Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

When I heard there was a coming bowdlerization of Ian Fleming's works, that our cultural overlords decided James Bond needed to be sanitized[1] for the dainty modern reader, I decided I'd better read some of these novels for myself before they got butchered.

Casino Royale is the first in the series, and it's well-told. The story is laid out at first indirectly, via intelligence reports and flashbacks; then when the action picks up, the author tells the story in real time. The book is better in some ways than the movie(s), not least because the written James Bond is a more credible character than the movie version[2]. Rather than the Mary Sue we know from the movies, here Bond is believably human: beset by doubts, uncertainties, even unease.

There's one silly deus ex machina event in the story, but it's made up for by an unexpected twist ending. All in all a readable, solidly three-out-of-five stars book. It won't change your life but it passes the time.

[1] Yes, it's true, sadly. The institution that owns the rights to Fleming's work employed "sensitivity readers" to look through and remove anything "offensive."

[2] Unfortunately the movies have permanently altered my internal narrator: my brain plays Sean Connery's voice in my head for all of Bond's dialog. A similar thing happened to me when reading Arnold Schwarzenegger's (unexpectedly interesting) autobiography!

Stress Without Distress by Hans Selye

A short book distilling Hans Selye's groundbreaking technical work The Stress of Life into practical principles for handling daily life. Articulates a basic philosophy that can be boiled down to "earn thy neighbor's love." Selye calls this "altruistic egotism" and argues that satisfaction in life can be achieved by seeking genuinely satisfying work, earning the goodwill and gratitude of others through that work, and by living with a philosophy of gratitude. Not his finest book, but it is interesting and useful to hear the values and prescriptive statements of one of biology's most eminent scientists. The ideas in this book are not original--the author candidly admits as much--but offer helpful guideposts for how to live. Notes: 1) The first chapter is essentially a layperson's summary of Selye's main work The Stress of Life , defining key terms, what he means (in biological terms) when he talks about stress, describing the evolution of the stres

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 definition. La

The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 by Peter Brown

Late Antiquity is a rich, messy and complicated era of history, with periods of both decline and mini-renaissances of Roman culture and power, along with a period of astounding growth and dispersion of Christianity. And it was an era of extremely complex geopolitical engagements across three separate continents, as the Roman Empire's power center shifted from Rome to Constantinople. There's a lot that went on in this era, and this book will help you get your arms around it. And Christianity didn't just grow during this period, it was a tremendous driver of political and cultural change. It changed everything--and to be fair, really destabilized and even wrecked a lot of the existing cultural foundation underlying Mediterranean civilization. But then, paradoxically, the Christian church later provided the support structure to help Rome (temporarily) recover from extreme security problems and near collapse in the mid-third century. But that recovery was an all-too-brief min

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