📚 Samuel Ross Meehan's Tubular Book Page 📚

As the header says, this page is "under construction" - like all of us. And it is with great fortune that we have books to help us along the way. I would not consider myself formally trained as a literary critic but in middle and high school at Chazy Central Rural School, we had to read like 600 pages each quarter and keep a summar reading log were grilled on it - it's not my first time "around the block", as one may say.

Scores are given for entertainment and how much one may get out of the book from the perspective of insight. They have a lower bound of -1 to allow for anti-recommendations, in the case that you should not bother, and a soft upper bound of 10.

Books I have Read Thus Far

• 12 Rules for Life : An antidote to chaos - Jordan Petersen (An intense talk about a cute kids book)
• Entertainment Score : 7
• Enlightenment Score : 8
• Review : The title is unfortunate and doesn't do this book justice. It gives the impression that you are diving into some mopey self-help book from an academic Tony Robbins written for mid-career, lost souls. In reality, Petersen explores the Yin and Yang boundary between order and chaos and how we are obligated as humans to search for and support order while embracing chaos as a means of growth. He ties together history, literature, science and religion, and contemporary living in a fascinating way. Each chapter unfolds like a walk through some dense wood, as some point getting so engulfed in the immediate story ahead of us (he really likes bringing up the soviet gulags, the masculine/feminine and (yes) Jesus) that you feel like you have almost lost him but then ... you emerge on the other side, the brush clears and you are lifted into some clear and enlightened place. I walked away from each chapter with the start of a meditation. And the author, Petersen, is Canadian, so I somehow was biased to think he was well-intentioned and kind the whole time.
• Recommended : Highly
• Unbound : A story of snow and self-discovery - Steph Jagger
• Entertainment Score : 7
• Enlightenment Score : 3
• Review : If the "12 Rules" was like eating chicken soup (for the soul), then this was like eating those hummus potato chips that are seemingly healthy at face value, and then you look at the label. It tasted good and was entertaining the entire while, but didn't leave me with a sense of guru enlightenment that I think the author wanted. There was a lot of sex scenes, both explicit and left to the imagination, and the core message of the book was largely slanted towards discovering ones feminine and folding it more wholly into your life. Now, while I do think this is important regardless of gender, this was difficult to relate to in some respects (e.g. at one point, her lover speaks to her vagina). This was accompanied by a more gender-neutral message about not orienting ones perspective on life towards artificial goals to be achieved and "checked off" that will help win the approval of others. I think this would be a very admirable goal in and of itself to achieve - to seek for approval from internal forces rather than external. It was a very easy read before bead that required little thought and animated a number of ski destinations throughout the world that I would now like to visit. I recommend it to anyone needing and easy read.
• Recommended : Highly
• How to Build a Habitable Planet - Charles H. Langmuir, Wally Broecker
• Entertainment Score : 7
• Enlightenment Score : 10
• Review : The best description I can think of is that this is a "mathematical proof for why the Earth is where we live". Starting from the Big Bang, the authors guide you through all of the steps of planetary evolution all the way up to human life. Each step of the way, they survey the data that tells us how we know what we know and paint a picture of the dynamical systems that sequentially evolved to support life. It has enlightened me to view life (and consequently myself) as a natural next stage of planetary evolution, similar in spirit to plate tectonics or the water cycle, thereby giving a new meaning to the adage “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”. This entire journey provides a foundation for two chapters near the end that outline climate change, both natural and human in nature, and armed with the requisite knowledge of geology and chemistry and biology that was constructed throughout the preceding 600 pages, I was given a better appreciation for the nuances of the current stage of planetary evolution, the civic mechanisms that we humans have constructed to preserve the planet and those which we haven't but should. Unfortunately, this reads much like a textbook and at times feels like walking through a swamp of knowledge that can be rather laborious. However, overall, I highly recommend this to anyone in this group.
• Recommended : Highly
• The Moral Landscape - Sam Harris
• Entertainment Score : 6
• Enlightenment Score : 8
• Review : This book attempts to be forward thinking, drawing upon moral philosophy and neuroscience to posit that we can objectively work towards a better world by reducing suffering and increasing well-being through a more thorough understanding of the mind. Sam strongly objects to moral relativism as the paradigm that is used as a shield against telling other cultures where they fail and proposes a "moral landscape" (think energetic potential) and our thoughts and actions in our lives drive humanity around this "landscape", moving up and down on the z-axis to descend into valleys of suffering and peaks of ecstasy. An interesting proposition and one that appeals to the desire to be quantitative though it requires getting over one's natural tendency to desimeasurement of the thing you are trying to optimize. He's also a well-articulated author, so its good conditioning for the mind I feel.
• Recommended : Moderately (if you want to go out on a limb and challenge your worldview)
• Sapiens : A brief history of humankind - Yuval Noah Harari
• Entertainment Score : 10
• Enlightenment Score : 10
• Review : Super well-articulated journey from the beginning of Homo Sapiens 200k years ago up until the present and into the future. Yuval does a nice job framing things just abstractly enough that you can begin generalizing our behaviors and beliefs in a way that allows you to view history as the extrapolation from physics --> chemistry --> biology, though not so much that you feel like your head is in some far off philosophical cloud. This allows him to build to the end and lay out a myriad of possibilities for where humans can go from this hinge point in history where we are bucking the constraints of natural evolution and appearing more and more God-like with every bit of knowledge we acquire. He admits the downside, but with less doom and gloom than I was expecting.
• Recommended : Highly

Books I have NOT Read Thus Far

• Every Vote Equal : A state-based plan for electing the president by national popular vote - John R. Koza et al
• How to win friends and influence people - Dale Carnegie
• The Gulag Archipelago (Abridged Version) - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• What We Owe to Each Other - Tim Scanlon
• White Fragility : Why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism - Robin Diangelo
• Lifespan : Why we age, and why we don't have to - David Sinclair
• Coming Apart : The State of White America - Charles Murray
• Scientific Knowledge and It's Social Problems - Jerome Ravetz
• Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well - Douglas Stone