How to Live

Recently, I have started to read How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell. For anyone interested, here are the 20 themes discussed in the book: 

Don't worry about death;
Pay attention;

Be born;
Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted;
Survive love and loss;
Use little tricks;
Question everything;
Keep a private room behind the shop;
Be convivial: live with others;
Wake from the sleep of habit;
Live temperately;
Guard your humanity;
Do something no one has done before;
See the world;
Do a good job, but not too good a job;
Philosophize only by accident;
Reflect on everything; regret nothing;
Give up control;
Be ordinary and imperfect;
Let life be its own answer.

Trust by Hernan Diaz

I just finished reading Trust, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction by Hernan Diaz. The novel begins in New York City in 1927 and ends in 1938, chronicling the collective experience of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The book explores themes such as class, power, and money, and how they can be used to control the truth, thereby controlling the narrative. Here is an excellent review of the book by The Atlantic.

Law and Manners By Lord Moulton

I came across Lord Moulton’s incredible essay titled “Law and Manners” while listening to the EconTalk podcast. In his essay, Moulton discusses unwritten rules, or the Obedience of the Unforceable, that fall between Positive Law and Free Choice. The central tenet of the essay is that Positive Law provides a necessary but not sufficient framework for regulating human manners. He, therefore, argues that manners are crucial in maintaining social stratum. Here is a direct quote from the essay that emphasizes this theme — 

“In order to explain my title I must ask you to follow me in examining the three great domains of human action. First comes the domain of positive law, where our actions are prescribed by laws which must be obeyed. Next comes the domain of free choice, which includes all those actions as to which we claim and enjoy complete freedom. But between these two there is a third large and important domain in which there rules neither positive law nor absolute freedom. In that domain there is no law which inexorably determines our course of action, and yet we feel that we are not free to choose as we would. The degree of this sense of a lack of complete freedom in this domain varies in every case. It grades from a consciousness of a duty nearly as strong as positive law to a feeling that the matter is all but a question of personal choice. Some might wish to parcel out this domain into separate countries, calling one, for instance, the domain of duty, another the domain of public spirit, another the domain of good form; but I prefer to look at it as all one domain, for it has one and the same characteristic throughout — it is the domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable. The obedience is the obedience of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey. He is the enforcer of the law upon himself.”

What am I reading?

To those who follow my blog and want to keep up with my literary endeavors, I'd like to share three books that are on my bookshelf currently. 

1. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
2. All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
3. I Wish You Were Here, by Jodi Picoult. I am unlikely to continue reading this book for quite some time as it contains copious amounts of information and our shared experiences related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Reading it may not be a wise use of your time if you wish to avoid revisiting the pandemic years. 

The Silent Patient

The readers of my blog should know that I usually don’t read psychological thrillers and am not a big fan of thriller novels. But I must admit that Alex Michaelides’s The Silent Patient did not disappoint and was a roller coaster ride. Without giving too much away, the novel tells the story of Alicia Berenson, a successful painter from London who murdered her husband, Gabriel, a fashion photographer, and then goes silent after the incident. It follows a criminal psychologist and therapist, Theo Faber, who becomes obsessed with getting Alicia to talk and uncover the truth behind the murder. Alex used flashbacks to Alicia’s past, interspersed with Theo’s present-day therapy sessions, to maintain a sense of intrigue and a steady pace. The plot’s twists and turns are skillfully executed, culminating in a satisfying and shocking ending. I recommend reading this book if you want to escape from reality for a day or two. 

After reading this, you may be interested in The Maidens by the same author. 

Here are some thoughtful quotes from the book

“We are made up of different parts, some good, some bad, and a healthy mind can tolerate this ambivalence and juggle both good and bad at the same time. Mental illness is precisely about a lack of this kind of integration - we end up losing contact with the unacceptable parts of ourselves.”

“Choosing a lover is lot like choosing a therapist. We need to ask ourselves, is this someone who will be honest with me, listen to criticism, admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible”

“The aim of the therapy is not to correct the past but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it.”

All the Light We Cannot See

In All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr skillfully captures the essence of human resilience in the face of the immense upheaval of World War II. The book is a heartwarming and inspiring tale of hope, optimism, and self-determination, following the lives of two characters, Marie-Laure, a blind girl from France, and Werner Pfenning, an orphan raised in Nazi Germany. Their stories intertwine against the harrowing backdrop of war, highlighting the indomitable human spirit even in the darkest of times. The book's poignant conclusion reminds us of the sobering reality of war and the importance of learning from the past, yet their journeys serve as a powerful testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the importance of striving forward. For those with an interest in historical fiction, I would strongly recommend this book.

Sea of Tranquility

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, published amid the COVID-19 pandemic, examines the themes of human existence and perseverance during a crisis. Woven inside these themes, however, is the bigger metaphysical question of what constitutes or doesn’t constitutes time and reality. Are we living in a simulation? Is reality real? If life is all but a simulation, is human flourishing still possible? 

In a little more than 270 pages, Mandel transports you through four distinct periods (1912, 2020, 2203, and 2401) while narrating the tale of three characters who experience the same abnormal phenomena at various points in time and one detective who investigates this anomaly. The interconnectedness between these periods is what makes the book very enthralling. As the story unfolds, the logic and sequence become more explicit, revealing the author’s purpose.

If you are a science fiction fan and love such topics as space colonization and time travel, you will enjoy reading this book. However, you will probably benefit from reading The Glass Hotel first as some overlapping characters appear in both books (which I learned later). 

Here is my favorite quote from the book: “…as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

And one more related to public health: “It seems like it’s been fairly well contained,” but here’s an epidemiological question: if you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all?” 

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Siddhartha examines the human condition and the pursuit of meaning in life. It is one of the easy reads for anyone interested in Far East Buddhist philosophy. 

The book tells the story of a young man named Siddhartha who embarks on a journey of self-discovery with his friend Govinda. Siddhartha and Govinda leave home and family and join a group of Samana (ascetics). Siddhartha, however, becomes disillusioned with his path and sets out on his own, meeting Gotama Buddha on his way. Among other things, the book explores the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, which holds that the meaning of life cannot be taught or given to an individual but must be discovered through one's own life struggles and experiences.

Here is one of my favorite paragraphs from the book: "When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he cannot find anything, take in anything because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal."