Books read: 14 (10 Fiction, 4 Non-Fiction)

Unique Authors: 14 (10 Men, 4 Women)

Average Rating: 4.04 (3.85 Fiction, 4.25 Non-Fiction)

warning: some spoilers may be contained in the following reviews

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera

This is a series of seven short stories, some of which are related. Kundera explores love, sex, bodies, and expression in a characteristically psychological way. They also have the classic Kundera-esque commentary about the ways communism influenced the collective Czech psyche. The way he writes about the Czech zeitgeist reminds me of a statue I once stumbled upon when visiting Prague. It’s of a crawling baby with no face - it’s supposed to represent the generation that grew up in the communist Czechia that emerged after the Prague Spring, a generation that struggled to create an identity for itself as it was suppressed by the equality of the Soviet dogma.

Kundera is absolutely brilliant at the sentence level (I was constantly highlighting passages that blew me away), but pretty mid at the story level. Deducting a star because I got bored with the plot of most of the stories. 4/5

South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami

I’ve probably read close to a dozen Murakami works at this point. Murakami is the reading equivalent of comfort food for me - curry and naan, or ramen and beer. The same type of semi-autobiographical loner protagonist, mysterious women, and classical music, all steeped in nostalgia. This is another one of his rare novels that is not particularly Murakami-esque with his patented magical realism, which is ironically the novels of his I like the most (e.g. Norwegian Wood, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. ) 4.5/5

The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver

Solid book about how we err when making predictions, and how we can get better at doing so by thinking probabilistically. Silver extolls the virtues of Bayes’ theorem throughout, and each chapter focuses on a different topic (e.g. meteorology, sabermetrics, chess, poker) that gives us more insight into the art of making forecasts. Felt a bit repetitive though, could have been 100 pages shorter. 4/5

Intermezzo - Sally Rooney

I was so excited for Rooney’s latest that I tried to use a VPN to change my IP address to a later time zone so I could get the Kindle copy delivered to me earlier (unfortunately to no avail).

The story follows two brothers: Ivan (a 22 year old chess prodigy) and Peter (a 32 year old lawyer) who are navigating their respective romantic relationships as well as their complicated relationship with each other in the wake of their father’s death.

Rooney explores a different stream of consciousness style, particularly in Peter’s chapters, that induce in the reader the same type of frenetic anxiety and maddening overanalyzing that is going on in his head (it’s pretty funny how my personal life currently has some loose resemblance to his).

I’m obsessed with the way Rooney writes dialogue and inner monologues. There’s a James Baldwin line as follows:

“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky."

Rooney is one of the authors who makes me feel “seen” and it’s beautiful to know this random Irish woman who I would have otherwise never interacted with can relate to my lived experience so much (and actually has the talent to articulate it, and in doing so, enriches my life and makes me feel less alone).

Five stars and much love. 5/5

Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher - Clayton Atreus