I’m an avid reader. I like to post book reviews here. I also add extractions of highlights and favorite quotes in the form of JSON payloads created with a tool I wrote called AmaJSON.
The Teachings of Don Juan Rating: 2.0 / 5.0
In the Fall of 1995 I was gifted this book. The cover was the one pictured. It came to me in October, a month that has come to rule my life in so many ways. There, or then, in my first Fall as a freshman, I drank in the adventures of Carlos, an ethnology student at UCLA, and his (mis)adventures with psychoactive drugs under the tutelage of the teacher/sorcerer/shaman Don Juan.
The central conceit was simple: a graduate student from UCLA in chinos who is curious about peyote shows up in the desert at a bus station. He meets a Yaqui “Indian” called Don Juan whom he interrogates about peyote (which or, rather “whom” Don Juan calls “Mescalito,” lovingly). In pursuit of answers, Castaneda dips a toe into the world of Don Juan’s shamanic reality. And, like any good ghost story, having dabbled with the awesome primal power of the supernatural unknown, he runs away, afraid.
And here I was in 2024, with my nose bandaged up and a steady run of blood coming out of my surgically opened nose. I took Byron out into the cold for a walk and I saw the same edition of this book in the little library around the corner. Knowing I would be spending a lot of time in the coming days in bed, I borrowed it, so that I could re-experience Don Juan’s shamanic world.
Amazingly, it still holds up. In part, I think it succeeds because we small apes never really quite feel at peace in this vast universe where so many much-bigger things wheel around us at all times, indifferently.
Mammals evolved as prey and even now, even as man stands as the peak apex predator, we haven’t let our adaptive default mammalian anxiety go. We’re nervous, shifty, suspicious and ready for flight or betrayal; we wheedle and prevaricate in the face of being held to account. Other niche apex predators are calm, even ridiculously relaxed because they’ve accepted the Game of Thrones condition that their apex role requires. It is a world that is lethal, absolute, and unforgiving. Most of the time the penalty for error is death, but there are few moments with anxiety.
We have not evolved to have that cool.
To whatever degree our species resisted being another warm-blooded snack, it did so by means of knowledge. Therefore knowledge that quells anxiety is revered in us. That knowledge is called “magic” or “insight” or “revelation,” and the human who possesses it is called prophet, sorcerer, or shaman.
And that is the tantalizing promise of The Teachings of Don Juan. The rather-dull character Carlos is shown a world of power, of the animal, of the final where the only chit for play is death. But what Don Juan promises Carlos, and the reader, is the gaining of true insight. Tantalizing, no?
I'm Glad My Mom Died Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
The Evenings Rating: 3.0 / 5.0
Steve Jobs Rating: 3.0 / 5.0
This book appeared in the “little library” in front of the nearby St. Ignatius' Episcopalian church during one of the later phases of COVID and I had meant to read it then, but then came welcoming new life and reading time turned scarce. I had to wait until surgery recovery this past week to read it.
During the press junkets around the book, I was chiefly struck by Isaacson’s report of the desire by the subject (and even his subject’s family!) to report his life as it actually was. What was fascinating is that Jobs had a horrible reputation in and around Santa Clara county. From jerk behavior in the Whole Foods parking lot to jerk behavior on 280 (whom hadn’t he cut off?). Getting an honest assessment by a friend would still have felt like a hatchet job. But, it was related, that Jobs wanted his children to know who he was, why he wasn’t around, what his errors and regrets were, and what drove him. Knowing he would die fairly young, he knew that without a true testament, his younger children might never know him. To some extent I think he feared that his children would reveal some of himself to themselves and not understand “Dad was like that too.” So it was critical that he leave a true appraisal. The book ends with the belief that while it had not been flattering to Jobs, it had been faithful.
So as a gift of Jobs to his children, the book succeeds. But as a biography, it failed for me because it failed to tie his Icarian ascent, time in Hades, Icarus resurgent narrative together fully. There was some connective tissue that a biographer needed to provide that I simply didn’t get.
Crying in H Mart Rating: 3.0 / 5.0
After seeing their excellent performance on SNL Season 47’s finale, I was very into the band “Japanese Breakfast.”
As I read up on the band, I realized that the name of their vocalist rang a bell from a display I’d seen at The Strand earlier that day by chance: Michelle Zauner. Creative, dreamy, shoegaze-inspired rocker and memoirist? The reviews of the book were strongly positive and so I put it in my library queue.
With recent “The challenges of growing up (half-?)-Asian in America as a dutiful, Asian daughter” media front of mind with Stephanie Hsu’s turn Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, Pixar/Disney’s Turning Red, and Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Zauner’s book is part of a millennial movement that sees the “dutiful daughter” being investigated with tools from anti-racism, feminism, and outmoded Orientalist hangover.
You know you’re in for “why did my parents cook this for school lunch?” à la the comedy of Margaret Cho from the 90’s, but you’re also going to get questions about the sexual politics between her (white) father and his wife, the feminism of an thorough homemaker, and a peek into the closely-held heartbreaks of South Korean women. On top of all that, Zauner sets the stakes high in the first pages: we know that her mother doesn’t live through this story and that tragedy lies ahead.
The Chrysalids Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
The Chrysalids is a really engaging and insightful tale about the emergence of a new subspecies of human within a theocratic state that has risen to power after the loosely-defined disaster of a Tribulation some time in recent history. It has many of the genetic markers of proto-YA literature that has become robust in the post-Harry Potter era and which includes Percy Jackson and dozens of other sagas i which the youth awaken to a power latent within them that adults cannot or will not tolerate. As we join the story, the narrator’s father is a patriarch within the theocracy and is a vehement axe-man against “Deviations:” stock, crop, or human whose phenotypic expression suggests corruption via the latent effects of the Tribulation (i.e. “mutants”). Much as Scout narrates a corrupt society innocently in To Kill a Mockingbird, David blindly narrates, blithely, the horrors of this genetic aristocracy. Motifs of The Crucible and The Lottery manifest to crank tension and peril.
Chocky Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
As would be expected, when considering the source material of a show that impactfully scared the bejesus out of me, I loved this novella. Nevertheless, this story as rendered in text added some interesting nuances that were not present in a made-for-English-children Thames TV adaptation.
First, the book is narrated from the point of view of the father. He has no idea whether his son is being visited by an alien, a demon, or is mentally disturbed. The phenomenological experience (“My son is arguing with himself”) is the same regardless of the actual case, and all the parents can wonder is “how far is too far?”
"Index, A History of" by Dennis Duncan Rating: 2.5 / 5.0
I should have loved this book. It featured many of the concepts that define my interests and work and therefore my life:
- Information storage and retrieval
- Card catalogs and extracting meaning from raw token
- Monks speaking Latin in the middle ages
- Philosophers asking what one’s relationship to a topic is when one only sees a index covering a book on that topic
But I didn’t. The main arc was interesting and compelling and would have been fine as a 50 page book, a multi-post long-form article, or a multi-part podcast. In a way oddly similar to The Man from the Future, there was a simple and lovely gem of a story at the heart of the book, but then somehow extensions got tacked on that made me forget about the story I had been enjoying. It was a bit like eating an amazing dinner with wonderful service: glasses refilled, well-chosen wine, witty repartee from the service staff where, after the check was dropped, the staff disappeared for an hour and thereby wouldn’t let us leave. Thus while the first impression was amazing, the last memory was idly shuttling breadcrumbs back and forth on the tablecloth.
The Man From the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya Rating: 2 / 5.0
For much of my life, in multiple ways, I have been exposed to the myth and mystery of the mathematician, scientist, physicist, and general smart fellow, John von Neumann.
Name an area of scientific or mathematical advancement in the 20th century, and you’re likely to see von Neumann’s thumbprint somewhere in the mix. Computers, today, run on von Neumann architecture, von Neumann’s hawkishness defined American foreign policy, he was at the Trinity atomic bomb test in Los Alamos, he defined concepts in game theory and abstract computation. He was an intellectual titan. I was absolutely in the target market and…
I was really bored throughout most of this book.
A Questionable Shape Rating: 3 / 5.0
A Questionable Shape is a strange book with an unusual proposition: the zombie apocalypse has come and its end is in sight. Mankind mastered the disease, learned its contagion vector, and has even faced the bureaucratic knots of the personhood status of the infected (still human, but incapacitated as in the case of Alzheimer’s or some other degenerative disorder).
In this strange lacuna of time and ontological status, AQS’ drama finds place. Vermaelen, his friend Mazoch, Vermaelen’s girlfriend Rachel, and Mazoch’s recently-infected father are the bare-bones dramatis personae of the story. They reflect upon “when do we call this thing over” and “what’s an acceptable risk?” Strangely, this story came to me right as we mulled the same questions in the (hopefully?) waning days of the COVID pandemic.1
"Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama" by Bob Odenkirk Rating: 3 / 5.0
Bob Odenkirk is one of the most impactful comedians of my life. He brought life to one of the funniest SNL characters ever: Matt Foley (played by Chris Farley):
Also, Julia Sweeney, Phil Hartman, David Spade, Christina Applegate…just…so much comedic talent on one stage. And, my god, Applegate and Spade trying to resist breaking.
And then, on top of that, he and David Cross produced the sketch comedy series that quite possibly broke one of my ribs, Mr. Show.
WHO SPEAKS ILL OF PORNOGRAPHY?
And then, when you’re like, that’s cool, what else, he gives the cripplingly haunting portrayal of Saul Goodman / Jimmy McGill on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Unbelievable.
OK, so how’s the book? It’s good! It’s a pleasant chronology about how this unique comedic mind got started, and it shares some enjoyable anecdotes about the scenes and players he encountered along this storied path. If the book communicates anything it’s:
- You never know where your failures are going to take you
- Never stop at that grind
South to America by Imani Perry Rating: 3.0 / 5.0
I’ll readily grant that this book might not be for me: I’m neither Black, nor woman, and my genealogy doesn’t run out at the historical Mason-Dixon line where my people suddenly return to being nameless property. Nevertheless, to be Southern-born and dwelling in the North is a kinship of sorts. I find the same recipe my grandmother made in Texas in Harlem: a gastronomic treasure borne North in the Great Migration. In some ways all exiles need each others' stories to remember the good that is there as it slowly becomes a memory, a ghost’s whisper of an era whose ever-more primary purpose is to be the part before here.