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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.

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.