Belated 2015-2016 Reading List

Hi folks,

If you're looking for new things to read, I'm here to share the things I've been reading.  I'll start with the things I most highly recommend, but that will be followed by everything in case our tastes don't quite align but you just need some ideas.

Top Recommendations (in no particular order):

1) Different Seasons by Stephen King: 4-part collection of novellas, 3 of which were made into the movies The Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, and Stand by Me.  Just really compelling, solid story-telling with a weirder 4th story-within-a-story at the end.  The characters are so well-developed that they feel relatable, even though many of them are not.

2) The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling: not a Harry Potter book!  This is a story of small-town politics as well as teen angst.  Lots of different characters all developed pretty well.  There are one or two that are just meant to be hated, but most are imperfect and realistic.

3) Fall of Giants by Ken Follett: part 1 (and the best installment) of a trilogy that spans the 20th century.  It's a giant book that centers around World War 1 with a good bit about women's suffrage as well.  Again lots of characters and lots of opportunity to learn about history while also being entertained.

4) Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner: a short, nonfictional collection of observations and research about out-side-the-box problem solving that uses a lot of real-world examples that make it very entertaining rather than overly theoretical.  By the same guys that wrote Freakonomics.

5) The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson: There are two storylines: the present tense story of an old guy on the run with a stolen bag of money and the past tense story of the rest of the guy's life.  It reminded me a lot of Forrest Gump in that the man just finds himself in an absurd number of history-affecting circumstances-- and it is just as entertaining as Forrest Gump as well.

6) Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: This one is a bit dryer, but it's worth it.  It's a nonfictional exploration that looks at the development of human civilization to explain why certain groups of people became powerful while others did not.  It is very educational and is also useful in dissolving a lot of myths about the superiority of any given race or nation.

7) A Man Called Ove by Frederick Backman: This is a rare focus on a curmudgeon of a main character-- that guy who just always seems dissatisfied with everything... and it somehow makes you really empathize with him.  It's the kind of book that sneaks up on you in a great way.



The Rest of my Reads (in no particular order):  Most of them are worth a shot, unless I say otherwise.

8) The Case for Reincarnation by J. Allan Danelek: a brief look at the beliefs held about spiritual reincarnation.  Interesting but hard to take too seriously as much of it is speculation.  However, there are some accounts of people who seem to accurately remember past lives, which is quite compelling.
9) The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros: a series of vignettes about growing up in a Latino community in Chicago.

10) The Dark Volume by G.W. Dahlquist, lengthy sequel to the thrilling Glass Books of the Dream Eaters.  Unfortunately it falls short.  The villains are less compelling, the mystery is less compelling, and the ending is extremely dissatisfying.

11) Why I Write by George Orwell: a collection of essays

12) The Hatchet by Gary Paulsen: story of a boy who crash-lands in the Canadian wilderness and must survive on his own.

13) The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: Classic tale of a man who stays young by having a portrait age for him and collect all his sins.  It felt like my version was incomplete because it seems like almost nothing happens in the story.  I was like, "Did China censor the story?"  There are some compelling philosophies, but there are also many parts that drag.

14) Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami: I remember liking this one a lot, but I didn't put it above because I couldn't remember many details.  It's about a guy who's in love with a girl who's kind of crazy.  I think I liked it because it has the quirky characters Murakami is known for but a more realistic story and setting than he is known for.

15) Winter of the World by Ken Follett: part two of the Century Trilogy, it focuses on WW2.  I enjoyed it, but was sad to see many of the characters from book 1 older and less important.  It was also less educational because I knew more about WW2 than I did about WW1.  However, the new characters are still pretty compelling, most of them being the children of the 1st book's characters.

16) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami: possibly Murakami's most famous work, but a weird combo of off-the-wall things happening in juxtaposition with really boring almost-nothing happening.  It was quite jarring, and the meaning is hard to pin down, but there's a lot there to unpack if you want to try.

17) Edge of Eternity by Ken Follett: 3rd book in the Century Trilogy, centered mostly on the fight for civil rights.  I would not recommend reading this one.  It stretches on for the longest amount of time in terms of both the physical length of the book and the in-story time.  The characters are not compelling enough to make you want to read for that long.

18) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: creative work of fiction that is told from the perspective of an autistic boy (though the text never directly says he's autistic).  It's really interesting to read about something that seems very abnormal from the perspective of someone for whom it is normal.

19)  Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut:  as with many Vonnegut works, it's hard to really summarize exactly what this is about.  Basically it tells you that the main character is going to lose his mind, and then it takes you through the few days leading up to this happening.

20) Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan: a lengthy fictional look at the same spirit being reincarnated into different animals throughout the history of the Communist Revolution and then the reign of Mao Zedong in China.  I loved the initial donkey section, but then the narrative perspective changes and starts alternating between sections, which I found off-putting because I liked the second narrator a lot less.

21) The Complete Short Stories of Roald Dahl, volume 1: unlike his most famous works, these are not children's stories.  A large number of them focus on war, specifically fighter pilots.  His style is quite compelling.

22) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: lots of stuff to unpack, and maybe one of the greatest fictional works of all time, but the reasons for this status are becoming less relevant, in my opinion.  I wrote an in-depth post about it last year, if you wish to look in my archive.

23) Unwind by Neal Shusterman: young adult dystopian novel where abortion is illegal... until the child is 13, and then parents can elect to have them "unwound," which basically means they are cut up and all their parts are used to heal wounded and sick people.

24) The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern: the story of two competing magicians whose competition occurs in the context of a circus over the course of many years.  Lots of magical, poetic passages, but I found myself not really believing the motivation of the two characters to participate in this life dominating competition with almost no information from the men who compelled them to be in it.  I much preferred the side stories about people who were inspired and drawn in by the magic of the circus.

25) The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe:  a memoir of the last parts of the writer's mother's life and their time spent discussing books and life.  Lots of good thoughts about outlook, meaning, and of course books.  Although I must admit I have only been compelled to read one book from their list so far.

26) Watership Down by Richard Adams:  It's about bunnies!  Bunnies travelling all over the place to try and create a new home.  It's an adventure so lots of stuff about leadership, friendship, trust, and risk.

27)  The Fault in Our Stars by John Green: sort of a love story, but not quite... it's more about having cancer (or some other equally massive problem) and still living your life anyway.

28) Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend by Matthew Dicks: lots of thoughts on childhood, autism, and loneliness told from the perspective of an autistic boy's imaginary friend.  Halfway through it becomes a mystery, and then later an adventure.

29) Six Years by Harlan Coben: mystery thriller about a guy who falls in love and is unceremoniously and without explanation left for another man.  Six years later, that other man dies, and our main character decides to look the girl up... but she's nowhere to be found!  What to do?

That's it, folks.  You may notice that this two-year list is a similar length to past 1-year lists.  And you may think that I'm getting lazy with my reading.  And I will say to you that at least 8 of these books were quite long, so give me a break!

Anyway... try something out.  Happy reading.

When You Travel Alone

When you travel alone, you will find yourself going through a range of experiences and emotions.  Depending on the makeup of your personality, your age, and your travel experiences thus far, you could experience them in any order and in any level of extremity.  But you will likely experience them all at one time another on any given trip of substantiality.  

You can expect to feel some anxiety, maybe even fear.  “What the hell have I gotten myself into?” you may ask.  “What am I doing here?  How did the chain of cause and effect result in this random outcome?”  This line of thinking is the almost inevitable result of going outside your own comfort zone.  Some people feel it in a somewhat darkly humorous way, a mild masochism where they are able to observe their own discomfort and find amusement in it.  Others may feel borderline paralysis, the feeling that they have jumped into the deep end of the pool without being able to swim.  Some may feel they are somewhere between these two.  Some may go back and forth between the extremes.  I know because I have felt all of these things, on different trips, at different times.  

You can also expect to feel intense joy at the novelty of it all, the discovery that there is so much out there in the world, that so much of it can be so different from your past experience and so beautiful-- not necessarily beautiful because it is so different, just beautiful in its own right.  And the fact that you can see both beauty in your own life and in the lives of those so completely alien to you gives you a sense of prideful accomplishment and wonder regarding all the yet undiscovered beauties that this world might have to offer.  

You will likely experience intense loneliness.  You will miss those people whom you love and who have not come with you.  You will want to call them, Skype them, Facebook message them, write blogs for them.  Some of this is because you simply want them around.  They are important to you because they care about you and because you care about them.  Life is just better when they are around.  But some of this loneliness comes from other places.  It comes from not having talked to anyone for longer than usual and just really really needing to speak.  It comes from talking to others but not about anything of substance, perhaps from having the same small talk conversation three or four or five times in a row.  It comes as a result of a fresh connection with our own weird individuality which it is very easy to ignore when surrounded by those we know, but which comes out guns blazing in the absence of strong outside influence.  It can come from being misunderstood.  It can come from realizing that you’ve misunderstood yourself or some other part of the world.  It can come from discovering and understanding something new about yourself.  Regardless of the source, you are likely to experience or re-experience your individuality in a fairly intense and aching way.  

If you are single, you are likely to feel excitement and arousal towards others of your sexual orientation-- countless thrilling possibilities and/or successes and/or frustrations that may result from these feelings.  Be it positive or negative, you can expect an extra charge to things that is not there in everyday life and that makes you more alive than on your average day.  

If you are in a relationship, you could feel that aforementioned loneliness at being separated from them, perhaps guilt for having left them, perhaps resentment for them not having come with you.  You may feel the aforementioned pride and sense of self at being your own person, a ME instead of half of a WE.  You could feel incredibly secure in meeting new people-- able to do and say anything because you know you have someone who loves and supports you, so you don’t need the approval of anyone new.  Their approval is nice of course, but you do not need it.    

You could instead feel tempted, desiring of others, and yet restricted from giving yourself fully to an experience with them, held back by your existing devotions.  

You will most certainly feel empowerment in your ability to handle yourself out there in new circumstances with people you don’t know, languages you don’t understand, and places you’ve never been.  The successful navigations.  The conversations you understood with foreigners, however basic the topics may have been.  Perhaps amazement at how easy it sometimes seems for this world to feel and be meaningfully, usefully connected.  Is it really this easy?  Are you just more capable than most?  Are you luckier than most?  Is this world really this nice?  Are people really this kind?  Whatever the answers to these questions, you will likely feel more able than you did before.

You may feel insecure, perhaps not wanting to speak to locals as a result of either the embarrassment of not knowing their language or fear of being taken advantage of -- or perhaps not wanting to speak to fellow travelers for fear of revealing your own loneliness or a comparative lack in experience and understanding.  

Or perhaps you’ll feel the opposite-- that you are more experienced and understanding.  This may make you look down upon these others and feel that to talk with them might be a waste of your time.  Or it might make you eager to share what you know and help others to see the beauty that you yourself have seen in this world.  How you feel and act is largely your choice. 

You will likely feel free to a rare degree: no job to prepare for, no people to see, no chores to complete.  You do not need to consider anyone else’s opinions when planning your day.  You do not even need to plan your day.  You can be yourself.  You can be someone else.  You can be several someones in different circumstances at different times.  You can find the time to do those things that are so easily put off until later because of the pressures of every day life, those self-growth type things like writing or meditating or reading or traveling itself-- which is more than anything a physical embodiment of our striving to grow through experience.

You might feel bored.  There is only so much time you can spend reading museum displays, walking around cool places, and taking photographs  (or doing anything, really) before it becomes tedious.  If you sense this boredom coming on, there are two healthy reactions.  One is to change it up.  Do something completely different to keep things varied and stimulating.  One of my favorite change-ups is going to a cultural show of some kind.  Some people try unique sporting activities.  You’ll still feel very tired afterward, but in a good way.  The other reaction is to simply rest and do something normal, typical.  Have a coffee and surf Facebook.  Go back to your room and lay down.  Have a beer and chat up the bartender.  Do one of the self-growth things mentioned before.  Mine is writing.  

You will likely feel irritation with someone.  

You will likely feel grateful toward someone.  

You will likely feel ripped off in some exchange.

You will likely feel like you got a bargain in some exchange.

You may at times feel strong, spiritually tapped in, even all-powerful-- the stallion that mounts the world.  You may also feel overwhelmed and insignificant- a speck in the great scheme of things.  But excluding adolescence and some key highs and lows of life, lone travel is something that best gives rise to new feelings and thoughts, whatever forms they may come in.  

So expect to feel and think.

Lessons from the Concentration Camp

        I spent some time at the Sauchsenhausen Concentration Camp outside Berlin, and I was amazed at how freshly the Holocaust can hit you, no matter how much you have learned about it already.  Two things stuck with me in particular. 

The first came early on when our tour guide gave us some background knowledge on exactly how someone like Hitler or Mussolini was able to come to power.  The guide was a gifted speaker, his rhetoric was poetic in its parallelism which consisted of a sequence of descriptions that always began, “A fascist will...”  And the thing that struck me most about this description (and it is possible that it was intended this way) was that nearly everything that was said could also have been applied to talk about how Trump has recently come to power.  

For example: a fascist will contradict himself.  Mussolini would make speeches to farmers about how the people in the cities were living like kings while the farmers did all the hard work and had nothing.  Then he would go to the cities and talk to factory workers about how people in the country were living like kings while the factory workers were doing all that hard labor and had nothing.  And as a result he gained widespread support-- because everyone felt like he understood and spoke for them, but he didn’t speak for them.  He said what he thought they wanted to hear.   

And you may think that, yeah, that could have worked back then, but now we have smart phones, mass media, and the internet-- so if someone contradicts himself, everyone will know and that person won’t be able to do what the fascists of the past were able to do.  But you would not be right about this because people still hear what they want to hear.  They latch on and identify with ideas that resonate with them, and once this happens they are willing to overlook everything else.  Yeah, Hitler says the Jews are bad, they might think, but Hitler doesn’t mean Jews like my friend David.  He means those other bad Jews.  Yeah, he imprisons political threats, I guess, (shrug) but he’s going to make Germany great again!

       

       These last four words, by the way, were one of Hitler’s political slogans, because a fascist uses nationalism to his advantage.  He uses ideas of large-scale pride and change to get people on his side.  Your average voter is not politically savvy.  They simply want somebody they can identify with, someone who seems to tell it straight.  They do not want to listen to some intellectual outline in detail a specific plan and the research backing it up.  They can’t identify with this intellectual.  They want the guy that speaks their language.   

        

The second thing which has stuck with me (very much related to the first) was how things escalated to such an extreme where tens of thousands of German people were willingly contributing to the horrific acts that occurred. It’s easy to blame the leaders, but they were not able to do what they did without a lot of people going along with them.  How did Germany go from being a strong nation contributing on many levels to the development of the world before 1915 to a less strong but still proud country by 1925 to a broken country where a guy like Hitler is gaining popularity in 1935, to the mass-murdering enemy of much of the world by 1945?

In summary, Germany got screwed by the combined results of World War 1 and the Great Depression, which allowed a persuasive speaker like Hitler to get a following.  Because people listened to him (and because people were so anti-Communist) they allowed him into a position of power knowing he had extreme ideas because, hey, at least he wasn’t a Communist.  Hitler than recruited the police and the military to his side and got them to eliminate all of his political opposition.  These police and military men made other people so afraid that more and more people became informants and/or joined the Nazi party simply to try and avoid being considered a political threat themselves.

Hitler also rewarded extreme ideas in his leaders, which understandably resulted in those leaders seeking further extremes in order to gain favor themselves.  This encouragement of selfish thinking was dangerous. 

More dangerous (and ingenious in some ways) was the diffusion of responsibility that enabled the mass murders of the Holocaust.  It started out with Nazis simply being ordered to shoot people en masse.  After a while, Himmler recognized that this was having a negative psychological impact on the soldiers doing the shooting.  Only after that did they start using things like gas chambers.  The idea was to divide up the responsibility of the mass murders so that no one felt individually like a murderer.  If a bunch of people were to be suffocated with exhaust fumes, one soldier would put the people in the van.  Another would connect the exhaust pipe to the interior.  And a third would actually drive the van around.  If people were to be individually and unknowingly executed, one man would lead them into a room.  A man in a different room would press a button causing death without seeing it.  Then another man would come dispose of the bodies.  The Nazis were able to do this much more easily and with less psychological downside for them. 

And the mass murders were not always part of the plan.  It got to that point in phases.  It started out mainly as imprisonment and isolation of people who were considered political threats.  Then it was realized that all these people could be economically useful (in the form of free labor) and so they were inhumanely exploited.  This stepping stone of less humane treatment combined with Hitler’s strong personality-based leadership combined with the war turning against the Nazis in the last few years all made it easier for the mass murders to take place.

Something the Germans have really taken to heart, which I’ve seen in museums and on tours, is the idea of learning from the mistakes of the past.  They do not try to cover up or deny any of the awful things that happened here less than a century ago.  Other countries (and I’m thinking especially of China and the U.S.A. right now) would do well to have a more similar mindset.  China still censors its people in many ways and it is taboo to talk in detail about any of the questionable acts that have happened during and since the Communist revolution.  Americans and their politicians frequently make short-sighted decisions using incomplete reasoning as support for these decisions in addition to downplaying their overly domineering military presence in the world both past and present.  

It is easy and common for people to still associate Germany with Nazism, but I urge folks to (if they must to this) do this not in a condemning way but rather with a conscientious mind, one that seeks to find some meaning in all that happened and use that meaning to ensure that the world continues to be a better place than it was in 1945.  Because phrases like “make Germany great again” or “make America great again” have something inherently false about them.  There was never a point in the past where either nation was without flaw.  Progress in general is such that in most cases, both countries (and most countries) are at their best right now-- with memories of past greatness being greatly influenced by nostalgia or better circumstances for individual people rather than the nation as a whole.  Phrases like these are designed to ignite nationalistic fervor which, once ignited, is very easy to manipulate.  

Reflections on the Berlin Holocaust Memorial

         As you approach the Holocaust Memorial of Berlin, you see that it consists of a series of dark stone rectangular prisms with no signs or labels of any kind (other than a possible assortment of temporary messages drawn in snow).  Upon seeking a meaning for this presentation of rectangles you may find yourself noticing that the approximate size and shape of each one matches that of a coffin.  But in between each coffin-sized rectangle is a 2-foot-wide space which allows you to easily walk further into the memorial.  Upon doing so, you quickly realize that there are a great number of these stones, and that the further in you go, the larger they become.  They go from being coffin-sized to being as tall as you are, and then taller, and then twice as tall.  At this point they are surrounding you, towering over you, dominating you.  

They are organized in an almost perfect grid, one that you’d think it would be easy to escape from, should the need arise.  And yet, you may just find yourself on edge, trapped, claustrophobic.  You may find yourself wondering whether or not those footsteps you hear around the corner might just be those of a sinister intent.  

And if you go in the winter, as I did, you will likely find the path slick with ice and not always to be trusted.  You may find yourself holding on to those dark stone walls-- those same stone walls that are dominating this temporary world of yours, those walls which are making you somewhat uncomfortable, those walls which make possible the cold that keeps ice frozen here even when the normal streets nearby remain perfectly walkable.  

And if you venture beneath these stones, you will find the names and stories of the 5 to 6 million people who died as part of the Holocaust-- this does not include those who died as a result of the war, only the Holocaust itself.  The word murder, which is not used in connection with war, is used frequently.  The stories of the 5 to 6 million  who were murdered-- that’s what you will find under the stones.  They are underground.  Although, not all of the stories.  It would take quite a lot of time and space to tell 6 million stories.  And half of the stories are unable to be told anyway, as they happened too quickly, or in places too obscure, or to people who were not writers, or to people who had no one left to write to, or to young children, or to the mentally handicapped, or before the victims yet knew for sure what was going on.  

Then when you emerge from this underground museum, you are back amongst the stones.  They are large and well-organized.  They are also very similar to one another, never exactly the same, but quite similar.  They are dark.  They are blank.  They are hard.  They are cold.