Recursion by Blake Crouch

Quite a good novel. Diverting and a fast read with a creative central theme dealing with the nature of memory, and what actually happens in our brains when an experience is "experienced."

The book also gets you thinking about how you might live your life if you had a chance to re-live it: what things you would do--or not do? And what would be the nature of your experience during that second go-around? Will you be grateful to live it again? Would it teach you that you aren't grateful enough right now, in this go-around of your life?

Speaking of gratitude: I'm grateful this writer doesn't have the flouncing, gamma "I've deliberately inserted something witty here my dear reader, can't you see how funny I am?" tone seen in certain modern sci-fi writers like John Scalzi or Andy Weir.

Finally, critics speak pejoratively about the Macguffin, an item or device used to move a story along--usually when it lacks momentum or direction of its own. The time travel used throughout Recursion is in some ways the mother of all Macguffins: just think what an author can do if he has time travel at his disposal: he can do anything he wants with the story, including giving the characters repeated do-overs! You can turn what's thought of as a literary crutch into your primary tool, if you're writer enough to get away with it.

(speaking of recursion...)

PS: if you're looking for some new fiction sources, read the acknowledgments: you can mine it for quite a few potentially good writers. See for example Helen Smith, Amor Towles (author of A Gentleman in Moscow), F. Paul Wilson, Joe Hart and John Shaw.

The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Francis Golffing)

Of the three essays of The Genealogy of Morals I recommend the first two. Skim the third. Collectively, they are extremely useful reading for citizens of the West to see clearly the oligarchic power dynamics under which we live. Show me a modern Western nation-state where there isn't an increasing concentration of power among the elites--and a reduction in freedom for everyone else. You can't find one. Today we live in an increasingly neo-feudal system, where elites control more and more of the wealth, the actions, even the thoughts of the masses. Perhaps we should see the rare flowerings of genuine democratic freedom (6th century BC Athens, Republic-era Rome, and possibly pre-1913 USA ) for what they really are: extreme outliers, quickly replaced with tyranny. The first essay inverts the entire debate about morality, as Nietzsche nukes centuries of philosophical ethics by simply saying the powerful simply do what they do , and thus those things are good by defi...

The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe

If you've read the original The Fourth Turning , much of this book will be review. However, this book explains the Forth Turning framework more cogently and tightly than the original, so if you haven't read the original book, I recommend just reading this and skipping the original. You'll walk away with the same central ideas plus the author's additional new (and slightly-adjusted) conclusions. The most profound takeaway from the overall Fourth Turning paradigm is that it teaches you to remember your place in the grand scheme of things. Sadly, modernity teaches the exact opposite: it persuades us to think we humans are bigger than history, that we can ignore it, be oblivious to it, and yet not repeat it. Worst of all, modernity teaches us to believe we've somehow managed to defeat history with our SOYANCE!!! and tEcHNologY--ironically none of which we can understand, replicate or repair. These "modren" beliefs, as arrogant and wrong as they are, conflic...

Anatomy of the State by Murray Rothbard

Tight, concise discussion of what the State really is and what it really does, not what we would like it to be. Thanks to the recent pandemic response, most of us lost once and for all our delusive belief that governments are a force for good, a force for fairness and justice. In this short book, Murray Rothbard shows how the State--no matter how "limited" a government you might set up in the beginning--always, always abrogates its citizens' rights and freedoms. It's just a matter of time. We also come to understand why the State loves war. It loves it. It gives the State far more power. It provides an easy justification to abrogate still more freedoms. And of course those in the State apparatus who profit politically or economically from war never seem to send their own sons to fight it. An all-too-typical example: note how Benjamin Netanyahu's military-age son lives safely and luxuriously in Miami, his security paid for by Israeli taxpayers . The fourth chap...

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