Reading these stories was a bit of an exercise in empathy. They begged me to find something redeemable in characters that on summarization would be easy to write off as unlikable. I appreciated how most stories avoided a neat resolution, and the way speculative elements appeared naturally instead of being explicitly announced. In that way, it seemed more technologically literate than most modern writing (even in science fiction). Where technology, both modern and near future inventions, seep into daily life naturally rather than remaining a tool that is clearly external and divorced from interior experience.

A sober novel, but not a boring one. I felt that it made a genuine attempt to embody historical consciousness not just a historical setting. And, as a result, I found a lot of its commentary on authority, dignity, and faith unconventional in a productive, and decidedly non-romantic, way.

I aspire to be able to write like this. As a person I have a bad habit of stopping to look things up. This book had more opportunities to stop than most fiction. I never did. Read it entirely in two sittings. The language passed the way time does, by obscuring just how well it captures your attention

This one took me a long time to finish. The prose demanded focus, and the narrative flow was surreal and absurd and definitely did not help with keeping my attention sharp. All of the discussion of the fictional de Selby was interesting, even if some of the footnotes were longer than I would have liked. And it does build nicely to its reveal at the end. Ultimately very glad that I read it, but it is a tough read.

My favorite poems were Jealousy, Recitative, and Forms of Politeness

My favorite poems were The Rabbit Catcher, The Night Dances, The Courage of Shutting-Up, and The Rival

This book subtly pushed me toward greater intentionality in my own life. Particularly in the attention I pay to nature around me during routine and mundane travel, and my commitment to jotting down small notes about striking details. This impact on me was not immediately recognizable after finishing the book, but became more clear over time. Words like 'massage', 'seep', and 'coax' come to mind when trying to describe the type of impact I felt.

I liked the structural conceit, and there are undeniably a lot of beautifully unconventional images throughout. But I don’t think the writing style is for me.

Some of my favorite passages from this book:

Nowhere has the number zero been more of philosophical value than in the United States. “Here goes nothing,” says the American as he goes off the high diving board.

”How can you tell a good painting from a bad one?” he said. This is the son of a Hungarian horse trainer. He has a magnificent handlebar mustache. “ All you have to do, my dear,” he said, “is look at a million paintings, and then you can never be mistaken.”

Circe Berman had come down by then. We were both in our nightclothes. People do strange things when suddenly confronted by a person out of his or her mind. After taking one long, hard look at Slazinger, Circe turned her back on all of us and started straightening the pictures of the little girls on swings. So there was something this seemingly fearless woman was afraid of. She was petrified by insanity.

The dark secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

My favorite three poems were - Terminal Human Velocity - Last Suppers - The Astronaut Falls in Love

Some of my favorite passages from this book:

All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.

They did nothing— other than subjecting us to complete nothingness. For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.

Some of my favorite passages from this book:

There was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.

There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.

”I’m not optimistic, darling, but I’m hopeful. There’s a difference. I’m hopeful.”

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

Some of my favorite passages from this book:

I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence I ever learned in Greek. Χαλεπά τά καλά. Beauty is harsh.

”Are you always up this early?” I asked him. “Almost always,” he said without looking up. “It’s beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.”

Though not nearly so spectacular, this manifestation of grief for Bunny was in many ways a similar phenomenon— an affirmation of community, a formulaic expression of homage and dread. Learn by doing is the motto of Hampden. People experienced a sense of invulnerability and well-being by attending rap sessions, outdoor flute concerts; enjoyed having an official excuse to compare nightmares or break down in public. In a certain sense it was simply play-acting but at Hampden, where creative expression was valued above all else, play-acting was itself a kind of work, and people went about their grief as seriously as small children will sometimes play quite grimly and without pleasure in make-believe offices and stores.

Some of my favorite passages:

Let's make no mistake: whether it's the drop-outs, the beat generation, automobile drivers, migrant workers, tourists, Olympic champions or travel agents, the military-industrial democracies have made every social category, without distinction, into unknown soldiers of the order of speeds-speeds whose hierarchy is controlled more and more each day by the State (headquarters), from the pedestrian to the rocket, from the metabolic to the technological. Unable to control the emergence of new means of destruction, deterrence, for us, is tantamount to setting in place a series of automatisms, reactionary industrial and scientific procedures from which all political choice is absent. Significantly, the American government will not deem it necessary to establish a veritable welfare system on its own territory. It is convinced at the time that the promotion of paternalistic and humanitarian comfort civilization will perfectly replace social aid through the technical assistance of bodies, from the household robot to the company psychiatrist or the latest model of car. ...But the politics of comfort was superseded by that of social standing. Everyone suddenly found himself exposed to the scrutiny of his neighbors, compared with the Identikit portrait of the ideal American consumer: a model of civic-mindedness whose gestures, quirks and attitudes toward life were henceforth broadcast without reprieve by the radio, the press, television and the cinema, and buried under commercial messages. ... In fact, American-style (social) security implies the population's cultural underdevelopment. It is remarkable to see modern democratic States bragging about their silent majorities.

We is officially my new favorite dystopia novel. Serving as clear inspiration for both Brave New World and 1984, this 1921 Russian novel manages to warn readers about both Big Brother surveillance and hedonistic erosion of freedom. Following a mathematician as he develops the “illness” of a soul that causes him friction with the religious and political force of the One State, it is both a gripping romantic drama and poignant piece of political satire. If you read one dystopia novel on my recommendation, it should be this one.

The first book to make me cry multiple times since the Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. This sweeping family epic is certainly one of my favorite books I’ve read in 2023, and likely will continue creeping up my all time rankings as I find myself ambiently thinking of this book often. Very few books honestly capture humans in their full contradiction and complexity, but this book does it for generation after generation of characters. A masterpiece of magical realism and literature, with thought provoking political, romantic, and ethical subplots, I only wish I could read Spanish to fully understand the depth of this novel.

The most exhaustively citation filled book that I have ever read. This thorough critique of the health professions makes the case that the decision to turn the art of healing into the cold science of medicine has done as much harm as it has alleviated. He criticizes the way the unique individual is being replaced by the statistical person, and he investigates the over-medicalization of American society and the commodification of health. Like most critical theory, it fails to provide much direction on what to do about our predicament— but the critique is solid.

A creative and engaging science fiction novel that serves as a compelling examination of consciousness— exploring everything from artificial intelligences to octopuses. This was only the second or third science fiction book I’ve read that felt like it understood modern technology, culture, and institutions, allowing it to deliver a lot of real-world wisdom. Probably the most enjoyable book I read in 2023. I would pay an unreasonable amount of money for a 0.5, which I won’t explain further to avoid spoilers.

“Artifacts are man-man objects; they are also fossilized ideas” This brief introduction to archaeology has aged remarkably well. It covers most of the basic strategies used in excavation and archaeological analysis incredibly well— managing to be both concise and informative at the same time. There are some longer dry sections attempting to do things like apply linguistic models to archaeology, and utilize other contemporary social science tactics that have since fallen out of favor. But we can hardly hold that against the book, as Deetz self admits that his field of archaeology was in its infancy at the time of his writing. He maintains a clear distinction between his ideas and generally accepted archaeological ideas and his future section at the end predicts the rise of computer relevancy to archaeological practice. Archaeology students may find this work to be a bit outdated and simple, but for the general reader curious about archaeology this is a great place to start.