What I Just Read

A mournful, beautiful novel, quite unlike anything I've read. The author writes with idiosyncratic detail and with a sincere voice, and it makes for a subtle and arresting story. Our main character, Tsukiko, is 37, alone, passive, and buffeted about by life. She is socially awkward, drinks a little too much, and doesn't know what she wants. But while stumbling down the road towards becoming a Japanese version of a cat lady, she has a moment of bravery.  And what begins as sort of a weird, borderline-inappropriate friendship with her former high school teacher--Tsukiko calls him "Sensei" out of both habit and respect--gradually blossoms into something that feels innocent and proper. They meet for lunch, have beers together, go on various excursions together. Sensei reminds this reader of the teacher in Eugen Herrigel's wonderful  Zen in the Art of Archery : imperturbable, modest, even simple-seeming, but yet a man with surprising and unusual interests. [A quick  af...

Tremendously useful. This is a book about meta-preparation: about what it really means to be prepared when you don't know the future. It teaches readers how to think about skill development, optionality and flexibility--and by virtue of these meta-tools, how to earn true individual self-sovereignty. Deep Response is a sophisticated strategy-level discussion hidden in a simple story: a thirty-something man goes back in time to offer guidance to his twenty-something younger self. Their discussions are engrossing on many, many levels, as the two characters--with radically different perspectives, despite being the same person--work out various life problems. The older character wants to warn the younger man that all of his strivings will eventually cause him to achieve nearly the exact opposite of what he seeks, and worse, if he doesn't adjust, his life will soon lack enough flexibility to do anything about it. The reader is the lucky beneficiary, getting exposure to a wide-rangi...

A biology professor buys 300 acres of Maine woodlands with money he doesn't have and spends the better part of his life exploring it. This book is a collection of essays musing upon his experiences over the years, as he brings the reader along on a tour of all the bugs, birds, trees and fungi in the forest ecosystem. This work will seem very familiar to readers of Edward Abbey, Paul Gruchow, Henry David Thoreau and other important environmental advocates. It has the same flowing and  at times convoluted  style, the same gentle lecturing of what happens and why on the trail and in the forest, and the same subtle misanthropy as he tells us all the things we're doing wrong by having the temerity to live on this planet. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate c...