From the newsletter: 2023 Reading Goals 📝 world.hey.com/thom/2023…

I’ve watched the Fellowship of the Ring movie maybe a dozen times. I’ve seen The Two Towers a handful of times, and Return of the King maybe once or twice. Given this, it’s pretty hard to separate my experience of the book from my experience of the movie. I think this is both for better and for worse.

For worse because I have a hard time taking characters and scenes exclusively as written by Tolkien. Instead, end up I envisioning the scenes as they were interpreted by Peter Jackson. But, my experience with the movies is for better because I found some parts of the book to be kind of a drag, or written inaccessibly, and in those moments I was happy to have my understanding of the plot and the character dynamics from the movie to help propel me through.

Given that I’ve seen the second two movies a lot less than I’ve seen the first one, I am interested to see if my reading of the second two books is less affected. My book versions of Aragorn, Gandalf, Frodo and Sam are already starting to diverge a bit from my movie versions of them… and I hope that process continues as I read the next books.

I’m also really looking forward to rewatching all three movies after I finish the books.

New blog post from me: A Reflection on the Nativity 📝 world.hey.com/thom/a-re…

I put this book on my reading list after seeing it recommended on several different reddit threads around smart consumption and sustainability.

This book is about the effects of consumer culture on human society: the psychological effects, the environmental effects, and how it affects our relationships.

With a topic like that, one may imagine a doom-and-gloom read - it is not! The author breathes life into the text by bringing in interviews with lots of interesting people from all over the world. He paints a vision of a livable future as he brings the reader through all the processes and mechanisms that need to change for us to start living under our planetary limits.

I found this book engaging, and I think it would make a great introductory book to anyone interested in mindful consumption.

This book was recommended to me by the Director of IT at Sierra Club, Dave - a.k.a. my boss’s boss. I listened to it on audiobook, and most of my listening sessions were during morning walks.

Walking was a great way to listen to this book, which is, as the title suggests, about walking. It’s Bill Bryson’s account of walking parts of the Appalachian Trail. Bryson is super funny! The book goes back and forth between fun stories about the trail, observational humor, and sharing the history of the region.

It’s a fun book that nature lovers & hikers will enjoy.

New blog post from me: Summer ‘22, in photos 📝 world.hey.com/thom/summ…

This is an absolutely awesome book, and I found it totally by accident.

I was reading about how the Apple TV+ series, Central Park, had been nominated for an NAACP Image Award. I had never heard of the Image Awards, but figured looking into it would be a great way to find out about quality books & media that might be marginalized out of mainstream coverage.

I put a few recent winners on my reading list, and Long Division was the first one I opened, and holy cow. Long Division is a super entertaining and deeply interesting book, and one I highly recommend.

The protagonist (and narrator) of this book is a black fourth grade boy who lives in Mississippi. I’ve never been to Mississippi, I barely remember the fourth grade, and I am not black. So the newness of the child’s experience pulled me in immediately. On top of the narrator having a life experience so different than my own, the fact that the narrator is a fourth grader allows the author to write with a casualness and a frankness that texts narrated by adults can’t reach.

That frankness gave the book an extremely intimate feeling. The author made me feel like I was right inside the brain of the protagonist, which is a rare and at times less-than-comfortable experience when reading something written by someone with such a radically different life experience.

As you’ll see from the quotes below, one thing the book wrestles with is the place of blackness in literature. The meta nature of this endeavor is complemented well by the meta nature of the narrative, itself - the book is mind-bending in more ways than one, and totally awesome on every page.

I really don’t want to ruin anything about the narrative, but I will say that the story quickly gets wild, and stays wild for the whole book.

Not only do startling and interesting things happen throughout, but the book is written in such a way that previous, seemingly innocuous plot points come back around to enhance the story’s eeriness. Frankly, I’d probably need to read it again (at least once) in order to really get everything the author is doing. I’m sure I will.

I highly recommend everyone give it a read!

Favorite Quotes:

“the Bible was better than those other spinach-colored Classic books that spent most of their time flossing with long sentences about pastures and fake sunsets and white dudes named Spencer. I didn’t hate on spinach, fake sunsets, or white dudes named Spencer, but you could just tell that whoever wrote the sentences in those books never imagined they’d be read by Grandma, Uncle Relle, LaVander Peeler, my cousins, or anyone I’d ever met.”

“English teachers like Ms. Shivers were always talking about “the reader.” Whoever “the reader” was, it never seemed like she could be like me.”

“Treat it like it never happened, you hear me? You are a smart child, an educated young man. You try to act grown in front of them cameras? Well, grown Black folks forget what they need to forget. That’s what grown Black folks do.”

“Everybody I knew, at one point or another, had called someone [the n-word], but I never heard the “er” when we said it to each other. It was just something that all of us said. We didn’t mean it to hurt each other and we didn’t mean it to make someone feel lucky. It was like the only word that meant lucky, cool, and cursed at the same time.”

The Book in 3 Sentences

In an alternative near-future, the UK has come through the far side of Cold War-related nuclear holocaust by establishing a fascist state with extensive surveillance, propaganda, and law enforcement arms. A man driven insane by experiments performed on him in a concentration camp (run by this government) carries out a series of terrorist attacks, including the murders of all those involved in his detainment and torture. Throughout the book, special emphasis is put on artistic expressions, through his house, which is an museum of now-banned art, music, and films from the 20th century, and through the use of TV, radio, and performance dialogue woven behind and between character conversations.

How I Discovered It

I picked up a used copy of this book at Half Price Books

Impressions

What struck me most is how different the message of the book is from the message of the movie. The movie, essentially, conveys “domestic terrorism is good, sometimes, and torturing Natalie Portman may be justified.”

The book gives no such blessing to the actions of the protagonist: by my perception, he’s portrayed as certifiably insane, and his tactics are destructive and futile. The goal of his terrorism, as articulated near the end of the book, is to start the rebuilding of Britain through the destruction of the current, corrupt & cruel, order. But no such rebuilding occurs, or is even hinted at- the book ends with the streets in chaos, conflict, and exhibiting the dark elements of human nature.

What’s great, though, is that no one is portrayed as noble, and no ideology is portrayed as both benevolent and functional.

Who Should Read It?

It’s a classic postmodern ending, designed to say “f you” to the reader. But, usually to redeem that sort of ending, I expect a more engaging journey. This book is a great art piece, but is a lot slower than it needs to be, and is frankly boring at times. I wouldn’t discourage people from picking it up, but I would say it’s not for everyone.

This spring, on a trip to Bloomington, I stumbled on a massive, hardcover volume of Kurt Vonnegut’s collected short stories, which I excitedly bought and have been enjoying when I lug it off the shelf from time to time. I read a handful of Vonnegut novels in college, and really, really enjoyed them.

As I’ve enjoyed the short stories, I’ve been forming a vague resolution to return to the novels; and I figured re-reading Slaughterhouse Five was a great way to start. And reading it right after Maus, also a World War Two book, was the perfect time.

This book remained a solid read the second time around. Personal, funny, and dark. It’s definitely worth a read.

I’m not going to dissect or analyze the book. Like Maus, or Persepolis, or any book written by someone trying to relate or make meaning out of their own painful experiences… I’m happy to just accept the words, and recommend the book to others.

From Slaughterhouse Five: “There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is suppose to be very quiet after a massacre, and always is, except for the birds.And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?'”

From Maus: “The victims who died can never tell their side of the story, so maybe it’s better not to have any more stories. Samuel Better once said ‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness’.

“On the other hand, he said it.”

This is the third recommendation I’ve taken this year from my friend Jay, after Snow Crash (which I disliked), and All The Shah’s Men (which I thought was interesting).

White Noise was absolutely incredible. I tore through it in just over three days; the way it picked me up and sucked me in reminded me of my experience last winter with House of Leaves.

But where House of Leaves tries to devastate the reader, White Noise absolutely delights the reader. I felt like I was chuckling almost the whole time. It’s continuously hilarious and surprising, while also being drum-tight and laser-focused on the themes it explores and captures.

The aim of the book is to both indict and trivialize modern consumer culture, as it manifests in our work, in our relationships, and in our supermarkets. The descriptions of super markets are absolutely incredible. There are several of them throughout the book, and I savored and reread each of them.

I was told, a few days before I opened this book, that I have something called supermarket syndrome. Apparently, “The lights, rows of shelves, and crowds of people can trigger symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, and light-headedness.” I know that I can’t stand grocery stores, but I’ve always seen my mental rejection of those spaces as a morally virtuous response to being faced with the enormity of our culture’s overwhelming amount of production and consumption.

From reading this book, it is clear that Don DeLillo shares my perspective.

The book is also an excellent post-COVID read, because it features a community health threat which at first disrupts the lives of everyone in the community, but is then normalized, and then ignored. It’s such a beautiful depiction of how people adapt and move on with their lives, when faced with both trivial and monumental changes of the status quo.

I loved, loved, loved this book, and I highly recommend it.

The Book in 3 Sentences

The author relates his father’s stories of World War II to the reader via a graphic novel. More than a retelling of war stories, Spiegalman relates how the war affected him, as well, by recounting his complicated relationship with his father. Spiegelman’s father was a Polish Jew who was put in a ghetto and then later a concentration camp during Nazi occupation.

How I Discovered It

This book was suggested to me by one of the employees at my Local Comic Shop.

Impressions

World War 2 was absolutely brutal, and this book succeeds in portraying that brutality. Liz also read this book with me, and we were left blown away by the wartime living conditions described by the author, and were left in awe of the resilience of everyone made to suffer through Nazi rule.

The book also explores how the war affected the psyche of survivors, their progeny, and the world, after the war ended. That was also super interesting to read about, and reflect on.

The book was described to me as “The best graphic novel of all time”. I don’t think I agree with that. It’s not even the best graphic novel that I’ve read. But it was very good, and well worth a read.

How the Book Affected Me

This book is a spiritual successor to reading Persepolis: a graphic novel read with the purpose to learn about cultures and peoples who lives are different than mine. It left me with a deep respect for survivors of World War 2.

I’ve read a handful of books by Thomas Merton. In fact, he is certainly the author most formative to my spiritual life. But it’s been a few years since I’ve read one of his books. I picked this one up on the recommendation Ruth, my cousin’s fiancee.

This book was great: the chapters are short and focused, and each paragraph is expertly crafted, in top-form Merton style. The most notable things about this book, compared to the other Merton that I’ve read, is the practicality of the topics discussed. Merton doesn’t linger on contemplative prayer, or the nature of being and knowledge, but instead focuses on such topics as adult friendship, practical spiritual discipline in modern life, and how to find fulfillment in your job. Not monk stuff: people stuff.

New Seeds of Contemplation remains Merton’s most accessible book. But Life and Holiness would make a great second book for people who are interested in going deeper with Merton’s writings. It’s definitely worth a read.

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

Actor Terry Crews walks through his life, picking stories that correspond to different themes around which his experience has brought wisdom (chapter titles are “Identity”, “Agency”, “Masculinity”, etc). Stories include his impoverished childhood in Flint, Michigan, his struggle to overcome his porn addition, his experience as the victim of sexual assault at the hands of a high-powered Hollywood executive. Crews has been through, and overcome, and learned, a lot!

👀 How I Discovered It

I found out Crews had put out a memoir when I saw & read this excerpt of the book in The Wall Street Journal. Knowing a few bits and pieces about other parts of his life, I suspected the full story was worth a read.

🎨 Impressions

He has a contemplative, detailed, engaging writing style that pulled me along the entire book.

I walked away from the book endlessly impressed by the patience and perseverance of Crews' wife, Becky, who has worked really hard to help keep their marriage together, and to help Terry emotionally mature.

I also walked away impressed with the candor and humility of the author. Crews really goes into depth about his personal challenges & pain; both the baggage that he carried with him from his childhood/early adulthood, as well as his own set of independently acquired personal demons.

☘️ How the Book Affected Me

I decided to pick up this book after reading the WSJ excerpt because, in at least one sense, Terry and I fit a similar profile: we’re both over 6'2", we both weigh over 225 lbs, we both like lifting weights, and we are both survivors of sexual abuse. I thought Terry might have some wisdom or insight that I could relate to around the ideas of masculinity, power, and shame… and he did! I’m not in a place to share specifics about how hearing his story helped me process my own experiences, but suffice it to say that was a great book for me to read, and has helped to start unlock some previously locked doors in my emotional psyche.

I really admire how the obstacles that Terry has overcome has led him to a place of compassion, reconciliation, and ideological centrism & balance in his life. I feel like most stories I’ve read, where someone goes through this much trauma and pain, ends in cynicism and extremism. Terry clearly has a beautiful heart, and I came away from this book with him as a role model.

Terry (like me) also grew up in a conservative religious environment, and (like me) a big part of his personal spiritual journey has been overcoming his distrust and rejection of religion in order to come to a productive middle ground. Lots of people only make it to the “distrust and rejection” stage, so it was cool to read about how he healed his relationship with organized religion.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

“I used to fly off the handle at people for the slightest lapse or imperfection, and it was because I was always mad at myself for the slightest lapse or imperfection.”

“when men are made to feel guilt and shame around sex, it can cause them to hate women, because they are the ones ‘tempting them’ into sin.”

“Self-righteousness is the thing that allows us to lift ourselves up in the same way that dehumanizing others allows us to lower them down. Once we allow that dynamic to take root, we’ve created a moral monster—and the monster is ourselves. […] Anyone can fall into the trap of dehumanizing others. Anyone can become so convinced of the goodness of their own cause that they will excuse any action that supports it, and in the end they will wind up no better than the abusers they set out to destroy.”

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This graphic novels shares some stories of a girl living in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. The protagonist grapples with the discordant political realities of the time. The author does a great job of inhabiting the perspective of a child, complete with a child’s confusions and a child’s answers to problems.

👀 How I Discovered It

Liz was reading this book for class this semester, while I was independently reading about Iranian history! Given that the subject matter matched, and that it was a graphic novel (another kick I’ve been on lately), it felt like kismet!

🎨 Impressions

Iranian culture today seems so different from how we live our lives in the US; it’s very interesting to see the point in time where their customs “branched off” in the fundamentalist islamic direction.

This book picked up right where All The Shah’s Men, the last book I read, left off. It was great to get continuity that way, and expand my picture of the very interesting history of this country.

☘️ How the Book Affected Me

It’s been great to learn about Iran from a variety of perspectives: All The Shah’s Men gives a historical account of midcentury Iran, this book gives a first-person perspective of Iran from within the Islamic Revolution, and the show I’ve been watching, Tehran, tells modern stories built upon all of this context. I’ve also been listening to the King of Kings Hardcore History podcast, which talks about Cyrus the Great in ancient Iran.

As I said in my blog post for All The Shah’s Men, learning in depth about foreign cultures is a new experience for me, but one that I’ve enjoyed greatly. And a habit I’m excited to continue!

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book tells the story the midcentury coup in Iran, which was orchestrated by US and British intelligence operatives. The purpose of the coup was to remove Mohammad Mosaddegh from power, who was Iran’s popular, progressive, anti-colonial leader, and who wanted to oust the British from controlling the Iranian oil industry. The book provides a detailed account of Mosaddegh’s career, and gives an interesting background of Iranian culture & politics.

👀 How I Discovered It

I became interested in learning more about Iran from watching the (amazing) first season of the Apple TV+ Original show Tehran. I mentioned my interested to my friend Jay when I was visiting him in Chicago in March, and he suggested this book which he had read last year.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

The subheading of this book is “An American Coup and the roots of Middle East Terror”. On top of my interest in Iranian culture, I was also excited to learn some history about western involvement in Middle Eastern geopolitics. I frankly don’t know very much at all about that part of the world, or the United State’s role there.

But I absolutely at this book up, and I am continuing so seek out additional learning resources to help me learn more about Iran and the Middle East.

This book also awakened in me desire to learn more about different cultures, in general. In my formal education, I never sought out or paid much attention to history or geography or social studies classes… but I am now discovering that I enjoy learning about other parts of the world, and the people there. This book did a phenomenal job explaining the cultural inheritance of Iran, and how their history affects the way Iranians see the world. I’m not used to thinking about people (including myself) like that, so it was fun to learn, and gain fresh perspective!

A lil’ music snack from me to you: Thom’s Jams May 2022

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

A detective, who has a striking resemblance to a fresh murder victim, goes undercover as the murder victim, living with the victim’s roommates, who are told that their dear friend has miraculously recovered from the attack after a week in the hospital. The book is about the undercover detective’s relationships with the roommates – all of whom are suspects – as she gets to know them, as well as her “real life” relationships, which have been put on hold while she’s deep undercover. I found it to be an engaging, suspenseful, and emotionally relatable read with an unexpected ending.

🎨 Impressions

This book has many similarities to The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I always wish Tartt would write another novel, so it was fun to pick this one up and find it so dark & cozy in that familiar way.

I only come across a few books a year that are so good that I stay up way past bed time to keep reading them; and this book had a few moments like that. It’s a thick project of a book, and for that reason I probably won’t rush into binge-reading the rest of French’s work, although her other books are definitely going on my “beach read” list.

👀 How I Discovered It

My friend Drew recommended it to me!

🙋 Who Should Read It?

I think most people would enjoy this book! The themes that stuck out to me in this book were around the idea of community & belonging, chosen family, and personal identity. But I also learned a little bit (and reading the book spurred outside research) about 20th century Irish history & cultural inheritance, which was cool.

New blog post from me: Spring 2022 updates 📝 world.hey.com/thom/spri…

Thanks to this blog post by Filipe Donadio, which gave me this new template for book reviews, which led me to write 850 words.

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

Johann Hari methodically explains many different ways in which the structure of modern society erodes our ability to sustain focus, both on individual tasks and at the grander level of living a “focused life”. These include environmental factors (e.g., air pollution & our processed food diets), technological factors (e.g., reading ephemeral text on screens instead of persistent text on physical pages), and economics factors (e.g., the profitability of distracted, stressed, and exhausted consumers). The structure of the text is refreshingly well done, the arguments are presented plainly and thoroughly, and the author adds personal color to the research findings in a fair, responsible way.

👀 How I Discovered It

I discovered this book when I heard him on an episode of Andrew Sullivan’s podcast. Johann Hari is super playful and fun to listen to, which definitely comes through in his writing. It helps that I heard the podcast first! I think I would’ve been more irritated with his casual writing style if I wasn’t familiar with how he speaks first.

That’s not to say that the research or the argument in the book is lackadaisical. In fact, it’s one of the most well-organized and responsibly presented books I’ve ever read; Hari’s background as a journalist certainly shines through. He was meticulous about presenting counter-arguments to the research he shared, and goes as far to say things like “I will be presenting the arguments against this research in the next chapter, so as you’re reading, please remember that these findings are disputed”. I was thoroughly impressed by this element of the book.

🎨 Impressions

Overall, this book hits like An Inconvenient Truth for attention deficit. After reading, I was left with the “oh my goodness, what a nearly insurmountable problem this is” feeling that I’ve only ever experienced before with books & movies about climate change.

After finishing the book, my imagination fast-forwards American future to the set of Idiocracy, with bad food, air pollution, and advertising having totally eroded our ability to hold jobs or collectively undertake social projects.

Unlike An Inconvenient Truth, however, Hari doesn’t provide the relief of saying that the answer to our problems lie in incremental fixes made by individuals. In fact, one of the reasons the problem of unfocused attention seems so dire after reading the book is because ,throughout it, Hari demonstrates again and again how the issues are structural, and not based on the bad habits of individual people.

He spends some time naming this distinction, in fact: he calls it “cruel optimism” when you ask someone to “just” feed their children better food, or “just” stop looking at your phone so much, or “just” breath cleaner air. He has a virtuous awareness throughout the book that suggesting these one-off solutions will only benefit people with means.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

That being said, learning about attention deficit issues in society has made me crave greater focus, and as such it’s caused me to make a few personal habit changes:

1. I’ve started keeping a small memo notebook in my pocket to jot down notes and questions, so that I’m not pulling out my phone to do something with every thought or Google search that pops into my head.
2. I’ve started “time blocking” my time at work, scheduling out each hour of the day. This allows me to focus on one thing at a time, and allows me to set aside certain chunks of time for email correspondence. Knowing I have an hour set aside for email later in the day helps keep me from compulsively checking it when I have other more important things to do.
3. I’ve stopped bring my iPhone/iPad to the gym, and turned into my “unplug” time. I’ve switched over to an old iPod shuffle, and using that same notebook – instead of an app – to record my weight training. This habit change has had the biggest net-positive benefit to my day; I now come back from the gym feeling refreshed, relaxed, and centered.

🙋 Who Should Read It?

This is a great self-improvement/productivity/mindful awareness book for anyone who doesn’t have time for all the regular productivity-movement bullshit.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

“The more information you take in, the less time you can spend processing any individual piece of it”

“If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. […] Slowness nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.”

“losing your [sense of purpose] is “the deepest form of distraction,” and you may even begin ‘decohering.’ This is when you stop making sense to yourself, because you don’t have the mental space to create a story about who you are. You become obsessed with petty goals, or dependent on simplistic signals from the outside world like retweets. You lose yourself in a cascade of distractions. You can only find your [sense of purpose] if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind-wandering, and deep thought.”

“Modern fitness is shaped by neoliberal ideas of the optimizable self, by consumer capitalism, by race and class privilege, and by gender norms.”

Exercise Is Good for You. The Exercise Industry May Not Be - The New Yorker

This book was recommended to me by a friend around the time the fourth Matrix movie came out. I tried to rent it from the library, but the hold queue was extremely long… turns out that this novel is where the word ‘Metaverse’ was coined, so it’s having a renaissance thanks to Facebook’s rebranding.

But then I heard the name of the book again when it was mentioned by Jaron Lanier in Dawn of the New Everything, and so I bought the ebook - I was very disappointed to find that it was not very good.

There are some awesome parts of the book - the dystopia that Stephenson creates is hilarious and creative, there are some sweet inventions, and the action scenes are riveting. The part I like the best, though, is how the dystopian reality is super kooky and surreal, while the metaverse “virtual reality” is pretty buttoned down and business-focused. That was a great script-flipping that I thought was clever and really enjoyed.

But… there’s a lot of the book that’s dedicated to a mythology and backstory around the evil character that I think is basically unnecessary. It doesn’t add to the commentary, or the narrative, or really to anything. It just a lot of pages to get through. The nemeses were well-constructed characters, but there’s so much unnecessary color — which is so unnecessarily complicated — around their motivations and histories, that it obscures the good parts of the book.

I probably won’t jump at an opportunity to read anything else by this author.

This is the second book (after The Imitation of Christ) that I am reading as part of my effort to re-introduce Christian writing into my spiritual practice this year.

This is a book that I first encountered in the book club at an Episcopalian church that I sometimes went to when I lived in an intentional Catholic community in Kansas City.

It was during my time in Kansas City that I made an important realization about my spirituality: that I best experience the presence of God alone, and in silence, and not in the boisterous evangelical praise and worship sessions I had been raised with.

This realization was a huge door opener for my pursuit of personal prayer, and when made me interested in meditation & contemplative prayer.

Reading the book in it’s entirely now has been a great primer on the basics of contemplative prayer, and one that has very much enhanced my prayer times. The author (depending on the translation) is kind, and gentle, and humble. And it’s in very short chapters, so it’s easy to read during prayer times. I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in Christian contemplative prayer.

This was the third book by Jaron Lanier I’ve “read”, although the first two, You Are Not A Gadget and Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. I liked both those books, and I liked this book, too.

Jaron Lanier is an incredibly expansive thinker. In the beginning of this book (which serves both as a memoir and as an introduction to concepts pertaining to the field of Virtual Reality), he says that, outside of the project of creating VR technology, VR works as an excellent thought experiment through which to explore the ideas of human perception, the concept of “interfaces” in the digital and organic spheres, and others.

Jaron Lanier has the unique ability to hold the technological, humanitarian, and spiritual concerns of a problem in hands all at once, and analyze the multidimensionality of a technological issue insightfully and succinctly.

The beginning of the book is chock full of beautiful insight about the nature of creativity, memory, and identity. The end of the book has some very interesting ideas about the future of technology, and it’s virtuous and immoral potential applications. The middle of the book.. sags a little bit. Worth a read, but has a couple tough spots.

One of my resolutions for this year was to add more structure to my daily prayer time, and to add a component of reading Christian theological texts into that prayer time. I’ve developed a steady meditation practice over the last few years, and I figured this would be a good way to add some religious substance back into my spiritual practice.

I asked several Christian friends for book recommendations, and ended up with a long list (so, hopefully, many more reviews in this genre forthcoming). I don’t recall The Imitation of Christ being on that list of suggestions… I’m not quite sure how I found it.

The chapters are all very short, which is great reading serially over the course of prayer times. It was a fine enough book to start the year with, but definitely doesn’t quality as a “need to read”. There were, frankly, a lot of ideas that were dangerously constructed… the author can go from talking about the importance of humility to the importance of “holding nothing but contempt for yourself”. These are two very different pieces of advice. The former is a universally helpful edict, while the latter is terrible advice for all but a very slim set of readers who are in the safe existential and spiritual mindset in which to productively receive that perspective.

There’s lots of stuff like this, with context so deep and specific that many casual readers might not recognize the wisdom of Jesus in a surface level reading of the next, and which may in fact be harmful. However, as I write this, I am struck… ideas like “holding nothing but contempt for yourself” are exactly the type of punishing, harmful ideas that people may associate with organized religion.

An interesting entrance back into religious theology for me, then.

There are many beautiful passages and sentiments in this book. But, in areas where you ask readers to trust you on faith, as it is with spiritual direction… it only takes one piece of bad advice to throw people off of a spiritual path.

I was happy to stumble on this book in a used bookstore the other day. I was looking in the “folklore” section, but not really for anything in specific… just something to go along with the book Cultish I just finished.

This book was a very quick read. It’s a primer on the social phenomenon of witch legends & witch hunting… it doesn’t go too deep on any topic. But it did pique my interest in this topic! How “witch hunts” of all kinds have been used throughout history to punish societal out-groups, and to consolidate (or exercise) power.

It was also published in 1999, so it was refreshingly devoid of navel-gazing about “these uncertain times” it talks about Hitler and Sen. Joe McCarthy as 20th century witch hunters.

Between this book and Cultish, I’m thinking a lot about the power of group affiliation, and how different self-identified groups interact. Also: how groups work to try to lump outsiders together into a group… whether or not that other group actually exists as such.

One point I liked from the book was that, if you want to, you can demonize other people based on anything. Witch hunters come condemn women for being witches both on the basis of being “bewitching” (alluring, seductive) or “wicked” (repulsive, unfriendly).

This book caught my eye last summer when it came out, but I didn’t get around to reading it until it was given to me as a Christmas present. It ended up on a couple year-end “best of” lists, so I was surprised to find that… it’s not especially well written. I found there to be a lot of distracting editorial choices throughout the book, and I went through big parts of the book very confused about what the author was trying to say.

Now: it wasn’t all bad; not in the least. The author does offer some fascinating ideas. I’ve subscribed to her podcast, and the book has spurred some related reading. But maybe a book wasn’t the right form for this information? Or maybe it needed a re-write in order to really focus in on an argument? Throughout the book it seemed the the author was spending lots of time setting up different ideas, but then abandoning them and moving on before getting too deep, or even bringing home a point.

One thing that is well illustrated in the book is a point she posits in the first part of the book: “Group affiliations make up the scaffolding on which we build our lives.” Thinking about human behavior in terms of this idea has been illuminating, just in the past few weeks since picking up the book. The central premise of the book is that our language choices revolve around these group affiliations, and that, because of this, the language illustrates the shape of the groups. A cool idea, for sure.

In the final section, she spends time illustrating the ascendancy of social media cult followings, and then observes that, on a grander scale, “social media” as a whole has its own larger cult following. Another great idea, and one that I wholeheartedly agree with. But I feel like there was a real missed opportunity here to analyze the language patterns of “performative wokeness” on social media. That culture, as much as any other explored in the book, has it’s own (evolving, and sometimes opaque) lists of things that are right to say or wrong to say. There was much (deserved) critique of Donald Trump’s demagoguery, and a comprehensive deconstruction of the ascendancy of Q-Anon… but without even an attempt to analyze any contemporary, left-leaning cultural phenomena (this, coming from a hard left-winger), sections of the book ultimately came across as lacking in self-awareness.

I did really like the voice of the author, and thought she was after the right things… a large part of me wants to just chalk this one up to poor editorial decision-making. Since this book centers around topics that I am interested by, it was still fun to read, and I’ll continue to follow this author.

Holy smokes this was an enrapturing book. Over 600 pages, and I binged it over the course of four days. It’s postured as a horror story, and it totally delivers. Not only is it extremely spooky to read, but it has an eerie, infectious quality that left me thinking about it hours after I’d stopped reading it. It infected my dreams, too.

However, the book doesn’t sit neatly within the rest of the genre of horror; Stephen King fans wouldn’t necessarily enjoy this book. A lot of the horror comes from the unsettling, unmoored nature of the book’s narrative - the structure of storylines is jumbled, and obscured, and the reader is often led to confuse how “real” different parts of the book are meant to be. Blurring the lines of fiction and reality happens in layers and layers within the book.

The peculiarities of titular House leave it well-suited as an object of projection - I’ve found myself thinking about the house several times since finishing the book, as a metaphor for various other things. It sticks with you. I don’t know a lot about the intentions of the author, or what he was aiming for… but this is a damn fine work of literature.