Reviewing Every Book I've Ever Read
Attention Conservation Notice: For many of the books here, I no longer have an accurate recollection of their details. I’m relying on memories of memories.
The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury
★★★★
I read this collection for a book club I was attending while living in Oklahoma City. This was one of the only books that all members managed to read significant portions of. Bradbury writes so simply and imaginatively that it makes you believe you could write short stories too. </span>
Man of Steel and Velvet: A Guide to Masculine Development
Aubrey Andelin
★
Was either required or recommended reading at the theological college I attended, and was quoted with the confidence as if Moses had brought it down himself from a third trip up Mt. Sinai. Andelin wrote this book in the 1970s and it contains the worst of the reactionary movements of this time. Homophobic, sexist, essentialist: reading this book may increase the likelihood of beating your wife.
The authors wife, Helen Andelin, wrote Fascinating Womanhood, a perfect sexist complement to this volume, and started the movement of the same name which went on to reinforce millions of (mainly American) women’s belief that housework and cooking in suburbia was not only god-commanded, but the only way True Women had historically lived. </span>
How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education
Mortimer J. Adler
★★★
Overrated. That is not to say this is a bad book, and I certainly wouldn’t say that to Adler’s face. Unfortunately, How to Read a Book has been picked up by part of the self-help community, with promises of its brilliance way outpacing the books original scope. Any nerdy, voracious booklover is likely to pick up most of Adler’s techniques just by virtue of reading books and filtering to not read other books.
Some of the banalities include: reading the table of contents, skim-reading, situating the book within the context of other books it references. One wonders why Adler thought anyone willing to read through 400 pages on How to Read a Book wouldn’t already know the vast majority of its contents.
Adler, also a joint founder of the Great Books Movement, ends by giving us a list 137 recommended authors with only two women: Jane Austen and George Eliot. </span>
The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East
Caroline Glick
★★
I read this book at a time where I had a very limited knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or at least an extremely biased pro-Israel perspective. One can’t blame me for being brought up with this perspective, but perhaps we can blame Glick a little more.
The Israeli solution is exactly that: an Israeli solution for a Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One-state instead of two-state. Israel gets official hegemony and we just have to forget about the past. I’m sure any educated reader could see the problems with this book, but I certainly wasn’t at the time. Later, I read The Lemon Tree. It would have been beneficial to reverse the order. Two stars perhaps only in order to see what conservative Israeli’s say about the issue.
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Kim
Rudyard Kipling
★★★★★
Kim is immersive and brilliant. Not many books I have read compete with the level of sheer enjoyment I had in following the Kim around. Kipling apparently has a legacy of perpetuating racial eastern stereotypes, but I am in no way qualified in judging whether Kim suffers from this defect. What I do remember were the most lively, engaging characters and being introduced to Buddhism and the Wheel of Life. This is a book I want to read again for the first time.
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Mastery
Robert Greene
★★★★
Greene is a master of the historical biography and all the characters he introduced in this book were fascinating no matter my interest in the subject. I can remember walking around in my dormitory completing my cleaning duties fascinated by how Jean-François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone, how Marcel Proust’s life prepared him for In Search of Lost Time, or how Temple Grandin created machines to handle animal stress.
If you’re looking to become a Master by reading Greene, you’re reading for the wrong reason. He seems to have either no knowledge of survivorship bias or has just convinced himself that if he just continues to act like it doesn’t exist, no one will notice. His protege Ryan Holiday follows the same script, pumping out book after book on how to Be Successful by mapping out the way other successful people did so. They’re both bestselling authors, a testament to the unimagineable selling power of telling people the only barrier to success is the right mindset rather than genetics and luck.
Mastery is just so good despite the dubious premise that the reader’s latent talent will get unlocked by a simple reading because the stories of its masters are too engrossing. Read it as history and not self-help.
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Life of Charlemagne
Einhard
★★★
A short biography of Charlemagne, written by Einhard who was a courtier in the emperor’s court. Not recommended if you just care about learning about Charlemagne. I often found it hard to know when Einhard was exagerrating, how accurate his description of Charlemagne’s temperament was, or any of the useful surrounding information and modern biographer would provide. More interesting to me as a historiographical artefact than as history. </span>
New Testament Survey
Merill Tenney
★★
Was required reading for a class on the gospels I took while studying theology. The blurb describes it as a “comprehensive” survey, but unless you are an evangelical Protestant this is undoubtedly not true. It’s discussion of the problems of the origin and order of the gospels is at least a relatively accurate entry level introduction, but leaves out all of the interesting analysis and implications: i.e. if we have found out that Matthew and Luke are both just copying Mark, what does this really say about the supposed oral tradition? A book like this suffers from the fact that its audience is undoubtedly going to agree with it–Bible College attendees aren’t usually wanting to be told inconvenient truths about the book they worship. </span>
Harmony of the Gospels
A. T. Robertson
★★★
A genuinely interesting way to read the Gospels, if one cares to do so. Robertson lines up the different ways that the canon gospel writers tell the same stories in tables. If Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell the same story, we can see the similarities and differences in the telling.
The example above has been of particular interest to critical scholars, and if I had the knowledge I do now of the state of New Testament studies, this would have been a much more interesting read. In general Mark tells the story first, with the least embellishments. Matthew and Luke come along later, inserting what they believe to be neccessary theological additions. Finally, John, decades later, often tells completely different stories, but when he chooses one common to the Synoptic gospels, the Jesus he describes has leveled up. In the story above, where Jesus comes to be baptised by John the Baptist, Mark, writing first, describes how Jesus is baptised and the “Spirit as a dove” descends on him. Luke repeats essentially the same details, while Matthew adds later that John tries to stop him from getting baptised, telling the crowd “I have need to be baptized of thee!” Yea, sure Matt.
Robertson doesn’t even include John’s account in the tables, being so different from the Synoptics. But in his version, John sees Jesus and begins proclaiming that Jesus is the “Lamb of God” who will “take away the sin of the world”–referencing Isaiah 53. Wow John, that sure was convenient!
This pattern occurs over and over in the gospels, and Robertson does a good job (not that I guess he intended to do so) of showing visually how this happens. Often, the text in Mark tells the story in such a mimimal way that we get to see a huge wall of text in the Matthew and Luke columns surrounding Mark’s explanation, an obvious sign they have taken some liberties with interpreting the text for their intended audience.
The Harmony doesn’t do any of this intepretation for us though, and I can’t blame them for not doing so. Any explanation of the text would have been outdated in the matter of a few decades. </span>
The Illustrated Man
Ray Bradbury
★★★★
The Martian Chronicles were good enough to convince me to read these less famous but just as entertaining short stories. Unlike the Chronicles, this set of stories don’t have a common plot. Years later, I do not remember the stories, but I do remember it being a page-turner. </span>
Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
Carl Sagan
★★★
This was the first of Sagan’s books that I read, and though it doesn’t manage to reach the quality of his vocal chords, it was what I needed at the time. I was still studying theology, mired in a conspiratorial mindset, checking behind every door for a hidden for clues God left of his existence, mining every news story for signs of the end times. Sagan was the Anti-Conspiracy, the Skeptic before the community had a name, and the chronicler of highly intelligent but slightly insane.
Only a few chapters have stuck with me over the years. In one Sagan spent his time debunking (a topic he probably overdid) a mathematician who spent his time finding evidence of the divine in every biblical number he could get his hands on. In another he discusses Velikovsky’s Worlds In Collison, a fringe theory of a near encounter with the planet Venus which supposedly was the cause of “innumerable catastrophes”–ones that Velikovsky predictably connects to ancient mythological disaster stories.
While Sagan’s analysis of the topics Broca’s Brain deals with might contain an element of timelessness, the topics themselves certainly don’t. His mathematician is only one in a line of thousands of Jewish and Christian crackpots who convince themselves that God directs the integers, rather than a household name, and I wouldn’t trust myself to find a person (who hasn’t read Sagan) that would recognise Velikovsky or his theory. To a reader post-2000s, reading Sagan’s 1979 book simply means explaining unrecognizable, irrelevant topics only to have them dunked on. Sagan is no doubt right about much of what he writes in this book, but if I spent my time writing books combatting fringe lunatics, I’m pretty sure I’d be right too. </span>
Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before
Jean Twenge
★★
Another forced book club read, and certainly a book I would have avoided if I had the chance. Twenge deals with statistics throughout the whole book, and yet I am convinced she has no idea just how little she does (to anyone but the most gullible reader) to convince us that her correlations equal causations. This opposite phrase is no doubt uttered somewhere it in the book, a throwaway line to get us to believe that she has considered that possibility, but that in this case, it really is true.
Twenge hardly gets past the most banal accusations that Millenials are entitled and want special treatment, and blames smartphones for a large part of their supposed ills. It reads like your boomer uncle at a family gathering, but the boring conservative one, not the crackpot conspiracy theory one. If someone likes this book, I don’t trust them. </span>
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
★★★★
One of the great novellas. Not one to be stuck with in an English class though, as one may get discouraged writing about the symbolism of the fish and the boat after you discover Hemingway said there was no hidden meaning after all–the boat and fish was just a fish and a boat.
Hemingway employs the “no chapters” strategy, one Terry Pratchett also loved, but one I wasn’t a fan of at the time. </span>
1984
George Orwell
★★★★★
I wouldn’t have anything to say about this book that someone else hadn’t said. Continuously relevant and will probably gain parable status. When Trump was elected president of the United States, it was endlessly recommended and discussed by talking heads, recently-graduated Youtubers and people who you get the impression only read the SparkNotes. This annoyed me but in the end I felt guilty. I only wish people would have read it without the prompting of America’s Berlusconi. </span>
Animal Farm
George Orwell
★★★
Feels overrated. Certainly not a favourite of the Orwell I’ve read. Perhaps I didn’t get it, I read it just out of highschool.
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Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
★★★★
Huxley is great at leaving images in the mind. I agree with the consensus that it pairs well with 1984. It’s hard to determine which will be the popularity winner in the longer term, although the latter is out to an early lead. If you read soma as dopamine, you can almost see Brave New World as our world. Whether people see that as a real dystopia is currently under debate. Huxley was asking whether Nozick’s Experience Machine is something we would want to live with but more and more the answer seems to be yes. There are a fair amount of us who genuinely wouldn’t care if we could turn it on and step inside. Huxley would most likely be surprised since a fair amount of us, myself included, would choose to be Cypher and not Neo if we found ourselves inside the Matrix.
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Lord Jim
Joseph Conrad
★★★★★
Lord Jim was my favourite book for over a decade. Unfortunately, the plot is hazy to me now but what remains is the atmosphere. I imagine what appealed to me, as a conservative teenager reading it, was the type of questions Conrad seemed to be asking about masculinity and chance and fate. I certainly can’t see Lord Jim being as appealing to me if I were born a woman instead. I will note the first half of the book is what hooked me and the second half, where Jim earns his Lord title, was a change in direction that didn’t satisfy. I’m scared to read it again in case it’s worse than I remember.
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Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
★★★★
Read it in a single night with only a lamp to illuminate the room. I found it hard to understand on the first reading, but I read it around a decade later and the colonial context I had gained in the meantime made it more digestible but less exotic. As with Lord Jim, it was Conrad’s production of a disconcerting atmosphere that held my interest. That being said, I’m not sure I’d recommend Heart of Darkness to anyone–a colonial history would probably do better.
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The Stranger
Albert Camus
★★★★★
Absolutely brilliant. I haven’t talked to a single person who has read it who didn’t love it. It has been fifteen years and I can still remember the walk along the beach and the dialogue with the chaplain.
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A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking
★★★★
I read it when I was around 12, but the writing was clear enough for even me to understand. I believe it was anti-recommended by a jealous church-goer who was telling me that Yahweh had cursed Hawking for not believing in his existence by sending him to the chair. The time’s-arrow concept was particularly interesting, but not something I understood then and I will admit it has never landed in the intermediate years. Probably Hawking started my interest in physics and in my highschool years I would start reading a number of books on the quest for a unified theory.
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The Book Thief
Mark Zusak
★★
Unremarkable to me. I’ve never been able to understand the hype, although the type of person who has raved about it have never been those whose book judgement I trust.
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The Turning
Tim Winton
★★
A forced read in high school. One wonders if Tim Winton is Australia’s Herman Melville, unnecessarily hated by schoolkids because they were asked to read him in the wrong environment. I wouldn’t put any stock in my low rating, it would likely raise significantly if I didn’t happen to be so familiar with the setting Winton writes about.
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Magician
Raymond Feist
★★★★
One of the first significant fantasy novels I read after the Ranger’s Apprentice YA series when I was a teenager. At the time, I was completely transported. The world and the magic seemed unbelievably expansive. I have no idea why I didn’t continue the series, perhaps I didn’t realize there were other books to read. It doesn’t receive five stars only because as time passes I trust the ratings of my teenage self less and less.
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Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
★★★★★
Undoubtedly the funniest book I’ve ever read. I would read it on the bus and hide my chuckles. His jokes made me feel like I was in the know. What’s more likely is that teenage me missed half the references and half the fun. Hitchhiker’s Guide wasn’t the first comic book that I’d read. That honor goes to a book whose name I cannot remember but whose only joke I do recall was a character opening the last of his supplies and seeing the label on the water container: “Just add water”. The Guide seemed to have an endless supply of jokes, largely funnier and more absurd than any I’d read before.
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The Plot Against America
Philip Roth
★★★
I read this book too early in my life to have the necessary context. Roth happened to be on Harold Bloom’s Great Books list which led me to pick it up, prematurely. I can neither recommend nor discourage it, only mention the prose was excellent.
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2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke
★★★★
Not as good as the movie, but still fantastic. Exceptionally clear writing.
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The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
★★★★
The Alchemist is a page-turner with a loveable protagonist. But I imagine even Paulo is a little surprised this book lands on self-help lists. Maybe this is because American celebrities have a short memory and have forgotten that “its the journey not the destination” is a wisdom-turned-platitude that a kid could tell you. An enjoyable read nonetheless, as long as you don’t ever have to meet someone who tells you it’s their favourite.
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The Pilgrimage
Paulo Coelho
★★★★
Further evidence that I am not a Coelho hater is my reading of this book. I remember reading The Pilgrimage on my lunch breaks working at a fast food fried-chicken chain where I worked on the fryers for hours at a time. The upstairs storeroom was the only place in the building where it didn’t feel like oil was saturating the air. After missing it reading The Alchemist, I realized Coelho was a Christian and a mystic one at that. At the time, I was anything but–I was Protestant in the strictest sense, obsessed with the biblical text. If God told me he wasn’t a fundamentalist, he’d just have come back later after he’d done some additional study.
So The Pilgrimage introduced me to the meditative side of Christianity, one severely underexplored in the cult I grew up in. It didn’t make any immediate impact, but was one of many other views of my religion which eventually piled up years later and convinced me my specific brand of belief wasn’t The Truth.
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Angels and Demons
Dan Brown
★★★
Don’t be put off reading Dan Brown because everyone educated tells you he’s an idiot. Just remember you’re eating at Macdonalds, not Nobu. This book was a pageturner.
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The Books of Pellinor (Series)
Alison Croggon
★★★★
Extremely engrossing, tropey, YA fantasy. I can’t remember a single plot point but I remember I loved finding these at random in my high school library. I felt as much inside this world as I did when I read Philip Pulman’s The Golden Compass.
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The Great Gatsby
Scott Fitzgerald
★★★★★
I found it average when I was assigned it in high school, but it has invaded space in my mind since. Controversially, I see Gatsby as an enviable figure, despite no one showing at his funeral. Perhaps it is because I love the idea of parties too much. The Great Gatsby is one of the few novels I have read twice and would probably read a third–the plot seems endlessly interpretable, the themes of romance, deception, capitalism, happiness, homosexuality, reputation, legacy, are just so numerous that every time I listen to someone analyze it I hear something new.
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The Odyssey
Homer
★★★★★
Worth reading for the Sirens alone. Even more interestingly, Homer has been receiving the Moses treatment by scholars in the last few centuries. He is no longer said to have existed, or more precisely, written, as a single person or poet and the work is now seen as a composite of many writers or speakers, just like the Pentateuch. The discovery of a convincing theory behind how this was done over possibly hundreds of years is fascinating. (The wikipedia entry on Homer is a good enough starting point.)
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Walden
Henry Thoureau
★★★★★
One of the few books which completely changed my thinking on a whole range of topics. When I read it as a teenager, I wanted to ditch my apartment and live alone in the woods, although the fact that my rent was too high and I had no job may have played a bit into this. I suspect that Walden is one of those books that one grows out of and for this reason I am scared to give it a re-read.
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Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
★★★★★
Frankenstein is so good I get angry the movies portray such a different vibe. Unbelievably, Mary Shelley began writing it when she was only 18. If someone ever wanted to start reading the classics and had not been in the habit of focussing, I’d tell them to read Frankenstein because Shelley’s brilliant style makes the story incredibly clear, vivid and discussable.
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On the Road
Jack Kerouac
★★
I never finished Kerouac’s stream of consciousness masterpiece. It feels as if the fact that it was written in a manic revelry is more important than the book itself. There were a few striking scenes but it never hooked me and it doesn’t seem to hold any important part of the culture anymore.
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
★★★
Fun, but not particularly memorable for me. Huckleberry Finn just doesn’t hold the same weight for an Australian as an American.
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Dead Men’s Secrets
Johnathan Gray
★
I was given this pre-history conspiracy theory adventure story pretending to be scientific theory by my uncle who thought Yahweh would kill Richard Dawkins for speaking about his non-existence. In the end, it was a good introduction to the genre as it allowed me, a long while later, to notice the same inflections and suspicious attitude that permeated the books of the leader of the cult I escaped.
From what I can now tell, Gray was a budget Graham Hancock, with the book having the same general thesis as Magicians of the Gods. Unfortunately for Gray, he never appeared on Joe Rogan.
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Malachi’s Message
Gerald Flurry
★
One of the worst-written books in the history of mankind. Flurry is incapable of writing an interesting sentence and only by a slim margin has been able to write one that doesn’t contain either all caps, small caps, italics, or an exclamation mark. I calculated previously that at his peak, <a href=”https://agnostichistory.com/cult/pcg/2019/10/05/the-exclamation-mark-church-of-god.html”>one in four</a> of Flurry’s sentences ended with an exclamation mark, which places him in a pantheon of exaggerators.
Malachi’s Message makes the claim that Flurry is a special prophet mentioned by the Old Testament’s book of Malachi, one that was so hard to swallow that even the majority of the conspiracy-theory-primed followers of Herbert W. Armstrong rejected it. If Yahweh were to exist and Flurry was correct, it’d be enough to make one a polytheist–it just couldn’t be true that there was only one god if its taste were so inadequate.
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The Missing Dimension in Sex
Herbert W. Armstrong
★
Armstrong talks about sex as if he never had an orgasm. It may be that he had just not recently experienced one from his partner since it was later revealed, in a court case, that he had been molesting his daughter.
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