The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Every Book I Read Last Year
I set a goal of reading 26 books last year, or approximately one every two weeks. I did not meet that goal. Probably primarily because I chose to read War and Peace while annotating it for a friend. I also read snatches of a lot of other things, but only included stuff I read more or less cover-to-cover (I’ll admit to skimming sections of Yellowface and Stranger in a Strange Land between about the 50% and 85% marks).
Honorable Mentions I did not finish: Seeing Like a State, which was brilliant and I’ll get around to finishing it later, but I only read it in boring meetings and I didn’t have quite quite enough of those where I wasn’t involved; The Good Soldier Svejk, which is good but I got bored of; Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Songwriting I still have like a half dozen songs to go, but it’s not really that good and I got out of the rhythm of it; I worked my way through a pile of Platonic dialogues, but I try to stick to only counting it as finishing a “book” if I’ve gone cover to cover as bound at the printer otherwise I'd have to start thinking in pages and then wordcount; ditto, I suppose, the King James bible, in that I read passages but not the whole book; I started The Savage Detectives while walking my wife around the mall but haven’t got back around to finish it; I started Where Men Win Glory, Krakauer's biography of Pat Tillman, which is good but I forgot it at my parents house at some point and never got back to it. I also don’t “count” audiobooks towards the goal, though I quite enjoy them and listen to them pretty constantly.
Razzmatazz! I devoured Chris Moore’s novels when I was a kid, but this was painful to read. His schtick just doesn’t work anymore. I keep meaning to reread his novel of Christ’s lost years, Lamb, so I can review it for themotte, it really is a brilliant time capsule of mid-2000s Morally Therapeutic Deism. Would not recommend this one though, trying to be sensitive to historical traumas of prostitution while also playing it for laughs leaves you with neither.
The War Nerd Iliad Loved it, brilliant. A prose translation of the Iliad, what I admire about it is that it has a strong interpretative view of what the work means, and he sets out to give the reader that view; where so many academic translations get so caught up in accuracy and euphemism that they fail to give much energy. Highly, highly recommend, you owe it to yourself to read this one.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Excellent book, deservers all the praise it ever got. It filled me with nostalgia for when great literature could also be fun. It’s a book that has a real political and philosophical message, while also being a perfectly fun adventure story. Back in the day a masterpiece could also be a bestseller.
From Hell Great book. Boy is Alan Moore weird. I keep meaning to look more into the theory behind it.
Sevastapol Sketches Around here I got off track to the goal, because I made the mistake of starting War and Peace. But I told a friend I would annotate it for her. I kind of stalled on it, so I went and read Sevastopol Sketches to kind of get a win in the books. It was a great pick me up, and reading it added a lot to reading War and Peace so I was glad I did it. It’s interesting seeing prototypes of a lot of the characters, Nikolai and Andrei and Berg showing up in miniature. Would highly recommend it if you’re a Tolstoy fan.
Cheated A book about the Astros trashcan scandal in Major League Baseball, it is a high-mediocre sports journalism book but a bunch of anecdotes stick with me today. If you liked that era of baseball, you’ll like the book.
Day of the Oprichnik I hated this book and didn’t get it, but I think it’s because I’m not Russian and I don’t find gross-out gore or porn interesting.
Trust the Plan A book pretending to report on the QAnon phenomenon, but it mostly got so many things wrong that I only got through it because it was mercifully short. I wasn’t, ultimately, any better informed about Q after than I was before.
Aeneid The Dryden translation. I prefer older translations of classics generally, both because they tend to aim for actual poetry, and because they believe in what they’re writing about. Maybe not the most accurate translation from the Latin, but the translator thought that the story had value and meaning beyond as a museum piece, which gives it more energy.
Yellowface This was the worst book I read this year. Turner Diaries for the anhedonic members of a college Women of Color Collective.
And The Band Played On Brilliantly written, and I learned a lot about the AIDS crisis and gay culture. A really great example of writing, in that I would bother my wife by reading out passages that were alternately horrifying and hilarious, it captures the tragedy of plague without ever letting go of absurdism and fun. It was amazing how many personalities turned back up like bad nickels for COVID, and how the actions taken to combat COVID largely map onto the AIDS crisis as things that would have worked for AIDS, but didn’t for COVID. I expect we’ll see the same cycle again, always fighting the last war. Perhaps a consequence of Gerontocracy.
Path Lit by Lightning Really nicely written biography of Jim Thorpe, a well done piece of sports history, and I was thinking later while listening to Lonesome Dove on audiobook about how time periods intersect. Lonesome Dove is set in the West in the 1870s, Newt is around 20 by the end. Jim Thorpe was born in 1887. Jim Thorpe’s father could have been one of the sad Indians in the background of the cattle drive in Lonesome Dove, Newt (assuming a natural lifespan) would have lived to read headlines in the Montana newspapers about Thorpe’s exploits. Thorpe meanwhile, is just on the edge of modernity for us: one of the first modern Olympians, the first president of the NFL, an early Hollywood fixture. He’s just on the edge of having run into people that I could have watched on TV, and then he is just on the edge of having known rebel Indian chiefs in the old west.
Master and Commander What can I say about this that hasn’t been said before? He does such a good job of giving a feel of how crazy the world his characters inhabit is. A firehose of exposition without a single speech.
Stranger in a Strange Land When I read Dune I felt like I had suddenly discovered what Star Wars had ripped off, Star Wars was just Dune with less thinking. Then I read Stranger and realized that Dune was just Stranger if the author was terrified of human sexuality.
War and Peace My favorite work of literature. A masterpiece. It contains all of human life.
King Rat I read it after watching Shogun with my mother, and wanted to revisit Clavell. This was so much better than I thought it would be. Absolutely perfect book. Read it. The strongest indictment of capitalism I’ve ever read, and a love letter to it all at once. Clavell was a master of writing books that are deep and engaging adventure stories.
Stepford Wives Really fun Halloween book, and it’s funny how much of it holds up, but at the same time how much of it never makes any sense at all.
My Brilliant Friend Read it because it was ranked so high on various best of the millennium lists. I can see why it ranked so high: Ferrante pulls you into her world, head first. Beautifully written, and consistently engaging. I can’t wait to get to the sequels this year. There’s an amusing irony to the debates, which in America center on whether men are sexist for refusing to read this brilliant book by a female author, and in Europe mostly revolve around which man is the real Elena Ferrante.
On the Edge The further I get from this book, the less I think about it. Junk food in text form.
The Price of Peace A Singaporean educational propaganda book about Malaya during the Japanese Occupation in WWII. An angle of WWII we don’t normally get in America. Fascinating to look at, but not something I’d recommend. Mostly fascinating for examining the message the propaganda is trying to get across, and for considering different viewpoints of WWII.
Sad Cypress An old Agatha Christie, just something I got as a gift. A nice little treat.
Il Gigante A biography of Michaelangelo around the David. Picked it up at a church flea market, it was mediocre, but I finished it anyway.
The Message Ta Nehisi Coates new book. I’m buying copies of it for all the Nice Liberal Jews in my life. He makes a powerful case for why the core values of American liberalism are incompatible with support for Israel as a Jewish ethnostate.
I feel like I’m forgetting something, but I’m probably not. Right now, in addition to struggling through Plato, I’m loving Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey. It’s not the most traditional translation, but it’s so wonderful, the language feels like sipping an icy sprite on a sunny day.
For 2025, I want to read some self-help books, strange as that may sound, to get some of the books that are always being recommended. I want to read more science fiction, I haven't been able to get into the genre in a while. I want to get around to some more of the recommendations people made here for graphic novels. Basically, I'm in the mood for lighter fare.
I found Unbearable Lightness of Being to be pseudo-philosophical trash. Posting my review from goodreads below. Don't think we have anything else in common on our read list from 2024.
I think I would have appreciated this book more if I had visited Prague/Czechia in general, but as it is, my feelings about the book were very mixed. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a book primarily about four people: Tomas, his wife Tereza, his Mistress Sabina, and her lover Franz in the middle years of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, after the attempt revolution in 1968. There isn't really a central plot per se, but most of the book revolves around the conflict between Tomas and Tereza about Tomas's repeated infidelity, and a contrast between the "lightness" with which he seems to live his life and the "heaviness" that she seems to be unable to escape in hers. There's also some classic Kafka-esque living-under-Communism subplots that revolve around an article Tomas publishes in 1968 right before the revolution, but these honestly felt like a distraction from the main aspect of the novel.
For the first 2/3 of the book, this was almost certainly a 1/5 star read. The supposed difference between the lightness of Parmenides and the heaviness in Nietzsche's eternal recurrence seemed like a bunch of pseudo-profound bullshit to me. The supposed lightness of being is just an adolescent refusal to take responsibility for one's own decisions and the life one inhabits. Each of the four title character's also seemed incredibly narcissistic, and the singular focus on sex and desire above all the other things that were going on in Czechia at the time seem to highlight this fact. The detached way in Kundera wrote this didn't help either, the characters really did feel like characters he made up rather than real people, and the plethora of sex scenes bordered on inhuman and frankly disturbing.
There's also the anti-communism. This seems to be something pretty common among Czech authors in particular (perhaps something to do with the Ayn Rand "I'm better than the proles") attitude that they seem to have as an entire country, but there was little acknowledgement about the kinds of things communism did right, and a demonization of Russia as the land of evil-totalitarianism equivalent to Nazi Germany. Kundera couldn't even recognize the happiness and beauty of the socialist May Day celebrations, rather using them as a jumping off point to discuss the concept of Kitsche. The whole thing just reeks of sore loserdom: like we have here in the Old Confederacy. I'm not denying that the Czech communist state (and the Soviets) did horrible things, but we also have to remember who is writing here.
However the last third of the book, after Tomas and Tereza move to the countryside redeemed the book for me quite a bit. We get some wonderful reflections on the role of their dog Karenin in bringing joy to both their lives, and some pro-vegan philosophical musings. We also get to see Tomas and Tereza actually happy. I'm still not quite sure what Kundera's message is: I would likely have to reread this book to figure it out more completely, and I'm pretty sure I don't care to do that, but the beauty of the last part of the book cannot be denied.
How do you define the term pseudo-philosophical?
An argument/piece of media that tries to make a profound philosophical point, but the point ends up being a tautology, or an unreal distinction of some kind. For example, in this book, I think "lightness" of being is just an excuse to not engage with one's life, not an actual philosophical state.
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