Briefly, why I picked these books as some of my favorites. (Not in any order. If I had to pick a #1 in fiction it’d be Kafka’s Metamorphosis).
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Flush: Virginia Woolf uses a dog’s life as a metaphor to elucidate the complex and (sometimes) unexplainable ups and downs to life. She intertwines the development of wisdom with a larger idea of the fragility and escaping of life – life that deserves to be chased and cherished.
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Notes from the Underground: Dostoevsky’s work encapsulates the insane mind of alpha men. Specifically, he articulates the predisposition to find things to obsess over and rank each other about that objectively do not matter, yet completely destroy the inner minds of men.
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E Unibus Pluram: Wallace is irritated with TV/media culture, and recognizes correctly some main psychological forces at play. Specifically, he pinpoints and articulates how we all seem to hate media, yet can’t look away.
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The Case Against the Global Economy: An insightful read on some seriously unethical, wasteful, and ridiculous ways that global trade and money dynamics operate. Did the US really patent a potato type and sue farmers on the other side of the world for growing it – natively? Yes. Yes we did.
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The Metamorphosis: Kafka delves into his subconscious and the reader dares to follow. The content of the book is absurd, yet it makes clear Kafka’s shyness, feelings of insecurity and inferiority, and desire for love and acceptance in a myriad of ways that a non-surreal medium would struggle to.
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Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism: Trungpa villifies ego while cautioning us not to involve ourselves on a battlefield to fight it as part of our spiritual training – since battlefields are distinctly unholy. A mind-bending, refreshing and cerebral, yet down-to-earth read about how to really fix our mind’s big issue from the ground-up. (Minus 1 star because the last few chapters are almost incomprehensibly dense).
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An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge: Bierce succinctly lets his Civil War era character dream and ends with the final point: the only thing that matters in life is the people we choose to care about, and who care about us.
Other books I loved that are not in the above screenshot:
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The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by David Anthony – an incredible story of the formation of our language roots and how ancient people survived and moved. Dense but worth it!
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Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History by Jeffrey McKinnon – a fascinating and deep science exploration of evolution in ancient lakes around the world whose unique conditions allow for special case studies.
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A Death in the Rainforest by Don Kulick – a linguistic journey to a remote village in Papua New Guinea leads to interesting discoveries and opens up a connection to people who are no different than you and me.