At the end of each year, I reflect on the books I have read. With much less time to read now, I started incorporating audiobooks into my schedule. My reading personal record was during the days of COVID-19 when my friends and I read a new book each week and discussed it in our three book clubs of 2020. I had, by then, read 150 books in that calendar year. Will there be another year when I will read this many books? I do not think so. However, I am content to always fall short of that record. To approximate the ideal is a satisfactory goal for any failed perfectionist, and my failure to reach perfection will supply me with ambition. A voracious and prolific reader, and now listener, is good enough, and as Dionysus instructs us: “‘Earth is well enough,’ they say. ‘Let good enough alone.’” [1]
In this year’s list, I will add my favorite books, and I will pick the arbitrary number of twenty-one, because ten would have been too few, twenty-five too many, and twenty leaving just a book that I could not omit. The joy I extracted from each one as it was read is irrelevant now; I will choose retrospectively based on my current memory of the joys, pleasures, interests, and education gained as I esteem them now, not as they were acquired or incurred at the duration of reading. The rules for inclusion are lax: Books I’ve previously read in years past will be allowed, and in many instances, variety will be favored over honesty; personal satisfaction in remembrance, and relation to my current as opposed to previous circumstances at the time of reading is granted privilege over the quality of the book.
The main purposes of this list are to share some of the books I most enjoyed reading and to suggest books for the interested readers who keep asking me for book recommendations.
With that said, and without further ado, I shall commence with the last book on the list.
21 – The Iceman (Anthony Bruno)
The Iceman is a story about the infamous American serial killer Richard Kuklinski, also known as Polak, or the Iceman. I listened to this book on Audible as I was driving my car to and from work. The story of this cruel, cold-hearted, cold-blooded, unempathetic murderer captivated me not because I love thrillers, for I don’t usually seek out these books, but due to my astonishment as to how any man can sink to such depths of depravity.
The two central characters of this story are Rich himself and the undercover agent who ultimately caught him, Dominick Polifrone. Both are complex, strong, men, pursuing each other – even in partnership. Only one may survive, and at each increment in time, each believes he has gained a step over the other, only for the next increment to reverse. The story is very exciting, to say the least, and strong is the nerve of the reader who does not at every second expect gore and spilled guts to leak from the pages (or the car’s recorder). And it gives one perspective on what we may accomplish if we were not directly under the scrutiny of society.
Can any man be Richard Kuklinski? Well, let’s rewrite this question: can any man be Juan Pablo Castel? Given the incentives and circumstances, yes! Given the circumstances, we become the men in Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. We become the man of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Kuklinski, thug though he may be, learned – that is, changed through experience – to become the monster we now know him as. This should teach us an important lesson: To what degree should we be passive and allow ourselves to change and adapt to our environments? After all, didn’t Vonnegut say, ‘we are who we pretend to be?’
This book presents an even harder question to its readers. How should the social theories we adopt deal with such men as Kuklinski? Can we believe that man is good? Is man evil? Did short-sighted self-interest guide him to the life he led, and to what degree did his environment allow, or shape him? The book starts with his upbringing, but we should not be fooled, for many a man lived in such squalor and did not resort to murder sprees.
I am happy that I read this book at such a time, to always have in mind examples that would throw a monkey wrench at the systems of my belief, and not allow me to be blissfully ignorant: Such men exist in every society, and they do not shy away from exploiting our belief that we are peaceful, cooperative, and willing to live and let live.
20 – Everybody Lies – Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are (Seth Stephens-Davidowitz)
Everybody Lies was a book that had been sitting on my shelf for many years. It called me whenever my eyes caught a glimpse of it, but never until earlier this year did I grab it for a pleasant read. I started this book because I wanted to write an article with my friends about lying. It was one of the first articles we wrote in our creative writing club. My article was so horrible, and no one liked it. I figured that reading more about our deviant behaviors (behaviors that, immoral as they are, abound, and hardly anyone refrains from their practice). With such a goal in mind, in retrospect, I have not chosen this book with wisdom, as it does not address my question.
The book turned out to be about something completely different: It’s about the virtual distance between what we claim to want in life and what we actually want as gauged by our search histories on Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Pornhub, Tinder, and what-have-you. We claim that we want X, though we look for Y, and choose Z as the closest thing we may attain to Y. The book is all about the methods, Y’, we use in searching for Y, and how are the close alternatives, Z’, not as lucrative as Z, which we ultimately choose. This is a problem that concerns psychology and sociology more than it does economics. Though equipped with data analysis tools, and the mindset of an economist, the author finds great ways to answer these questions.
The author is an economist by profession: Though, in this book, and his professional life, he is an applied statistician. Most of the book talks about his data-collection methods, how the methods may influence the results, and his explanation of the statistical and econometric tools he uses and their limitations. The book helped me a lot in understanding data science, and it taught me more about myself as I applied the practices that people used in the book. After reading the book for a few weeks, I found myself in many instances doing exactly the things others were doing.
The book also encouraged me to use Google more, not so my data would be recorded, but because of how useful it may be to solve my problems. I am not the kind of person who would google the reasons why he had a break-up, or why he was not doing very well in a course in school – since I favored thinking through problems by myself. But what harm would I get if I gained more information about how others would advise me to behave if, in the end, I thought them through as well?
I had fun reading this book, and it was one of the most pleasant nonfiction works that the modern reader may have in his library. I recommend it to all social scientists, mostly because it helps them in using modern tools to tackle age-old scientific questions. Moreover, the book does not shy away from asking the questions we are most ashamed of. What are our sexual preferences? What pornography do we enjoy? Are we racist? And why are we, ourselves, and not our neighbors, racist? And so on.
19 – The Happiness Hypothesis – Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Jonathan Haidt)
Jon Haidt’s pop psychology book was one of my first ordered Amazon books. I got it for its alluring title and was excited for more than eight years to read it. Will this book finally tell me what happiness is, a concept I have come to appreciate more and more every year? I read it after sinking my teeth into the topic and found it massively underwhelming. That is not to say that it is a bad book, for it was written well and each page was fun and exciting. It was below my previously unrealistic expectations.
The prime error in the book is the one we see committed by many sociologists, social psychologists, and economists: Happiness is measured without being properly defined, and many of its alternatives are treated as if they pour into this monolithic concept of happiness. Can something be measured without being defined? This is a question of immortal value that Plato asks one of his interlocutors: Without proper definition, a search cannot be initiated because we may never know what exactly we are looking for.
What is happiness? Is it the good life, the absence of anxiety, or pleasure? Paul Dolan, in his train-wreck of a study, Happiness by Design, assumes that every human being is a practical hedonist and continues this flawed and superficial (indeed, corrupt) assumption. For his methodology, a survey that seeks to report the subjects’ subjective well-being affects to compare apples with apples, but it doesn’t because of the fallacy of interpersonal comparison of utility: Suppose I tell you that I enjoyed doing X by Y units of enjoyment (utils), and you enjoyed X by Y’ utils. Can we have an equation like A x B x Y + A’ x B’ x Y’ = 0, where A and A’ are weighting factors, and B and B’ are real numbers that balance the equation? This is a controversial issue in the social sciences. Austrian economists refuse such interpersonal comparisons of utility, whereas Keynesians use them every day in their theories of consumer behavior. Still, what the trained economist favors is a demonstrated preference as exemplified by the act of demand, whereas the psychologist has no such tool to use besides the personal report of the test subject through surveys. Can happiness be measured in this way? I do not think so.
This book does not do much better in that regard. Happiness is pleasure on one page, the absence of anxiety on another, elation on another, and contentment on another. At no place is happiness defined precisely and only that precise random variable which was defined is measured.
One great thing the book does very well is to emphasize the importance of earlier writings by philosophers on the good life. If anything, this is the thing the book accomplishes in the best way. It overviews the ideas of ancient and medieval as well as early modern philosophers on happiness and injects them with findings from modern psychology. The author is wise to not dismiss traditional thought: Grandma truly knows best, maybe not on everything (as we see in Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s example at the beginning of his book), but on so many things that we ought to pay attention. This is also an insight that Friedrich Hayek (below) has repeatedly advised: We should not dismiss traditions so quickly, for they contain pearls of wisdom that not even the elders propagating them understand.
Earlier in my reading career, I placed five books on my list to read in the very near future. I kept going to other endeavors instead of crossing out the ones on this list. (The list included Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes, Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, and Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do. The only book left is Huxley’s, which I started this year but was unable to finish due to how horribly hermetic it was.) I was satisfied to cross this book from the list, as I felt that in one way I was truly progressing in my reading career. But such progress is an internal journey without much practical value. What value I have gained is learning, if only in bits, how to write a successful nonfiction book. This book is a very successful one, and I should learn, if at least one thing, that.
Just like any social psychology book, I found great fun in finishing this title. I started it just around Christmas Eve of 2022 and finished it in January of the following year. I remember this book with great sadness since I was lonely and unproductive during the reading. I returned from the USA in September and instead of publishing the papers from my M.Sc. degree, I took on myself the task to instruct researchers on Optical Physics and Climate and Atmospheric Physics.
The last chapter of this book was read in the Surra Starbucks on a Friday, when my best friend, Bader Al-Qattan visited me to read some papers on individualism with me. We left later that day, and I went to the church to meet with my Christian-converted friend. It was such a funny night, and I will remember those memories for the rest of my life.
18 – Winnie-the-Pooh (A. A. Milne)
Winnie-the-Pooh was one of this year’s great surprises. I bought the book to read to my friends’ children and ended up only reading it to my mother. The stories are so funny and have lost nothing over the century (this volume was published in 1926).
It is a collection of short stories – in each story, a new character is introduced, with one clumsy flaw of character. As we progress in the stories, we come to love the characters precisely for their flaws. I reread the book and its sequel yesterday as I was writing this. There is rarely a sentence in this book that is not achingly hilarious, each quip stemming from one misunderstanding that makes them all just so adorable.
There is a great cast of colorful characters, each brimming with life. Winnie-the-Pooh, the main character, is gluttonous and idiotic: ‘A bear with no brains,’ as he is often called. All of his plans backfire in ways perfectly predictable to all but himself and his friends; and in his stories, irony is displayed in its full glory. His name, Edward Bear, was changed to Winnie-the-Pooh for reasons no one in the hundred-acre woods knows. As for the Pooh, it might be due to an event that occurs in the first chapter, where he is stung by bees and has to blow on them (Pooh) as they approach his face. What’s so beautiful about Pooh is that scarcely an opportunity passes by without him suggesting a solution, and he always has a poem to hum and recite for whatever occasion presents itself. His ‘poems,’ actually songs, are simple fun, reflecting enjoyment of his situation. (What modern poets now call vers-d’occasion.)
Piglet is cowardly, subservient, and with a weak and pliable character. He is also the closest character to Pooh, accompanying him in all his pursuits. He is important mostly to allow each character to interact with others.
Eeyore is depressive, contemptful, and proud, but internalizing; everyone’s at fault but him and he heaps on himself the worries of the world. He is both unkind in thought and forgiving. He is pitiable; in a word, pathetic. In two distinct chapters in the second book, he shines the most. In the first one of these, he is proud of having learned what an ‘A’ is and becomes so bitter upon knowing that Rabbit also knows what an A is, that he breaks the three sticks into six, then into twelve. In the second of these two, he believes that he is a better poet than Pooh, and recites his poem aptly named ‘poem’ to the whole Hundred-Acre woods.
The irritable Rabbit is avoidant, easily angered and frustrated, wrathful, and only easygoing when everything is on point.
Tigger (introduced in the next book, not here) is a compulsive liar, proud, full of himself, full of verve and energy, always assuming, and has a severely magnified conception of his skills and abilities.
Owl is a know-it-all who knows nothing, having the air of wisdom while being goofily dumbfounded at any issue demanding understanding.
Finally, Kanga the mother, and Roo the son, are respectively conservative, reserved; excited, and foolhardy. Kanga is important only to Roo, and Roo wants to jump on anything regardless of appropriateness to his age.
Winnie-the-Pooh is the perfect book for children not only because of its value as a fun bedtime read, but as a reminder that we are flawed, and our flaws give us character, and we should come to love our flawed nature and make peace with it.
17 – The Holy Quraan (Allah)
I have read the Quraan three times this year: Once, at the beginning of the year, when I was terribly sick with a bacterial infection; then, during the holy month of Ramadhan where it is customary to read it – one chapter a day every day; and finally, by the end of the year as I was finishing up the tasks in preparation for the new year.
I was assigned a task at the beginning of the year to estimate the volume of dunes in a remote region in the deserts of Kuwait, and to write a mathematical formula for a paper a colleague was writing. This was to remedy an error an earlier Professor committed: His formulae were off by over 50% of the correct value. Mine were in a tolerable margin of error of around 5%. The day I returned, I caught a bacterial infection that left me bedridden for a week. During that time, I wrote two technical reports: The first was on shape memory alloys, and the second was on the transmission electron microscopy of dust samples. Both technical reports, along with a third on oceanography and marine sampling, qualified me for a major promotion. (I have fought for months afterward with the management to allow me to work from home, since I am more productive there, to no avail.) At home, I read and wrote, and I listened to the Quraan. Usually, I find the task tedious, so I tried to introduce variety by reading it while it was recited by the two readers of the Quraan from Mecca, the Sheikhs Sudais, and Shuraim[2]. It was a spiritual experience that percolated through my heart.
During my second time through the Quraan this year, it was functionally in the background, listened to more as white noise than a book I had to focus on reading. I say this not as a disparagement of this book: It is a cultural fact that we often have the Quraan run in the background to bless our homes and offices. I had it run in the background not as a blessing, but as a soothing presence. It was during Ramadhan that I listened to it, and that was my second time through it this year (three months after my first.)
My third time through was during tough times in July when I felt that time had come to a halt. My life was in shambles, and everything progressed so slowly with no end goal in sight. These were some of the hardest times in my life, and the Quraan helped me through them.
I appreciate the Quraan most when it is read by the two Sheikhs, not when I am reading it because, with quite frankness, I don’t ‘understand’ the Quraan – meaning, I don’t understand why it ought to be so special to us Muslims. To me, it is simply a sacred ritual that I have to go through. And that’s the sad state of affairs in my situation.
16 – Early Poems (Ezra Pound)
Pound’s Earlier Poems accompanied me to Turkey. I have taken Pound’s volume to practice writing in his style, knowing nothing about him save for the fact that he was T. S. Eliot’s instructor. The biographical introduction in this volume told me that he studied the romance languages at Hamilton College and the University of Pennsylvania, which endeared him to me – I, being a self-taught student of Latin and Deutsch at the time. I also love linguistics, and the romance languages, and I love Latin so much. I did not choose him for these reasons, but I discovered all the better reasons why I would want to read him.
His poems were strong and fresh and new. He quickly became one of my favorites. I would surely start reading his other poems because it is such a thing with poetry: Most of the poems anyone will read in his life will be lackluster and mundane, mine included. And from time to time, we read those poems that remind us how beautiful life is, and how true Nietzsche’s eternal words were, that ‘it is beauty that justifies living.’ Pound is very fresh in that regard, in that even the poems that are not very flavorful still have the breath of life breathed into them, and they retain that seed that will force us one day to hold the volume and read them again. I appreciate that in a poet. T. S. Eliot always does that to me, and I hope the same will be true for the poems of Pound.
Indeed, Pound is a phenomenon among poets because he is at once a classical poet, writing in the traditional style, and an innovator – a bard, a folk singer, and a modernist. His poems show a strong appreciation of the Romance languages, and medievalism, and still feel like the works of a twentieth-century author. In reading him, I feel like I am reading Bob Dylan’s or Leonard Cohen’s best poems; and at the same time, I am reading Gerard Manley Hopkins and Arthur Hugh Clough. He is such a poet who puts together two of the things I love the most. His originality and authenticity take me away from the garbage poetry I read every day. That’s what makes him special. He speaks from the heart and is not in any way cliché. He is strong, fresh, and new.
My favorite moments reading Pound were in an ice cream parlor/café in Bitez, Turkey, with a cigarette in hand, a cup of tea, the grass below me, and the stars above me. I sat on a beanbag chair reading him, enjoying the fresh verses, and the environment. There were young university students around me smoking cigarettes: How I wished to ask them for a cigarette, and if they would like to listen to some poetry. It was a dark night, save for the little lights of the store, and I missed those nights even though I want to be very distant from them now. I remember reading him as well in a café where I ordered the most delicious San Sebastian cake I ate, the Royal Café, where I met Melek and Fateme. These were special times when anxiety vanished from my life, and I could truly enjoy living. I am forever grateful to Pound for accompanying me through these nights. I do not remember the last night I was not crippled with anxiety and depression, it eats me alive and kills me slowly, and I figure I just have to savor these moments.
15 – The Complete Odes and Epodes (Horace)
Quintus Horatius Flaccus’ two volumes of Odes and Epodes stood out among the twelve volumes of poetry I read this year because they were ancient, but a modern ancientness manifests in his poetry: For he appeals to the Gods while utilizing modern aesthetic poetic techniques. It is hard not to love him for that. In one poem, he is the most racist, sexist, most vile person on the planet, absolutely horrid. And in the next, he is the sensitive poet asking for undiluted wine while he contemplates the flowers of the garden. Horace, as we now call him, is among the foremost poets of the late Roman empire, along with Cinna, Calvus, Catullus, Vergil, and Ovid.
His Epodes are interesting to read, but his Odes stand out as some of the best-written poetry in the history of the human race; unique and singular among the poets, blending the style of earlier Greek and Roman poets with his own unique attitude towards the world as one who fancies life and enjoys it in a hedonistic, appreciative, manner. Nietzsche called Horace the greatest poem in Rome – and though I favor Catullus, I see why he would have picked Horace: Horace is exactly the poet who exemplifies Nietzsche’s man in the Birth of Tragedy, who has taken it as life’s goal to appreciate the world.
His quip, ‘carpe diem’ or ‘harvest the day’ in Ode 1.11 summarized his outlook and attitude in one of the greatest vers-d’occasion poems in his repertoire. Each poem, each Carmina, utilizes delicious language that not just allows us, but forces us to look at the scrumptiousness of life and to enjoy it – indeed, to drop everything from hand and to dance in rituals of joy that we are alive and among the living in any time. Though the world burns, we ought to adopt this devil-may-care stance and sit down on the grass, pick the iris or daffodil, and inhale its intoxicating scent. Horace helps us enjoy this life with maniacal zeal, and I find that such madness is so beautiful.
Horace is to be read and enjoyed, if not in Latin, then in one’s mother tongue. And a proper reading transcends his written language. I could only put the volume down after it was fully consumed in one sitting.
I read it in Kuwait, in the library, reading ten poems between ten Philip Morris cigarettes, then taking a stroll. They were wonderful days. That was before I had discovered Catullus. The two poets are in no way alike, and in general, the poems of Horace are more ‘beautiful’ than Catullus’, but the latter is the master of poetry, and a poet who has lived his poetry, instead of write poetry in order to enjoy living.
14 – Social Justice Fallacies (Thomas Sowell)
Perhaps, Thomas Sowell’s last written book, Social Justice Fallacies disappoints those who expected a magnum opus and comes like the sweet perfume of wildflowers to those without great expectations. Here, one may find a summary of Sowell’s works over the years. Exposing the errors of the political left through sound, waterproof economic reasoning is what Sowell does best. The book is segmented into five chapters. The first deals with the errors of the sweet-sounding concept of equality of opportunities, as opposed to equality under the law championed by libertarians, and equality of outcome, championed by socialists. His basic point is that no matter how one looks at it, it is impossible to set up two distinct individuals so that their opportunities are equal since it is (1) already impossible to know what opportunities are available to them, and (2) it is also impossible to keep a person at his level of available opportunities which adjusting that of another person to equalize both. If that is so, how can we go the further step of equalizing their outcomes instead of simply their opportunities without destroying our social lives as we know it with coercive control?
The second chapter focuses on the errors committed daily by the sexist, racist, and egalitarian postmodernist philosophies of cultural studies. The author demolishes, one after the other, the many claims held as gospels by these fields, and affects to show how massively their attempted solutions will backfire.
The third chapter reminds us of what a folly treating people as chess pieces is. We know that people respond to incentives, but there is no assurance that those incentives are the ones we have in mind, nor can we imagine how people may or will behave once we enforce any law or regulation. People are not simple. They cannot be modeled without serious errors inflicted on our models. Nor should we treat them as if they ought to be controlled for their own good.
It is in the fourth chapter, on knowledge, that Sowell brings out his best tools, his original contributions to economics and sociology. In this chapter, his analyses in Knowledge and Decisions are expanded and commented on.
The fifth and final chapter, like the fourth and final chapter of his The Quest for Cosmic Justice, tells us how dangerous our situation has become: How the rule of law was abridged, how the constitution’s spirit diverted, how intellectuals veered us from our original trajectories for gains they claimed to be aiming at, and able to reach, and horrid our circumstances have become because of their ignorance.
Though this book may not be Sowell’s best, and it will most probably be his last, it deserves to be read and savored. It is Sowell, in his unblemished capacity to think, and to inflict serious injury to the egos of the intellectuals of our age.
13 – The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (Sigmund Freud)
I started reading this book in New York. I grabbed a copy from a run-down bookstore in Manhattan, where I hoped to find some Christian books (and did, but not the ones I was looking for). It was a frustrating experience, since I had limited time to look for bookstores, and my friend who was with me did not want to go to bookstores. So, this bookstore was the last one we went to, and we hoped to find something good. (We were looking for books by Anthony Kenny, Alvin Plantinga, John Cottingham, and other Christian writers of importance, whether of the Catholic or Protestant denominations.)
This book came as a pleasant surprise. I did not know, just upon seeing it, that Freud had such a book. It is filled with great psychological insights, funny (albeit racist/sexist/antisemite) jokes, and careful analysis of human behavior. The author’s primary goal was to employ his theory of the human psyche in as many areas as possible, be they to understand religion, violence, taboos, or the comic.
I remember very little of this book, but I can still use its ideas successfully. In an outing with my dear friend, Dr. Nasir Al-Brechy, I remember analyzing many jokes using the ideas of Freud here, mostly unsuccessfully, but effectively arriving at conclusions that made us understand why our jokes are what they are today. We were discussing common jokes in Arabic that make fun of tribal affiliations, of which there are many. There are common stereotypes in these jokes. For example, the Azmi family is portrayed as stupid; the Mutairi, as malicious; the Hasawi families as shrewd penny-pinchers; and so on. We wanted to understand how these stereotypes came to be not based on the historical situations these people lived through since maliciousness can be attributed to any family or tribe, but how they gained currency and how they are being reinforced. Needless to say, my friend was not very happy in the beginning, but seeing how good-natured he is, he ended up going at it full throttle. How much I love him.
As characteristic as ever of Freud, he tries to understand why people joke in the first place. He tries to understand four types of jokes, through one great psychological mechanism: In joking, we are trying to relieve ourselves of psychological pains through the employment of a minimum of the limited resources of the mind: Psychological economizing. Some jokes expose us in a lighter mode to our torments (Jewish jokes against the Jews, to water down the punch of antisemitism). Some, to stimulate the other’s sexualities (lewd jokes uttered from men to women, or the opposite, such as those that invoke images of the joker’s genitalia in the mind of the receiving end). Some, to lighten the burdens we live with (jokes the poor tell about the rich, or about themselves, to laugh at the situations they are so bitter about). And finally, some, encourage themselves to act in ways that go counter to their inhibitions (jokes about sexual bravery that push one toward making a move toward his or her beloved, by resizing the situation so it seems in a way contracted and simplistic).
I don’t think the book is respected today as solid psychology, nor has it much value as a study of the human mind. It still is a very interesting book to read. The introduction disparages the author’s jokes since many of them are sexist or ridiculing to women. I didn’t see it as such, as these criticisms are naturally anachronistic. I enjoyed them and told them to my friends; and I remember fondly how my dear friend, Husain Nabatati, and I used to laugh at them.
My chief complaint about the book is not that it is sexist, but that it tries too hard to force a theory without paying much attention to Ockham’s Principle of Parsimony. I would have loved it if the book demonstrated that the mechanism which he is trying to use works, and formulates hypotheses and designs experiments to test such hypotheses. But none of that is done in this book, nor can we find any data to support his claims.
12 – Beauty – A Very Short Introduction (Roger Scruton)
In the earlier months of the year, I had been (and still am, for that matter) particularly interested in aesthetics. I read paper upon paper from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the British Journal of Aesthetics, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. We wanted to be familiar with the current literature to contribute to it. My friend, Abdullah Al-Shimmery, and I read these articles weekly to start writing our aesthetic ideas and publish our writings, but nothing tangible materialized from our readings, yet. (Our project is on hiatus, till further notice.)
We chose to read Roger Scruton’s Beauty, and Ayn Rand’s The Aesthetic Manifesto, hoping to synthesize the analytic and the objectivist traditions in our research article. Ayn Rand’s book was interesting, but much below expectations. I couldn’t add it to this list even though it is much better than some of the books above discussing the matter of aesthetics. In her philosophy, the purpose of beauty is to illustrate the moral virtues of men: All art serves to put examples of the best practices of men in their best of situations, showing how the ideal man behaves in the most unideal circumstances of our everyday world. It is a great book, very useful and important for those interested in aesthetics: However, the writing itself is not beautiful, and therefore, not an exemplar of how men ought to write. We find many unjustified assertions there, that I would probably agree with, but whose power of conviction is not commanding and may not help those who themselves do not agree with these convictions initially.
This book, Scruton’s Beauty, was unparalleled in its brilliance. From the earliest pages, it seeks to define beauty, gives us its purpose, and attempts to acclimatize the reader to the philosophical language of the field, which is not very far from the common parlance of aestheticians, but incorporates within the language some of the terms used by philosophers to justify their claims and demonstrate the utilities of their tools and systems.
Scruton’s Beauty does not shy away from tackling the toughest questions the layman might ask: Can beauty be defined? Can the arts be enumerated? Is what is beautiful universal, objective, and eternal? Do tastes and aesthetic truths converge? What about contentious problems in aesthetics, can they be solved without relying on one theory or another for specific solutions? (I.e., can all aestheticians agree on some aesthetic opinions? )
Scruton is a great philosopher of the twentieth century, both for his mature conservative philosophy and for his analytic aesthetics. One often imagines that not much can be said on this topic besides commonsensical observations on beautiful objects, never general statements including all things that may be considered beautiful; however, one is baffled upon reading this condensed book. There is much to say about beauty. Scruton was able to do the impossible: He was able to articulate precisely what we mean when we say that something is ‘beautiful.’ And regarding that beautiful, what its properties, qua its being beautiful, are.
This volume evolved from a previous book simply called Beauty. I remember watching a documentary about it some years ago, which my friend Noora from the Q8 Writing Club recommended to me. She was a special friend, and I respected her precisely because her conservatism was worthy of respect. I have not read that book, by the reviews tell me that this volume is the better version, and I will have to take their words for it. I am excited to read more books by Scruton, which will hopefully be very soon.
11 – A Man’s Place (Annie Ernaux)
By the time I bought Annie Ernaux’s La Place, she had been the most recent Nobel laureate in literature, and I was curious. I found this memoir, along with several of the author’s memoirs, in a Turkish bookstore peculiarly named ‘Penguen Books.’ (We went there believing that it would exclusively sell Penguin books: That was tempting because I did not find one good bookstore in all of Bodrum.) Little did we know that there would be really good books here, from multiple publishers.
The redheaded clerk working at Penguen was a big fan of Ernaux, so I asked her to choose two memoirs out of a collection I had chosen. She picked this one out, and I picked another. I was not disappointed at all. She had really good taste in books, and she knew which book to pick, and which to leave for the birds of prey and the mongrel dogs.
Truth be told, I had a crush on the redheaded woman because she liked Steinbeck and Vonnegut. I tried to help my Turkish friend become her friend, but it was obvious that there was some coldness in her. She was pretty and kind, and in my fabulations smart, and that made her all the more attractive to me. My fantasies would prove to be a very important theme in my upcoming novel. My friend, Abdullah, made a joke about me once that I don’t think I will ever forget. He said that Adnan is the first to mock those who claim to be sapiosexual, though, to him, intellect and mental capabilities are sufficient conditions for attractiveness. I don’t think I disagree with that claim at all. Although I think sapiosexuality is an erroneous term, intellectual merit is the sexiest thing I can ever imagine.
Annie Ernaux is an inspiration. Her book was one of the biggest inspirations for my memoir-turned-novel A Fortnight by the Sea of Aegeus. She is straightforward in writing, though her style is very minimalistic. She does not provide more information than needed. She does not say anything that does not need to be said, and she often emits information that we imagine to be necessary for the smooth flow of the story. She doesn’t try to be complete. Her memoir is extremely fragmentary. The episodes that compose the memoir are disjunctive, and not continuous at that. She is unique in that regard.
I found it very helpful to read her work. Now, I know how to move from one memory to another. It is often said that reading is the best way to learn writing, and by reading Ernaux, de Maupassant, and Carrington, I feel that I am much more equipped to write memoirs now. But it is not simply that which is to be taken: Ernaux proved that even the most personal information, that which we would tell friends in our intimate conversations, and in the way we would deliver these stories – Ernaux showed me that these stories can be told in the most gripping way.
La Place is about the death of the author’s father, and the vacuum he has left in the family and her own life. At once, I was ashamed for not being my father’s good friend. She shared my shame and disappointment in herself. This is an important theme in Larry Elder’s memoir, Dear Father, Dear Son.
Fathers often don’t know how to love their children, and that is all the worse for both the parents and the children. In this memoir, this theme is not explored, though we feel the message working its way out through the narrative. I loved that about the book, and this ice-berg technique is one of my favorites in literature.
10 – The Macchiavellians – Defenders of Freedom (James Burnham)
I read Burnham’s Suicide of the West in 2022, liking it quite a bit but not believing it was one of the great books on the philosophy of conservatism. James Burnham was a peculiar character to me, and nothing more. My opinion drastically changed when I read this spectacular book, a book that made me love Machiavelli. (I loved Machiavelli, and in turn, Marlowe so much more. I loved the quoted soliloquy so much, that I read his play, The Jew of Malta, the following week.)
The book offers insight from seven authors: Dante, Machiavelli, Mosca, Sorel, Michels, and Pareto. His introductory chapters on Dante show how NOT to read the books of political thinkers; there are formal reasons for writing the texts, such as what Dante shows in his De Monarchia, and then there are real reasons that may be understood once we get to know Dante’s life and history on a more intimate level. In writing about the ideal society, Dante’s intentions may not have been the rectification of the current, corrupt systems of power, but to seize power for his party. This is what the learned and attentive reader would immediately see. The same could be said about Marx and Rousseau, who obviously did not care about creating a better society, but their enrichment and interests.
Before reading this book, I had not heard of Mosca, Sorel, or Michels, and never had I thought that Vilfredo Pareto was such an interesting character. I came to appreciate the French/Italian economist, so much more after reading about his rational study of systems of power, and how the elites garner ever more power and preserve it.
Even Machiavelli has grown in importance to me: His innovation of political science was in formalizing it using empiricism. He has sought to study history to learn what worked in history, what did not, and most importantly, why. I read Machiavelli a long time ago while taking Astronomy at Kuwait University, and I remember the hours I spent right out of the lecture hall reading it and waiting for the lecture’s time. I understood it only superficially and thought of it as a manual. Had I read this book first, I would have seen how brilliant a thinker he was, since he aimed to create a science out of theories used throughout history to gain favors. Irrespective of Machiavelli’s intention with the publication of this volume – i.e., whether he wished to gain power, status, and office through its publication – he has successfully changed the course of the science of politics by empirically studying the problems those in power face and must deal with.
Mosca, Sorel, and Michels were less impressed in my memory, and I decided to reread the book to remember their ideas. They introduced the concepts of elites, and their formal study until Pareto came and wrote the most important texts on the topic. Pareto was a very important figure in Rothbard’s History of Economic Thought, and rightly so; and now, I understand how great of a thinker he is in many other fields of social thought.
The Machiavellians is one of the most important books on conservatism because it shows the reader how complicated political theory is, and it reminds us not to take political thinkers at face value, but to try to inspect their writings and read them in context, seeing what is hidden a layer under the surface.
9 – Water Capitalism (Walter Block and Peter Lothian)
Water Capitalism is a book about the theory of homesteading and private property generalized to encompass things most readers may not imagine to be property: Ownership of oceans, and not simply land, through homesteading. This book helped me write a series of research articles with the author which will hopefully be published this year.
I read much of this paper in a beach resort during workdays, telling my boss I wanted to go to the sea to conduct research. There, on the beach, I was contemplating the schemes of ownership for bodies of water, and while floating on the warm waters of July, I thought of all the problems a policymaker has to think of before issuing such far-reaching proclamations. These were beautiful days that I will not forget soon. I would go to work, punch my card, and then park my car at my grandmother’s house to go with my friend to Khairan. There, I would apply sunscreen on my body and wait an hour before jumping in. While waiting, I read this book and took notes. We did that every Tuesday for a couple of months and then stopped. When we stopped in late July, I started working on my articles with Professor Block with little time for any other activity.
We expanded many of the ideas in this book and studied many important aspects of property. Our most important contribution was dismantling current ideas of collective ownership, especially publicly owned or government-owned resources, which was the topic of an earlier article for the Mises Institute.
The first three chapters of the book were no doubt my favorite since they were the most general and abstract; they justified ownership of property on both utilitarian and deontological grounds, and they defined ownership through homesteading and provided the important economic data around that so the reader may follow along smoothly. I hope to write a book with the author one day, perhaps after we publish our articles.
8 – The Road to Serfdom (Friedrich von Hayek)
The Road to Serfdom, apart from being a very famous book about how we enslave ourselves without ever knowing it, is a fantastic introduction to political philosophy. Having read it the previous year, I wanted to read it again slowly and with extra care. This time, to absorb as much as I can from what this great philosopher-economist has to offer. I was not disappointed.
Friedrich August von Hayek is among the fathers of modern Austrian economists. Though he diverges from the Misesian strain (something that can be seen clearly in the Block-Friedman interchange), he still holds firm the foundations of libertarianism.
This book is a literal life-changer. Each chapter opens up my mind to things I did not even think I would find here. The chapters are so fascinating, and they are not one bit less relevant today. Among the topics are the liberalism that Western societies ‘discovered’ and then deserted; their dreams of actualizing a utopia only to discover that their methods lead to dystopias; how collectivism has substituted individualism in intellectual circles; why the push for central planning results directly from the current ideologies; how planning directly conflicts with our notions of justice and the rule of law; why such planning inevitably creates totalitarian regimes; how trade-offs are lost sight of for blurry targets not quite understood by those pushing for them; how the most corrupt and evil eventually wield the instruments created to (affect to) foster prosperity and progress; why scientific truth must be sacrificed for these planning institutions to work as they were designed to; how the Nazi regime is a direct offshoot of Marxism and socialism; how our intellectuals who seem to ask for peace and democracy are pushing war and total control onto the citizenry; what happens when the language of economics is not used, and in its stead, political slogans are adopted; and finally, what we must do to escape such unsavory fates.
The book is a treasure mine, and it covers a variety of topics the intellectual of today is in dire need of.
7 – The Bounty (Derek Walcott)
Perhaps, Walcott’s The Bounty was the book that most influenced the poetry I wrote in Turkey for my memoir. My friend, Dr. Nassir Albrechy has asked me to read him for months, and he brought me a copy of his Omeros so that we may rigorously study it. I am halfway through it, and I am loving it. (Fun fact: Walcott received the Nobel Prize in literature two years after publishing his Omeros) Though this is not without its troubles, for now, I have to read Sophocles’ Ajax to fully appreciate Omeros.
Walcott is one of the freshest voices of poetry I read last year, and I will not have my fill of him until I have read all of his works. He is totally unpretentious in his writing. He is very easy and smooth, transitioning from one concept to another, never shying from the simple, yet always deeply inspecting the nature of human emotions.
The Bounty is poetry par excellence! It is the richest volume of poetry in style and imagery in my recent memory, always new, always colorful, and always aiming directly at the ideas most interesting to the poet. There truly is never a dull moment to be had in reading him, for not one poem is tedious or boring. He does not play games. To be found is the real deal, and nothing short of that. And this has to be said, since there is virtually no volume of poetry without a few lackluster, or less-than-spectacular, poems (exceptions may be said of T.S. Eliot and Louise Gluck). Here, there are none.
Four of my favorite poems in my novel were directly inspired by his poems. After reading The Bounty, I was encouraged to write: Secret Knowledge; Ege’nin Meyveleri; Dancing to the Beats of a Wave; and, the Lost Aegean Droplet. I am happy to have picked this book up with me to Turkey.
6 – How to Have Impossible Conversations – A Very Practical Guide (Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay)
I keep fighting with other people. I always argue with anyone who does not agree with me, or whom I do not agree with. I think that this is the healthiest behavior for an intellectual. Almost no one I know agrees with me on this point. And it is so rare for me to convince anyone. I am successful at convincing smarter people. I am a failure at convincing those whom I don’t consider to be very smart. I do not think that I consider them not to be smart because they disagree with me.
What better book to read on informal logic and rhetoric than by a philosopher and mathematician who are so effective at convincing me with their arguments? How to Have Impossible Conversations is a very fun guide to talking to people without infuriating them. Most of the book is about being kind to your interlocutor, asking them the right questions at the right time, and listening to them with the intent to learn. The book warns you from completing your opponents’ words, even if you were going to agree with them. I tried some of the techniques on my mother, my friends, and strangers, and they work!
I read most of the book in the Surra clinic while waiting for my appointment at the dentist’s. These were fun days, as I remember going to work to punch my card, then going to my boss and telling her I have to go to the dentist’s, then returning to Surra for the dentist’s appointment, doing one tooth, and returning home for three or four hours playing GBA and N64 games, and then returning to the dentist for another appointment. They were fun times, but I remember them now with such melancholy.
5 – The Sultan’s Preachers (Ali Al-Wardi)
Ali Al-Wardi’s ‘The Mockery of the Human Mind’ was assigned as the second book in a book club at the College of Engineering at Kuwait University. I bought the book sometime before that and delayed reading it because many of my ‘smart’ friends vehemently derided it, calling him a pseudointellectual. I realized how stupid they were, how silly Ali Al-Wardi was, and how worthy of mockery the human mind truly is.
When I read the book, the colorful and vibrant language was so captivating that I kept reading the book, page after page after page after page, till I finished the whole book in three days. I barely agreed with anything Dr. Al-Wardi said, but I knew there was some wisdom in him.
I got all his books some weeks after and read after a few months his lecture ‘Ethics: What is Lost from Our Ethical Resources.’ It was again so fascinating, and the language was unlike any other Arabic writer I have read before. I bought many copies and gave them to my friends.
After this book, I read The Myth of the Lofty Literature, where Dr. Al-Wardi talks about how we were fooled into thinking that Arabic literature through the ages was the loftiest, the highest, the best to be written. He analyzes important Arabic poems showing how simplistic, plain, and often stupid and subversive they were. I loved it because I was never exposed to these arguments.
That was the third book in the series. I figured I had to read the first book, which is the one I am reviewing now: The Sultan’s Preachers. In many ways, this is the lesser of the three. It is, still, a masterpiece of Al-Wardi’s writings, and it shows an important side of history that was never spoken about in our house or school, but only a little in the intellectual communities and spaces I frequented. The side that was shown is how much of our Islamic heritage was written to appease the Islamic sultans. Much of what we have inherited is the ideology that would support one Sultan against his adversaries, many of whom were Shi’i Muslims.
The author is very compassionate about the socialism of the rebels of the time after the prophet’s death. The author is not yet an atheist, though he addresses the prophet by his first name without praying for him. That is truly strange, and beautiful in some way.
After reading this book, I checked out some of his other works without completing them. These books, quite sadly, entertain pseudoscientific ideas without a firm basis, rooted in mysticism and hermeticism. I read only their introductions, ‘Dreams, between Science and Faith’; and ‘Parapsychology.’ I was extremely disappointed that my hero would believe such things, having only recently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and writing the aforementioned masterpieces.
Now, I am content with reading his great works, and I am glad I read the first book of this trilogy. I hope to find other Arabic authors in the near future who write as well as Al-Wardi does, and on topics of such appeal and interest.
4 – The Jew of Malta (Christopher Marlowe)
Marlowe is one of the evilest littérateurs in history, and The Jew of Malta is his evilest work. It seems classical yet is so modern in its style. For example, at the beginning of the play, even before the events take place, the curtain opens to Machiavelli (the very same political philosopher) who gives an odious speech about the nature of human beings and how society favors the vicious while proclaiming to champion the benevolent. All of this is before the curtain closes and Barabas, the Jew of Malta, enters the stage. It was because of this speech (which was quoted in James Burnham’s The Machiavellians) that I decided to read Marlowe’s play, and I enjoyed it immensely.
I remember ruining my sleep for it, reading one scene after the other, snuggled up in bed in mid-June with my new air-conditioner blowing cold air on me. They were sweet memories reading this book of evil, and sweeter still was me reciting these lines to my friends.
(There was a running joke, where I was reading this line to my friend, and she kept saying Khunfushari, and then, because the character calls himself Machiavel she spontaneously started saying Khunfushar. I really loved her for that, and I still remember these memories with fondness. After a week, I read this to my friends, and then we played a quiz game: I was going to name myself Machiavel and my friend beat me to it, so I named myself Machiavel_. I only mention this story because it’s one of my favorite associated memories.)
The Jew of Malta has displaced Doctor Faustus as my favorite Marlowe play, and I am very excited now to read the rest of his plays as soon as I find the time for them.
3 – Nature and Selected Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most important philosopher in my life. His writings, especially his first four in this volume, Nature, The American Scholar, Divinity School Address, and Self-Reliance, made me want to strive for greatness and not accept the kind of life I was living. I read most of this book in the Starbucks in Diya’, going there every Friday to read an essay or two, and rereading them every once in a while. His writings still resonate with me, and he still affects me.
I am still affected by his essays and his spirit and love of individualism. His inspiration continues to inspire me and provide me with energies that push me ever forward.
It was my first girlfriend, Amal, who made me read; but it was Plato, Steinbeck, and Emerson who made me so in love with reading, that I read and never stopped, beginning so late, and reading now up to 760 books. I do not think I would have done it without the passion Emerson has instilled in me.
2 – A Slow Suicide – A Novel (Mubarak Kamal)
Mubarak Kamal’s A Slow Suicide is the book I read the most this year, perhaps four times in editing its drafts until it saw its way through publication. How much I was honored to have edited it, and how I am proud of the author, is very clear now. What is clearer however is that I finally have a book in my library that describes the errors of our social lives satisfactorily. Kamal’s novel is a special book because it talks about the problems of the individual Kuwaiti, unsatisfied with his life, his efforts at improving it constantly frustrated, his outlook is bleak, and yet he is constantly being told to cheer up and accept his fate. It is the kind of life many of us live, in the middle class, trapped in our daily practices, bound by governmentally approved lives we do not wish to continue to entertain.
The novel revolves around an unnamed protagonist, working as an editor in a news agency. It starts with a bang, where our friend breaks his desktop computer, attacks his Egyptian colleague, and destroys the workplace in an explosive frenzy. The novel then returns to his earlier days as a student to explore how he has ended up in such a situation.
The remarkable things in the novel lie mostly in the lost yearnings of the protagonist, his muffled longings to be free, to love, to be loved. How he hated in envy, how he wanted the love of women whose only virtue was that they were less mediocre than the rest; how he resented his peers for their superficial successes, since he had no great dreams of his own nor could actualize them had he had them. His escape, whether in substance abuse, alcohol consumption, asking for the services of call girls, or simple mean obtuseness, cannot rectify the situation he has been trapped in. We wonder how much of it is really up to him, how much to his surroundings. Should we be compassionate, should we pity him, or should we look down on him as a man who refused to carve his fate from the marble of his circumstances?
1 – Catullus’ Bedspread – The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet (Daisy Dunn)
Daisy Dunn’s Catullus’ Bedspread is undoubtedly the best book I have read this year. The book perfectly accompanied me through Catullus’ experience, as I was trying to secure my lost Lesbia. I called her my Iris, and I loved her so much. I wrote so many poems about her and tried everything, in vain. It was unrequited love, and it was about to destroy me, but I got the better of it.
No one now would call what I felt love, and I think there is wisdom in that. Though, before the twentieth century, love was the name given to these strong feelings of affection and infatuation which I have felt. I learned from Catullus that it is toxic to ‘love’ if the beloved does not love you back. And it was partially due to Catullus that I learned to lessen the agony and ‘move on.’
Catullus’ Bedspread competes with Sowell’s and Horowitz’s autobiographies as the best biography I have read in my life. The book uses two great techniques: It introduces the history of the late Roman Republic and weaves into it Catullus’ life and the lives of his contemporaries; and it extracts from his poems anecdotes about his life to form the integral story found here.
Little is known about the poet Catullus besides what he has provided in his three volumes of poetry. And these three volumes are enough to lace the fabric of this biography, making it all the more beautiful.
I was introduced to Catullus through Edith Hamilton’s The Roman Way. Chapter seven of Hamilton’s brief history of Rome condenses the story of Catullus to his relationship with the lovely Lesbia (Clodia Metelli), the object of Catullus’ obsession. I remember going through that chapter with my Iris, singularly occupying my thoughts: I understood Catullus, for I too had my beloved, a woman – nay, an angel – so far from my grasp, yet near enough to be seen and talked to. I tried everything to reach her, I tried everything to be with her, I tried to be kind, to give her gifts, to show her that I respected and admired her, I wrote her a poem, I expressed my interest to her through an engagement-proposal letter. Nothing worked. She outright refused me, almost kicked me out of her life, and it devastated me.
Unlike Catullus, though, it took me a few months to understand that if she loved me, she would have done everything to be with me. It was not meant to be. I wished these words had balming effects, but they do not work with me. Catullus died at my age, having written 116 surviving poems, and I wrote at his age less than half that number. I decided to up my game and to be a poet of the caliber of Catullus not to impress my lost Iris, but because like Catullus, I believe that poetry is the ultimate form of art.
Surra,
March, 2024.
[1] Dionysus, from Stephen Sondheim’s musical adaptation of Aristophanes’ the Frogs: From the number, ‘It’s Only A Play.’ It can be accessed on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/track/3jU1P9JPw74jy8NtqWGET1?si=b0b526944c064ad3
[2] You can listen to the particular reading on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4eCqsFcKAZt92ddWCoPFge?si=TOVmwCHgTeyoqi_YgyozXg
Derbeel Q8 