Category: Book Review
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The Courage to Follow
Why that one line always gets me There are spoilers for a nearly 50 year old movie in this. I first saw the movie Watership Down (1978) as an early teen, and even then, it felt old. Even compared to other animated films from that period–Disney’s Robinhood (1973) or The Rescuers (1977) —Watership was noticeably…
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GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy
A Short Review I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is, in terms of its physical object, one of ugliest books that I have ever seen. Literally everything is wrong. The low res photo cover is trash. The paper is…well actually the paper is not bad. But most tragically, the…
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Review: I Want to Die, but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki
I Sat Down with the International Smash Hit Earlier this year, the English speaking world was treated with the sequel to Baek Sehee’s best-selling memoir/self-help book, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. The original, which was self-published in Korea in 2018 and received its translation and international release in 2022, became…
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Review of What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy
“I know that the majority of people who are not only regarded as intelligent but are indeed intelligent, capable of understanding the most difficult scientific, mathematical and philosophical reasonings, are very rarely capable of understanding a most simple and obvious truth, if it is such as requires that they admit that a judgement they have…
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Is Finding a Purpose for Losers?
The Bourgeois Man Makes His Case. Going by the title, you might assume that this book would be some religious self-help text about strengthening one’s faith. You’d be wrong. Published in the aftermath of WWII, The True Believer is instead an attempt to describe the psychology of the individual member of a mass movement, any…
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The Rules of Attraction
By Bret Easton Ellis “The rich, privileged kids at Camden College play by a new set of rules…” So reads the back jacket of Ellis’s 1987 novel, The Rules of Attraction, which follows the exploits of three wealthy college seniors (Lauren, Sean, and Paul) through a semester at their expensive private school. Ellis’s work reached…
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Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
In this 1985 work, Neil Postman makes the case that TV is altering the form and content of American discourse and culture for the worse.
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The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche
Exploring the final work of the West’s most controversial philosopher Dostoevsky once said, “If Christ is not the truth, I prefer to remain outside the truth with Christ.” Though anybody can understand the words, to truly understand the sentiment is a difficult thing. Everyone finds ways to deceive themselves; it is another matter entirely to…
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The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Meaning, Nihilism, and the Question of Suicide Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus is singularly obsessed with one question: is suicide a valid reaction to realizing that one lives in an absurd world? The Absurd It’s important to understand what Camus means when he refers to an absurd world. He doesn’t simply mean that we live…
The Barking Years 