James is probably the best novel I’ve read in years. Even more, it’s possibly the best American novel of my adulthood.¹

James is a perspective on the events of Huckleberry Finn.² James, whom we know from Twain as “Jim,” flees his enslavement upon receiving a tip that he was to be sold and separated from his family. Scarcely into his flight, he makes contact with another runaway: Huckleberry Finn.³ Like an American Odyssey, the voyage up and down the river bring James and his various compatriots into contact with confidence men, enslaved folk, runaways, slave-catchers, and grifters.

Perhaps what’s most remarkable is that with three small choices, barely more than six sentences, Everett’s James alters the DNA of the respected body of Huckleberry Finn and widens its (already wide) wide audience and deepens its (already deep) impact. Perhaps for this moment of plotting alone, the book earns my recommendation. But it’s not just that the plotting is good or the insights about the philosophy of slavery ore keen, simply put, Everett is a master of characterization and a ferryman of beautiful sentences as well.

I’ve long been fascinated by the idea that what we naively perceive as “reality” simply can’t be what’s actually there.

The most interesting experiences exploit time and the maximal speed of electricity to show that e.g. given a stimulus, that stimulus’ signal could not travel up the nerves, to the brain, trigger a response, direct a response signal, trigger a muscular contraction on the time scales we observe. My dear, late professor Solomon once suggested that if a looming T. Rex-like shape were to suddenly darken the wide gallery windows atop Waggener hall, we would run for the exit without having much conscious appreciation of what we were running from.

So somehow, we are either beating the hard speed limit of information communication in our bodies or something more subtle and strange is happening. Books such as The Experience Machine suggest that our brains are designed to help us maintain our erroneous belief that we are in control of our responses – even when it’s manifestly impossible for that to have been so. If our brains burning calories to maintain that façade seems strange, remember that our bodies have only one goal: preservation and offspring. What if the veridical apprehension of reality is not helpful, or even harmful, against surmounting selective pressures (see: The Case Against Reality, or Consciousness)? Suddenly veridical apprehension of reality might not be so very important after all. Perhaps the better strategy would be lower-fi (non-veridical) but generally accurate-ish predictions?

Clark presents a lighter and more pop approach to this question about the disconnect between veridical apprehension and prediction in this enjoyable read.

While Goth occasionally has turned into a parody of itself (“Renfield” from “The IT Crowd” come to mind), there’s no doubt that its sounds, its majesty, its occasional self-serious lumbering pomposity have turned it into some sort of long-running youth movement. By rights, this should have petered out nearly 50 years ago if it were just a fad. I’ve long wondered, why does this black helium balloon never quite seem to deflate or pop?

I approached the book with two questions:

1. How does Goth, a movement originating around 1975-1980 relate to the Gothic literature/arts of the 19^th century?
2. What were some of my favorite Goth acts like back in the day?

Tolhurst obliges answers in this book.

I heard a wonderful interview of Driscoll on “the Advent of Computing” podcast talking about Minitel, the French pre-web computer information service. He seemed to be doing the anthropology and electronic archaeology to help understand the early history of the connected age and so I picked up this book.

Driscoll’s fundamental insight is this:

[On BBS’] [y]ou were visiting a real place with real people, personality, and vibe. The web of 1994, by contrast, felt less like a place than a thing.

I suppose ever since the America welcomed in and ushered out its 45^th president, I’ve become fascinated with the obviously abusive behavior narcissists heap out on their targets (Hi, Republican Party esp. Sens. Cruz and Graham), why their targets tolerate it beyond pure opportunism, and why so many third parties will come to the aggressor’s defense.

As I’ve done ever-more research on the matter, I’ve seen more patterns around manipulation and narcissism affecting those in my own life. Particularly as a manger, I’ve come to see that some leaders, unwittingly or no, influence by manipulation instead of persuasion, alignment, fairness, and shared vision.

Enter this book.

Unfortunately, the book feels like huge chunks of it were written with AI assistance or with near-verbatim cut-outs from support web-sites. To be clear, I’m fully open to the idea that Ms. Morningstar and her site are good and noble pursuits in the world. Unfortunately, the book, for me, didn’t give me the dispassionate exploration of narcissistic manipulation I was hoping for. On the other hand, it provided many anecdotes and a lot of support for survivors, and, again, that’s a good thing.

I took some notes and some inspiration, but it wasn’t the type of analysis I was looking for. I’m blessed in that I don’t need affirmation; I don’t need examples talking about how others are dealing with the same thing – blessedly! For those who need the confidence to break away, validation of their own invalidating thoughts, etc. this book might have a lot more value.

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?

An undiagnosed, mentally ill mother pushes her daughter into child acting success. Then the mom dies, leaving the daughter to see that what was deemed normal was actually a profound level of abuse. She had been the ego-puppet of a narcissist (oh, and she never really wanted to act anyway) up to the point her mother died. And then the daughter tries to heal. This is the story recounted here.

Tiny The Netherlands’ literary history is largely unknown to the outside world. A recent translation of Gerard Reve’s The Avonden (1947) (The Evenings) serves as a funny, shocking, historic introduction to Dutch literature. Having read it sometime in the 90’s, I was firmly of the opinion that the work could not be translated. It was, it seemed, just too Dutch; too much a comedy of very specific manners; too shell-shocked and depressed from the Nazi occupation. But two things happened recently that, I think, make this book accessible for the wider world: the COVID-19 pandemic and translator Sam Garrett’s vibrant translation.

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.

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 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.

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?”