Book Reviews: What I Read Last Summer

• Giles Goat-Boy, John Barth, 1966.

A long stretch of post-modern fiction with allegories to the Cold War and the liberal college curriculum trends of the 60s. There’s treatment of Western vs. Eastern philosophic approaches to human enlightenment as well. The Goat-Boy struggles with his own bestial origins vs. his aspirations to be a spiritual guide to the undergraduates of an Ivy-League patterned fictional college.

• A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, 1945.

Only around 900 pages of pungent, but surprisingly digestible, reading, and an excellent introduction to Western thought from the ancient Greeks to the German and English philosophers of the mid-Twentieth Century. Russell’s background in mathematics serves to make his overview analytical and fairly objective, tracing the Platonic and Aristotlian schools of thought through Hellenism and early Christianity, through to the Renaissance and the Reformation. What makes this work for me is not just the insightful introduction to the plethora of thinkers over three centuries, it’s how Russell identifies historical and cultural contexts, lending an understanding as to why metaphysics and ethics developed in the ways they did.

• The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini, 2003

No introduction necessary for this bestseller, which offers an intimate study of an Afghan upper-middle class family forced to emigrate to the United States with the takeover by the Taliban. Engrossing, but there’s a few character lapses in the second half of the book that didn’t ring true for me, and I’m starting to tire of stories that resort to incidents of sexual molestation to capture my emotional engagement.

• The Big Short, Michael Lewis, 2010

The basis for a surprise movie hit that featured celebrities explaining the intricacies of complicated investment instruments containing overvalued subprime mortgages that created the market bust of 2008. The story centers on the smart guys who figured out early that the mortgages propping up this ballooning market were absolute trash, and then convinced big investment bankers like Merrill Lynch to sell them short-buy contracts to let them profit from the looming disaster. Fascinating, but then, I’m kind of a money wonk anyway.

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers, 2000

Autobiographical tale of Eggers leaving his Lake Forest, Illinois home for California in the 1990s after the death of his parents to raise his seven-year-old brother as he tries to establish a Bay-Area magazine geared to Gen-Xers. By turns funny and tragic, Eggers’ self-effacement is charmingly quirky until you realize that this is basically the tale of a slacker stumbling around with his startup business and his responsibility as guardian to his brother. Example: he struggles to establish any viable relationship to a woman, citing his worries about what is happening to his ward during his dating. Entertaining, sure, but ultimately not much going on here.

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Mark Haddon, 2003

A 15-year-old autistic boy in Swindon, UK finds a dog killed with a large gardening fork in his neighbor’s front lawn, and his detective adventure begins, involving unwinding what happened to his parents broken relationship, and facing his own crippling fears. Fresh and funny, and totally engrossing, presenting his solitary train ride to London as his heroic step into adulthood.