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Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion Mark Twain effusively reports on Bermuda. If you have an hour and change to read today, just skip my review and read it yourself: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3182/3182-h/3182-h.htm I’ve never been to Bali, Vietnam, or Greece, so take it with a grain of salt. But in my opinion, Hawaii is the king of island experiences and Bermuda is the queen. Mark Twain would probably not object too strongly, if this short book is to be believed. It gives you a charming tour of a charming island, at a charming time. It’s every bit as funny as the rest of his work, but Bermuda manages to take some of the acerbity out of even Twain. If you’ve been to Bermuda, definitely read this. If you’ve never been, definitely read this and then visit Bermuda. This is the last of my Mark Twain travel book reviews, so I want to reiterate: these books absolutely slay. If you like Twain, Bryson, or Barry, don’t sleep on them. Five stars.

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A Tramp Abroad Mark Twain does Central Europe. It’s all the usual wit and humor, applied to the very low hanging fruit of Teutonic seriousness and bumbling tourists. He lays it on unusually thick in this one, telling patently fictional stories, including one about preposterously over equipped alpine adventure. He’s also a good deal more harder on “himself” (as a stand in for the prototypical tourist) and the things he encounters in this book. The idea is at least as much to parody the typical travel book as it is to report his own experience. But as always, between the lines there’s an excellent travelogue. The section on German academic fencing sticks with me in particular. The appendix on the German language slays and can be read independently. Highly recommended for anyone who has studied German at all: https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html Four and a half stars. It’s the weakest of the Twain travel books I read, but it’s still outstanding.

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Red Rising Oppressed poor boy who’s Ackchyually Super Awsome sneaks into the rich kids’ hunger games summer camp. He sees through the meta, crushes the game, and gets the girl, even though she’s not as good as his old ride or die poor girl. The writing at the end is mediocre, which comes as a huge relief after the atrocious writing at the beginning. The author was apparently figuring out how to write in real time over the course of drafting the book. God awful prose, even by the most tolerant standards. The storytelling, as distinct from the language itself, is passable, if unimaginative. The character development is laughable. The thesis is exhausted, the tropes are threadbare, and the relationships are entirely implausible. Absolute slop, a waste of attention, almost no redeeming qualities. My 5yo loved it. Two stars, only because I have a soft spot for Battle Royale stories.

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Anyone interested in a very good looking noun? It’s in the market for a loving home

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Roughing It Mark Twain describes crossing the country, trying his hand as a prospector, and then sailing out to Hawaii. Just like yesterday’s review: great travel writing, hilariously written. The Hawaii section hits like a ton of bricks. It evokes the place modern visitors know and love, but at a time before it had become widely known as an earthly paradise. It will make you nostalgic for a time long dead before you were born. Like the rest of his travel writing, this book is a mainline hit of the distilled essence of the times and places it covers. Plus, of course, a heavy dose of Twain’s personality and perspective. Five stars for its class.

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Day 19: The Innocents Abroad A young Mark Twain makes fun of everything between here and Jerusalem. It works as a travelogue, but he also parodies contemporary travel writing, self deprecates hilariously, and evenhandedly roasts everyone he encounters. I originally meant to read a Bill Bryson book as a palette cleanser following The Magic Mountain, but I discovered I’d run out of them. So I read this instead and liked it so much that I binged five more of his travel books in a row. I can’t believe these books don’t get talked about more. They’re funny as hell, they’re delightfully anachronistic in their takes, and they’re peerless as time capsules of the travel experience of ~150 years ago. “In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.” Five stars for its class. Tender, irreverent, exotic travel writing at its best.

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Day 18: The Magic Mountain A novel about time, illness, death, and the fight for the spirit of Europe. If you pick this up, you better be prepared to put your ass into it. Superficially, it’s ~1000 pages of the petty squabbles of affluent Europeans in a sanitorium. But it’s one of those books that professors love where actively decoding it transforms the experience. I read it primarily because Joseph Campbell treats it as a peer to Ulysses in Creative Mythology. It falls well short of that mark. You probably already know if you should read this. If you’re uncertain, read something else. I’m going to reject its classification as great modern literature and I’m still going to give it only three stars for its class. I did the interpretive work and it still fell flat for me. If you loved it, please reply to convince me that I’m a phillistine. Until then, I maintain that the only reason to profess fondness for it is to impress others who also think they’re supposed to like it.

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RIP to one of the greatest to ever do it

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Day 17: The Jungle Book A series of fable-ish stories mostly populated by animal characters, including a bunch that don’t star Mowgli. The Mowgli stories are the best known for good reason. The Rikki-Tikki-Tavi story is the second strongest. The rest are good but not noteworthy. My 6yo and I both had a pretty tepid reaction to it. If you’re out of content to read with your kids, go for it. But here are some alternatives I’d recommend more strongly: Better orphan story: The Graveyard Book Better animal story: Watership Down Better adventure: Treasure Island Better Kipling: Captains Courageous Four stars carried on Mowgli’s little man cub back

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Day 16: Death in Venice A book about age, illness, decay, and obsessing over a teenage boy so hard that you die. There’s a lot going on underneath the fairly mild surface, which is typical for Mann. I love writing that draws on classical stories and myths, which this does heavily. But Mann is subtle about it mostly and I prefer it to hit me on the head like a billy club. It’s an unsettling book on every level. You feel like a sick old degenerate just reading it. For a book without deep cringe that handles some of the same themes, I recommend Narcissus and Goldmund by Hesse. That being said, it’s undeniably a classic. Four stars for its type.

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Day 15: When Breath Becomes Air A neurosurgeon reflects on the meaning of life as he approaches death. What could be bad about that, right? Such poignant irony! Such perspective! When I plucked this off of my wife’s section of the bookshelf, that’s what was running through my head. “Great, I’ll read it and then my wife and I can talk about it together!” So I’m psyched. I love books about death. I love reading books by super smart people. I get settled in and start reading. It quickly becomes clear to me that I’m reading a collection of essays, panicked diary entries, and dollar store philosophical ramblings. Apparently the editors, without a living author to work with, decided to just ship it as they found it. If Kalanithi had made a miraculous recovery, he’d have reread this, realized that it’s sentimental hallmark movie slop, and tucked it in the drawer where it belongs. I went to my wife to say all this. Her response: “Oh yeah, never read it.” Two stars. Don’t fall for it.

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Just to refresh the mission here: I read a whole bunch of books last year, and I’m gonna try to review one per day until I’ve covered them all. Stay tuned for a scathing review of When Breath Becomes Air tomorrow

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Day 14: Medium Raw This makes a solid hit of methadone to carry you through the end of Kitchen Confidential. It’s more mature, but it has less manic energy than its predecessor. In a way, it’s more accessible because he focuses on household names from the food industry. But it’s kind of like a sophomore album about life on the road. The technical mastery is more advanced, but it’s less relatable for most. If you’ve enjoyed both Kitchen Confidential and this, check out Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. Four stars.

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Day 13: Kitchen Confidential An absolute treasure. I listened to the audiobook this time, read by Bourdain himself, which I strongly recommend. It popped out of that magical overlap of eras where the artist’s craft has fully matured but the artist’s pathos has not yet been quenched by the validation of great acclaim. In other words, it’s a masterfully written book with the energy and intensity of youth. He more or less disowned it in his later years, but there’s a good reason why it outperforms his later, more sophisticated, more emotionally mature work. It works as a coming of age memoir, as industry gossip, as food writing, as travel writing, etc. he could have written about tech, history, interest rates, whatever and I still would have gobbled it up. If you liked his shows but haven’t read it, it’s mandatory reading. If you just like good writing or eating at restaurants, it’s mandatory reading. It’s mandatory reading. Five stars. I recommend his Medium Raw to help with the comedown.

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Day 12: Dispatches A semi-cohesive collection of spectacular gonzo flavored Vietnam War semi-journalism. Chaotic neutral on the war book alignment chart. The author worked on the scripts for Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket and this book has a lot of that energy. It also created lot of the vibe and a lot of the tropes that show up consistently in other Vietnam War movies. It’s heavy on absurdity and you constantly feel like anything could happen, but it never gets too disorienting. If you read it in a single sitting, you’d spend the next week talking like Dennis Hopper’s character from Apocalypse Now. Five stars. Definitive work

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Day 11: The Age of Gold This was great fun. The writing is good, it’s packed with exciting adventure, and it’s got enough history to feel substantial. More than I expected, a lot of it echoes the tech industry: the frenetic energy, SF as the center of the universe, cycles of boom and bust. Even the $10 cups of coffee. It’s the early history of California through the lens of gold prospecting, but it’s also a set of warnings about our own time. If you’re new to the Bay Area, I especially recommend reading this. Even if you’re not, it’s worth adding to your list. It’d make a great book for an international flight. If nothing else, it’ll make you grateful that you don’t have to cross the Darien Gap on foot. Four stars for its type, but only because its type is so stacked.

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Day ten: This Kind of War This is a military history deep cut that I read on @cameron’s recommendation. It does a great job giving a granular blow by blow history of the Korean War. It shows the 30k foot view, but also tells lots of stories about the exploits of individual soldiers. On top of the detailed descriptive work, the author does an honest and evenhanded job of advancing a core prescriptive thesis. Presented in simplified form: It’s a bad idea to send doughy, undertrained soldiers into battle lol, especially without sufficient logistical support. Maybe don’t half ass a war? It’s hard to read this and not find yourself applying the things he says to every war from Vietnam to present. This book has some of the flavor of We Were Soldiers Once…And Young in the detailed accounts of action, and it holds up as simple military history. But it’s even more compelling as a thoroughly illustrated essay on the consequences of fighting a certain kind of war. Five stars for its class

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