Reviews and Comments

The Great Gatsby is in the public domain this year! And as a celebration, NPR's Planet Money team did a full, unabridged reading of the book and put it out for all to listen to! This was a fun book to return to. I read it in high school, but as is often the case with teenagers, I did not have the attention or experience to appreciate it's skillful writing. One of the things I like about this novel is how short it is. I love books I can read in an afternoon. It makes it possible to digest the whole thing in a day, and then just mull over the narrative for awhile. I recommend listening to this BBC In Our Times Episode on The Great Gatsby before listening to the book. I found that it primed me really nicely to take better note of the magnificent imagery that makes this novel a great one.

I have a lot of feelings about this one. And I do feel I need to toss in a disclaimer here, I listened to this in audiobook format. Which for me, while I love them, I often don't give them my full attention. And this book is dense, if you really want to pull out all it has in it, it needs one's full attention. Okay, disclaimer over. So large portions of this book is Huxley being far more mystical about a single omnipotent deity than I'm comfortable with. Which, really wasn't bad, and he's certainly never preachy about it, it's just that after growing up in a toxic religious environment I'm not keen on the whole g-d thing. I do see myself as having faith and participating in religious practices, but those that I chose to pursue are all very light on g-d. That said, this is very good. I think this is a useful religious piece for people of any faith. Huxley (in a very typical Anglo-American manner) attempts to dig into the mystical/spiritual practices of all the major world religions and find their common threads. I think he does quite a good job, I agree with much of his analysis. That said, not much in this book really struck me as useful for my personal spiritual practices. That's not a lack in the book, but rather I have kind of just already chosen the religious traditions that I find valuable and wish to dive deeply into. However this book works for any reader that's interested in spiritual exploration. This is a great overview, but one should choose a small number of spiritual practices that partake in these common threads and pursue them with persistence.

Oof. I loved this book! It's such an interesting take on time travel and I was gripped! The premise is that in a certain coffee shop in Japan it's possible to travel back in time, but there are rules. Among them; you can only travel back in time to meet someone who has been to the shop before, nothing you do to change the past will change the present, and you must return before the coffee gets cold. I would say it's a deep exploration of how we deal with regrets, and the ways in which small shifts of our own internal perspectives can have profound impacts on how we judge our situation, and the actions we are willing to take to achieve our own happiness. The narrative follows several different characters, each with something in the past that they long for, something that is a huge hindrance to their happiness in the present. And each one, even though they change nothing, return from the past and are able to use their experience to pursue and achieve a happiness that had not even conceived of. I feel there's a profound life lesson here, and I cannot recommend it enough. If you only choose one book to read from my list here, choose this one.

What a delightful memoir! I was never super into Star Wars as a kid so most of my familiarity with Carrie Fisher is from social media screenshots of her great tweets. And this memoir very much fits in with the tone she cultivated on there. She was traumatized a few years prior to the book by the death of a friend, and that is very much the current that flows underneath everything she shares. She shares quite a bit about the traumatic event, and the fact that it affected her deeply, but she never dwells on it, and she always cracks a joke about it. I found myself wondering a little, are the jokes a way to avoid the weight of it? Or are they a way of dealing with it? We all suffer trauma in life, and we all deal with it in our own way. I really got the sense that Carrie was dealing with it the best she could (you bring a certain je ne sais quois of vitality when you do I think), and I walked away from this book with the lesson that I should trust myself to make it through, and to be there for my friends.