In past years, I’ve published a list of the best books I read that year in a list titled “Top Books of 201X.” This year, my relationship to reading was a little more complicated. Books are so often complex and multifaceted, it can be hard to boil them down enough to place them on a
“The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” is a song by the Beatles released in 1968 as a track on the White Album. Its deliberately sloppy recording and somewhat juvenile lyrics make it feel like a bit like a children’s campfire song, which is maybe why it was one of the early Beatles songs I got
I took notes on all the books I read in 2018; these are the books that (with the benefit of hindsight) I liked the most. In no particular order: A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky I know Professor Robert Sapolsky from his human behavioral biology lecture series on YouTube. Coming to understand ourselves as beings
Every December, I head up to Northern California to see family and friends, and mostly I love catching up with everybody, and feasting, and singing, and other holiday things, but I also have to brace myself for a particular type of interaction: “How’s Los Angeles?” “You haven’t become an LA native, have you?” “They haven’t converted you, have
The best books I read this year, in no particular order: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon This novel tells the story of two Jewish cousins who become successful comic book authors in the 1940’s and ’50’s. It explores the antifascist origins of the superhero genre, as well as questions surrounding the role
A couple years ago, sick of all the heavy literature I had been reading, I picked up the complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, expecting, in essence, a fun romp. Sherlock Holmes was, I thought, the original puzzle-fiction: solvable who-dunnit (or how-dunnit) mysteries that encourage the reader to exercise their reasoning skills and that maybe teach something about
pastiche: a work of art in the style of another artist This post is the last in a series of three pastiches of French authors. As with the other two, there is commentary at the end. The first post (Stendhal). The second (Flaubert). There were in essence two Caltechs: The Caltech with a campus that
pastiche: a work of art in the style of another artist This post is the second in a series of three pastiches of French authors, all depicting undergraduate life at Caltech, appended with commentary targeted at readers with no familiarity with French literature. The first post in the series. It was eleven fifteen pm, Friday,
pastiche: a work of art in the style of another artist For a class I took my last term of college, I wrote pastiches of three different French authors—Stendhal, Flaubert and Proust—all depicting undergraduate life at Caltech. I set out to answer the question, approximately “What do the lenses these artists provide tell us about
