March Reading Recap
I plan to do monthly reading recap posts with some scattered thoughts on the material I’m covering each month this year. I hope that these looser musings will serve as a foundation for more in-depth reading and writing in the future, and also just serve as a place for me to recommend books that I love (or warn against books I hate).
The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien (Audiobook, narrated by Andy Serkis)
I have a fairly long commute, which has been a real boon for my audiobook time. While audiobooks are different in many ways from “reading,” listening to oral storytelling is wonderful and I don’t hesitate to count listening as “reading” for the purposes of lists like these. I began the Lord of the Rings series (narrated by Andy Serkis) a couple of months ago, starting with The Hobbit. I have been wildly impressed. Serkis obviously excels at the Smeagol portions of the stories, but his mastery of voices and songs throughout the series has kept me enthralled. The Two Towers was a solid couple of weeks of commute time, but it was worth every second. It has been quite a long time since my last full LOTR revisit, and I’m hoping to round out this year by diving into material I’ve never managed to complete (The Silmarillion, certainly, and other posthumous Tolkien stories I’ve been putting on the backburner).
Physics and Philosophy, Werner Heisenberg
I think anyone who reads seriously can mark intellectual turning point texts that shaped who they are and how they both read and live today. For me, one of those texts was Werner Heisenberg’s Physicist’s Conception of Nature. Heisenberg is a complex figure: Nobel Prize-winning physicist, pioneer of modern quantum mechanics, and wartime scientist in service of the Nazi regime. Though after his capture he claimed he believed an actual atomic bomb was unfeasible for the Nazi nuclear project, it’s hard to let someone off the hook for that kind of collaboration.
Nevertheless, he was also an incredibly rich and deep thinker. The child of a classics professor, Heisenberg was steeped in the classics of moral and political philosophy and brought his philosophical background to bear on his scientific research, advocating for ethical training for scientists and explaining how his encounters with ancient philosophers shaped his approach to science and life. Here, he grapples deftly with the philosophical implications of quantum uncertainty and the difficulties of understanding the universe as physicists must. My own background in math and physics is so scant that I can’t trust myself to say much more without butchering his points, but this collection of lectures should be accessible to any reasonably interested layperson who would like to get a crash course in some major 20th century physics developments and their philosophical consequences from the horse’s mouth. Keep an eye out for a lengthier essay on Heisenberg coming soon.
Why We Are Restless, Benjamin and Jenna Silber Storey
This book promises to explore the origins of our modern restlessness and possible solutions to it. I’m not sure it fully lives up to the promise, but it gives readers bountiful food for thought along the way. Beginning with an anecdote of a student who has seemingly endless paths and opportunities available to her but a fundamental indecision based in a restless spirit, the two Storeys take the reader on a tour through four (coincidentally?) French thinkers who speak to the question of happiness or contentment: Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. The thinkers are pitted against each other, in a way. Montaigne’s ideal of immanent contentment that minimizes the importance of transcendentals and idealism is contrasted against Pascal’s oft-derided, self-effacing fixation on his own fallenness and his need for God and grace. Rousseau’s irreligiosity and haphazard approaches to life in various phases ranging from citizenship to “isolation” is presented as a counter to Pascal’s religious musings, while Tocqueville’s search for the key to American success is, in a way, presented as a tentative-yet-tense synthesis of the best parts of each. Not fully intellectual history, not fully self-help, and always provocative, this book made for an excellent campus reading group.
Harry Potter, 1, 2, 3, and 4
I first read the Harry Potter books in mid high school, and my mother conscientiously requested that I write review essays of the themes of each book as I travelled through them. While I would not characterize my upbringing as overly censorious or burdensome (I was allowed to read just about anything I wanted, and I did, in piles), we certainly ran in circles where Harry Potter was default suspect. I haven’t revisited them since, but have recently enjoyed the open-world Hogwarts: Legacy game and thought I would take a dive back into some light reading this month. Halfway through the series, I think that the books are both better than many people give them credit for and flawed in noticeable ways. I may attempt to write a broader review essay on completing the series again.
Adam Smith’s America, Glory Liu
I have lived in Adam Smith’s texts since my first semester in graduate school in 2017, and I don’t expect to put him down any time soon. 2022 was a banner year for Smith scholarship (including some of my own), and Glory Liu’s Adam Smith’s America has been on my radar since Princeton began promoting it. An extraordinary example of reception studies, scholarship that looks at how various ideas, thinkers, and texts are interpreted and utilized by those who read them long after the original author is dead, Liu tracks Smith’s influence from the American founding through the founding the “Chicago School” of economics to explain how the Scottish moral philosopher became an icon of American free-market rhetoric and scholarship. Highly recommend!
Ninth House & Hell Bent, Leigh Bardugo
I committed this year to reading more things published less than 10 years ago. We’ll see how that pans out. So, after thoroughly enjoying my first read of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History in January, the entire internet promised me I would love Leigh Bardugo’s debut adult novel Ninth House and its recent sequel Hell Bent. Well, they’re no Secret History, but they get the job done. The series focuses on Alex Stern, who can see ghosts, by the way. Stern, a drug addict with severe issues due to, you know, the ghost stuff, is recruited by a secret society at Yale that exists to reign in the occultic enterprises of the OTHER secret societies at Yale. Imagine Harry Potter + Netflix’s Wednesday + spooky, occult, “dark academia” aesthetics with a murder mystery plot, and you’ll have a good feel for the series. While the story isn’t always groundbreaking, what impresses me about this series is Bardugo’s ability to weave carefully-researched details about Yale’s campus, the town of New Haven, the history of both, and real-world Yale graduates and secret societies into the fictional narrative to make it very immersive. If you’re looking for the literary equivalent of a sleeve of Oreos that you don’t have to be embarrassed to recommend to others, these might do the trick.
For the Life of the World, Fr. Alexander Schmemman
In undergraduate, I took a course called “Food, Friendship, and Communion.” In that class, we read a selection from Alexander Schmemman’s For The Life of the World, and I have been long due for a full read. The book is in one sense an explanation of eastern Orthodox liturgy, in another sense an explanation of Orthodox sacramentology. But at its core, as Fr. Schmemman explains, it is a book about Christianity’s distinct understanding of life, the world, and life in the world that sets it in opposition to other religions that act simply as salves against fear and death. Highly compelling, whether you are from the Orthodox tradition or not.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
My first selection from the Book of the Month Club (sign up if you want to get me a free book credit)! I knew absolutely nothing about the book’s content going in, only that it won the Goodreads “best fiction” vote in 2022, as well as being selected as the Book of the Year by the BotMC.
The story centers on two game designers, old friends separated for a time who reconnect in Massachusetts during college. Sadie attends MIT, her friend Sam attends Harvard. Their friendship blossomed out of a shared love of video games, and they reunite to create something magical. With the help of Marx, Sam’s roommate, Sam and Sadie create a wildly popular game, become rich off it, and spend the next decade fighting, gaming, fighting about gaming, and creating beautiful things.
I liked this book more than I thought I would, but it might require a full post to review it and get my thoughts out in full. It had significant high points, but suffered from a sort of didactic form of writing that I’ve found frustrating in some contemporary fiction I’ve tried. The book is so interested in me knowing that it’s about trauma and disability and sexism and capitalism and racism and identity that at times I can’t hear the book itself over the loudness of the message. My favorite books hold up to repeat readings because to fully understand them, you have to dig deeper. I’m not sure that this book requires digging deeper, because it went to such pains to tell me what it was trying to tell me so explicitly and often. That sounds harsher than I mean it to, overall I think my impression of this book is positive and I would give it a lukewarm recommendation.
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
I’m teaching Nietzsche next week and so I’m refreshing on previous reads. Can’t possibly summarize in short form. What a trip.