Tag: Book Review
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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 Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann
The question at hand is how does what passes for “knowledge” and “reality” within a given social situation or context achieve this status? How do groups of people come to share an agreed upon “reality?”
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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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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 