I bought every 99 cent classic book ever recommended as part of the Western Canon to take with me to Africa.

I got through a good number but more than a few I gave up on.

Not for me to join the ranks of people pretending to have read books that they have not. Here is my list of shame:

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Halfway through I started flicking to see what would happen, then I flicked through to the end and even that seemed to take forever. I was not a big fan of the prose or character building, but my main problem is that it is 60% too long.

Be brief.

Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Sir Edwin Arnold

This is a book review of Puberty Blues by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey, In My Father’s House by Gabrielle alone, and a discussion of the story and personalities behind these books.

In 1979, Australian society was scandalized by the release of Puberty Blues, a novel written by two teenage girls about their experiences growing up. More frequently discussed than read, the broadly autobiographic account follows two thirteen-year-old besties as they gain access to the world of cool surfies on Sydney’s beaches, an achievement that allows them to sit on the sand and watch the boys surf, fetch them snacks and commend their awesome moves.

Review of Thermopylae: The Battle For The West, by Ernle Bradford, Open Road, 1980.

Like most bogans, the first I knew of the Battle of Thermopylae was from the art house film 300 (2006). I decided I needed to read a book about it. The film turned out to be more historically accurate than I’d thought.

Ernle emphasizes the significance of the battle for Western history. Once the Persians were repelled, Athens enjoyed its Golden Age in which much of our modern politics, philosophy, drama, art, architecture and science were developed. The city would soon be defeated through a stupid war of choice, but its culture survived and was eventually absorbed by the Roman Empire, and from there spread to Europe and the Americas.

The classical columns of the Capitol in Washington DC echo this legacy. Less visibly, our entire way of thinking finds its roots in a civilization that only flowered because of one of the most remarkable wars in history.

The book starts from the second major Persian invasion of Greece. At this time, there was no Greek nation. The peninsula was divided into disparate and mutually hostile city states who shared a language and little else. Under attack, their only hope of survival was to unite.

They barely did so. In our age of great stupidity, it’s a relief to look back on a time we venerate and see that its leaders were just as vain, self-aggrandizing, jealous and petty as our own. The author makes sport of Greek uber-individualism, with the Athenians being the worst. It is no surprise that many cities sold out to the Persians long before they arrived. Nevertheless, the two greatest states, Athens and Sparta, ended up fighting together against the invaders, ever distrustful of each other and always internally divided.

Book review of The World’s Greatest Short Stories: Selections from Hemmingway, Tolstoy, Woolf, Chekhov, Joyce, Updike, and more, Dover Thrift Editions, 2006.

Any collection starting with “The World’s Greatest . . .” will be controversial. In this case, the editors have given preference to famous or influential stories rather than digging up hidden gems.

If you want to read the biggest names in short stories, this is a good place to start. As these are the stories most frequently referenced in later writing, and in conversations between white women on Slack channels while they work-from-home, they’re worth familiarizing yourself with whether you end up liking them or not.

Book review of The Face Mask Cult by Hector Drummond, CantusHead Books 2022

I bought this book as a show of support for a fellow traveler, not knowing if I’d read it as I was already skeptical about facemasks, but I opened it while bored on a train and ended up reading the whole thing with great interest.

In 2020 I already knew that the evidence for masks was sparse because I’d looked it up many years earlier, when I lived in Asia and was curious about the phenomenon. At that time, I’d concluded that masks went in parallel with gargling green tea to ward off influenza, stretching your left knee in order to get rid of a wart on your right hand, and thinking Westerners are fat because they eat bread instead of healthy white rice: Oriental arguments-from-authority that persist through the generations, impervious to scientific evidence, and reinforced by socially unassailable, octogenarian doctors who wouldn’t know what a Cochrane was if they found one sitting in their high-waisted underpants.

Mask skepticism was the evidence-based position of Western experts cough cough when coronadoom began in China. Then the scientific method was thrown out in the mad rush by our rulers to show they could do something – anything – to Stop The Spread.

This is where The Face Mask Cult starts from.

Book review of Unsqualified Preservations by Mencius Moldbugman.

Frequently confused with his near-namesake, Moldbugman was for some time a noted Twitter shitposter who poured scorn on gaping photos, collectors of bobbleheads and those who would arrange their bookshelves by colour.

Unsqualified Preservations, rather than a dry and wordy account of why Curtis Yarvin should be appointed God Emperor of the Universe, is a collection of funny and macabre short stories.

The first, ‘Rickadoodle Applestrudel,’ is a vivid and creepily realistic depiction of too-online madness that turned out to be even more autobiographical than Moldbugman expected, although I don’t think he quite ended up with a Pinoy cock in his mouth.

Book review of The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer.

Over the last few years, I have been compelled to curiosity about the nature of mass hysteria. I previously reviewed Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay.

The True Believer focuses on who gets involved in movements before they become established institutions – Bolsheviks in 1920, Nazis in 1925, Christians before Constantine and so on.

That’s a motley collection of mass movements, so I must add that Eric claims he does not see mass movements as necessarily bad. This book is mostly read as a warning about how extremist movements get started but it could equally be read as a how-to guide for getting a noble cause off the ground. Keep that in mind as we continue.

Eric’s main assertion is that true believers are, for the most part, unsuccessful and unhappy people:

. . . people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

Discontent is not enough. There must also be a sense of power to change things. An extremely poor peasant with no rights is unlikely to join a mass movement unless something convinces him it may succeed, perhaps a charismatic leader who seems infallible or firm belief in a doctrine.

The true believer seeks to join a movement primarily as a way of escaping himself.

Book review of Welcome to Hell by “Bad” Billy Pratt

I’ve been reading Bad Billy’s blog Kill to Party for many years. In a sphere of game and neoreaction, his site is more a mix of personal dating horror stories and thwarted romantic dreams presented through the lens of pop culture as he attempts to pull apart what the hell happened to GenX.

Welcome to Hell is a collection of these blog posts but it also holds together as a book because the themes develop throughout.

Rather than blame everything on Boomers, his attention is focused inward:

Despite all the nihilistic postering, it’s important to remember that Generation X wasn’t the one with all the school shootings. The murky attitude was as shallow as the cuts on their wrists; it was a fashion accessory, it was an act, it was total bullshit. Even if they didn’t become noteworthy go-getters, GenX eventually had to grow up into lame adults.

Though carefully outside the mainstream Manosphere, Billy gets drawn into the last decade’s Manofads. One of the most interesting chapters is about his addiction to kratom, which he describes alongside the self-destruction of the Stone Temple Pilot’s lead singer:

Review of McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War by Hamilton Gregory, 2015

It is an eternal fallacy to imagine that we live in uniquely corrupted times. Reading any good history book reminds us that we’ve always been this bad, but then we put the book down, check social media and go back to thinking we are in the End Times.

In America, the 1960-70s hosted an evil that I’m unaware of in any other time or place: forcibly recruiting mentally disabled men to fight in the Vietnam War.

Men who could not learn how to independently load or maintain a rifle. Men whose disability affected their physical coordination, meaning they could not pass the required tests.

The demand for warm bodies was so great that they deployed them anyway.

Previously: Literally Hitler

Book review of Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan, 2008.

Executive summary: Churchill and friends ruined Britain by blundering into both world wars.

The claim about the First World War is much less controversial than the Second. In fact, I considered skipping the section on the lead-up to WWI because I’d read a lot about it already. A few pages in, I changed my mind.