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This is a reasonably good introduction to Islamic theology, but the authors pull no punches when introducing you to their subject. Aristotle's categories and rudimentary knowledge of Neoplatonic thought are absolute musts. When I understood everything in an essay, it was quite the achievement.

It becomes apparent after a bit of reading that the primary points of contention are essentially the same everywhere: Is there free will? What is the nature of reality, and how did the universe even begin? What about God is even knowable? By what means does causation take place? The borders between Islamic theological schools are drawn over these questions.

To me, the most interesting one was the Muʿtazila, which seems to have largely died except among the Shiʿa.

The text concludes with thought since the 19th century, and new directions in Islamic theological thought today. The bulk of the book covered the 9th-12th centuries (CE); or, in other words, the classical era, although there was a bit about epochs afterwards.

I’m hesitant to rate the content of a religious text, so I’ll instead speak here to the translation and the essays.

Over the course of the past month (Ramadan) I made it my personal mission to read the Qur’an in its entirety. I had read that many considered this version to be the best, so I read a juz each day. I also read all of the essays, although I did NOT read the commentary.

I think that this edition of the Qur’an seeks to be what the King James Version of the Bible is for the Anglophone world. That is to say, the standard, which can be quoted and referenced for decades or centuries to come. The language used in the Study Qur’an reflects that. It is dignified in tone, not conversational or casual, but also not jargon-laden and unapproachable. Seyyed Hossein Nasr and his team did a great job on that front.

The essays are all written from a Muslim standpoint, although they are non-sectarian and lean towards perennialism, which I personally appreciate but understand that others may not. You won’t find the critico-historical perspective here and, if that’s what you’re looking for, the Oxford Handbook to Qur’anic Studies does a great job of filling the gap.

The Qur’an is a hard text, and I’m sure it’s not meant to be read cover to cover. It’s light on narrative, and the sūwar are organized from longest to shortest rather than by theme or chronology. The message really seems to be about how to build a Muslim community, with a lot of legal regulations. When narrative is invoked, it’s as an aside to some other larger point. Still, I’m glad I read this version, as the editors—at times—signpost important passages and how they fit into zāhir/bātin (exoteric/esoteric) readings.

If it’s not heretical to have a favorite sūrah, or at least a sūrah that resonated with me the most, it has to be Sūrat al-Kahf.

This book was lent to me by my therapist after I had talked to her about some of the trouble I’m dealing with, mostly about the idea of doing certain tasks feeling so unpleasant that I don’t do them. Before she handed this to me, I actually had told her about DFW’s Infinite Jest, and I think the two pair well together.

The sense here is that so many of us (all of us?) live our lives chasing after a sense of “feeling good,” but that’s actually quite destructive. Lembke offers us the image of a scale: if we push down on the “pleasure” side of the balance, the amount of pressure falling on the “pain” side increases to balance it out. As a result, our homeostasis becomes one where one of high pleasure, to the extent that it engulfs us. As soon as the stimulation is gone, we feel horrible.

A lot of the book is dedicated to addiction, which I find fascinating. It should be so obvious that pleasure and addiction loop together, but there’s also something uncannily strange about it—as if the pleasure can’t be “true” pleasure for its addictiveness, but it is.

Lembke offers a handful of strategies to help the reader (aka me) balance my life better. The discussion of increasing pain (which causes a rebound in heightened pleasure) and engaging closely with accepting communities (to mitigate shame) really resonated with me.

This isn’t related to the book, but, as I wrote the above paragraph, I had this impression that there’s this really powerful, symbiotic relationship between pleasure and pain. I thought a bit about Freud who, until the last two decades of us practice, attempted to figure out why we do things that we find painful if the Pleasure Principle demands we act in such a way to increase pleasure and decrease pain. There something is to be said about the death drive (rather than Eros) here.

Now I have more questions about pain and pleasure than I did when I started reading Lembke’s book, and I don’t think I would have thought about them so closely had I not read it.

I miss Banipal. It was a great magazine that translated Arabic literary works--whether poetry, short stories, criticism, and even novels--and made them accessible to a larger audience. This book is a Banipal text that collects a few dozen short stories from Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia. I'm not sure that this "cluster" of countries makes much sense in any cultural way, but it is reflective of sheer geography. Egypt/Sudan and Algeria/Morocco/Tunisia would be better off grouped in these discrete categories.

I might be pedantic here, but it's for good reason--there are clear similarities between the stories from the "Maghrib" and the stories from the Nile River Valley, but they don't really talk to each other beyond some vague sense of "arabicity" (عروبة). But, if that's the case, which is entirely valid, then there isn't really any reason to include stories from the East as well.

Still, most of them were good, well-translated, and meaningful. I was pleased to see that my former Arabic instructor, Professor Shakir Mustafa, was responsible for a handful of the translations here.

I can't say that I'm entirely impressed by Mona Lisa Overdrive. There was something that the other books had that this one totally lacks, and I don't think that it's the blitzing pace or cyberspace runs. I think it lacks the sense of wonder w/r/t the enormity of the entire cyberspace project.

Moreover, the new characters don't have nearly as much as swagger as older ones. I know that they represented a specific, historically-bound definition of what "cool" meant. Case was this bitter, angry, but powerful guy. Bobby Newman, aka Count Zero, was hands-down the coolest character in the entire trilogy. Molly Millions and Angie Mitchell are also great! But Mona, Kumiko, and the gang at Factory? Not so much.

The book seems to rely heavily on fan service: there's a lot of throwbacks to the earlier two books in the trilogy, and old characters make comebacks, but there isn't the fascinating "change" in what happened in cyberspace (with the Voodoo AIs and everything in Count Zero, for example).

My version has a fascinating, brief essay by Gibson about how he wrote the book knowing nothing about computing, and that they're really reflective not of digital technology but what it means to live in an industrial (and post-industrial) world, where humans and technics rapidly merge. Cyberpunk, as a genre, is reflective of our cyborg reality. The concluding essay gave me a greater appreciation of the whole trilogy, and I'm really glad it was included.

This book is great—I read the 1905 edition, and it’s an attempt by Freud to understand the phases of psychosexual development before the introduction of concepts like the Oedipus conflict, so on. In some ways, Freud is strikingly progressive here. He pushes back the idea that homosexuality is a “perversion,” and argues that most sexual behavior is not worth being classified as pathological. Instead, we were just thinking about it the wrong way.

Freud goes on to argue that sexuality is not just a function of reproduction, and that it really begins in infancy, with actions like sucking, hugging, and being softly caressed. As a result, what is understood is “pure love” by parents is actually experienced by young children as sexual attraction. After early childhood, sexuality undergoes a “latency period,” with some notable exceptions. When a child reaches sexual maturity (i.e. puberty), his or her behaviors have already been defined by the way s/he experienced sexuality as a child, although the adolescent won’t remember it as such.

The essays in this book represent an idea just beginning to germinate, and I think Freud might be right in a lot of ways.

I’m honestly super impressed by this book. The cover, as ugly as it is, gave me pause, but I’m glad I worked through it.

This book takes the traditional approach to astrology, ignoring the planets discovered after 1700. The book begins with a discussion of the components that makes up the elements, genders, and modes that combine to produce a wide range of astrological interpretations.

Rather than focusing on interpreting a chart, this book focuses more on the mechanics of how it works, and includes extensive detail on doing calculations without automatic outputs that we have now—this is especially useful with the Arabic parts.

I will admit, I felt a bit lost in the last few chapters. The book was largely comprehensible and made sense, but I think fixed stars, Arabic parts, and accidental dignities/debilities added a bit too much complication for me.

I’ll read around more and see how others cover this, as well as the more interpretive side of things. If they don’t, I can feel confident knowing all the content is right here.

I suspect that this is intermediate level—it’s the logical next step for diving in after getting your toes wet (and the appendices are great for showing why the authors are committed to the traditional model).

First of all, I must confess that I did not read all of these essays here. I read primarily the epistemological and historiographical essays, essays on Islamic origins and the construction of the Qur’an as a single text, and most of the essays on Qur’anic themes, among a few others. I largely dodged the extensive chapters on Qur’anic commentaries (tafsir).

This book is fairly readable, and it stands in contrast to the Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology, which is significantly denser and seems to presuppose knowledge of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic philosophy (which makes sense, given that many early Islamic thinkers turned to these traditions as they sought out tools to understand God). The book is also comprehensive, and there’s a huge amount covered. I was particularly interested in the debates over epistemology and Islamic origins, although the arguments here push against the Islamic tradition, and I’d be curious to hear arguments by traditionalist scholars that go beyond the Qur’an referencing itself as the literal word of God. Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s version of the Qur’an in English does some of this work, although it’s very much a “first encounter with the Qur’an” sort of work (although I haven’t read the commentary, as my Kindle doesn’t allow it.

I should be upfront before I begin: this is my fourth work by DFW. I've been working through his entire oeuvre and have been amazed by it. Previous works I've read by him are Consider the Lobster, This is Water (which, I guess, is really a lecture), and Infinite Jest.

The essays included here are of differing quality--the least powerful of which was his review of Morte d'Author--but the best here ("A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All," and "David Lynch Keeps His Head") are really phenomenal.

The man's observational capabilities are apt and hilarious. While other essayists are informative and offer new insights on X or Y issue, DFW has the uncanny ability to write about specific experiences that mirror what it is actually like to live these experiences. I've been to state fairs (in Indiana, not Illinois) and I've been on a cruise, and both experiences are described exactly as they actually are, from my stand point.

With that in mind, I'm not sure that DFW's style will resonate with everybody. He has this maximalist, neurotic style that resonates with me pretty heavily, but I'm not sure that it will for everyone. I hope it does. It would sure as hell make me feel less alone if it does, but I'm not sure that this is true. I'd love to hear anyone else's feedback on this as well.

I've been raving about this book to my girlfriend, it's so well done, and it's Salma Jayyusi who did something really special here. This collection is a large selection of around 80 short stories from the pre-Islamic period to some later, undefined time (although evidently not "modern"). In addition, there are a handful of selections from larger works. The stories were well chosen, and very well translated.

One of the big challenges with this sort of literature is the question of origins and transmission. These stories were rarely considered to be "literature" in the societies that produced them, and only some were written down. The pre-Islamic stories, especially, are interesting, given that they were orally transmitted and only really recorded after the coming of Islam. As part of their transmission, these stories changed to be more palatable to Muslim audiences, and there are some overarching themes here--the characters really struggle with older, largely tribal, codes of honor, and Islam (or monotheism more generally--there are stories about conversion to Christianity, too) offered a way out. This reminds me a bit of Corneille's Le Cid, which extols centralizing tendencies among seventeenth century European monarchs for their ability to arbitrate disputes.

What's perhaps most interesting about these stories more largely is that they're all fluid, having undergone various transformations over the course of their life--it's hard to refer to the "authentic original" when looking back at the context in which they were produced. Avoiding this discussion, Jayyusi wisely organizes the stories by major theme: religion, comedy, romance, and more. Juha gets his own section, and Jayyusi has edited another collection consisting entirely of Juha stories (which, as you can imagine, is on-deck for me).

The selections of longer works were also well-chosen. They don't fit clearly into our modern understandings of genre, and there's enough here to get a taste of the literary tradition. Of those works, my absolute favorite were the selections from Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's Kalila wa Dimna (which is itself a fascinating case study in the transmission of stories from far-away lands--in this case, from India).

All this is to say: it's a must-read for those interested in the Arabic literary tradition. It's so good!

This is a short, sweet collection of haikus collected and translated into English. The contents here range from famous and classical poems to more recent ones, and they tend to be good.

The translation style isn't exactly consistent, for good reason. Some poems were translated more freely than others, and the choice of how a poem got translated was decided by the end result. That's to say, if a more freely translated poem was more "faithful" to the original Japanese, it was often kept. There's a huge disparity between English and Japanese w/r/t to syllables and structure, so this seems to have been the right choice.

Only the first part of the book is exclusively nature poems. This is a bit of a shame, as those were the best of the collection. The more "human" poems seemed to lose something, but it's not for want of trying.

Still, this is a good collection. It can easily be read in an hour or so; I just wish there was more here.

This is a great introduction to philosophy as a practice. I was a bit concerned that it would be overly academic, but I was pleased that this wasn’t the case. When I read the table of contents, I thought that the text may be segmented by disciple: “philosophy of mind,” “logic,” “epistemology,” “ethics,” and so on.

Instead, Blackburn approaches larger themes and questions that philosophers ask. Then, he dives into perspectives that different thinkers take, while explaining their arguments to us. He seems charitable toward to most arguments, although Blackburn doesn’t seem at all convinced by religious fundamentalism or post-Derridean deconstruction.

His discussion of each larger issue is really quite interesting, and he mobilizes primarily early modern European philosophers (almost universally before the Analytic/Continental divide), which is fair given that the target audience is anglophones who are dipping their feet into the field for the first time. Descartes and Hume seem to get the most attention, with plenty here on Locke and Kant as well.

Blackburn’s tone is almost conversational, with a dry humor that feels warm. It eased the reading tremendously.

I can’t say say I “got” everything, but Think is an excellent starting point.

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.