What I Just Read

Fascinating and challenging 1960s-era sci-fi about the incredible, even unimaginable, difficulties involved in first contact between civilizations. The planet Solaris features a strange, tissue-like surface that usually acts like a liquid, but can also spontaneously form all sorts of shapes and geological formations. It has been studied and debated over by generations of Earth scientists, many of whom believe the planet itself exhibits a form of intelligence, perhaps even consciousness and self-awareness.   Unlike TV sci-fi, where aliens always seem to be other actors wearing bumpy rubber foreheads who all somehow speak great English, this is "hard-science" sci-fi, and it traffics in the much more plausible notion that an alien species would have an intelligence so radically different from ours that we might never understand it. Author Stanislaw Lem tells the story in a nested and indirect fashion, reminding the reader a bit of Mary Shelley's  Frankenstein . The reader ...

A sincere, earnest book that teaches three master skills for navigating modernity: the practice of compassion, attention and gratitude. The book has an intellectual foundation based on cognitive-behavioral therapy, but it's not a therapy book per se. Rather, it's an articulation of the author's techniques, practices and general philosophy for living a more mindful life, a more fulfilled life, in which we behave decently and practice living wisely. This of course is in stark contrast from modern behavioral norms, which include chasing stuff and status--and making doubly sure to show off that stuff and status to everyone else. And when you aggregate this "stuff and status" behavior across a society, you get modernity: where everyone is increasingly envious, competitive, heartless, vicious. Those familiar with cognitive-behavioral therapy modalities will recognize the mechanisms underlying all the extremely useful tactics and strategies the author offers. They are si...