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I went into this book blind after coming across it on /r/Numerology—people on their raved about how much they liked it. I was much less impressed.

In short, I don’t think it matters whether astrology or numerology or other such things are “true.” The important thing is that they are symbolic systems that help us make sense of the world when there is actually no solid ground to stand on.

Millman tries to do this with birthdays, which is fine, but it’s not a home run. The text was simply too broad, so any number could encompass anyone. This is in marked contrast, in my view, to astrology, which is both broad enough to encompass many people, while narrow enough to make you feel special. In this book, I felt like the author was not really saying much of anything at all.

It also didn’t help that the writing was neither good nor engaging. I wouldn’t recommend this book.

This is a great collection of (largely) pre-Islamic poetry--Dhu al-Rumma did live after the coming of Islam, and Michael Sells points out that he's often considered the "Seal" of the classical poets, closing that age permanently.

I can't assess the quality of the translation, as I don't know the Arabic well enough to do so. However, the poems here stand well on their own, and they're really quite beautiful. Almost all of them deal with the desert and a sense of longing. Even though we often see the desert as somehow "dead," the way it's painted here appears as though it's teeming with life.

There's love and longing, wine songs, boasting, and travels all depicted here. In fact, it seems as if these components were compulsory--the make the qasida work.

It's a short text; I read it in two brief sittings. In fact, I do wish more poems were included here, it would flesh the book out some.

The two most famous poems here are the Muʿallaqat, which were said to have hanged (hung) from the Kaʿaba after a poetry competition. There were five other Muʿallaqat and I wish they were included here too.

This is a good collection of primary sources on Arabic political thought during the first three quarters of the 20th century. The real pull of the period was between the experience of "tradition" and "modernity," both of which are contested concepts. There is little in the way of resolution, and a lot of the same questions remain important to politics in the Arab world.

That said, Islamism seems to have been delegitimized by the so-called "Arab Spring" and the subsequent explosion in political violence. Marxism, too, seems to have been largely delegitimized by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I haven't seen much indication that Marxist politics have become more prominent. Arab Nationalism largely died with Nasser and, its last reverberations seemed to have died with Gaddafi.

The political scene, in many ways, looks bleak. Judging by the state of politics today, neoliberalism seems to be the hegemonic ideology, just as it is everywhere else. There are also some signs of a turn toward national populism, but many Arab states are too pluralistic to support such a political vision. What's next? It's hard to say, but it seems like the texts in here are at risk of becoming relics of the past.

My main gripe with the text is that there isn't enough in the way of introduction to and conversation between the individual pieces collected here. This makes it hard to see the "bigger picture," but it is a useful text to see the state of political thought as Boomers came of age. It's a different ideological world now, although individual Arab states have experienced a long-standing structural continuity based on exploitation for the benefit of Western powers.

Hopefully, the next generations will be able to throw this off and build something better.

This is such a beautiful, short novella. I went into it with no expectations, and I'm glad I didn't.

The whole story takes place over the course of seven hours, from midnight to 7 am, and follows a small cast of characters over the course of the night. The experiences that most of the characters had reflect a strong sense of community and care that I remember coming across late at night while I was in university. Of course, there are bleak moments here, but the weight of them are kept at bay by the humanism of the characters.

The story does have surreal moments, but they don't predominate, and they add a lot to the story. Late at night, things don't always feel right, and the surreal really feeds into that.

One component of the story that does a lot of work is the point of view. For one, the narrator and the point of view have nearly anthropomorphic characteristics. At the same time, the whole story is told in the present tense. The narrator learns about occurrences at the same time we do, and it offers a sort of meta-commentary. In some ways, it reads almost more like a screen play than a novel. The PoV's voice adds to the sense of strangeness and wonder.

My only regret was that the book is so short--but I also think it was as long as it has to be.

I'm sorry, but I wasn't impressed. In short, this lengthy anthology is a collection of responses and reflections to Alvin and Heidi Toffler's 1970 classic Future Shock. While there were some good essays in here, the bulk are either far too optimistic or borderline insane. There was one essay that discusses the solar system entering a part of the galaxy with "weird energy" as contributing to climate change--which the author of the piece claims is actually us entering a new ice age, although in differing words.

The essays also lean much more conservative than the Tofflers' book ever was. I suspect that this is partially due to John Schroeter being the man responsible for selecting the authors. His own piece urges us to look past social categories and see each of us as individuals. While yes, we are all individuals, human society--including American society--is structured above all by social groupings. We can push for groups to experience emancipation and other forms of liberation, but the dissolution of social categories--whether racial, gendered, national, class, or any other ontology--strikes me as impossible.

If you want a good sense of techno-utopian insanity, this is a great place to start. For serious, cautious, and calculated futurism, it's better to look elsewhere.

WOW. This book had long been on my to-read list, but I pushed it to the top, as someone mentioned that it helped them cure their depression. It surely didn't do that for me, but it had me reflecting on my own life. There isn't a lot here that's resolved, but it's so easy to get attached to the many, many characters--both "small" and large. I felt most attached to Don Gately, and Mario is one of the single most lovable characters in literature. There's so much here that's unresolved, but it feels a lot like life. The book functions as both a circle and a triangle, but I'll let you read it to get a sense of what I mean by this.

I have more to say on this, and I might just write a post about plateaus and what J. O. Incandenza calls "figurants." Those two concepts, in my reading, are central to the novel.

This is a good collection, although the stories are of varying quality. It leans especially heavily into contemporary African short stories, which I was pleased to see.

Probably the single-best was the closing story, Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent," which brough me to tears. I had never read anything by Lahiri before, and this was a great introduction to her work.

Other excellent stories were Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "My Mother, the Crazy African," Martin Ramos's "The Way of the Machete," Dipita Kwa's "Honor of a Woman," and Sequoia Nagamatsu's "Melancholy Nights in a Tokyo Cyber Café." Ravi Mangla's "Air Mail" and Vanessa Gebbie's "The Kettle on the Boat" were also especially touching.

The collection is effective in bringing together that which is universal around the world. Abandonment, generational conflict, loneliness, gender inequality, and discrimination are all really important themes. One theme that unifies a number of stories is the sense that characters are required to make really difficult decisions in order to (1) improve their lives, or (2) avoid punishment.

In general, the collection is light-reading, but it's thematically heavy, and that makes it all the more valuable.

This book took far longer to complete than I anticipated. It had been on my to-read list for quite some time, but I picked it up at the beginning of the year when I saw a post on Reddit asking users what books might help "cure" their depression--someone recommended Either/Or, and I decided it was time to pick it up.

Cure my depression, it did not. However, it did force me to think seriously about my own life.

Kierkegaard frames his book as an outside, pseudonymous editor. He claims that he found the texts contained within this book; we intelligent readers know that it was he who wrote them.

The text ultimately takes place from two perspectives. The first volume, "Either," is very much a treatment of aesthetics, and it comes from the perspective of a man who lives his life only for enjoyment. Today we might call him a gourmand, or perhaps even a "fuck boy." But, he really isn't interested in sex at all--what really consumes him is sentimentality as a way to overcome boredom. A lot of the text in this section is a philosophical examination of various different art forms, although Mozart's "Don Juan" perhaps gets the most space. The final section of volume 1 is the viewpoint of a man named Johannes, as he pursues his romantic interest, Cordelia. As soon as he has her, he loses interest and moves on to the next thing.

The second volume, "Or," is from the perspective of a Judge Vilhelm, and is largely made up of two long letters to Johannes, followed by a sermon by another individual. Vilhelm's first letter is about commitment, especially to marriage, while the second is about doubt and despair.

We readers know that everything in here was written by Kierkegaard, so he's trying to tell us something. He plays with dialectics here, the post-Hegelian that he is. On one side is the "aesthetic" life, epitomized by Johannes. On the other side is the "ethical" life, epitomized by Judge Vilhelm. Both sides collide here, and it's up to the reader to tease out the contradictions in each of their perspectives, although I'm not sure that I'm quite well trained enough in dialectics to be able to do this effectively.

But, I did learn a lot reading the book. For one, I went into it thinking that I'd have more in common with Judge Vilhelm, as I have little trouble with commitment, and didn't believe that aesthetics were important to me. Kierkegaard disabused me of that notion, and I think that he himself may have also identified with Johannes for a large part of his life.

You see, one thing I struggle a lot with is despair. Kierkegaard makes the argument (as Vilhelm) that despair is the result of not being who you are, and that the way out of despair is by committing to something beyond yourself. This needs some further elaboration.

I think I speak for a lot of us when I say we often try on different hats, different roles, and so on. This is the aesthetic life: "I could be either a doctor or a lawyer, it makes no difference to me." Then, the aesthetic tries on the role, finds it doesn't suit him/her, and backs out, opting for the next thing. The ethical life, on the other hand, requires committing to one thing. It is the statement that I will be a doctor, without ifs or buts about it.

Interestingly, Kierkegaard gives a lot of time discussing "ifs." One aspect of s/he who despairs--i.e. me--is that it is self-imposed by various conditional statements. For instance, I often say, "I would be happy if only I had large sums of money" or "I would be happy if only I had more time to pursue my interests" or "I would be happy if only the world was not as it is." Kierkegaard says that this is a sure way into despair. We are setting standards far too high, imposing conditionals that are beyond ourselves. Happiness requires conditions imposed on oneself, not the outside world. For example, "if I engaged closer with my community, then I would be happy." The structure of the sentence is totally changed.

I think a lot of what's written here is echoed in modern psychotherapy. For instance, living in a way not in line with our deeper values and desires is a form of fragmentation (which a Jungian psychoanalyst might say requires individuation, other therapists might say require living according to one's values, etc.). Transforming the conditionals, on the other hand, is a classic technique in cognitive behavioral therapy, which in turn has its roots in the Stoic tradition.

So much of this should be self-evident, but it isn't always so. We can see these things clearly in other people, but it's remarkably different to see them in ourselves. It's true, my own despair comes from not knowing how to live my life, so I think my way through all kinds of different possibilities, none of which seem appealing enough. It's to the point that it feels like there's no way out--that I will be in this eternal state of circling forever. But, what's needed here is what we might call (but Kierkegaard does not) a "leap of faith." Of course the ground might be shaky, but it doesn't matter. It's the leap itself that matters. This requires action, instead of interminable rumination.

As a final comment, there's an interesting section in the "Either" volume where the author comments on the difference between "pain" and "sorrow." He argued that "pain" is something experienced by everybody; normally you feel it and let it go. But, "sorrow" on the other hand, emerges when we think about our pain over and over and over again, on an unending loop. He speaks a bit about Sophocles's Antigone here, and how sorrow did not affect the ancients as much as it does we moderns, because free will demands that we are fully responsible for our own actions--by believing in fate, the ancient Greeks did not have to worry nearly as much about "regret" as we do. There's something powerfully Nietzschean about this insight: eternal recurrence and amor fati as a way out of despair.

I'm so glad I read this. I might have been more like Judge Vilhelm at one point--as I worked on my Ph.D. dissertation--but I no longer think I am. Since leaving my program, I don't know what to commit to. But, I suppose, it doesn't matter. It's not the thing in itself that's important, but the commitment.