Books, Books, and Music

I have finished close to fifteen books already this year. From No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, to Infomacracy by Malka Older, to the entire Red Rising series, to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and so much more.

The last time I was reading like this was during the five months that I traveled the country in 2019, and the only time before that was before I moved to Florida in the middle of 2015.

One of the best books that I read was The Free People's Village by Sim Kern. As an aside to this, it is the book that introduced me to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but the thing that made this book so amazing is how easily it transports the reader into social situations they aren't prepared for. Perhaps for all the wrong reasons, as well, but how good can come from it.

It depicts so effortlessly the concept of how everything is a commodity for someone else's power - or can be manipulated for such things.

The Red Rising series is also a fantastic one if you want to see how the human mind can get lost within power, and how unchecked goal seeking can lead to atrocious things, and how losing perspective of others can make a person less than human. It is a long read, and the series isn't yet complete, but it is a fantastic series nonetheless. The first three books complete a major story arc, and the reader can easily stop there; however, by doing so, they are missing out on the best parts of the entire series, I feel.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami was another book that really triggers the mind in ways that is too hard to describe. As is the case with everything I have read by Murakami, it is some kind of surrealist fever dream of a story where the reality often times feels tangentially attached to our world, and seemingly completely unconnected things are connected in the most absurdist fashion. The only real way I could explain this novel to someone is that it is a coming of age story if the entire story consisted of metaphors and unimaginable weirdness.

Johann Hari wrote one of the books that I have quoted more than any other, and encouraged others to read more often than any other throughout my life. When a friend of mine was telling me I should read Stolen Focus, I was pretty immediately intrigued. Then they told me that Johann Hari wrote it and I immediately told myself I had to read it.

And so I did. And it does a great job at explaining all of these vast sum of factors that are within our every day lives that contribute to the fact that we, as a whole, are losing our ability to focus on anything for any real length of time. It doesn't offer solutions, but that is also not really fair to put on a person who is just investigating an issue that no one else seems too concerned about. He interviews the person who created infinite scroll, he writes to great length about things that he does in order to circumvent technology trying to steal his focus, he writes about air pollution and the known effects it has on the brain (as well as how in impoverished parts of cities, there tends to be fair less done to reduce any kinds of air contaminants). This is one of those books that you have to read at your own risk - and that risk is to notice all the ways you're allowing your own focus to be stolen, and just how difficult it is to not succumb to it.

And I also finally finished the greatest series I have ever read - The Three Body Problem series. All three of the books in this series really work to highlight various aspects of humanity in a way that I have not yet really seen. The way that progress can be hampered by arrogance, or the way that tiny slivers of actions can have everlasting impacts on the species as a whole. The first novel comes off as a mystery novel while humanity comes to terms with a future alien invasion, while they are actively sabotaging humanity from within. The second book deals with plans, politics, and social ways that humanity deals with the impending attack. And the third book deals with the ramifications of just how unsustainable those plans truly are. Having said that, the physics is incredibly dense. By the end of Death's End, I was unable to sleep just trying to work out the physics that was being described in the book.

Most of the books I've read have just been, mostly, entertainment. The Alchemist is a novel that so many people have recommended, and I have seen so much praise for; however, it just didn't resonate with me. It was a pointless novel of chasing things for the chase with an ending that made it seem like drivel. While I am someone who believes firmly that the gifts from pursuit tend to be worth it, regardless of what the outcome is, the way this novel ends feels more like that journey is just this - pointless.

Snow Crash was just a fun read. I really didn't ever imagine that a pizza delivery scene could be so entertaining, but this book proved me wrong. It also does a great job of presenting a near future Capitalist hellscape where, one of my favorite things about the novel, is the fact that in order to deliver pizzas you must be college educated and the pizza chains are ran by criminal organizations who hope for your fuck up in pizza delivery so that you can be indebted to them for the remainder of your life. These things just really do work to set up for the real meat of the novel, but it works to highly the absurdist nature of the novel.

-Dustin S. Stover