What I Just Read

A readable and creepy manga novel built on themes of guilt, agency and how to grapple with genuine evil. Over the course of nine volumes,  Monster has a lot of plot threads, many left hanging, and there are many, many  minor character extras drifting in and out of the story. Thus it reads less like a cohesive story and more like the middle third of David Copperfield . This is considered a highly-regarded work (it sold more than 20 million copies), but I don't recommend it unless you're a serious manga aficionado. And if you're a serious manga aficionado, you've already read it. A few thoughts on Monster's  central themes, which are more notable than the story itself. It is increasingly obvious today that quite a lot of evil exists in the world--certainly more today than during the 1990s when Monster was published. And so we have to figure out how to navigate that evil somehow: perhaps confront it, perhaps avoid it, and of course sometimes it's simply not clear...

This book at first strikes a reader like the humor writing of Mark Twain: nowhere near as funny as it sounds. But gradually it becomes clear that this is a subtle, nuanced satire that does something extremely difficult: it satirizes an elite social class without being cruel, it somehow satirizes with affection and sympathy. The Late George Apley is a pseudo-biography of a person who never existed, but who represents a typical member of the Boston aristocracy during a crucial period: when that aristocracy lost its near-total control of Boston's social and political environment at the onset of modernity. We get a tour of Boston Brahmin culture from before the Civil War right up to the 1930s (this was the "current day" for this 1936 novel), and we see how this culture, clannish, exclusive and powerful for generations, passed into obscurity as Boston became overwhelmed with mass immigration, as government became increasingly corrupt and bureaucratic, and as the city grew int...

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...