About the best books I've read on 2019
I’ve had a lot of free time in 2019 and so I managed to read 50 books or so by the end of the year. Here are short reviews of the ones that impacted me the most. From Shakespeare plays, Sci-fi and Biographies to Fantasy.
Evening in the Palace of Reason (James R. Gaines): Brilliant and informative, this book uses the famous meeting of Young King Frederick the Great of Prussia and Old Bach (THE Bach) to illustrate the whole ethos of an age of change (aren’t all ages a conflict between the Old and the New?). The enlighted “philosopher-king” gives the old-fashioned master, arguably the brightest genius of western civilization, a musical challenge. A challenge of improvisation and counterpoint, the old ways of music that were being slowly substituted by what we call today the Classical style (That itself was superseded by the Romantic style).
De Profundis (Oscar Wilde): When Oscar Wilde was arrested on charges of “sodomy” and “gross indecency”. After a year of forced and miserable work, he was permitted to write as part of his rehabilitation by the prison warden. The product is a profound and somber letter of acceptance of one’s fate. He spends some words forgiving everyone involved in his incarceration and focuses on the healing of his own soul, the only way of doing that being accepting his fault and owning his mistakes on his exaggerated and hedonistic lifestyle. For one should be the only responsible for his own ruin (His words).
Sixty Short Stories (Dino Buzzati): Curious short stories, on which the characters are often exposed to surreal situations that begs some meaning, but there isn’t one to be found, this is not the point. We only are told how they react and try make sense of the world around them, dealing with their own expectations.
Lingua Latina: Per se Illustratta (Hans Ørberg): Hands down the best language learning book I’ve ever come across. I’ve given myself the challenge to learn Latin and I would have given up if not for this book’s didactic and fun approach of naturally introducing grammar on increasingly complex short stories, with new words being organically presented and recalled.
Zeno’s Conscience (Italo Svevo): An old man (Zeno) recounts his life to his therapist, so that he may cure his lifelong psychological “disease” Zeno always believed he had. The book consists of the writings of episodes of his life that Zeno sent his doctor, before giving up on a cure. This is a book about the impossibility of pinning down one’s consciousness, about the randomness of life, of logically being cured of something that might very well be the disease of adapting to a messed up society.
Hyperion (Dan Simmons): Beautiful beyond measure, this book tells the story of six pilgrims selected to travel to the outback of human civilization, to the planet Hyperion. Each one of them having had his life mysteriously affected by a entity known as the Shrike, a godlike being from another time that haunts human civilization and is linked with the artifact know as the Time Tombs on Hyperion. This jaw-dropping epic was inspired by Keats unfinished poem with the same name. The prose is musical and poetical at times, and the richness and beauty manages to inspire like few fiction books even dares to try. The planets of the human civilization have forests with trees bigger than anything society has ever built, seas of grass the size of an ocean, electrical jungles made of “Tesla Trees” and many more bizarre and beautiful vistas. This epic, like the poem that inspired it, is about surviving the creation of our own gods.
A Mathematicians Apology (G.H. Hardy): A sincere memoir from one brilliant mathematician, G.H. Hardy. It demystified to me how does one works with Math. The search for patterns, for simplicity and at the end of the day, for beauty. This book gives a glimpse as to why some practitioners of the field see their activity as a craft or even an art form.
The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco): An expertly crafted historical detective-esque adventure set in medieval Italy. A mystery involving patterns of language and an exploration of theology and faith. A conflict on the physical level but also at the intellectual. A clash of philosophies presented with brilliant historical accuracy and infinitely packed with references and secrets on many levels of interpretation.
Exhalation: Stories (Ted Chiang): Infinitely creative and though-provoking stories that contains these real and at times bizarre hypothetical worlds of possibility. In these worlds abstract problems of philosophy, language, religion, ethics, and physics are a tangible reality and this challenges the reader to think about our humanity in an expanded context. What if, on a world where the reality of the New Testament is proved beyond faith, scientists discover that the universe revolves around other planet and other people, the ones truly intended by divine design and not a random byproduct of evolution?This is one of the realities Chiang creates to bring to life new ways of thinking about old problems.
Hamlet (Shakespeare): On the theme of Fate that I explored before on the list on ‘De Profundis’, this play is the ultimate existential exploration of one’s fate/duty. “To be or not to be” is a cliche today exactly because of the lasting impact it had on our culture. A little bit of Hamlet is inside many, if not most, of all tragic heroes since then.
The Dresden Files (Jim Butcher) (I’ve read a bunch of books from series this year so I will just talk about what the series represents to me): There is something deeply human about the Dresden Files series. Harry Dresden is a character that has acknowledged fear, weakness, pain and regret as few people do. This mixture of bravado when the situation is incredibly dire and hopeless and the full knowledge that he is not prepared as he should be, and very well may die on this very day makes for a very relatable story to read. Again and again Harry is beaten, hurt physically and psychologically, kidnapped and threatened and yet, he soldiers on, barely capable of thinking straight or walking at times. He is so focused on his task because he knows that no one can do his job for him, that people depend on him, that he can only count on himself. He is incredibly stubborn on this regard, rarely trusts and even more rarely asks for help. Maybe he considers his task of saving people his bane on this earth. He plans two suicide missions on the same day (this happened on two books!), when he doesn’t even know if he will be alive to die on the second one. Lots of books and stories function like that with it’s heroes, but what helps making Harry’s adventure such an empathetic one is the First-Person narrative style of the books. It makes the experience evenintimate. Harry might act tough around enemies and friends alike but deep inside in his thoughts we have a glimpse at how vulnerable hereally feels.
I will concede that the books sometimes work like a male power fantasy and that might set some people off them. But there is a self-aware quality about the themes on the book: The author is clearly very passionate about the characters and the story and he clearly owns using some famous detective tropes with honesty. The main character considers himself a chauvinistic pig and chuckles about making grand entrances and saying corny one-liners. I think this is something lots of books and movies and games could learn something from on these cynical times.
Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami): This is a tough book to write about. Murakami magical realist style blurs the line between dream and reality. Nonsensical stuff happens all the time, charged with meaning but a the same time very elusive, as if you are always on the edge of understanding the big picture of all the bizarre and magical things driving the plot and the characters forward, like inside a dream. Even the characters themselves discuss about how everything might represent something else. I think Italo Calvino explains very well the power of metaphor can have in a book:
“I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.” (Emphasis is mine)
And is this mystical setting where things are linked by metaphorical threads there isn’t anything the book is too afraid to deal with. The main character is on a quest of sexual discovery and finding his authenticity. He thinks himself cursed by his father to live something like Oedipus fate. Other characters are also cursed with different psychological realities, like one woman frozen in time. The physical and the mental realities intertwine is this amazing exploration of the human mind.