Library
This library is a record of books that I’ve read, with a written response to each. There are no ratings here. I limit recommendations, and I do not write with the aim of reviewing. A book might make me think about something else, I may engage extensively with one passage, or I might evaluate the argument of the text as a whole. The texture of my responses will shift depending on the text.
One caveat: the write-ups from before 2024 read more like book reviews, because that’s what they were. Most started life on Goodreads, a few in graduate seminars, back before this site existed.
Some of my responses are short (perhaps a few paragraphs) while others may be entire essays. The amount written is a reflection not of the quality of the book, but of my own thinking.
My books are listed in reverse-chronological order by when I completed them. Each entry is listed in full bibliographic form, with a short annotation below. Some of these I own, others I do not.
2025
Bregman’s “moral ambition” marries talent to solvable, scalable problems: why are our best minds in finance and ad-tech rather than abolishing the next slavery? Where I break with him: he leans too hard on effective altruism, and well-being beyond bare survival can’t be quantified; the Tunisians risking the sea for Lampedusa aren’t short on metrics, they’re short on dignity and meaning.
The rare book I’ll be harsh about: prose so pretentious I reread sentences to extract meaning, arguments I find both nonsensical and reprehensible (Trump as selfless hero, pro-Palestine Jews as self-hating). All it offers is the contrast: a celebrated dramatist whose essays are worth nothing, and a reminder that the disagreement is a divergence of values, not facts.
Pépin’s move is to externalize self-confidence into three dependencies: trust in others, trust built by doing, and trust in the world itself. It’s that last one that matters: self-confidence runs inverse to cynicism; approach the world as charitable and you can fail without it meaning anything. A warm, fatherly book that arrived when I needed it.
Yan, Ge. Elsewhere. New York: Scribner, 2023.
Stories of enormous range: earthquake survivors, Confucius’s academy, a miscarriage in Burma, strange and precisely made. Admiration becomes a motive here: an imagination this far past auto-fiction is exactly what makes me want to write, the wish to have access to worlds like these rather than just visit them.
Huxley writes more like a classical academic than the other non-dualists I’d been reading. His most useful move is the contrast between “immediate experience” (the mystic reaching the source directly) and “symbolic religion” (what calcifies after, into dogma and ritual), a pattern I see in every faith, and which I’d been calling prophetic versus priestly.
Watts elucidates non-duality for a secular age: opposites as two sides of one coin (no black without white, no crest without trough) so to vanquish evil is to level the good. This is more than thought experiment; it offers an actual pathway to a spiritual life that survives quantum physics, which is partly why such traditions grew as the old cosmology failed.
Lipman, Joanne. Next!: The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work. New York: Mariner Books, 2023.
Not self-help but Gladwell-style journalism on reinvention, built on a search/struggle/stop/solution model. What lands is the role of the “stop”: solutions arrive after you quit working the problem, when the unconscious connects it, and the validation that I’m not doing anything wrong; most reinvention is slow and only legible in hindsight.
The same ground as Be Here Now and The Untethered Soul, but far more abstract and unmoored. The craft point it makes about spiritual writing: I don’t doubt Adyashanti’s wisdom, but without concrete anchors it’s nearly as opaque as the Tao Te Ching, with none of the poetry to carry it.
Atwood, Margaret. Old Babes in the Wood. Reprint ed. London: Vintage Books, 2023.
Atwood at 84 writes a wiser, different woman than The Handmaid’s Tale; the recurring subject is what it means to age. The Nell and Tig stories are the ones that hold: Tig dead but present, eerie in Fisher’s exact sense, presence where there should be absence, and Atwood’s deadpan refusing to let the grief turn maudlin. They brought me to tears.
LaPointe, Sasha taqʷšəblu. Thunder Song. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2024.
Memoir-essays from a queer, indigenous woman raised near Tacoma. It lives in the contradictions she holds without resolving: her veganism against the cultural weight of salmon, the white punk scene reading her indigeneity as appropriation, and her point, which I share, that the deeper failure is the absence of curiosity about the why.
A primer on the tools of therapy, much of which two years of my own therapy had already given me. The part that helped is the final section, “On a Meaningful Life,” it helped me re-chunk my values out of an identity crisis, on the premise that depression is often a breakdown in meaning-making rather than a chemical fact. Best used as reference.
Striking how much of the famous “McKinsey Way” is just social-science research method repackaged for profit: decompose the problem, secondary sources, interviews, ethnography. It came down to recognition: McKinsey does, for money, what I was trained to do, and the only real divergence is that the end is always financial.
Ram Dass. Be Here Now. Reprint ed. New York: Harmony Books, 1978.
A hippie Power of Now, and the better book: the eternal present, the unity of religions. Two things, both personal: Ram Dass’s flight from academia into spiritual life is one I recognize, and writing this review is exactly the rationalizing trap he warns against; reason is one tool, and at some point you have to have faith in something.
Cho, Zen. Spirits Abroad. Easthampton: Small Beer Press, 2021.
Chinese-Malay fantasy blending Taoism, Islam, Buddhism, and indigenous Southeast Asian tradition into a single kaleidoscope. The standout is “If at First You Don’t Succeed,” an imugi’s millennial attempts to become a dragon, foiled until it accidentally learns to live in the present, which carries the whole non-dualist lesson lightly.
Franzen, Jonathan. The End of the End of the Earth. Reprint ed. New York: Picador, 2020.
Franzen’s ecological essays make a case I keep returning to: “climate change” as a concept is so total it produces paralysis, where “this wetland, this gas company” produces action. It pairs that with the title essay’s grief for his uncle, the tangible and human against the airy and abstract, the same pull I feel.
Tabor’s argument is that we read the New Testament backwards: the Pauline epistles predate the Gospels, which reach us through Paul’s followers. Unsettling and persuasive: Christianity as a religion begins not with Jesus but with Paul: baptism, communion, the superseded Torah are his innovations, and he won for social, not providential, reasons.
Baird, Leslie. Salomé. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2026.
A retelling of the John the Baptist/Salomé story relocated to a France shadowed by the far right and by tech-baron dreams of living forever. Baird shatters the protagonist’s romantic image of France with real deftness, and nearly every character (even the harsh ones) is drawn sympathetically and in full dimension.
Park, Ed. An Oral History of Atlantis. New York: Random House, 2025.
Stories that move past conventional narrative into Dada and Surrealism and somehow land, form-play with real substance underneath, recurring names threading the collection. Boundary-pushing fiction usually fails as mere curiosity, and Park’s doesn’t; I respect it more than I love it.
Kaminski proposes the “otrovert,” someone genuinely indifferent to group identity, neither excluded nor seeking inclusion. My doubt: the quiz says I’m one, but I feel the sting of exclusion, so I’m not. A surface-level concept that needs research, though it may help people who recognize themselves in it.
I read it cover to cover after the Qur’an: Genesis in April to Revelation in November. What holds is the contrast between the Deuteronomical History’s wild honesty (heroes who turn villain) and the Chroniclers’ later politics of purity, and the line I keep: Elijah finding God not in wind or fire but in sheer silence.
Skeptical at first, then won over by the second half. The useful bit is the ideal-career triad: love, money, and flow (work that absorbs time), and Guillebeau’s reframing of the line between freelancing and building a business, which let me start treating my own ideas as things I could actually make.
Singh, Manvir. Shamanism: The Timeless Religion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.
Singh argues shamanism is convergent cultural evolution, not diffusion from one Siberian origin: the same role independently invented across societies. The concept that stays is “xenization”: practitioners make themselves strange (suffering, taboo, the divine) to gain authority, and his afterword defense of universalism against its colonial misuse is the sharpest part.
King, Stephen. If It Bleeds: Four Novellas. New York: Scribner, 2020.
King at 70-something is as strong as ever, thematically rich on evil and Faustian bargains under the thriller machinery. The follow-through is uneven: some novellas develop their themes, others bury them in plot, and the honest verdict that it satisfied like fast food, good in the moment, short on the nutrition I wanted.
I’d reached its conclusion independently a year before reading it. The framing is the gift: “digital maximalism” as the default we don’t notice, filling life with low-value bloat for tiny gains, and the corrective of choosing tools against the life you want, a philosophy of values rather than trends.
Irby, Samantha. Quietly Hostile. New York: Vintage Books, 2023.
Did not finish. I tried to leave my comfort zone and met the dismal state of popular comedy. A judgment about a genre: Irby banalizes the quotidian with cynicism where it could be made luminous (King’s If It Bleeds does the opposite), and I’ll distrust the praise around it.
Marx, W. David. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Viking, 2025.
Marx fuses economic and cultural history into a biting account of capital and culture merging in 21st-century America. The concept that stays is “poptimism”: the collapse of gatekeeping that, structurally, denied small artists the room to develop, and its cousin, the right-wing counter-counterculture filling the void the absorbed left vacated.
Ruiz Zafón, Carlos. The City of Mist. Translated by Lucia Graves. New York: Harper Perennial, 2021.
Interlinked Gothic stories where the true protagonist is Barcelona, a city haunted by the failure of its revolutionary project, advertised today as sunny and avant-garde. What lingers is the weight of an unrealized past, and that not one story here is mediocre, which is rare for a collection.
Swallow, Michelle. Northern Bull. Calgary: Freehand Books, 2026.
A debut comic novel set over 24 hours in Yellowknife around a missing moose head, stunningly ridiculous, and I read most of it in one sitting. Nothing intellectual here; it’s a reminder that craft can serve pure fun, and that a love letter to a place (the Northwest Territories in deep winter) is a real thing to write.
Slog through the techno-utopian first quarter and it pays off. Feifer’s why/how/what frame is the tool: titles and methods (the what and how) change, so anchor on the why. Mine turned out to be the moment something “clicks” for someone I’m teaching, which reorganized how I think about my own next chapter.
Aphorisms fusing 19th-century German pessimism (Cioran, Schopenhauer) with cognitive-science accounts of consciousness, toward a fatalist, absurdist end: submission rather than the Serenity Prayer’s “courage to change.” It speaks to anyone who takes the interconnectedness of all things seriously and follows it to its conclusion.
Not the career book I expected but a “suboptimist” critique of both techno-utopianism and techno-nihilism. The phrase that stays is “don’t be an endpoint” (a framing I’d never had) for the trap of sitting between two systems that don’t talk, doing work an API will eventually absorb.
I’d never liked Gay’s op-eds and changed my mind. A misallocation of attention: her best writing is the cultural criticism and the profiles (thoughtful, expository, personal), not the identity-politics essays she’s known for, and I wish those were the ones elevated.
I didn’t realize it was romance until I was in it; Babalola is excellent, and the sub-Saharan retellings ignited a curiosity I lacked the background for. Centering the women is what does the work: turning Naleli’s crocodile skin into a teenager’s vitiligo is the kind of move that gives an old myth new agency.
Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Reprint ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Mumford synthesizes 800 years of technological history (1934) as fine a stylist as a historian: “the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age.” What stays is his eotechnic/paleotechnic/neotechnic scheme, and his warning that the machine is one tool among many, not a thing to worship, aimed exactly at the techno-utopians least likely to read it.
Wells, Martha. System Collapse. Murderbot Diaries, 7. New York: Tor Books, 2023.
The weakest recent Murderbot, essentially incomplete, resolving its central conflict in last-chapter exposition, and less emotionally attentive than the books before it. Its absence shows what made the series work: the genre was never the draw, the human dynamics were, and here they thin out.
Smith, Zadie. Grand Union. New York: Penguin Press, 2019.
Smith’s stories burst with life, and she’s improved past White Teeth. It’s about agency: who has it, who’s denied it, and her redistribution of it to women and reprehensible characters alike, written so you don’t despise them. The register-shifts, literary to lowbrow in a line, are what I yearn to be able to do.
Danticat, Edwidge. We're Alone. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2024.
Essays on Haiti (underdevelopment, diaspora, violence), though I’d resist calling Danticat a “Haitian writer”; she belongs with Morrison and Marshall. The structural reading: Haiti’s suffering is engineered for extraction, the same dynamic across the Global South and in Black America, which makes it mine to witness too.
For older job-seekers, and unsettlingly pre-ChatGPT, essentially a self-help Future Shock. It forces a hard premise: experience is no longer enough, because things change faster than experience compounds; adaptability is the asset, and the book reads more urgent now than when written.
Overpraises LinkedIn but left me clearer-eyed: it’s an algorithmic tool sold to recruiters, not the starting point of job-hunting; jobs still come from who you know. Against Pollard, its networking advice for introverts actually sounds human, which makes it the better starting point.
More fluff than substance, and finally an advertisement for Pollard as a coach. One distinction matters: he may genuinely be a good coach, but coaching and writing are different crafts, and this is the wrong medium for what he knows.
Didion, Joan. Let Me Tell You What I Mean. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.
My first Didion, and the prose ability is the event. She works by reframing: her essays on Hemingway’s posthumous publication and on Martha Stewart selling competence rather than domesticity changed how I saw both, and the personal pieces, “Why I Write” above all, show the sentence-level discipline behind it.
Wells, Martha. Fugitive Telemetry. Murderbot Diaries, 6. New York: Tor Books, 2021.
The first out-of-order Murderbot, structured as detective fiction, though I couldn’t have solved the crime, which is a flaw of the form here. Watch what Wells does to Preservation: she shatters its hopepunk-Eden image, letting its people stay prejudiced and flawed, which makes the utopia legible as work rather than gift.
Aimed at people deeper in corporate life than I am, which is why it taught me. What I took is the two-currency model: performance currency (doing the work well) and relationship currency (the network), and Harris’s blunt point that the second matters more, a logic my education-and-nonprofit background never spelled out.
Wells, Martha. Network Effect. Murderbot Diaries, 5. New York: Tor Books, 2020.
The longest and best Murderbot, where the length is the asset, a slower, layered burn that ends nearer Neuromancer than space opera, with hauntings and contagion in the web. ART’s return supplies what the novellas can’t: the time for a relationship to actually deepen.
The Holland-types framing is the useful part: it takes creative content seriously even in non-artistic jobs. It freed something for me: I don’t need a classically artistic field to do real creative work, which widened the search rather than narrowing it.
Career guidance via Myers-Briggs; as an INFJ idealist I saw myself in it. It marks the genre’s ceiling for the self-aware: it told me little I didn’t know at 18, which is no fault of the book; it’s powerful for those who don’t yet know themselves or the labor market.
Mecham, Jesse. You Need a Budget. New York: Harper Business, 2017.
I’d failed at YNAB in grad school because I never grasped the theory. It’s all in the reframe: “every dollar has a job” (you budget money you already have, not forecasts) so each allocation becomes a statement of priorities, money as value judgment rather than arithmetic.
Saunders, George. Tenth of December. New York: Random House, 2013.
Saunders’ stories are a sustained case for human goodness that never goes naive about moral cost: people do small things that help others, sometimes at ruinous price. It’s the language: he collides lofty prose with the way we actually talk, and the collision is where both the comedy and the tenderness live.
Wells, Martha. Exit Strategy. Murderbot Diaries, 4. New York: Tor Books, 2018.
A clean hostage-and-escape entry, but Murderbot’s development is the point: the want to do the job and retreat into observation. Plain recognition: “It made me feel like a person” is social anxiety rendered exactly, and I have it too.
Lalami, Laila. The Dream Hotel. New York: Pantheon Books, 2025.
A woman detained because an algorithm predicts she might commit a crime: surveillance not by the state but by private firms mining even her dreams. It barely qualifies as SF: swap the fictional names for real companies and nothing changes. The logical end of surveillance capitalism, and it’s chilling.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven. Reprint ed. New York: Scribner, 2023.
Le Guin takes Beat-era Daoism seriously: a man whose dreams remake reality, and the lesson that even benevolent wishes do harm because good and bad arrive together. It offers a non-dualist way out: stop trying to engineer the good in isolation, delivered, improbably, with pacific space turtles.
Freud, Sigmund. On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. London: Penguin Classics, 2005.
Totem and Taboo carries a dated developmental metanarrative but remains required Freud; the prize is “Mourning and Melancholia.” It hit home: mourning is conscious loss, melancholia is loss you don’t know you’re grieving. Leaving my PhD was the latter, the same structure as the left’s melancholia over a foreclosed future.
Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2019.
Not really self-help, closer to Bridle. Odell doesn’t argue for doing nothing but for choosing what gets your attention, against the attention economy and “context collapse.” It’s partly why I built my own website: a place where my words stay in their context, available to anyone willing to spend the time.
Murnane, Gerald. The Plains. Reprint ed. Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2017.
I expected an American West and got a deeply Australian meditation on liminality: a filmmaker who never makes his film, a region no one can agree on. The pleasure is the inversion of the rural-bumpkin trope (Murnane’s plainsmen are obsessive metaphysicians) and the idea that some experiences resist any representation an outsider could read.
Harvey, Samantha. Orbital. New York: Grove Press, 2023.
One day, sixteen orbits, six astronauts, less a plot than a love letter to Gaia. It’s all in the vantage: a typhoon devastates the surface and from the station it’s just another pass of weather, which is either the loneliest or the most clarifying way to see that the Earth is the only home we have.
Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip to the Mirror World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
Klein starts from being constantly mistaken for Naomi Wolf and builds a theory of the right as our “mirror world”: taking real critiques of surveillance capital and twisting them conspiratorial. The coinage that stays is “diagonalism,” the new coalition of wellness, nationalism, and quackery; the book weakens whenever every misstep gets routed back to Nazism.
Copland, Aaron. What to Listen for in Music. Reprint ed. New York: Signet Classics, 2011.
Copland’s 1939 canon is classical, but rhythm, melody, harmony, and tonal color endure. It taught me a limit of reading: I followed the parts of music, but the forms (sonata, fugue) can’t be grasped on the page; they need exposure, which the book concedes by appending listening lists.
Meadows’ primer on systems: elements, interconnections, purpose, stocks, flows, feedback. It comes down to the boundary problem: no system is truly self-contained, so you draw boundaries good enough for the question at hand and accept that the answers will often be counterintuitive. The right reflex for problems with no easy answers.
The series’ fourth book and the first to take Mercury seriously, which mattered with my Mercury/Venus-dominated chart. I kept the trio of verbs (Mercury shapes, Venus blends, Mars separates) and the insistence that you can’t read a planet through a single meaning, only through its mythological plurality.
Sharp, Carolyn J., ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Prophets. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Interesting in spots but, like the others, not enough to keep me; the book where I decided I’m done with these handbooks. It settled a reading strategy: for this material I’d rather pursue individual articles or single-author books than survey collections.
Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. The Literature of Modern Arabia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989.
An anthology of the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi, Yemeni, Gulf) whose short stories outshine its poems. What it recovers: a region dismissed for its recent literary heritage (though it holds the oldest Arabic poetry), with the Yemeni and Saudi stories hitting hardest.
Frahm, Eckart, ed. A Companion to Assyria. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.
Meant to be a deep dive into one of the Ancient Near East’s most interesting societies and instead reads lifeless and wooden. A negative lesson, but an instructive one: how a promising subject gets drained by the handbook format.
The best of the ADHD books I read: comprehensive without drowning in detail, with illuminating case studies. Mostly a comparative verdict: it does what the other two couldn’t, which clarified what I actually wanted from the subject.
Ligotti, Thomas. Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. New York: Penguin Classics, 2015.
A fan favorite that took me ages; the strong stories are genuinely cosmic (a world made alien by our own minds, then madness when the foundations give) but too many don’t reach it. Honest incompleteness: I’ve read Ligotti now and I’m not sure I get him.
Situates 1880–1940 SF, fantasy, and horror inside literary modernism, both asking what it means to live amid technological and social rupture. The parallel itself is the point; I hadn’t read most of the primary works and it stayed legible, though it wants a synthetic history read first to place its argument.
Neu, Jerome, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
A rigorous companion to read alongside the works. It sent me toward Freud’s middle period (Totem and Taboo, Beyond the Pleasure Principle) which I find more interesting than the canonical bookends, and it filled in his early work on hysteria that I’d skipped.
Doing too much: a survey of the wisdom books whose editor doubts “wisdom” is even a genre. Here I disagree: Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs do therapeutic work the historical books don’t, and that shared function is a real unity. I wouldn’t reach for this first.
A 1981 primary-source reader sorting the region’s thought into nationalist, modernizing-Marxist, and fundamentalist currents. What stands out is the conspicuous absence of neoliberalism, which arrived right after, not as theory but as reactive crisis policy (the IMF, the bread riots), and reshaped everything anyway.
Another book by popular bloggers, more validating than new. My doubt is about the category itself: “highly sensitive” looks like a spectrum’s tail, not a kind of person; people differ in degree, and naming the degree a type may do more comfort than truth.
Czerski, Helen. Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World. London: Torva, 2023.
Opens on the ocean as a single system (sunlight to heat to current to climate)then loosens into a survey that forgets its own frame. A craft lesson by negation: the systems thesis was strong enough to hold the whole book, and the disconnected chapters are what a missing spine looks like.
The founding Myers-Briggs text, built on Jung’s cognitive functions rather than the Big Five’s traits. I read as an introverted intuitive. My objection isn’t that it’s unscientific (I want self-understanding, not a study)but that HR co-opted it into something it was never meant to do.
Barnitz, David Park. The Book of Jade. New critical edition ed. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2015.
Decadent verse from over 120 years ago by an author we know almost nothing about: death, corpses, a 19th-century “Orient” of mystery. Really a defense of the minor: such work has a real aesthetic place even where it belongs neither in scholarship nor in the canon.
Perry, Sarah. Enlightenment. New York: Mariner Books, 2024.
I was more taken than most readers. Providence is the real subject, best approached through astronomy as the logos made visible (planets in determined orbits, the watchmaker’s universe) and threaded with Jungian synchronicity. The marvel is how well Perry holds aging: time happening not in sequence but all at once.
Johnson, Joel W. Political Economy of the United States. New York: Routledge, 2018.
A balanced general overview, though it overweights presidents and Congress at the expense of the civil service. It comes clear by contrast with the Middle East volume: it’s about how political decisions move the economy, not the fuller society-politics-economy braid, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise.
A conversational bridge from modern to traditional technique. The reframing of the signs is the gift: not personality traits but kinds of place (Capricorn as citadels, wells, cemeteries), which made more sense to me than the psychological reading I’d started with.
Chandrasekera, Vajra. The Saint of Bright Doors. New York: Tor Books, 2023.
Originality and ambition undercut by exposition; so many striking concepts never reach their potential, and the late tone-shift fractures it. I still enjoyed it anyway, which says something about how far invention alone can carry a book.
Reception chapters are the best, and Saul is the most fascinating figure of all. What came clear, reading it alongside the biblical text: the Deuteronomical History’s honesty (heroes who become villains) against the Chroniclers’ later politics of purity, two almost incompatible religions on one shelf.
Snell, Daniel C., ed. A Companion to the Ancient Near East. 2nd ed. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020.
Multidisciplinary essays, strongest in the reception section. It’s a question of sequencing: read Podany’s Weavers, Scribes, and Kings first for chronology and human texture, then this for the thematic, bird’s-eye complement; the two do different jobs.
Beck, Roger B. A Brief History of Ancient Astrology. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.
Strong on the astronomy that fed classical astrology, but Beck keeps insisting the whole thing isn’t factually sound, which gets in the way. The life is in what he won’t pursue: astrology as a symbolic system, a way the logos is inscribed and read, which is exactly the part I find alive.
A character study set across Tunisia’s Bourguiba-to-Ben Ali handover, a moment under-treated in the Anglophone literature. It’s really a book about trauma in every register (familial, political, sexual), and that Zeina’s self-erasing drive toward achievement is the character I recognized in myself.
Merton, Thomas. The Wisdom of the Desert. Reprint ed. New York: New Directions, 1970.
Merton’s selection of sayings from the early desert monks, who held that even rest opened the door to vice. The ethics read as near-universal, and that the harder path (virtue inside a community rather than alone in the desert) is the one I’d argue carries the greater reward.
The third of the lecture series, on sun and moon: Gaia and the Great Father, what makes us whole and what makes us singular. As with the others, the value is in the archetypal reading, not the chart analysis; the joint third section is where they’re best.
Twenty-one 21st-century theorists summarized. Mostly a missed opportunity: the writing is uneven enough that the chance to make critical theory exciting slips away, and Wark’s self-plugging grates. Not the place to start.
The academic counterweight to the gifted-adult self-help books: statistics and metastudy, not affirmation. The abstraction is the value; it lacks the human texture by design, and is best read against books that supply it.
Far more Jung than alchemy. A caution about expertise: her basic errors on Islamic history (Shiʿism as the mystical “sect,” a living imam) told me she was projecting Jungian theory onto traditions she barely knows. The Aquinas material (a saint flooded by the unconscious) was the exception that held me.
Wanted depth on ADHD and got a life-manual that treats it as intensified-normal, which I doubt; ADHD reads to me as qualitatively different, a neurotransmitter problem, not a dial turned up. Its one real contribution is the case for meditation, which fits why it helps coordinate the ADHD brain.
Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Translated by Gregory Hays. New York: Modern Library, 2002.
Far closer to me than Seneca—an emperor who reads like a man trying to figure it out. Logos and memento mori work as a pair: things can only be as they are, so accept the carriage you’re tied to and run with it. The most therapeutic philosophy I’ve read this year.
Rid, Thomas. Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
A history of cybernetics: feedback loops, the pilot-plane cyborg of WWII, the counterculture’s adoption of the vocabulary. I’m a digital native who never understood “cyber,” and that the book itself can’t quite hold its story together; the later cryptography chapters lose the thread.
Hand, Robert. Horoscope Symbols. Rockport: REDFeather, 1981.
Hand gives the underlying logic of the chart rather than a cookbook: each component read from its unifying meaning. It produced an actual click: “Mercury forms,” it assembles the day’s raw information into something legible, which reorganized how I read the whole system. Not for beginners.
My third regional political economy this year; Issawi sits between Owen’s technical density and Cammett-Diwan’s range. The balance itself is the virtue (big-picture without losing the thread in detail) which makes it the right starting point for the classic economic-history approach.
A 110-page rarity from before Western taste for Arabic fiction developed, and it gives the Maghrib real weight. Its value is curatorial more than aesthetic; what it chose to include, early, is the point.
Everything read through the narrative lens, which unifies but thins; many essays underdeliver. Comparatively it sits on the weaker side of the Oxford Handbooks, useful for range but not for depth, which is where I’d send anyone serious.
A collection that balances scholarship with religious seriousness; I spent most time on genres. Moberly’s chapter on the Old Testament’s unsettled place in Christianity is the keeper: Jesus “fulfills” the law, Paul diverges from it, which named a tension I’d felt but not articulated.
Chachra’s claim is that infrastructure is inherently social: a network where you can’t sensibly isolate one part, because the whole map lights up. Its defining trait is also its vulnerability: invisibility, which gets it defunded and left to fail by neglect long before any dramatic attack.
Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. London: Penguin Classics, 2006.
I read it aloud because the poems are essentially music, mostly iambic with deliberate breaks. The program itself is the point: poetry pulled down from the “sophisticated” to everyday English life, and how a darker undercurrent runs beneath what nonetheless leaves a strange inner peace.
Greene, Liz and Howard Sasportas. Dynamics of the Unconscious. York Beach: Red Wheel/Weiser, 1988.
More psychological astrology by lecture: aggression, depression, the sublime, alchemy. A lesson in method: reading it after The Secrets of Alchemy made the alchemical symbolism legible, which is its own lesson about how these symbolic systems cross-reference.
DFW playing with form without surrendering to cynicism, keeping the sincerity I wish had become the norm. It lives in the diagnostic stories (“The Depressed Person,” on the narcissism inside depression) which cut closer than comfort allows.
His most-read book and a poor entry point, an elaboration of ideas better stated in The Gay Science. Even Zarathustra can’t become the Übermensch, which I think is the point; but the presentation defeats the philosophy, and the frame story is the only part that fully worked for me.
John of the Cross, Saint. Dark Night of the Soul. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003.
I read it thinking I was in one and learned I’m not; the phrase names a stage of mystical ascent, a purgation, not a depression. The correction itself is the gift, plus the recognition that I’d need experiential, not just textual, grounding to gain from it. I’ll return.
About studying mysticism, not practicing it: Jones treats it as an umbrella like “language,” with no single referent. Where I diverge: I lean perennialist, many paths up one mountain, against his pluralism, and I share his frustration that theology won’t take mystical experience seriously.
Groff, Lauren, ed. The Best American Short Stories 2024. New York: Mariner Books, 2024.
Groff’s selections hit unusually often; a large share of the twenty reached me. An editorial lesson: her energetic introduction, against the usual withdrawn scholarly note, shows how much an editor’s own voice can charge a whole anthology.
Principe treats alchemy as a real material discipline, theoretical and experimental, and runs the recipes himself, where others see only woo. It shows how differently the premodern world reasoned: seven metals, each a planet, body and spirit, “inspiration” as literally drawing on the Spirit.
My therapist suspects ADHD, and this primer made it concrete: time blindness and executive dysfunction, with medication as the load-bearing intervention. The later strategies likely don’t work unmedicated, useful framing, even if the book stays shallow.
Distinguished by following gifted children into adulthood (the crashing and burning I recognize), via intensity, complexity, drive. Here’s the genre’s recurring ceiling: it can reframe an old problem freshly, but reframing isn’t solving, and sometimes the only answer is to change your environment.
Didn’t ease my skepticism, and the claimed Pythagorean pedigree is false. It sharpened an open question: why do some symbolic systems feel true to me and others don’t? The pyramidal life-cycles were the only part with any pull.
A serious history of the Copenhagen Interpretation and its challengers. Becker’s argument: its dominance owes as much to politics, personality, and logical positivism as to evidence; Bohr’s circle gatekept the field. It works, but “works” may be blocking the paradigm shift physics needs.
My therapist’s recommendation; the core (act, don’t ruminate, because the only real fear is of not being able to handle it) is right. What I learned came from where it failed: I did the thing, the feared outcome happened, and I relapsed. Self-help can’t account for how socially embedded we are, which is the work religious surrender actually does.
Cammett, Melani et al. A Political Economy of the Middle East. 3rd ed. Boulder: Routledge, 2013.
The introductory text I’d been missing, expansive enough to be near-comprehensive, fusing politics, economics, and society. Political economy was a genuine blind spot of mine, and the thematic-plus-case-study structure is what made filling it possible.
Not about India so much as India’s imprint on the world: the “Indosphere” from Rome to China. Remarkably good even where Dalrymple overstates influence into civilization. The fact I hadn’t met before: India’s turn to Islam owed less to conquest than to the Mongol refugee crisis seeding Persian Muslims across Delhi.
Read to understand my own heavy Scorpio and the Thanatos that keeps surfacing, the compulsion to destroy a project as it nears completion. Two things: the guided meditations are the real tool, but reading around the loop isn’t loosening it. Naming the powerlessness is exactly the Plutonian trap Cunningham describes.
Gennaro, Rocco J., ed. The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Mostly philosophy of mind with some cognitive science; the theories and major-topics sections held me. The field’s honest disarray is the lesson (no agreed starting point), and the recent, surprising drift back toward idealist and panpsychist accounts.
Psychological astrology by lecture, far livelier than expected: Sasportas cerebral, Greene mythopoetic. The puer/senex archetype is what I took (eternal youth against the backward-looking old man), which I hadn’t had a name for, and which reads onto lived patterns better than I’d admit.
Tresilian, David. A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature. London: Saqi Books, 2008.
A solid, maybe too-brief survey, strongest on the Palestinian chapter. Best is Tresilian’s account of why so little Arabic literature reaches English (it doesn’t fit Anglophone taste for pulp, or Orientalist expectations) which names a real poverty on the receiving end.
A burned-out former gifted kid, I read it for the same divination; better than Sapala’s because Prober looks past herself to case studies. It left the same frustration at a lower pitch; I wanted to swim and only got my toes wet before the beach closed.
Picked up as self-divination during a hard stretch. It uses MBTI as a theory of everything and rests on the author’s own feelings. It marks a limit of the genre: I felt seen but learned nothing, told what I already know about myself, more wordily than I’d say it.
A history of the Ancient Near East that forced me to confront how little of the deep past I know; my knowledge basically starts in the 15th century. The effect is almost therapeutic: against 3,500 years of cuneiform, our urgent troubles shrink to the scale of the Ozymandias sands.
Everett, Percival. James. New York: Doubleday, 2024.
A retelling of Huck Finn from Jim’s side, brilliant where it skewers white superiority and Twain’s well-meaning condescension. It loses its nerve in the third act; it trades the father-son metaphor for revenge melodrama. It starts on familiar tracks, takes a beautiful detour, then hurls itself off a burning bridge.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. Reprint ed. London: Faber & Faber, 2010.
Plath’s vision is kaleidoscopic, beautiful, then a turn and it’s jagged and surreal, the archetypal structure of the depressive’s reality. It gave me a coinage I needed: not élan vital but its dark inversion, an élan abîmal.
Shabout’s key move is separating “Arab art” from “Islamic art”: the former galvanized through contact with Orientalism and Europe, then folding old calligraphic forms back in as the West turned abstract. The second half, working through Iraqi artists, is where the argument comes alive.
Bridle, James. Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence. London: Allen Lane, 2022.
Bridle argues intelligence isn’t “what humans do”: plants, fungi, machines, chance all think, and that our anthropocentrism is throttling technology. It elicited the childlike wonder I’d been missing, and what it leaves is hopeful in a way I needed: better technology starts from a wider definition of mind.
The trickster-sage stories, organized by theme. The figure himself is the point: Juha as the absent-minded wise fool whose comedy is the delivery system for the wisdom, the same fusion the Sufi tradition trusts.
Essays contesting what to name the epoch. I land with “Capitalocene”: the “Anthropocene” lets all of humanity take a blame that belongs to capital; the “necrocene” erases responsibility; and Haraway’s “Chthulucene” is brilliant wordplay but a poor name for what we’re actually doing to the planet.
The thesis (that analogy and conceptual slippage, not logic, are the engine of all thought) should be obvious and isn’t. Too long, but what it left is permanent: I can’t stop noticing now when people, and I, think by analogy, and how differently languages carve the same concepts.
Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Bostrom takes the intelligence explosion as given and spends the book on alignment. Where I disagree: the real risk, visible already in LLMs, isn’t amplified human intelligence but alien intelligence (representation without our ontology), which is harder to control because it’s illegible, not because it’s smart.
Bevins covers the 2010s protest decade and argues horizontalism’s fatal flaw is the absence of a unifying idea: crowds negate power but can’t build it, so better-organized actors seize the opening. It formalized my own drift toward thinking some quasi-Leninist structure is necessary; I lived the Tunisian version of his thesis.
Owen, Roger. The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914. Revised ed. London: I.B. Tauris, 1993.
A near-encyclopedic economic history: the kind of densely-sourced book no one writes anymore. The mechanism of dependency is the lesson: Ottoman tax policy pushed cash-cropping, debt followed, and European capital used the bankruptcy to take control. Owen’s honesty about his sources is itself a lesson.
Darwish, Mahmoud. Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?. London: Hesperus Classics, 2014.
Darwish remains the central modern Arab poet; “The Eternity of Cactus” gives the collection its image of looking back at the abandoned home during the Nakba. Strong, but comparatively Mural and In the Presence of Absence cut deeper.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 2017.
So many writers I love cite Borges that reading him felt like reaching a source. I keep the nounless people of Tlön, a world described only by what things do and seem, never what they “are,” which is almost therapeutic, a release from the tyranny of identity. He gave back the magic I felt reading as a child.
Read a juz a day through Ramadan. Nasr’s team aims to be the Qur’an’s King James (dignified, non-sectarian, perennialist)and largely succeeds. A structural note: it’s not built to be read cover to cover, and Sūrat al-Kahf is the one that reached me.
Pulls no punches: Aristotle and Neoplatonism are prerequisites, and understanding an essay felt like an achievement. The schools divide over the same few questions (free will, the knowable God, causation); the Muʿtazila, now mostly Shiʿi, interested me most.
Lembke, Anna. Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. New York: Dutton, 2021.
My therapist lent it; it pairs with Infinite Jest. The pleasure-pain seesaw (push pleasure and the body rebounds toward pain) resonated, but the real prize was the question it left open about the death drive: why we seek the painful when the pleasure principle says we shouldn’t.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. London: Verso, 2017.
The 1905 edition, before the Oedipal apparatus; Freud is strikingly progressive, rejecting “perversion,” tracing sexuality to infancy, decoupling it from reproduction. The pleasure is watching an idea germinate, and suspecting he’s right in more of it than the later caricature allows.
A Banipal anthology grouping North African and Nile-valley stories by geography more than culture, which I found arbitrary. What’s left is mostly affection, for Banipal’s translation project, and for finding my old Arabic teacher among the translators.
Gibson, William. Mona Lisa Overdrive. Sprawl Trilogy, 3. Reprint ed. New York: Spectra, 2012.
The trilogy’s weakest; it leans on fan service and lacks the earlier wonder. But Gibson’s afterword is the prize: he wrote it knowing nothing of computers, so it’s really about the cyborg condition of living in an industrial world, which redeemed the whole trilogy for me.
Traditional astrology taught as mechanics rather than cookbook: how the system actually computes, Arabic parts and all. I want the underlying logic before the interpretations; the late chapters lost me, but I trust the foundation is here for when I return.
Choi, Franny. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. New York: Ecco, 2022.
Stronger than most recent poetry I pick up; the imagery is genuine. It cuts both ways: it’s so precisely of its moment that I suspect it won’t survive the moment, and I’m not sure that’s a flaw rather than the cost of speaking to one’s own time.
Readable and broad; I read selectively, drawn most to epistemology and Islamic origins. The field’s posture is the thing: these essays push against the tradition’s self-account, and I’d want the traditionalist rebuttal that goes past the Qur’an citing itself.
A collection where translation choices vary by what best serves each poem: fidelity over consistency. The nature poems carry across and the “human” ones lose something; the constraint exposes what survives the crossing.
Eighty stories from the pre-Islamic period onward, organized by theme. It makes the transmission problem vivid: these tales changed to suit Muslim audiences, so there’s no authentic original, only a fluid life. Kalila wa Dimna, itself a transplant from India, was the one I loved most.
My fourth DFW; his uncanny gift is rendering an experience exactly as it’s lived; the state fair and the cruise are dead-on. It makes a case for recognition as a literary value: his maximalist, neurotic register made me feel less alone, which is most of what I want from prose.
Organized by question rather than subfield, and charitable to almost every position. What I’d keep is the model of philosophy as practice (conversational, dryly warm) that I’d want to teach from, against the fear that rigor requires coldness.
Numerology that left me cold. It clarified by contrast: a symbolic system earns belief by being broad enough to include you yet narrow enough to feel personal; Millman’s is only broad, where astrology manages both.
Pre-Islamic poetry where the supposedly dead desert teems: love, longing, wine, the journey, all near-compulsory elements of the qasida. It’s the form’s logic: the parts aren’t ornament, they’re what makes the poem a poem.
Taylor, Carole. Astrology: Using the Wisdom of the Stars in Your Everyday Life. London: DK, 2018.
A clean primer that took my self-taught astrology a step further: signs, planets, houses, the natal chart assembled. It mostly oriented me; it marked where I’d want to go deeper rather than going there.
Murakami, Haruki. After Dark. Translated by Jay Rubin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
Seven hours, midnight to dawn, narrated in a present-tense, almost camera-like voice that learns events alongside us. It shows how point of view manufactures strangeness; the surreal feels native to late night because the narration won’t settle.
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. Reprint ed. New York: Back Bay Books, 2009.
Didn’t resolve my depression, but had me reflecting on my life through Gately and Mario. It’s structural: the unresolved, circling shape is the point, a form built to feel like life rather than to conclude it.
An anthology answering Toffler that runs from too-optimistic to nearly unhinged, and tilts conservative. It instructs by contrast: it’s a useful specimen of techno-utopian credulity, which clarified what serious futurism would have to avoid.
Allen, Roger. An Introduction to Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Serviceable but wildly uneven in pace: the poetry chapter moves so fast you’re guaranteed to lose the thread. Only the drama and Qur’an chapters slow down enough to teach.
Brazier, Chris. One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories. Oxford: New Internationalist, 2009.
An uneven global anthology leaning into contemporary African stories; Lahiri’s closer broke me. The unifying thread (characters forced into hard decisions to better their lives or escape punishment) reads as a near-universal of the form.
The aesthetic life (try every role, commit to none) against the ethical (commit, and despair lifts). It rearranged me: I assumed I was the judge, the committer, and Kierkegaard showed me the aesthete; it isn’t the thing you commit to that matters, but the commitment itself.
Land, Nick. A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings. Self-Published, 2017.
Unlike Fanged Noumena, this stages early Land against his Neoreactionary turn, which is exactly why I picked it up after Yarvin. What it shows is an uncomfortable lineage: watching the accelerationist machinery get repurposed toward reaction.
Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2024.
Varoufakis argues the platform lords extract rent, not profit, making them feudal rather than capitalist: the live class conflict running between technofeudalists and capitalists. It reopened Hegel for me: maybe the engine of history is still feudalism against capitalism, not capital against labor.
Moldbug, Mencius. Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century. Self-Published, 2017.
I read Yarvin because his influence is real. His negative critique of liberalism (sovereignty as that which stands above the law) is partly right; his positive vision is a surveilled corporate-fief dystopia. The disagreement is finally about values, not facts: he ranks security first, I rank equality.
Rubin, Rick. The Creative Act: A Way of Being. New York: Penguin Press, 2023.
Stylish and largely empty; a few good notes on sincerity and inconsistency don’t carry it. It belongs to a category: the same instagrammable wisdom-lit as Rupi Kaur, and I preferred her version for at least risking feeling.
Gibson, William. Count Zero. Sprawl Trilogy, 2. Reprint ed. New York: Ace Books, 2023.
Better written than Neuromancer and more gothic than cybernetic; the AI here haunts rather than computes. Gibson’s strength is atmosphere over plot; I wanted Bobby Newmark at the center where Case had been.
Nietzsche’s first mature work, and the one that’s helped me most through hard stretches; amor fati (learning to see the necessary as beautiful, to become a yes-sayer) is the line I carry. What it gives is ethical posture, not doctrine.
The accelerationist genealogy from Marx through poststructuralism to the CCRU. Some texts are impenetrable (Negarestani defeated me), and my verdict is partly a complaint: without per-text framing, a reader can’t see how the pieces fit the whole.
Early cosmic horror; Blackwood’s “The Willows” is the most frightening fiction I’ve read. It lays bare the genre’s mechanism: horror sited where the primal meets the genuinely alien, which is why True Detective could borrow it whole.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Reissue ed. New York: Modern Library, 1994.
A slog whose dream-content is now common knowledge; the durable idea is the architecture of the mind (Conscious, Preconscious, Unconscious), and the Preconscious as the censor that turns repressed desire into symbol. I keep it for knowing where my own assumptions about mind originate.
Duʿaji, Ali. Sleepless Nights. Carthage: Beit al-Hikma, 1991.
Stories from Duʿaji of the Taht Essour group: funny, puncturing the self-righteous, unusually clear-eyed about desire. What it exposes is a gap: this remains the best English sample of a Tunisian milieu that deserves far more translation.
A 1985 reader on the social sciences of the Arab world: urbanization, tribe, household, the new state. Dated before the Arab Spring, but it sets a baseline: it captures the moment Arab nationalism was ebbing and Islamism just finding traction.
Singer is better than Tolle on the same ground: you are the observer of your thoughts, not the thoughts, and the practice is to let stored emotion move through rather than clog. It turned on me: reading about letting go was itself a way of avoiding it; I cognify everything.