Video Night in Kathmandu - Pico Iyer

Iyer, an Eton, Oxford, and Harvard educated erudite Time Magazine journalist reports back from his gallivants in Asia in the 1980s. Part travelogue, part cultural commentary on how the West influences the East and vice versa, I found the book to be blunt (fortunately no words were minced; this book written today probably gets toned down by the editor in the name of political correctness), funny, but at some times masturbatory (yes, we get it you’re smart and worldly and well-read).

I love to romanticize about what travel must have been like “back in the day”, before globalized tourism and the internet. There would have been way more cultural immersion! So many more opportunities for serendipity! What’s funny is that every travel writer I’ve read feels the same way, that they were a touch too late, nostalgic for the whimsical past. Iyer spends a chapter in Tibet, right after it was reopened to international tourism in 1985, as one of many adventurous souls yearning for an authentic travel experience; his chapter on Bali laments its rapidly increasing commercialization while acknowledging his role in it. 4/5

The Idiot - Elif Batuman

Selin is a gangly, awkward freshman at Harvard figuring out how to navigate all the questions one encounters when they go to college for the first time. What classes should I take? Why do I find myself drawn to the people I hang out with? How can I get closer to truth, and what place does language have in it? (more of a Selin specific question) Overall a pretty funny (lots of witticisms) but extra (could have been edited down in length) bildungsroman that left me nostalgic and feeling endeared. 4/5

Non-things - Byung-Chul Han

Han’s core argument is that non-things (e.g. information, data, smartphones, digital media) have proliferated in the culture, and this is bad because things provide stability + sense of otherness, the lack of which untether one to reality. And then he launches into a bunch of specific examples and philosophical corollaries from this initial premise. Good, but didn’t give me as much of an “aha” moment as The Burnout Society. 3.5/5

Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

I ate up the Philsophize This 5-part podcast series on Dostoevsky’s biggest books, so I decided to pick up Notes from the Underground again (I started it a few years ago but never got into it). This time, I stuck around.

The protagonist, an unnamed character speaking in the 1st person is a 40-year old man on the fringes of society. He spends the 1st half of the book espousing his philosophy and the 2nd half reminiscing on a couple of core experiences from his 20s.

He is a walking contradiction. Narcissistic yet self-loathing. Proud yet shameful. He’s so in his head he doesn’t know how to interact or relate to others. He views himself so much more “conscious” than others, which is what paralyzes him to act and makes him unable to create and live life in an affirming way, so he constantly self-sabotages himself.

Dostoevsky does a fantastic job hyperbolizing how nihilism can create madmen. A short read and good introduction to the psycho-philosophical way he writes. 4/5

The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe

In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir - Francis Fukuyama