time and Change in 1912. Hewas a well known naturalist, corresponding with Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir and others. He has been largely forgotten since, even though much his nature writing is still relevant and insightful today. The following is from The Gospel of Nature, a chapter of…
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The Righteous Mind
I know I’m late to the party, but Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, published in 2012, contains some important ideas. Haidt’s assertion that “anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason” (page 104) neatly summarizes the book’s first part. What he means is that we don’t make judgements based on reason.…
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Paul Auster Has Died
Paul Auster is dead. I keep returning to two of his novels, Mr. Vertigo and Moon Palace. Their protagonists, even though they are fictional, are more alive than many of us. Their lives aren’t anything to envy but they hint at what it means to live life to its fullest.
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Tracking
Excerpts from Jim Harrison’s third-person autobiography Tracking, which appeared in his collection The Summer He Didn’t Die. About rivers: The last few days in the north he spent most of the time in the woods after packing was done. The water was warmish in August and he was able to…
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Daniel Dennett Has Died
Philosopher and scientist Daniel Dennett is dead. His book on Intuition Pumps, or thought experiments, is one I hope to return to here.
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Ash Jogalekar’s 100 Desert Island Books
This is a good list. Plenty of inspiration. I’ll have to make a list like this eventually. Stay tuned.
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The Maniac
Biographies are a waste of time. There’s little to be gleaned from the lives of those we admire. The details of someone’s childhood or their private lives rarely hold any explanatory power for their achievements. If there is any generalizable insight, it can be summarized in a few paragraphs. The…
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Utopia for Realists
The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has been around for some time. It’s a bold idea that has the potential to fundamentally change the way our society works, and there aren’t enough of those. Whether it’d be a positive change is a different question. The UBI is one…
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Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve
This is an unusual book. I’m not aware of any other attempt to analyze literature using big data and statistics. For example: Ernest Hemingway, together with the world’s English teachers, warns against the use of adverbs. He argues that adverbs, especially those that end in –ly, are a sign of…
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Tribe
When a society is under attack, what happens to its mental health? You may think that the associated stress will cause psychiatric disorders to increase, and you’d be wrong. When the Nazis bombed London during World War II, they hoped to produce mass hysteria. Not only did they fail, but…
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Improbable Destinies
Is there such a thing as destiny? How resilient are outcomes to changed starting conditions? This was the question that Stephen Jay Gould asked in his 1989 book Wonderful Life. If we travelled back in time to the Precambrian period before animals were a thing and restarted the tape of life, the kind of…
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Jim Harrison
I’ve been reading a lot of Jim Harrison lately. It’s an infatuation with his work that began a few years ago but has now reached new heights. I have purchased all of his prose and some of his books of poems. Four of the last five books I’ve read are…
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Vernor Vinge Has Died
This week, science fiction writer Vernor Vinge died. Rainbows End (2006) is one of the best science fiction novels of all time.
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The Second Kind of Impossible
Short version: Paul J. Steinhardt’s The Second Kind of Impossible is the best science book I’ve read in a long time. Long version: Crystals are formed by identical, neatly arranged building blocks. One example are the stacked water molecules that make up ice crystals. Quasicrystals are different and Penrose tiling is a…
Nehaveigur 