Siddhartha Golu

The School of Life - a massively popular YouTube channel - used to be this source of solace in some turbulent times of my college life. It is not something that you'd think would be cheerful and uplifting - a quick glance at some of the most popular videos of theirs would include titles such as ‘Why we go cold on our partners,' ‘Why you will marry the wrong person' etc. The honest yet straightforward manner in which the narrator calmly tells us that even though it might feel like this is the worst possible time of your life, it is not usually so - it was a comforting thought - to feel and accept that things are fucked up and move on with quiet resignation.

Alain De Botton is the founder of the said channel as well as the author of this book.

The Course of Love is Alain's critique of what's wrong with the society's current perspective of love and marriages. Romanticism - the idea that the briefest of glances of some stranger is the formulation of a satisfying relationship, the idea of soul-mates and the happily ever after - is one of the most mistakenly understood facets of life. The story revolves around two fictional characters who meet each other at work, fall in love, get married, have children and go through the whole process of frustrations and resignations and disappointments that constitutes a married life. Through this fictional story, Alain gives us some of the most profound insights into how love and relationships work in real life - quite unlike how they happen in stories. He writes in one of the passages -

“Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue”.

“At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love”.

If only I could take back the time I spent reading this masturbatory psychobabble and instead used it to re-watch Rick And Morty, I would've learnt a whole lot more than what I got out from reading this pseudo-science.

I first learnt about The Denial of Death when I was watching my first film from Woody Allen - Annie Hall. The witty, self-deprecating humor with subtle hints about problems of humanity was right up my alley, and so naturally the book referenced also caught my attention. The Pulitzer prize was a cherry on top. Recently, it also got heavily referenced in one of videos of the film analysis channel - Like Stories of Old.

And so my curiosity peaked and with a great enthusiasm, I picked up this book.

The central theme of Death and how we shape our lives around it was an intriguing theme and our need for hero-worship was a very interesting idea. However things started to go downhill the moment Freud came into picture. Even though Ernest Becker repeatedly mentioned how Freud got a lot of the things wrong and tried to bring out later thinkers' nuanced theories, it was clear that he worshipped Freud. How else can you explain a whole chapter on root-causing the times when “The Great Freud” fainted and trying to analyze the possible reasons! And then there's one chapter called “Perversions” where he declares homosexuality a “problem” to be solved and analyzes it to say that people engage in this act because they are trying to rebel against carnal reality of their existence being for the sole purpose of procreation. What bullshit!

Maybe this book deserves a place in history as a testament to our mistakes and how we used to treat genuine illnesses not through science but by psychobabble.

Although it gets repetitive a bit in the middle, the gist of the book can be summarized as - Do deep work instead of the shallow. You have to actively work on your habits to keep yourself from spiraling into the distraction laden life that the current online culture has inculcated. All this sounds like common advice and a touch of self-help vibe in the title of this book may make you skeptical to pick it up, but the advices and strategies Cal Newport suggests is applicable to everyone in the 21st century. If you can't make it through the entire book, read at least few of his blog posts on Cal Newport: Blog .

This was a fun read. Or I should say listen. The audiobook is narrated by the author himself and he is no stranger to comedic scenarios. His narration shows that he's a stand-up comedian - the word “bozo” absolutely cracked up me every time he used it! I'd recommend this one just because of the narrator, although subject matter is no less interesting.

Update from my 2nd reading:

A kind friend gifted me the hardcover version of this book. It was a sublime experience - to be able to hold the narrative in your hands, flip through the insanity and come out of the house with a greater understanding of human beings.

Original note:

This is probably the strangest book I've ever read. One of those cult favourites where you'll either passionately love the book, or vehemently hate it. Everything depends upon how much are you willing to invest - when you have to read the words upside down or sometimes vertically, when there are pages after pages after pages of incomprehensible texts, when you lose control of story at every step of the way and wonder what's really happening, are the characters losing their minds or is it you - you have to remember that this is just a book. Nothing more, nothing less. Otherwise, you'll end up like me, obsessing over every tiny detail, wondering at midnight whether the emptiness and coldness you feel is just because the temperature is low or are there other factors in play.

I know. I sound paranoid. But this is exactly what the author intended.

On surface, House of Leaves is a book about a house which expands on the inside while remaining unchanged on the outside, the vast empty space consisting of nothing but darkness accompanied by a vicious and nerve-wrecking growl. But it is so much more than that. This is the story of a famous photojournalist who is retiring from his life to fix his broken marriage in a quiet, suburb place. What he gets instead is a haunted house which initially intrigues his interest, but later on consumes him completely with its idiosyncrasies. How the paranoia creeps into his wife and his friends, threatening to break their entire relations. Eventually, it becomes a tale of how love redeems him and brings them closer than ever. All this sounds like a normal story, except the way Mark presents it makes it special. You find footnotes to footnotes of a book inside the book, with narrator consistently interrupting the flow with his own, fucked up life, slowly spiralling out of control from reality.

I'm glad I picked it up. The only letdown was that I read it on kindle, ‘cause I couldn't afford the paperback version at this time. But, this is a book that is meant to be read on paper. I will surely revisit it once I have the paperback in my collection.

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This is also available on my website

Don't make the same mistake as I did and pick this up believing it to be an introductory work of philosophy. It's a challenging but really comprehensive history of philosophical texts, supplied of course with the usual wit and charm and brutal criticism expected from Bertrand Russell. He doesn't pull any punches in making clear whom he likes and whom he doesn't and consequently, the whole book is filled with fierce, and at times comical, opinionated criticisms.

Keep this in mind when you tackle this, and you will surely be rewarded.

I'd recommend every Potter fan out there to listen to the audiobook version, even if they've already read the books. Stephen Fry's voice is really amazing! And speaking of this book, when I'd first read it, it seemed that Rowling made this book unnecessarily lengthy, and I also was really annoyed by Harry's behaviour. But listening to the book just after finishing Goblet of Fire made me understand and appreciate Harry's angst and alienation. The boy had just seen a friend getting killed right in front of his eyes, and on top of that everyone was avoiding him and telling him a liar - it was bound to have made anyone angry and bitter.

Disappointed. I am an atheist interested in the power of mindfulness and the whole world of so-called spirituality, so naturally, I am the ideal audience that Sam Harris is looking for. But it disappointed in almost every domain that I had expectations in. Using deep-sounding difficult words and wrapping them in an almost mythical aura of “Consciousness”, this one was a huge letdown. The irony is that I've been following his mindfulness meditation course and it's been the opposite experience there - in fact, his meditation course itself was what motivated me to pick up this book.

Save yourself the trouble of reading on why to meditate and instead dive into doing the practice itself and judge for yourself.

I have a special affinity towards people/books/shows/films which make me laugh at the horrible human experience, while at the same time, allowing me to introspect and be amazed at how clear and precise their understanding of the self has been. It's the reason I adore watching a horse whine about how selfish and pathetic he is in Bojack Horseman, or to see Rick treat those he love in a shitty way in a misguided attempt at feeling less alone in Rick and Morty.

In short, I love self-deprecating humor and this book had a lot of it. A lot!

Favorite chapters: Depression and Identity - parts 1 and 2.

Reviewing this book would be a monumental task, as I discovered when I sat down to attempt the same. The notes/highlights themselves have an estimated reading time of 86 minutes - to be able to build a cohesive narrative out of those scribbles and do justice to this masterpiece would be a fool's errand - and yet this is only the first 10% of the whole series. Oh my!

Until I get around to do that, please take my word for its brilliance and make some time to read it.

I wanted to like this book. Seeing all the rave reviews and because I liked Norwegian Wood, I picked up my second Murakami with the hope that somehow, it'll be able to smooth out the slight hollowness I felt after reading his last book. I am sad to say that wasn't the case.

Maybe it has something to do with it originally being written in Japanese - I feel as if whatever the author wants to convey, gets lost somewhere during the translation. In any case, I would not say that I really understood this book. Maybe next time? Who knows.

Reading fiction has always been a double-edged sword for me. Some of the most intimate moments I've spent alone is while reading fictional stories, while at the same time, feeling a pang of disappointment for myself because I wasn't doing anything “productive.” Is this mere entertainment? Am I just escaping my real-life responsibilities and reading stories of make-believe? While I still haven't found sincere answers to these questions, I've grown more confident of what I enjoy and what I don't, which has consequently helped me find peace with this conflict. Over the years, I've realized that reading good literature is therapeutic for me - not to be used as an afterthought but essential to keep me functional.

Stoner was another great session in my therapy.

A story that on the surface feels depressing and sad, but curiously enough has immense hopeful undertones. This is the ordinary story of a man whose only goals in life are to attain two of the most notoriously difficult things known to mankind - knowledge, and love. He fails in both, but if you look underneath the surface, he succeeds in attaining both as well - just enough to make him feel satisfied but not enough to make the world think the same. The story is simple. A man hailing from rural American farmland attends university, falls in love with literature, and decides to dedicate himself to fulfill his passion. He starts teaching at the university, gets married by following his desire, but without falling in love, has a passionate love affair and, in the end, dies without having accomplished much.

But the way Mr. Williams writes this simple story is mesmerizing, to say the least. There's an existential dread in all the interactions, always pulsing with energy, and the prose flows with a perfection, almost to a fault. When I looked back at the book having finished my 4-hour marathon run through it, I noticed that for the first 100 pages or so, the book had a lot of markings - sentences I had loved, descriptions I had enjoyed - however as it moved further, I got tired of doing so, simply because it only got better and better. If I had continued, the whole book would have been messed up by my pencil.

Throughout the book, I could sense Camus's influence on his writing; the existential dread always present. All the characters felt as if they could easily exist in my universe. The slow torment that the protagonist went through, at times, felt too personal, as if someone had mercilessly ripped out a few chapters from my life and laid it bare for the world to see. One of these moving passages is written at approximately two-third of the book, which I can't help but quote below:

In his extreme youth, Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity, he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which he ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge; that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.