Weekly Non-Fiction Reading List 4.15.24
This week we have four books on the list. We have the incredible new book on irrationality from Amanda Montell as well as one of my new favorite books on moral philosophy and ethics. We also have two surprise books on the list. Enjoy!
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Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices by Travis Rieder
This is easily one of my new favorite books on ethics and moral philosophy. Many of us are trying to live as ethically as possible, but when the world is in so much despair, it’s hard to do so. Regardless of how hard we try, we’re all contributing to climate change, we’re supporting companies with terrible labor practices, and we’re involved in systems of oppression. Travis Rieder is a philosophy professor, and he’s in the same boat as the rest of us, so he wrote this book.
The book starts off with Travis being pretty doom and gloom, and I’m just thinking, “What the hell did I get myself into.” He gets very nihilistic and gives stats and figures basically saying how our individual actions don’t really do anything when it comes to stopping climate change or the many other catastrophes in the world.
The second part of the book is when Travis starts dropping wisdom bombs left and right. He runs through the philosophies of a ton of famous philosophers like Kant, Mill, Plato, and others. Some of this is basic moral philosophy 101 that you may be familiar with, but he intertwines it with what’s going on in the world today. It really switches gears when he starts talking about how we can best do right by other people.
His overarching argument is that he believes we should practice “participatory ethics”, which are our moral obligations to one another. He knows that none of us are going to be perfectly moral or ethical, but he presents a matrix with ways of thinking so we can make better decisions to do the best we can.
I loved this book oh so much, and I hope you go read it right now.
The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell
I had absolutely no clue what this book was about before reading it. I just knew Amanda Montell had a new book out, and I loved all of her previous books. She’s an incredible writer, and she’s always covering different, interesting topics, so I picked this one up without hesitation and ended up binging it.
This book is about human irrationality, which is one of my favorite topics. If you’re a nerd like me and have read countless books on this topic, you may not learn much from this book, but I still highly recommend it. In fact, there were a few studies in this book that I hadn’t heard of before, which I found super interesting.
Each chapter is a different cognitive bias, heuristic, or general thinking error. What separates this book from others is that Amanda uses personal stories in each chapter to showcase how these thinking errors occur, but it’s also great that she’s humble and vulnerable enough to tell these stories so publicly. Many other books just sort of explain them and help us spot the thinking errors in others, but Amanda forces us to look inward so we become better thinkers.
Amanda also has an amazing ability to break academic topics down in a way that the average person can understand while also keeping their attention. Amanda has a big audience, and I’d bet many of them wouldn’t have learned about these topics had it not been for her writing this book. We need people in this world to recognize their own irrationality a bit more, and for that, I’m insanely grateful that Amanda wrote this book.
Fiction surprise reviews
That’s right! Surprise! I read some fiction books over the last week. My wonderful girlfriend and I went on a week-long vacation which involved two 37-hour rides on a sleeper train. I never read fiction, but she does, so I finished one book that I started months ago. Then, to cleanse my palette, I binged a much better book.
Bunny by Mona Atwad
I could write pages about how much I disliked this overhyped book, but I’ll do my best to not rant about it too much. I never read fiction, but I want to start getting into it. I like weird stuff, and I’ve slowly become a fan of horror. On booktok, I saw this book recommended everywhere and so did my girlfriend, so I decided to start my fiction reading journey with this book, and holy mother of God is this book overrated.
I honestly have no clue how this book is so popular. First off, anyone who labels this book as horror is out of their mind. This book mainly comes up on reading lists for “people who like weird books”. This book reminds me of when super basic people would say they’re “quirky” and like “weird things”, and you just find out they’re into very normal things that most people like.
As far as “weird” goes, it took about 80 pages to get to anything semi-weird in this book. If 80 pages doesn’t seem like a lot, just know that the book is a little over 300 pages, so that’s almost a third of the book with nothing happening. And it felt like it was such a tease. The book was so insanely boring up until that point, I think I just got overly excited that something was happening. I was like, “Alright, let’s get weird!” The supernatural “thing” in this book is kind of weird, but it’s barely a part of this book. Imagine you’re watching a movie, and something happens, then they do a montage of the group doing that thing some more times and then they just don’t do it anymore. That’s sort of how this book was written. The weird thing is a very small part of this book, and then it shows up (kind of) toward the end.
My main gripe with this book was how boring it was. You can tell the author tries to impress people with how descriptive she could be with things. I kept pausing and reading paragraphs to my girlfriend just to showcase how pointless and mundane the details were that the author was describing. It didn’t really “paint the picture” better or immerse me into the book, it was just the author describing so many pointless details that had nothing to do with the story.
My second biggest gripe with the book was that there was no plot. This book didn’t have you rooting for anyone because there was no real conflict or challenge to overcome. Things were just sort of “happening”.
Finally, toward the end, the book started picking up. Then, after introducing a mysterious new character, I just immediately stopped caring about them because of how boring she made it. Then, as the story starts to conclude, I’m thinking, “Oh God. Don’t do the trope to conclude this story…” Well, that’s exactly what she did. It made it unsurprising and it was just “blah”.
The best way I can describe this book is, “It’s basically the movie Mean Girls but far less interesting and in no way entertaining.” I immediately had to read another fiction book to make sure I wasn’t insane, and I’m not. This book is not good, and it just has mass appeal for the most normy audience out there.
Edit: Right as I was about to post this review on Goodreads, I saw that it has a big ol’ banner saying it was nominated for Best Horror of 2019. I almost died of laughter.
Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin
After reading the God awful book Bunny, my girlfriend recommended that I read this book to see if I found it more entertaining. It definitely was. This is a great book that had me hooked from the second I picked it up. The book is only 192 pages, so I managed to finish it within a few hours. The book starts you right in the action, and it keeps you guessing throughout the book as you try to understand what’s going on with this mother and who this creepy boy is that’s talking to her.
The description of this book is perfect: “A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. “
I enjoy stories that have momentum and mystery. They have you guessing, and each time you think you know what’s going on, it throws a curveball at you, and that’s what this book did.
If I had one criticism, it’d be that the book isn’t broken into chapters. It almost forces you to read it in one sitting. I’ll also say that a ton of reviews of the book talk about how scary and creepy it is. It’s not. I say this as someone who scares really easily. And yes, I know I referred to the kid as “creepy”, but he quickly goes from creepy to annoying, but in an interesting way.
Overall, this is a fantastic book and I think it lives up to its hype. I also found out they turned it into a Netflix movie, and I can’t wait to check it out. If you’re into supernatural stuff that keeps you guessing, you’ll like this book. If I could relate it to a show, it’d be season 1 of Stranger Things when we didn’t really know what was going on until the end.
Lastly, I’ll say that while this book does have a solid ending that wraps things up, it also leaves a few things up to the interpretation of the reader. When I went to see what people though the ending meant, I saw a lot of different theories. I think that’s pretty cool.
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