Library
This library is a record of books that I’ve read, with a written response to each. There are no ratings here. I limit recommendations, and I do not write with the aim of reviewing. A book might make me think about something else, I may engage extensively with one passage, or I might evaluate the argument of the text as a whole. The texture of my responses will shift depending on the text.
One caveat: the write-ups from before 2024 read more like book reviews, because that’s what they were. Most started life on Goodreads, a few in graduate seminars, back before this site existed.
Some of my responses are short (perhaps a few paragraphs) while others may be entire essays. The amount written is a reflection not of the quality of the book, but of my own thinking.
My books are listed in reverse-chronological order by when I completed them. Each entry is listed in full bibliographic form, with a short annotation below. Some of these I own, others I do not.
2025
Leans too hard on effective altruism; the Tunisians risking the sea are short on dignity, not metrics.
Pretentious prose, nonsensical and reprehensible arguments; a celebrated dramatist whose essays are worth nothing.
Externalizes confidence into three trusts; a warm, fatherly book that arrived when I needed it.
Yan, Ge. Elsewhere. New York: Scribner, 2023.
Stories of enormous range, strange and precisely made; an imagination this far past auto-fiction makes me want to write.
His useful contrast between “immediate experience” and “symbolic religion” is a pattern I see in every faith.
Non-duality for a secular age: an actual pathway to a spiritual life that survives quantum physics.
Lipman, Joanne. Next!: The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work. New York: Mariner Books, 2023.
Gladwell-style journalism on reinvention; what lands is the role of the “stop” and that most reinvention is slow.
Without concrete anchors it’s nearly as opaque as the Tao Te Ching, with none of the poetry.
Atwood, Margaret. Old Babes in the Wood. Reprint ed. London: Vintage Books, 2023.
Atwood at 84 on what it means to age; the Nell and Tig stories brought me to tears.
LaPointe, Sasha taqʷšəblu. Thunder Song. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2024.
Memoir-essays living in contradictions she holds without resolving; the deeper failure is the absence of curiosity about the why.
A primer on therapy’s tools, best used as reference; the section on a meaningful life re-chunked my values.
Social-science research method repackaged for profit; McKinsey does, for money, what I was trained to do.
Ram Dass. Be Here Now. Reprint ed. New York: Harmony Books, 1978.
A hippie Power of Now, and the better book; at some point you have to have faith in something.
Cho, Zen. Spirits Abroad. Easthampton: Small Beer Press, 2021.
A Chinese-Malay kaleidoscope; “If at First You Don’t Succeed” carries its non-dualist lesson lightly.
Franzen, Jonathan. The End of the End of the Earth. Reprint ed. New York: Picador, 2020.
“Climate change” produces paralysis; “this wetland, this gas company” produces action.
Unsettling and persuasive: Christianity as a religion begins not with Jesus but with Paul.
Baird, Leslie. Salomé. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2026.
A Salomé retelling that shatters the romantic image of France with real deftness.
Park, Ed. An Oral History of Atlantis. New York: Random House, 2025.
Dada and Surrealist form-play with real substance underneath; I respect it more than I love it.
The “otrovert” is a surface-level concept needing research, though it may help people who recognize themselves in it.
Read cover to cover; the Deuteronomical History’s wild honesty against the Chroniclers’ politics of purity.
Skeptical at first, then won over: it let me start treating my own ideas as things I could actually make.
Singh, Manvir. Shamanism: The Timeless Religion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.
Shamanism as convergent cultural evolution, the same role independently invented; “xenization” is the concept that stays.
King, Stephen. If It Bleeds: Four Novellas. New York: Scribner, 2020.
King is as strong as ever, but it satisfied like fast food: good in the moment, short on nutrition.
The framing is the gift: choosing tools against the life you want, values rather than trends.
Irby, Samantha. Quietly Hostile. New York: Vintage Books, 2023.
Did not finish: Irby banalizes the quotidian with cynicism where it could be made luminous.
Marx, W. David. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Viking, 2025.
A biting account of capital and culture merging; the concept that stays is “poptimism.”
Ruiz Zafón, Carlos. The City of Mist. Translated by Lucia Graves. New York: Harper Perennial, 2021.
Gothic stories whose true protagonist is Barcelona; not one story here is mediocre, rare for a collection.
Swallow, Michelle. Northern Bull. Calgary: Freehand Books, 2026.
Stunningly ridiculous Yellowknife comedy, mostly read in one sitting; a reminder that craft can serve pure fun.
Anchor on the why; mine is the moment something “clicks” for someone I’m teaching.
Aphorisms fusing German pessimism with cognitive science toward a fatalist, absurdist submission.
A “suboptimist” critique of techno-utopianism and techno-nihilism; “don’t be an endpoint” is the phrase that stays.
I’d never liked Gay’s op-eds and changed my mind: her best writing is the cultural criticism and profiles.
Excellent retellings where centering the women is what gives the old myths new agency.
Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Reprint ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
As fine a stylist as a historian: “the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine.”
Wells, Martha. System Collapse. Murderbot Diaries, 7. New York: Tor Books, 2023.
The weakest recent Murderbot, essentially incomplete; the human dynamics that made the series work thin out.
Smith, Zadie. Grand Union. New York: Penguin Press, 2019.
Stories bursting with life, redistributing agency to women and reprehensible characters; her register-shifts are what I yearn to do.
Danticat, Edwidge. We're Alone. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2024.
Essays showing Haiti’s suffering as engineered for extraction, the same dynamic across the Global South.
Essentially a self-help Future Shock: adaptability is the asset, and it reads more urgent now than when written.
Overpraises LinkedIn but left me clearer-eyed, and its networking advice for introverts actually sounds human.
More fluff than substance, finally an advertisement for Pollard as a coach; the wrong medium for what he knows.
Didion, Joan. Let Me Tell You What I Mean. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.
My first Didion, and the prose ability is the event.
Wells, Martha. Fugitive Telemetry. Murderbot Diaries, 6. New York: Tor Books, 2021.
Murderbot as detective fiction; Wells shatters Preservation’s hopepunk-Eden image, making the utopia legible as work.
The two-currency model of performance and relationship, with the blunt point that relationships matter more.
Wells, Martha. Network Effect. Murderbot Diaries, 5. New York: Tor Books, 2020.
The longest and best Murderbot, where the length is the asset; ART’s return lets a relationship actually deepen.
It freed something: real creative work doesn’t need a classically artistic field.
Myers-Briggs career guidance that told me little; powerful for those who don’t yet know themselves.
Mecham, Jesse. You Need a Budget. New York: Harper Business, 2017.
It’s all in the reframe: “every dollar has a job,” money as value judgment rather than arithmetic.
Saunders, George. Tenth of December. New York: Random House, 2013.
A case for human goodness never naive about moral cost; the collision of registers holds the comedy and tenderness.
Wells, Martha. Exit Strategy. Murderbot Diaries, 4. New York: Tor Books, 2018.
A clean hostage-and-escape entry; “It made me feel like a person” renders social anxiety exactly.
Lalami, Laila. The Dream Hotel. New York: Pantheon Books, 2025.
Barely qualifies as SF: the logical end of surveillance capitalism, and it’s chilling.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven. Reprint ed. New York: Scribner, 2023.
Even benevolent wishes do harm because good and bad arrive together, delivered, improbably, with pacific space turtles.
Freud, Sigmund. On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. London: Penguin Classics, 2005.
The prize is “Mourning and Melancholia”: melancholia as loss you don’t know you’re grieving.
Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2019.
Not doing nothing but choosing what gets your attention; partly why I built my own website.
Murnane, Gerald. The Plains. Reprint ed. Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2017.
I expected an American West and got a deeply Australian meditation on liminality, its plainsmen obsessive metaphysicians.
Harvey, Samantha. Orbital. New York: Grove Press, 2023.
Less a plot than a love letter to Gaia: the Earth is the only home we have.
Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip to the Mirror World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
The coinage that stays is “diagonalism”; the book weakens whenever every misstep gets routed back to Nazism.
Copland, Aaron. What to Listen for in Music. Reprint ed. New York: Signet Classics, 2011.
Taught me a limit of reading: musical forms need exposure, not the page.
It comes down to the boundary problem; the right reflex for problems with no easy answers.
The first of the series to take Mercury seriously; I kept the trio: Mercury shapes, Venus blends, Mars separates.
Sharp, Carolyn J., ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Prophets. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
The book where I decided I’m done with these handbooks; individual articles and single-author books instead.
Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. The Literature of Modern Arabia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989.
The short stories outshine the poems, with the Yemeni and Saudi stories hitting hardest.
Frahm, Eckart, ed. A Companion to Assyria. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.
A promising subject drained lifeless and wooden by the handbook format.
The best of the ADHD books: comprehensive without drowning in detail, with illuminating case studies.
Ligotti, Thomas. Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. New York: Penguin Classics, 2015.
The strong stories are genuinely cosmic, but too many don’t reach it; I’m not sure I get him.
Situates 1880–1940 SF, fantasy, and horror inside literary modernism; the parallel itself is the point.
Neu, Jerome, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
A rigorous companion that sent me toward Freud’s middle period, more interesting than the canonical bookends.
Doing too much: the editor doubts “wisdom” is even a genre; I disagree and wouldn’t reach for this first.
A 1981 primary-source reader; what stands out is the conspicuous absence of neoliberalism, which arrived right after.
More validating than new; “highly sensitive” looks like a spectrum’s tail, not a kind of person.
Czerski, Helen. Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World. London: Torva, 2023.
The systems thesis could have held the whole book; the disconnected chapters show a missing spine.
The founding Myers-Briggs text; my objection isn’t that it’s unscientific but that HR co-opted it.
Barnitz, David Park. The Book of Jade. New critical edition ed. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2015.
Decadent verse that defends the minor: such work has a real aesthetic place.
Perry, Sarah. Enlightenment. New York: Mariner Books, 2024.
Providence is the real subject; the marvel is how well Perry holds aging, time all at once.
Johnson, Joel W. Political Economy of the United States. New York: Routledge, 2018.
A balanced overview of how political decisions move the economy, though it overweights presidents and Congress.
The gift is reframing signs as kinds of place, not personality traits.
Chandrasekera, Vajra. The Saint of Bright Doors. New York: Tor Books, 2023.
Originality undercut by exposition, but I enjoyed it anyway; invention alone carried it far.
Reception chapters are the best, and Saul the most fascinating figure; two almost incompatible religions on one shelf.
Snell, Daniel C., ed. A Companion to the Ancient Near East. 2nd ed. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020.
Strongest on reception; read Podany’s Weavers, Scribes, and Kings first, then this as the thematic complement.
Beck, Roger B. A Brief History of Ancient Astrology. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.
Strong on the astronomy, but the life is in astrology as symbolic system, which Beck won’t pursue.
Really a book about trauma in every register; I recognized myself in Zeina’s self-erasing drive toward achievement.
Merton, Thomas. The Wisdom of the Desert. Reprint ed. New York: New Directions, 1970.
The ethics read as near-universal; virtue inside a community, the harder path, carries the greater reward.
The value is in the archetypal reading, not the chart analysis; the joint third section is best.
Mostly a missed opportunity: uneven writing squanders the chance to make critical theory exciting; not the place to start.
The academic counterweight to gifted-adult self-help: statistics, not affirmation, best read against books that supply human texture.
Far more Jung than alchemy, projecting theory onto traditions she barely knows.
Treats ADHD as intensified-normal, which I doubt; its one real contribution is the case for meditation.
Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Translated by Gregory Hays. New York: Modern Library, 2002.
An emperor trying to figure it out; the most therapeutic philosophy I’ve read this year.
Rid, Thomas. Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
A history of cybernetics that can’t quite hold its story together; the cryptography chapters lose the thread.
Hand, Robert. Horoscope Symbols. Rockport: REDFeather, 1981.
The chart’s underlying logic rather than a cookbook; it reorganized how I read the whole system; not for beginners.
The balance is the virtue: the right starting point for the classic economic-history approach.
Its value is curatorial more than aesthetic; what it chose to include, early, is the point.
The narrative lens unifies but thins; useful for range, not depth.
Moberly’s chapter on the Old Testament’s unsettled place in Christianity is the keeper.
Infrastructure is inherently social, and its defining trait, invisibility, is also its vulnerability.
Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. London: Penguin Classics, 2006.
Essentially music, read aloud: poetry pulled down to everyday English life, leaving a strange inner peace.
Greene, Liz and Howard Sasportas. Dynamics of the Unconscious. York Beach: Red Wheel/Weiser, 1988.
Reading it after The Secrets of Alchemy made the alchemical symbolism legible, a lesson in how symbolic systems cross-reference.
Form-play without surrendering to cynicism; the diagnostic stories cut closer than comfort allows.
A poor entry point elaborating ideas better stated in The Gay Science; the presentation defeats the philosophy.
John of the Cross, Saint. Dark Night of the Soul. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003.
The phrase names a purgation, not a depression; I learned I’m not in one and will return.
About studying mysticism, not practicing it; I lean perennialist against Jones’s pluralism.
Groff, Lauren, ed. The Best American Short Stories 2024. New York: Mariner Books, 2024.
Groff’s selections hit unusually often, and her energetic introduction shows how an editor’s voice can charge an anthology.
Treats alchemy as a real material discipline, running the recipes himself; it shows how differently premoderns reasoned.
Made suspected ADHD concrete, with medication the load-bearing intervention, though the book stays shallow.
The genre’s ceiling: reframing isn’t solving, and sometimes the only answer is to change your environment.
Didn’t ease my skepticism; it sharpened why some symbolic systems feel true to me and others don’t.
A serious history arguing Copenhagen’s dominance owes as much to politics and personality as evidence.
The core (act, don’t ruminate) is right, but self-help can’t account for how socially embedded we are.
Cammett, Melani et al. A Political Economy of the Middle East. 3rd ed. Boulder: Routledge, 2013.
The near-comprehensive introduction I’d been missing for a genuine blind spot.
Remarkably good on India’s imprint on the world, even where influence is overstated.
The guided meditations are the real tool, but reading around the loop isn’t loosening it.
Gennaro, Rocco J., ed. The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness. New York: Routledge, 2018.
The field’s honest disarray is the lesson, plus the surprising drift back toward idealist and panpsychist accounts.
Psychological astrology far livelier than expected; the puer/senex archetype is what I took.
Tresilian, David. A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature. London: Saqi Books, 2008.
A solid, maybe too-brief survey, best on why so little Arabic literature reaches English.
Better than Sapala’s for looking past herself to case studies, but the same frustration at a lower pitch.
A limit of the genre: I felt seen but learned nothing, told what I already know, more wordily.
Almost therapeutic: against 3,500 years of cuneiform, our urgent troubles shrink to Ozymandias scale.
Everett, Percival. James. New York: Doubleday, 2024.
Brilliant where it skewers white superiority, then the third act hurls itself off a burning bridge.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. Reprint ed. London: Faber & Faber, 2010.
Kaleidoscopic then jagged, the depressive’s reality; it gave me the coinage I needed, an élan abîmal.
Separates “Arab art” from “Islamic art”; the second half, working through Iraqi artists, is where the argument comes alive.
Bridle, James. Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence. London: Allen Lane, 2022.
Elicited the childlike wonder I’d been missing: better technology starts from a wider definition of mind.
Juha’s comedy is the delivery system for the wisdom, the same fusion the Sufi tradition trusts.
I land with “Capitalocene”: the “Anthropocene” lets all humanity take a blame that belongs to capital.
Too long, but permanent: I can’t stop noticing when people, and I, think by analogy.
Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
I disagree: the real risk is alien intelligence, uncontrollable because illegible, not because smart.
Horizontalism’s fatal flaw is the absence of a unifying idea; I lived the Tunisian version.
Owen, Roger. The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914. Revised ed. London: I.B. Tauris, 1993.
A near-encyclopedic economic history no one writes anymore; the mechanism of dependency is the lesson.
Darwish, Mahmoud. Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?. London: Hesperus Classics, 2014.
Strong, but Mural and In the Presence of Absence cut deeper.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 2017.
Reading Borges felt like reaching a source; he gave back the magic of childhood reading.
Read a juz a day through Ramadan; Nasr’s team aims to be the Qur’an’s King James and largely succeeds.
Pulls no punches: understanding an essay felt like an achievement; the Muʿtazila interested me most.
Lembke, Anna. Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. New York: Dutton, 2021.
The pleasure-pain seesaw resonated, but the real prize was the open question about the death drive.
The geographic grouping feels arbitrary; what’s left is mostly affection for Banipal’s project.
Gibson, William. Mona Lisa Overdrive. Sprawl Trilogy, 3. Reprint ed. New York: Spectra, 2012.
The trilogy’s weakest, but the afterword on the cyborg condition redeemed the whole trilogy for me.
Traditional astrology taught as mechanics rather than cookbook; the foundation for when I return.
Choi, Franny. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. New York: Ecco, 2022.
Genuine imagery, but so precisely of its moment it may not survive the moment.
Readable and broad; the essays push against the tradition’s self-account, and I’d want the traditionalist rebuttal.
Translation chooses fidelity over consistency; the constraint exposes what survives the crossing.
It makes the transmission problem vivid: there’s no authentic original, only a fluid life.
His maximalist, neurotic register made me feel less alone, which is most of what I want from prose.
Philosophy as conversational practice I’d want to teach from, against the fear rigor requires coldness.
Numerology that left me cold, clarifying by contrast: Millman’s system is only broad, where astrology manages both.
Pre-Islamic poetry where the supposedly dead desert teems; the qasida’s parts aren’t ornament but what makes the poem a poem.
Taylor, Carole. Astrology: Using the Wisdom of the Stars in Your Everyday Life. London: DK, 2018.
A clean primer that mostly oriented me, marking where I’d want to go deeper rather than going there.
Murakami, Haruki. After Dark. Translated by Jay Rubin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
A camera-like present-tense voice shows how point of view manufactures strangeness; the surreal feels native to late night.
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. Reprint ed. New York: Back Bay Books, 2009.
The unresolved, circling shape is the point: a form built to feel like life rather than to conclude it.
A useful specimen of techno-utopian credulity, clarifying what serious futurism would have to avoid.
Allen, Roger. An Introduction to Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Serviceable but wildly uneven: only the drama and Qur’an chapters slow down enough to teach.
Brazier, Chris. One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories. Oxford: New Internationalist, 2009.
An uneven global anthology; Lahiri’s closer broke me.
It rearranged me: I assumed I was the judge, and Kierkegaard showed me the aesthete.
Land, Nick. A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings. Self-Published, 2017.
An uncomfortable lineage: watching the accelerationist machinery get repurposed toward reaction.
Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2024.
Platform lords extract rent, not profit; it reopened Hegel: maybe history’s engine is still feudalism against capitalism.
Moldbug, Mencius. Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century. Self-Published, 2017.
His negative critique of liberalism is partly right; his positive vision is a surveilled corporate-fief dystopia.
Rubin, Rick. The Creative Act: A Way of Being. New York: Penguin Press, 2023.
Stylish and largely empty, the same instagrammable wisdom-lit as Rupi Kaur, who at least risked feeling.
Gibson, William. Count Zero. Sprawl Trilogy, 2. Reprint ed. New York: Ace Books, 2023.
Better written than Neuromancer and more gothic than cybernetic; Gibson’s strength is atmosphere over plot.
The book that’s helped me most through hard stretches; amor fati is the line I carry.
Some texts are impenetrable; without per-text framing, a reader can’t see how the pieces fit the whole.
Early cosmic horror; Blackwood’s “The Willows” is the most frightening fiction I’ve read.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Reissue ed. New York: Modern Library, 1994.
A slog whose durable idea is the architecture of the mind.
Duʿaji, Ali. Sleepless Nights. Carthage: Beit al-Hikma, 1991.
Funny, clear-eyed stories; the best English sample of a Tunisian milieu deserving far more translation.
Dated, but it captures the moment Arab nationalism was ebbing and Islamism just finding traction.
Better than Tolle: you are the observer of your thoughts; reading about letting go was itself avoiding it.