Book Notes

Currently Reading:

The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

Book Notes:

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
Finished: 6/12/2021. How Much I Recommend It: 85%
Beautiful but often deeply pessimistic musings. Best read in small chunks.

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Finished: 1/8/2021. How Much I Recommend It: 75%
Hesse does his usual philosophical self-exploration thing with some added romance and revelry.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Finished: 1/1/2021. How Much I Recommend It: 85%
Re-reading to celebrate the book entering the public domain today – always worth the read.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Finished: 11/11/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 85%
Some brilliant character sketches and several amusing frog-based anecdotes.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Finished: 11/10/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 90%
Sci-fi short stories to bend your mind. Creative concepts, highly entertaining.

The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks
Finished: 9/24/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 80%
A law professor describes her journey through schizophrenia. Exhausting to read, but because it accurately describes how exhausting it was to live through.

Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
Finished: 9/2/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 90%
My summary: (1) Suffering is bad. (2) Non-human animals can suffer. (3) Their suffering matters. (4) Factory farming causes suffering. (5) Don’t eat factory farmed meat.

Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert
Finished: 8/25/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 65%
Should be called People Don’t Know What They Really Want. The thesis is interesting, but Gilbert still follows the pop-psychology playbook and over-extrapolates from interesting anecdotes.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Finished: 7/4/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 95%
Hesse only writes one story over and over, but it’s a good one. Siddhartha is my favorite version because it’s the simplest.

Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening by Joseph Goldstein
Finished: 5/23/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 90%
A clear commentary on a major Buddhist scripture that helped me better understand how meditation can be important and what modern Buddhists believe.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Finished: 5/20/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 80%
Miserable people do a lot of miserable things, but in a beautiful way.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Finished: 5/11/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 75%
The Book of Revelation, but hilarious. When the humor isn’t clicking, the plot unfortunately doesn’t pick up the slack. Still great irreverent fun.

Mythology by Edith Hamilton
Finished: 5/11/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 65%
A useful summary of Ancient Greek myths.

On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Finished: 5/9/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 80%
Smart and useful advice on non-fiction writing. (More notes here)

A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
Finished: 5/3/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 70%
The book your grouchy grandfather would have written if he was a great American writer. Good fun. One counterpoint to Vonnegut’s pessimism about America: America has people like Vonnegut.

Watchmen by Alan Moore
Finished: 5/2/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 85%
I might be 30 years late to the party, but I’m glad I finally read Watchmen. It’s a smart and satisfying superhero story that captures the mood of uncertain times.

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Finished: 4/18/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 70%
A portrait of a self-destructive misanthrope. To Dostoevsky, the fact that this kind of person can exist proves that people do not always do what’s best for them.

Demian by Hermann Hesse
Finished: 4/12/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 75%
Hesse does Jung and Nietzsche. He isn’t as rigorous as the writers he’s drawing from, but Demian is less about the ideas and more about the beautifully dreamlike atmosphere.

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Finished: 4/9/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 100%
The most ridiculous book I’ve ever read. It’s great. (More notes here)

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
Finished: 3/24/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 90%
As the title suggests, it’s about death. Short, unpretentious, and executed perfectly. I expect to read it many more times before I die.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Finished: 3/15/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 80%
Race and religion in 1960s America. The point of reading this today is not to learn that America has a problem with race – that should be obvious. The point is to realize that brave people like James Baldwin had to write books like this to make it obvious.

Atomic Habits by James Clear
Finished: 3/2/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 85%
A definitive guide to habits with a ton of useful tips. (More notes here)

Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
Finished: 2/21/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 60%
A guide to going against the grain. I think you can get the same ideas from watching videos of Hitchens speaking – and I tend to enjoy his speaking more.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Finished: 2/19/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 75%
Short, very readable, and interesting book about overcoming mental blocks. (More notes here)

Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse.
Finished: 1/9/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 65%
Some interesting thoughts on education and burnout. Not Hesse’s best. (More notes here)

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
Finished: 1/25/2020. How Much I Recommend It: 55%
A book about how how disconnected we are from the food we eat. More than you ever wanted to know about corn. Lots of internal monologue from Pollan – some interesting, some not. (More notes here)