Books of 2023

A recommendation from my mother. I quite enjoyed this; I was kind of afraid to read a post-apocalyptic story – they feel a little too real for me nowadays – but this one was nice. Probably helps that much of it is set in Toronto, which is something that a resident of that city always appreciates.

This volume seemed to go by much faster than the preceding ones; I guess because it covers fewer philosophers in more depth. I liked the stuff on Spinoza; the first philosophical system described thus far in the series that kind of makes sense to me (Scotus was close, as I recall).

Really great book about the principles of cooking. I’ve been trying to get better at making food creatively, not just slavishly follow a recipe, and this is very much in that vein. It has good overviews of the fundamentals of what makes things taste good, basic cooking techniques, and a bunch of recipes plus ideas on how to iterate on them, all with wonderful illustrations. Very much recommended.

I like this Hume fellow, seems like he might be on to something.

Volumes four, five, and six of this series were originally supposed to be one (very long) book, so this is pretty much a direct continuation of the previous. That was about continental rationalism, this one covers British empiricism.

This volume is really mostly about Kant. Very challenging stuff to read and understand, but one can certainly see how it was a seismic shift in philosophy.

This gets into the Post-Kantian German idealism and materialism. As we enter the modern area, positivism and reconciling philosophy/metaphysics with science becomes a larger concern.

Continuing into British Empiricism, reaching to the modern era.

Found in a “little free library” in the neighbourhood. Decent overview; the book is from 2000, so many of the details have obviously changed (token ring networks are not especially common anymore, I think), but the core stuff is still relevant.

It was a bit repetitive; seemed like many sections were kind of copy-pasted (including formatting errors, in one case), repeated boilerplate stuff.

A gift, courtesy of my father & step-mother’s trip to Japan. Starts with essentially a history of Zen’s philosophy of aesthetics, continues into more practical advice for cultivating said aesthetic. Perhaps a bit of Orientalism, but an interesting, quick read.

Finally finished the series! The final volume wraps up with a discussion of French philosophy.

Very short little book, just read it after dinner one night. Kind of interesting to note the overlaps with the philosophy of Schopenhauer.

Absolutely fantastic book. Recommended to me by the same friend that gave me A History of Philosophy, which was an excellent preparation for this.

I’d seen some of Magee’s interviews, really enjoyed them, and getting to experience his knowledge, insight, and dry wit in a more extended form was great. He really makes the ideas come across very powerfully and with a great sense of the importance of the notions that Schopenhauer was trying to convey. I really want to read some of Schopenhauer’s own writings now.

Sort of an autobiography of Magee, but mainly through discussing his journey into vis-a-vis philosophy. A fair amount of it is learning about philosophers, but as he’s at pains to make clear, he felt these philosophical problems all his life and so it’s really a story of trying to find answers for deep, driving questions which only incidentally intersects with academic philosophy. Great book, very interesting, it has certainly added a lot to my reading list.

I felt that I needed to read some more fiction, Hardy had been mentioned in one of the previous books I’d ready recently, so I decided to give this a go. A very beautiful novel, but oof. I hate when I’m reading a book like this, things finally start looking up for the main character…but I see that I’m only half-way through and I know it can’t last.

After reading so much about the man and his work, I felt I needed to tackle the primary source directly.

As promised by Magee, it is amazingly readable. Unlike what one might expect from a philosophy book – especially one written in Germany in the nineteenth century – it is lucid, acerbic, and cogent. Schopenhauer does quite a good job of explaining the challenging ideas he’s developing and has many memorable turns of phrase while doing so.

Highly recommended; I’m looking forward to getting into the second volume next.

As our time of being parents draws increasingly near, we’ve been reading more about parenting. This book that my wife found was really interesting and she recommended that I read it as well. It’s a first-person narrative where the author talks about her struggles with raising her child and how she learned about different (non-Western) child-rearing strategies by visiting various “hunter-gatherer” or “traditional” societies. Kind of a more-applied version of The Cultural Nature of Human Development, another interesting book that Amanda recommended to me a few years ago.

Wanted to try this out after reading about Augustine in A History of Philosophy, plus the references Schopenhauer makes to him. Fun read; the bits that were about his personal history were interesting as most history is, the philosophical musings were interesting to compare with much later thinkers. Always neat to read someone from hundreds of years ago and realize that people are still people.

Short little book, read in about ninety minutes. Okay, but I feel like Hunt, Gather, Parent covers all the valuable parts of this book in a much more interesting narrative and with more useful advice.

Volume two of The World as Will and Representation was written many years after the first, when Schopenhauer was in his twilight years. It is, I think, not quite as good as volume one.

While volume one really outlines the fundamentals of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, this volume was more about explicating particular details. Some of those details are interesting – his theory of the arts, for instance – but a lot of it is repetitive, very much him projecting his own particular issues, or just phrenology. Still interesting, still has lots of Schopenhauer’s acerbic wit, but not as amazing as volume one.

I’d received a somewhat mixed review of this book from a friend (and a very good youtube channel), but gave it a go anyway. Graeber’s Debt is one of my favourites, so I felt I owed it to him to give it a try.

I found this book pretty neat in terms of the history and anthropology. I gather that most of the problems people have with it is the way it kind of goes too far away from “societies are consequences of their environment” in the direction of “societies are entirely self-created”. Fair enough; still entertaining, data to feed in to the mental mill, but not something to just take in without further synthesis.

Just a random book I grabbed at the library. Decent enough, despite a few editing issues; very much about the mechanics of poetry writing.

Some nice light reading while staying up with the baby. I’d only read a couple Holmes stories before and honestly, having going over a bunch, I found them fun but not particularly great. It seemed to me like the mysteries were either very obvious, or have a solution that relies on Holmes having some special knowledge that the reader has no way of knowing, which kind of takes away from the fun.

They occupy the mind while trying to not fall asleep rocking a baby in the middle of the night though, so there’s that.

A random history textbook I had lying around. Most of my knowledge of French history is from the revolutionary period onwards, so it was fun to fill out the background a bit.

A classic, obviously, so perhaps redundant to say it’s amazing, but in any case, I really enjoyed it.