It’s been a while since I lost myself in an out-and-out thriller, and I’d forgotten how much fun they can be. Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is a firecracker of a debut novel that left me aching for more at the end of each sitting. Blending near-future virtual reality immersion technology with an almost autistic […]
Anyone who reads Murakami expects a hefty dose of weirdness, but I think The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle set a new bar for me. This novel’s psychological density and elusive tone make it difficult to say anything definitive about it, except perhaps that it subverts the idea that human experience is definable in any consistent way. I […]
The idea of artificial superintelligence (ASI) has long tantalized and taunted the human imagination, but only in recent years have we begun to analyze in depth the technical, strategic, and ethical problems of creating as well as managing advanced AI. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is a short, dense introduction to our most cutting-edge […]
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is an exceptional novel by a very smart author who doesn’t know when to shut up. Michael Chabon’s prose is densely literary, rife with cultural references, and brimming with insight and passion. Kavalier & Clay’s 600+ pages read like the internal monologue of the hyperactive lovechild of a […]
This is probably my favorite of the books I’ve read by Edward O. Wilson, although it did not alter my worldview as profoundly as On Human Nature did when I read it back in early 2012. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is an eloquent explication of the ideas and dispositions I hold in highest regard. […]
It’s been ten years since I first read The Grapes of Wrath, and I now realize that my seventeen-year-old self was incapable of internalizing even a fraction of the tragedy and grace contained in this overwhelming story. A decade on, what was once fodder for my sophomoric literary intellect has recast itself as a narrative […]
“Not one single history book is objective,” Jason Ripper writes in the final chapter of American Stories, Vol. II. “Merely choosing which topics to include and which to exclude indicates an author’s personal understanding of historical significance. Choice is bias” (260). I heartily agree. This admission of bias is in especially good taste given Ripper’s […]
2022 Update: I enjoyed this book much more the second time around compared to my first reading. It’s smarter, more coherent, and more interesting than I remember. I think I understood it better, both because I’m more familiar with some of the ideas Watts was working with, and also because I’m less allergic to the […]
Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics is a radical book penned with a lot of passion and the best of intentions. This treatise on alternative economics serves up some very worthy ideas that are compromised by a handful of the author’s less rigorous tendencies and intellectually insupportable positions. As a whole, the book had a decidedly divisive effect […]
This is the kind of book I long to be intelligent enough to fully comprehend, although to purport having done so would be to ignore Blindsight‘s unnerving central message. Blindsight is an incredibly dark, thought-provoking tale that is equal parts science fiction, horror, and psychological thriller. Relying on a one-two punch that alternates between a heady […]