Skip to main content

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke [review short]

Quite a mournful, beautiful book. Draws the reader in slowly, and gradually becomes increasingly compelling. Thematically an interesting rumination on modernity, as well as humility vs arrogance in the face of a (dream)world you don't understand.

"I realized that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unraveled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery."

[A quick affiliate link to readers to the book here. You can support my work here by buying all your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or my sister site Casual Kitchen. Thank you!]


More Posts

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn is really two books: a good one and a bad one. The good one, the first fifteen or sixteen chapters, is engaging, original and beautiful. The second book, the bad one, is hackneyed, inorganic, farcical, and in places nearly unreadable.  It feels like the overall work was written by two different people, which in fact it more or less was: the Mark Twain of 1876, fresh off the tremendous success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the Mark Twain of seven years later, cramped with financial stress and writer's block. Thus the back two-thirds of the book feels more like a collection of vaguely related short stories than a coherent novel, with random characters entering and exiting the stage to resuscitate an increasingly cadaverous plot. Twain is even forced to wedge Tom Sawyer back into the story late in the book, thanks to one of American literature's least plausible coincidences. It brings to mind Virginia Woolf's famously condescending remark about the no...
Read more

Understanding Human Nature by Alfred Adler

A difficult book, in part because Adler isn't all that good at expressing his ideas: he's a practitioner, not a writer, and it shows. Further, I believe Understanding Human Nature has more in direct value than direct value: the reader has to move from what the book teaches to a layer of second-order insights. I'll explain what I mean in a moment. First a quick summary of the book's core themes and ideas. According to Adler, we all have a psyche, formed and largely fixed in childhood, and that psyche has an ulterior psychological goal. For most of us, unfortunately, that goal takes the form of striving for power, control, attention, or superiority. Throughout the book Adler gives examples where peoples' psyche-driven strivings cause suffering, both for themselves as well as everyone else in their blast radius. Most of us will likely resist Adler's claim that to understand other people and their motivations you must first understand their psyches' "ulter...
Read more

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Fun, engaging novel about a very intelligent--and very naughty--boy. If we're lucky, we will all have a little bit of Tom Sawyer in us: we all misbehave, we all show off, we all counted the interminable minutes until recess, and we all have our little schemes and connivances. Nobody remembers the boys who behave themselves all the time. There's some subtlety to Twain's writing too at times: we see a good example in Chapter 6, when Tom is late to school. [1] You have to read with fairly close attention to note that Tom sees an empty seat, the only empty seat, next to Becky Thatcher on the girls' side of the classroom. He was thinking several steps ahead, and this was exactly why he spontaneously admits to his teacher, loudly, that his tardiness was due to talking to the town's black sheep, Huck Finn. He did it because he knew the teacher would put him on the girls' side of the schoolroom, right next to Becky! [A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers...
Read more