What I Just Read

I read some fifty books in 2023. These are the ones that stood out, both good and bad, with links to my reviews. Thank you for reading! Best (5/5 stars or close): The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey The God That Failed , ed. Richard Crossman Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon by William D. Cohan The Blocksize War by Jonathan Bier Lies My Government Told Me by Dr. Robert Malone Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health by Ivan Illich J is for Junk Economics by Michael Hudson Worst (1/5 stars or close):   The Retirement Myth by Craig S. Karpel The Price of Time by Edward Chancellor This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

The novel Moonraker has only the barest resemblance to the mediocre 1979 movie, and as usual, Bond as Fleming conceived him is less perfect and far more interesting. He doesn't even get the girl at the end! Moonraker is just as readable as the other two Fleming novels I've reviewed. It offers readers a window into a gentleman's era of decorum (and admittedly of classism) that is surely lost in the UK today, and that likely never found much of a foothold at all in the USA. The story also features a classic "villain tells his whole evil plan to the hero and his girl while they're tied up and can't possibly escape" scene that Austin Powers movies have been parodying ever since. Something enjoyable happens once you get a few novels deep into a series: you grow to learn the characters' nuances and idiosyncrasies, you see depth and subtlety in their interactions and relationships, and as a reader you get to experience these things at a gradual, more natu

A 1995-era book for Boomers by a pre-Boomer (the author is technically a tail-end Silent, but he writes and thinks like a Boomer) who is dismayed at the Boomers' complete unpreparedness as they Boom their way towards an imaginary retirement in a system the author thinks is about to collapse.  Let's get the bottom line out of the way. This is a bad and boring book with incontinent logic.  Then why read it? You  don't have to, and shouldn't. But I often review bad books as an intellectual exercise: to think about what is wrong with a book, what should and should not have been done in writing it, where the errors (of, say, conception, of structure, of logic, of rhetoric) are, and so on. And with books that make predictions, it's a glorious opportunity to practice epistemic humility to read that book after its predictions should have (but didn't) come true. Finally, you can mine even the worst books for useful insights--or in this case contra-insights, since the in

Readable! A sci-fi/fantasy hybrid novel with plenty of world-building, using the standard narrative technique of alternating two story threads that unify at the finale.  An Earth ship deposits an "uplift nanovirus" on a planet, accelerating evolution there, and this inadvertently causes a species of spiders to develop a sophisticated civilization. That's one of the story threads. The other thread follows a group of humans on a multigenerational sleep-ship, seeking a new home after fleeing an uninhabitable, post-collapse Earth.  One warning. Do not read this book if you are grossed out by spiders. Or do! There's a well-executed mild horror movie vibe throughout. The story gets you thinking about the stages of development of cognition and the implications of sentience (a coincidental tie-in to Julian Jaynes' wonderful book The Bicameral Mind ). As the spiders evolve into the dominant species on their planet, they learn a sort of agriculture and animal husbandry, the

Recommended for literature geeks only. And I mean  real literature geeks. It will help enormously to have some background in English poetry and literature to follow along as the author explains how to use ambiguity to produce various effects in writing. William Empson has a wonderful gift for articulating all the unspoken feelings, images and notions that pass through our minds as we read good poetry or prose. He puts words to things that I would have thought impossible to describe, like how a feeling creeps over you as you read certain lines of poetry, even though you may not know why or what it was precisely that created that feeling. He explains techniques of communication and rhetoric with great facility, even describing techniques that in fact fail if the reader perceives them while reading! You will learn about several excellent minor poets (see for example Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughn, George Herbert, Richard Lovelace, Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others) as we