Was stream of consciousness the fad of the 1920s? I get that it might have been new and innovative and a tool to convey perspective, but I absolutely loathe it. I didn‘t like To The Lighthouse for that reason and this is worse. The first two chapters are written this way and are very difficult to follow. The third chapter is written in first person and the fourth and final chapter is written in third person. Each follows a different character.

This book is nine years old now and at the time of writing, the insidious nature of social media, ads and the invasion of privacy were scary enough, so I can only imagine what wondrous changes in apps and tactics these same companies and governments are employing now. To be sure, I think we‘re all aware of the adage that if the service is free, the product is you, but this book lays out in horrific detail the evolution of data and you as product.

This is a dark, haunting, existential novel which evokes similar feelings as Kobo Abe‘s The Woman in the Dunes with a bit of 1984 thrown in. The story conjures questions such as: What is a memory? What is it good for? Does existence depend on memory or in other words if no one remembers a thing any longer, does it exist? As things are forgotten and slip out of existence, does it even matter? Or should efforts be made to preserve what can be?

This is a collection of essays that reads essentially as a memoir, wherein Zweig details his life as a writer in Vienna and traveling abroad and his meetings and reflections on other artists and their work whom he had struck up friendships with (many it seems). But the real allure of this book for me was to read a first-hand account of culture, politics and daily life in Belle époque Europe, during WWI, the inter-war period and the start of WW2.

I‘m a history junkie and I‘ve always been acutely interested in the inner machinations of government, the media environment and propaganda, especially since 9/11, I suppose since that happened while I was in college, a rather formative time. Blumenthal is a reporter that provides a meticulous, yet wide scope of the underbelly of government, politics and media that often relegates him to the fringes because he challenges the official narrative.

I‘m not sure how to describe this book. It‘s both fascinating and frustratingly nebulous. The author claims he has access to higher realms of experience through recollections of life before he was born or the “between lives” time although it‘s never made quite clear how. The book is like a serious of aphorisms arranged by topic and then a FAQ section. Much of it is interesting life philosophy; some of it reads like Spinoza or Heidegger. Meh.

Finally, after a failed start on this tome back in 2012, I started over eleven years later and finished it. Jensen, if you don‘t know him, is a prolific writer whose work typically concentrates on the rampant destruction which industrial civilization inflicts on us and the planet. This particular book is a little off beat in that he explores dreams and those who may be working and informing us “from other sides.” Not his best, but decent.

This book was impressive. I‘m originally from AZ where the border has always loomed large, where cries for a wall and undue discrimination toward Mexicans and anybody who vaguely looks Latino is a staple. Grandin does an impeccable job tracing the origins of the current anti-immigration, anti-social rights, neoliberal economic, militarist order expressed currently through Trumpism in the disappearance of the frontier or subsequent frontiers.

I‘m going to be one of those people that appreciates the idea of the story and the theme of the maniacal, self-destructive quest, but wish to never read this again. I understand that Melville felt the need to expand the work by 70% with essays on whaling and whale anatomy and sailing and philosophy and that has its place, but I didn‘t care for it. After 300 pages, I just wanted this long slog to be over. But I was on team Dick, for sure.

I‘ve known about Chuck Tingle for 9 years now and initially, he was good for a bunch of laughs scrolling through his Amazon catalogue and a fun party gag or inappropriate gift, but it seems he‘s ventured into serious horror. I was a bit skeptical at first that this wouldn‘t have some gay dinosaur or inanimate object love carefully hidden within, but no, it was a well constructed horror novel about the fucked-up nature of gay conversion camps.

So it seems I‘ll be one of the few (from what I‘ve seen on Litsy) detractors of this novel. I realize a lot of people love this, but I did not at all. I‘m not sure what I just read. For me, this omniscient stream of consciousness style is difficult to follow. Each moment requires thirty pages of memories and meandering thoughts and impressions from every participant‘s mind. I‘m not clear on what the story is even about other than a painting.

Greene would have referred to this as one of his amusements and not a novel with serious themes or questions to be grappled with, yet he infused this story about a vacuum cleaner salesman fabricating intelligence reports for Britain‘s foreign service with the predictable Catholic and expat spy intrigue. The absurdity lies in London‘s credulity and the counter plot to remove him by the other faction. A comedy surely with a sprinkle of drama.

It‘s hard to characterize this little book. It‘s a sort of collection of fictional and non-fictional vignettes based on the author‘s travels with oddball friends, living in some unnamed country, perhaps in the former Yugoslavia. This gives the book a backdrop of random and absurd events so that Frederiksen can address concepts like nothing, zero, nihilism, optimism and pessimism. If anything, it‘s an interesting experiment as a book.

Benicàssim, Spain-
I thought about going out on the promenade tonight, but then remembered I had this cava I bought from a vineyard in Requena. So this seemed like an opportunity.

“You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us…But if you are interested in life it never lets you down.”

There‘s not much I can say that hasn‘t already been said about a 400 year old novel. But I do recall a friend of mine, also a philosophy major in college like me, saying that he thought everyone should read this book once a decade. And all I can think is maybe he was alluding to the death scene where the mad knight finally realizes that much of his endeavors have been in error, misguided and embarrassing. Perhaps that‘s all of us if we‘re honest.

Did I like this book? I don‘t know. Like others, I found the story to be gratuitously graphic and violent, but tried to put that aside as a feature of the kind of dystopian frontier western setting at play. And I think in the author‘s mind, the horror of all that was necessary in order for the reader to understand the twisted mental machinations and death cult philosophy that the judge espoused. All in all, a dark, grotesque read.

So I bought this book thinking that it was a new collection of essays, but was disappointed to discover it‘s all of A Long Desire and The White Lantern together with only two new essays, Mesa Verde and Messages on a Sandstone Bluff. So I read these last two new (to me) essays about the exploration of the southwest US and will call this “read.” And I think I‘ll give this to someone who enjoys this kind of material since I already own most of it.

Like his other collection of essays, A Long Desire, Connell‘s follow up is another highly entertaining and witty exploration of history, archaeology, exploration, culture and science. While a bit dated (1980), I‘d still consider it a must read for anybody wishing to delve into an easy introduction to a wide sweep of the human experience. Btw, the White Lantern refers to Antarctica as it reflects more light into space than any other Earth feature.

This wasn‘t bad and it certainly had its moments of tension, but it‘s also clearly a debut novel. Certain scenes or plot points seem implausible and sometimes characters are a bit too artificial in order to keep the plot moving. That said, it had some surprises and was a decent exploration into the psychological thriller genre. There are no likable characters except for perhaps Elaine. And then the anticipated dark ending. Not great. Not awful.

This wasn‘t bad and may be an interesting collection of stories à la Black Mirror, but I also wouldn‘t call it amazing. The stories are often of dystopian futures of coerced, brainwashed citizens or police states rife with propaganda or existential panoramas of a single event or life and the questions that multiple perspectives raise. They‘re creative and fun themes to explore to be sure, but they‘re not exactly thrilling or filled with tension.

This is a very academic text, so it can be a slog at times, yet I think for anyone interested in how societies collapse and why the public seems to be willfully ignorant of it while it‘s clearly happening, this is a must read. There are some particularly helpful insights into how complexity, once reached, cannot be easily undone. There are some interesting psychological insights about human group cohesion and specific American cultural traits.

I always enjoy well rounded treatments of a topic such as this one where the author combines personal experience on the research end of it with a narration on the science and the cultural impacts. In this book, you‘ll learn how tides are generated, how climate change affects them, how different ages and cultures interpreted them and what they mean to islanders in Panama, monks in France and mudshrimp and migrating sandpipers in Nova Scotia.

A 1960s actress comes unmoored after she has an abortion. Her origins in the Nevada desert are a stand in for how she feels inside, “nothing,” while she tries to fill it with driving aimlessly, sleeping around or stealing cars, searching for the place her mother died, searching for something. But later she seems to figure out that life is just craps and “nothing” is all one should want. But she keeps playing, unlike a friend. Dark story.

While this was written in 1952 and there is likely great modern scholarship on the matter, this is still a highly accessible and well researched piece on the origins, mindset, motivations and actions of those German soldiers who could not “psychologically demobilize” from the trenches of WWI once they left the front. The various freikorps were arguably the predecessors of the SA and SS, instruments of the nazi terror and war machines.

There are often parallels drawn between the executions of Socrates and later, Jesus, but the author argues these are superficial. Drawing on Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon and others, Waterfield tries to draw out the historical Socrates and the context in which he lived to understand the charges against him. “Socrates was put to death because the Athenians wanted to purge themselves of undesirable trends, not just of an undesirable individual.”

I wish there was a rating between pick and so-so since that‘s how I really feel about this novel. It‘s good, but I also didn‘t feel as though it‘s the “classic” it‘s touted as. It is however, an interesting thought experiment in how an alien race with neutral gender identities except when in “kemmer” (a monthly mating season when they assume either male or female) shapes a society and how a normal human (male) visitor attempts to comprehend it.

This is a brief biography of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, pioneer of the field of public relations, workaholic, ethically dubious, oddly progressive and shameless self promoter. Propaganda and its history has always interested me so Bernays is a figure I can‘t avoid, but I came away from this book with the impression that he was complex, with self-contradictory drives and self-perceptions. His uncle should have psychoanalyzed him.

This was a sort of dark comedy about the ways in which society is upended in unforeseen ways when everyone stops dying. And that‘s not to mean not aging or not being sick, just unable to die in a particular country after the grim reaper or death (with a little d) decides to finally give humans what they‘ve longed for: immortality. Later, death is reinstated, but is frustrated by a man to whom she cannot deliver. Overall, witty and philosophical.

“Which ‘Belle Époque‘ have I exhumed in the preceding pages? That of 1900, which did not yet exist? That of 1930, which was called ‘1900‘? The ones imagined in 1940, in 1950, in 1968, or even the one at the start of the twenty-first century?” Thus Khalifa‘s historiography posits that when we give a period in time a name or chrononym and as each generation re-examines it, we create a new time, the “past-present.” Very academic; interesting read.

This is the first Dickens novel I‘ve read and will probably be the last. Between the prolific use of dialect and characters I could not relate to and a rather nutty story, I just didn‘t enjoy it or connect to this work. I understand it‘s a classic and really, that‘s why I read it, but I‘m not sure Dickens‘ style is for me. Then again, I suppose works of fiction further removed from our own setting are harder to like anyway.

I really enjoyed this graphic novel. It combined history and psychology with personal experience in just the right proportions to explore how loneliness is spreading, how it changes the behavior and perceptions of those that slog through it and what the consequences for culture at large may be. I could directly relate as a former grave shift worker of seven years and then living through lockdown immediately following. The art is moving as well.

I gave it a rating of so-so as I think I enjoyed this one the least out of all the Chinaski novels. Henry is approached by a bizarre French director about writing a screenplay of events taken from Factotum, the formidable years of a drunk writer. Much of the novel is a commentary on the absurd business maneuvering and back-stabbing by film producers and the prima donna egos and odd hang ups of the talent on set. The least dirty book of the series.

The raunchiest of the Henry Chinaski series so far, this novel is like the Ernest Hemingway of candid, low class hook ups. The constant revolving door of women and Henry‘s sexual escapades seem rather like a low budget porn fantasy, but perhaps it‘s my own bias that I just can‘t imagine anyone living this way, but then again, I‘m sure there are those out there who do and perhaps in the 70s this wasn‘t too far fetched. Not a novel for everyone.

I wasn‘t quite as entertained with this one as I was with Ham on Rye, likely due to a lack of tension in the plot. This sequel is a chronicle of Henry‘s restless moving around the country to get away from his girl Jan only to then wander back to her in Los Angeles. One gets the sense he doesn‘t know what he wants or why he does anything as exemplified by all the dead end jobs he lands only to be fired from each within days or weeks. Still funny.

So it turns out there are five novels about Bukowski‘s alter-ego protagonist and I had already read Post Office albeit out of order. So I decided to start from the beginning with this one. It‘s all about Henry‘s childhood and teen years growing up with an antagonistic father and as an outcast lower class kid trying to survive the school yard in a rich, upper class school. It‘s just as raunchy, irreverent, funny and blunt as you‘d expect.

Liza Dalby may be one of the few if not the only foreigner to train in the geisha arts and serve in that capacity with the caveat that she skipped some traditional ceremonies and did not pass through the traditional stages of apprenticeship. The book is about that experience, the relationships she formed inside the geisha community and her detailed observations about geisha culture in modern Japan, although modern in this case meaning 1970s.

As usual, Moore delivers a Monty Pythonesque rendition of a famous story; this one, the lost gospel of Levi who is also called Biff, is the story of Jesus‘ (or rather Joshua‘s) life quest to figure out how to be the messiah and refrain from “knowing a woman” which becomes all the more difficult as Mary Magdalene (Maggie) arrives on the scene. While it‘s all in jest, its a nice touch having Jesus seem a lot more human. Fantastic read. Very funny.

I hate to bail on books, but I decided I needed to on this one. The book addresses the different ways in which East Slavic peoples have identified themselves and how religion, politics and geography shaped those identities. Essentially, it tries to answer questions like “Where did Rus originate?” and “What is Ukrainian nationalism?” And “Are Belorussians distinct from Russians or not?” It‘s incredibly dry and academic and I couldn‘t continue.

This is an early work of Postman‘s where you can see some of his nascent critiques and insights of language on display. “People who talk as if their religion were a political party and as if commerce were a religion, marriage a court of law, a court of law a sporting event, a sporting event a form of patriotism, patriotism a form of family life, usually project a vision of reality that I find crazy.” Published in 1976, still pertinent today.

Someone gave me this book ten years ago and I‘ve just now gotten around to reading it. It‘s a collection of essays exploring the why and how behind mankind‘s long desire to simply know what‘s beyond the horizon and also for treasure. It mixes narrative of the age of discovery and medieval legend with anthropology and the author‘s own musings on why we we‘re still fascinated by these stories. I‘d call it light history of a sort.

Kurin has two objectives: One is to trace the history of the gem, from its acquisition by Tavernier (I‘m related to him which is partly why I read the book) through its time in royal French and British circles to its transfer to the United States and its gifting to the Smithsonian. The second objective is to dispel the claims of a curse affecting the Hope‘s owners and explore the story of how the the curse claim evolved over the 20th century.

After the disappointment that was Icebound, this book delivered. Shoalts charts the history of Canadian exploration from the Vikings in Newfoundland, Europeans like Cabot and Cartier searching for the northwest passage to fur traders mapping the interior and Alexander Mackenzie and finally, Sir John Franklin‘s first overland expedition to map the arctic coast. He also touches on the American invasion of Canada in 1812, something not oft discussed.

I was really looking forward to this book as I‘ve enjoyed other books about polar exploration in the past, notable titles like Endurance, In the Land of White Death and Where The Sea Breaks its Back. I made it 50 pages in and couldn‘t stand it anymore. The prose is flat and the book reads much like a college sophomore‘s history paper. In other words, the historical figures fail to breathe life and the descriptions are two dimensional. Hard pass.

Bryson delivers another immensely interesting read chock full of wit, observation and historical rabbit holes. My only criticism of the book is that each chapter implies it‘s about a room and how that room was invented and evolved for various purposes, but sometimes that‘s not addressed at all and Bryson recounts the history of monument preservation and archaeology in Britain instead. Still a good read, just not quite what you think it is.

In the 1950s, Mayer lived for a year in Marburg, Germany and held numerous interviews with ten “little men” of the lower middle class to learn their motivations for joining the Nazi party, their experience inside it and in Germany during the Nazi years and their assessment of it in the post war period. It‘s a personal book filled with observations by Mayer and anecdotes, regrets and rationalizations by his interlocutors.

Although this book has Hitler on the cover and “rise of Hitler” in the subtitle, it doesn‘t actually cover him much. Instead it focuses heavily on the financial strain and the often impossible choices faced by the Weimar government during the years 1929-1931 in the heart of the world depression and the recalcitrance of allied powers to suspend reparations payments and the unintended consequences of international agreements. Interesting, but dry.

The author, working in conjunction with Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia has investigated over 2,500 cases across the globe in which children have made statements about having lived before as a previous personality. Some of the more interesting cases are presented in depth to support the argument in favor of reincarnation as the best explanation, however Tucker does explore objections along various lines to attempt to argue against.

I can‘t upsell this book enough. If you‘re like me and enjoy old Twilight Zone episodes or The Black Mirror, then this should be right up your alley. Most of the stories delve into the recesses of the human psyche to explore fear, guilt, suspicion and the meaninglessness of human glory. Occasionally there‘s just revenge or grace as well. But it‘s all done with a flair of the funny, absurd and darkly ironic.

This book offers to explore episodes in French cultural history or what the author calls the history of mentalités. It‘s fairly dry and not every episode is terribly compelling, but the highlights are the discussion of how original folktales help us understand the worldview of the 18th century peasant, how cats were equated with female power and sexuality and how a Rousseau novel inspired reading for amusement and obsessive behavior from fans.

I‘m not sure why I keep reading Toussaint‘s work. His novels are short and at times concentrate on descriptions of mundane activities by average characters, yet once in a while he hits a nerve describing a feeling or a situation we‘ve all experienced, but have never quite put into words, such as the encounter you have with someone at a party alone, sharing awkward anecdotes while other guests randomly stop by and leave your conversation, bored.