What I Just Read

A deep and crazy book that makes the reader wonder about religion and about the nature of reality. Along the way you will wonder about the author's sanity and maybe even your own.  I read Philip K. Dick's book Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said many years ago and was tripped out by it: you get to the end and you realize that the entire reality of the book was a construct, a type of Matrix that was never real in the first place. The movies  Total Recall (based on his short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale ) and Blade Runner (based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ) also toy with what experienced reality means: if you implant perfectly believable memories into someone, is that "reality" to them? How would they know otherwise? Valis goes even deeper, reaching into domains of psychological sanity, philosophy, religion and creation, and the reader is often wondering "Is this deep? Or is it just crazy?" I think this is part of the ple...

Slow, stately biography of three sisters from 1800s-era Massachusetts. The eldest, Elizabeth Peabody, was a well-regarded educator; the middle sister, Mary Peabody, was a teacher and author who became the wife of educator and congressman Horace Mann; and the youngest, Sophia Peabody, was an artist who married author Nathaniel Hawthorne.  It's not my favorite style of biography when the author attributes thoughts and feelings to each of the characters when there's no way the author can know their thoughts and feelings. This is "James Michener" history, not real history. At the same time, the book gives a competent tour of a kind of birth and early gestation of American literary and artistic culture.  You'll meet a shy and weird Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was Elizabeth's Greek tutor. You'll learn the circumstances of Nathaniel Hawthorne surprise breakthrough to worldwide literary fame with  The Scarlet Letter . You'll meet general (later President) Frankli...

A wonderful, subtle work of reverse psychology. A morality tale about the reclamation of a soul, told in letters from one demon to another, with its own pacing, narrative arc and surprise ending. Interesting on another level too: there's an intriguing meta-discussion running throughout the text about how rhetoric, propaganda, dialectic, media, current events, and even the use of theological doctrinal disputes can further either good or evil--depending on how they are used. Even a global event like World War II can be a device either to ruin the individual and distract him into petty evils, or it can cause him to focus on what really matters in life. The reader can also view these demons as a manifestation/incarnation of our own egos. We can all be as unmindful and ego-driven as we wish to. We can all make any virtue into vice by being proud we have it. We can all blind ourselves to our vices and see only our virtues, while for friends and family we do the reverse. Quite a subtle a...

A fast, readable thriller with a double twist ending. Some characters and some aspects of the plot are more credible than others.  Readers curious about psychotherapy might find this book intriguing. The setting and narrative are rooted in therapy modalities and the therapeutic world, and the main character, a psychotherapist, skillfully beguiles the reader in the same way a charismatic, Cluster B-disordered patient might manipulate a therapist. As the narrative progresses, the reader can't help but question which characters are sane and which are not.

Four brief essays from four renowned Asian writers exploring the theme of homes, while indirectly conveying a philosophy of simplicity and living in harmony with nature. A calming and subtle book that gets a reader pondering what constitutes happiness in this life, and are its requirements really as extensive as I thought? 1) The Thatched Hall by  Po Chu-I  [China, 9th Century] * "One night here and my body is at rest. Two nights and my mind is content, and after three nights I'm in a state of utter calm and forgetfulness. I don't know why it's like this, but it is." * A word on Western environmental writing and how it could take a page from books like this: I can't help but think about how so much Western environmental writing is at its core totally misanthropic: see the works of Paul Gruchow where a loathing disdain for his fellow human drips off every page; see also the works of Edward Abbey; see even the book I just reviewed by Rick Ridgeway . All hold con...

Useful for deepening your understanding of money, its origin, and the central role of bitcoin in a future monetary paradigm. This crisp, short book is a genuine gift, and I've already made a note to reread it about a year from now to re-groove the ideas in it. Notes: * Considering money in "layers" as a prism for understanding our monetary system: a pyramid of layers going all the way up to base layer money or "layer one" money. * Gold (the first layer one money) moves toward being traded non-physically: in the form of deposit slips representing the underlying gold. And those deposit slips become a type of money that can be used for exchange. Further, this is much easier than physically carrying/moving/exchanging the underlying gold itself. * Solving the problem of needing a unified form of money, one that was less debaseable than other forms, developing the first money market in Antwerp in 1531, where there could be price discovery for various second layer mon...