REVIEW: WHAT’S THE NAME OF THIS BOOK?

What Is The Name Of This Book?: The Riddle Of Dracula And Other Logical Puzzles (Penguin Press Science)What Is The Name Of This Book?: The Riddle Of Dracula And Other Logical Puzzles by Raymond M. Smullyan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In this popular puzzle, a man has committed a crime punishable by death. He is to make a statement. If the statement is true, he is to be drowned; if the statement is false, he is to be hanged. What statement should he make to confound his executioner?

I got this book after reading The Tao Is Silent and deciding that Mr. Raymond Smullyan must be one of my favourite people out there. A logician, a magician, a pianist, a Taoist and a mathematician? (it rhymes!)

What Is The Name Of This Book? 
(link leads to full text online, in case you’re curious—CTRL+F “Was I Fooled” to get a small taste) is a small journey through all kinds of logic puzzles, paradoxes, stories etc, most of them in the style of knights & knaves, that is puzzles in which the solver has to figure out from a series of statements which can be either always true or always false, depending on if they are made by a knight or a knave, who the knight and/or knave is.

Most puzzles in the book were based on similar themes and got a bit repetitive after a while, but really, how creative can you get with just logic, 0s and 1s that is? At this point it has to be said that lately I’ve been more interested in “irrational” puzzles, ones that have to be solved by acuteness of observation or thinking outside the box rather than clear-cut logic, i.e. those that try to trick you into blindly and thoughtlessly following logic, when using logic alone for solving the puzzle ends up being a hindrance, not a tool. I’m talking about games such as the ones Alberto from Spain taught me and I now play with groups of people whenever I get the chance.

Still, there’s plenty in What Is The Name of This Book? to make one think, and as a collection of quips, stories, anecdotes as well as logic puzzles, it does have a certain value. I would say that it’d make a great companion to Logicomix.

I’m making it my gift to dad this New Year’s; let’s see if he’s going to like it at all, him being more of a rational thinker than me and all. Maybe he can use these stories in his English classes in some way as well.

Solution to puzzle at top of review: (view spoiler)

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REVIEW: Η ΦΥΣΗ

Η φύσηΗ φύση by Ραλφ Γ. Έμερσον
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Είναι απ’ τα βιβλία που μπορεί να διάβαζα 1-2 σελίδες για τρίτη φορά και να μην θυμώμουν καν ότι το είχα διαβάσει άλλες δύο. Τόσο αδιάφορη πρόζα. Δεν ξέρω γιατί, αλλά αυτό το βιβλίο δεν βρήκε καμία επαφή μαζί μου. Καμία. Δεν μου έχει μείνει τίποτα, εκτός από το γεγονός ότι κάποιες αράδες κάνανε κρα ότι ο συγγραφέας έζησε πριν 200 χρόνια, οπότε και μπορούσες να είσαι όσο ρατσιστής ήθελες με ακόμα λιγότερες κοινωνικές επιπτώσεις από το αν έλεγες ακριβώς τα ίδια πράγματα σήμερα.

Τελικά, νόμιζα ότι θα ήταν ενδιαφέρον λόγω του τίτλου του… πόσο άδικο είχα. Και πόσο διαφορετικός είναι αυτός ο Έμερσον από τον Thoreau, με τον οποίο συχνά τον βάζουν στην ίδια κατηγορία απλά επειδή ήταν και οι δύο Αμερικάνοι και έγραφαν «ρομαντικά» για τη φύση τον 19ο αιώνα.

Σαν να βάζεις την Rowling και τον Aleister Crowley στο ίδιο ράφι στο βιβλιοπωλείο γιατί και οι δύο έγραψαν για μαγεία.

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REVIEW: ΚΛΕΨΕ ΣΑΝ ΚΑΛΛΙΤΕΧΝΗΣ

Κλέψε σαν καλλιτέχνης: 10 αλήθειες που δεν σου έχουν πει για τη δημιουργικότηταΚλέψε σαν καλλιτέχνης: 10 αλήθειες που δεν σου έχουν πει για τη δημιουργικότητα by Austin Kleon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ακριβώς ο τύπος βιβλιαρακίου που διαβάζεις και θα ξαναδιαβάσεις μια φορά στο τόσο για να πάρεις έμπνευση και να θυμηθείς αυτά που όταν το διάβασες πρώτη φορά ορκιζόσουν ότι ήταν καλή ιδέα αλλά ποτέ δεν δεσμεύτηκες με το να κάνεις τίποτα απ’ αυτά και έτσι αποτελέσματα δεν ήρθαν, και γι’ αυτό αναρωτιέσαι τελικά αν φταις εσύ, και τι γίνεται με τη δημιουργικότητα σου, και αντί να παίρνεις τον χρόνο να δημιουργήσεις όντως κάτι διαβάζεις βιβλία που σου λένε 10 αλήθειες που δεν σου είχαν πει για τη δημιουργικότητα, τώρα όμως που σ’ τις είπανε νιώθεις πιο δημιουργικός ή λιγότερο;

Δεν νιώθω πιο δημιουργικός, αλλά το Κλέψε σαν καλλιτέχνης με έφερε πιο κοντά σε ένα σημείο στο οποίο νιώθω να κινούμαι από μόνος μου τελευταία: την πίστη στο δικό μου είδος δημιουργικότητας, αυτό το παρόμοιο συναίσθημα με το να γράφεις αυτό που θα ήθελες να διαβάζεις.

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REVIEW: MUCHAS VIDAS, MUCHOS MAESTROS

Muchas Vidas, Muchos MaestrosMuchas Vidas, Muchos Maestros by Brian L. Weiss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Este libro se me sugirió de Fede, un uruguayo que conocí por suerte en el candombe de un domingo como todos los otros. Dijo que cambió su vida y le hizo pensar en su “misión de vida”, que para él era algo como ofrecer el amor a los otros en cualquier oportunidad. Sólo unos días después, lo ví en la librería Moebius al lado de la Posada al Sur donde viví cuando estaba en Montevideo, y era casi la mitad del precio de todos los otros libros. No podía no comprarlo.

Bueno, claro que me interesaba el tema, y aunque no podía entender todo, como sigo aprendiendo el idioma español, creo que era un libro bién escrito. Quiero decir que la manera de escribir de señor Weiss era simple pero comunicaba mucho.

Estoy en una fase cuando estoy leyendo muchos libros y material sobre la reencarnación, y algunas veces lo que se encuentra en un libro se contradice por lo que hay en otros. Diferentemente dicho, lo más que investigas, lo más dificil es encontrar fuentes válidas que tienen algo que ver entre ellos en los detalles. Creo en la reencarnación, pero no creo que Muchas Vidas sea el mejor libro para presentar el tema y su profundidad verdadera a alguna persona que ya no está convencida y que mira a la cuestión con un mente crítico, tan por su falta de algún tipo de prueba (quién es Catherine?) como por la impresión que intenta de darnos, que es un libro escrito por un psiquiatra, es una impresión que sin embargo no puede sostener. Este estilo me hizo preguntarme si todo esto realmente sucedió. Parece un mito, una historia basada en hechos reales y como todas las historias similares, es dificíl separar en ella lo verdadero de lo falso. Por eso no valen como pruebas sino como inspiraciones, y esto es sin duda algo muy personal y no cuantificable.

En todo caso, todavía era una lectura interesante con puntos espirituales válidos y con valor para ver la vida por otros ojos, como si el hecho de la inmortalidad del espíritu fuera un hecho indudable, y todo esto la verdá me está poniendo a pensar cada vez más.

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REVIEW: HIJOS DE LOS DÍAS

Los hijos de los díasLos hijos de los días by Eduardo Galeano
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Un pequeña exposición por cada día del año tomada de la historia del mundo y de la América Latina. La mayoría son ligeramente interesantes, pero no puedo acordar ninguna en este momento. Bueno, algunas palabras eran más difíciles para mi nivel de español, pero creo que no es mucho que no entendí al nivel de significado. Eduardo Galeano es una importante representación de Uruguay en el mundo, mi primer día en Montevideo era su velatorio, así que tengo un punto suave para este hombre. Quiero ya más libros de él, no sé si en español o otro idioma, Patas Arriba en griego era buenisimo.

Prestado de Roberto

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REVIEW: PERSONALITY TYPES: USING THE ENNEAGRAM FOR SELF-DISCOVERY // TYPOLOGY

Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-DiscoveryPersonality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery by Don Richard Riso

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Experience has shown that … personalities … may be grouped into various major categories, and for purposes of studying them this is a helpful device. Classifications must never be taken too seriously—they ruin much thinking—but the fear to use them has prevented much more thinking.

—Karl A. Menninger, The Human Mind

The above quote would find a lot of people in the world in open disagreement. Even in the US, where different social needs and anxieties gave birth to almost all forms of typology developed today, there is still some skepticism about the extent to which typology works and is based on fact; in the culture I grew up in, namely millennial Greece, the very concept of the existence of a number of more or less concrete personality types, is rather foreign to say the least—ironically, too, because some of the most adamant proto-typologists were ancient Greeks philosophers such as Galen, who is the best-known.

My enduring fascination with the subject and my attempts of discussing it with my surroundings have been mostly welcomed with polite indifference and at worst with open contempt: surely the entire wide spectrum of humanity cannot fit in a handful of archetypes. “How is this any different from astrology?”, asks a One that has made her mind up about right and wrong; “no system can pigeonhole the infinite complexity that is me” is a common reaction from Threes or special-snowflake disintegrating Fours; “you do know that people’s behaviours change according to their surroundings, right?”, comes the valid though overly dismissive comment from a Five who likes to think he’s unusually smart and thorough.

It’s been very difficult to get people to look at this seriously and see the strengths of existing typology systems and how they can help us empathise with and understand eachother and ourselves. Half-arsed online tests and the seeming equation of typology with “which Disney/Game of Thrones/famous person are you?” hasn’t helped people take the field seriously either, but I’m not one to judge; after all, it is how I myself, and many others I’m sure, originally came across typology. The difference is that I took an interest in the theory of it all, the questions that result in the answers that are all the different types. Thus did my research in this realm begin years ago and ever since I’ve been slowly trying to follow Kierkegaard’s advice to become subjective toward others and objective toward myself.

Before reading Personality Types, the typology system I’d been most familiar with was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, developed in the ’70s and in later years built upon by David Keirsey and his theory of four temperaments.  MBTI was based on Jung’s eight cognitive functions and laid out the sixteen four-letter type system we know and love today. According to it, each type is a different ordering of these Jungian functions that correspond to each individuals preference of use. I, for instance, am an INFP because I primarily use Introverted Feeling and then Extraverted Intuition.

Understanding how the cognitive functions work for each type is essential for understanding the MBTI, a fact which regrettably but understandably is most often missed by online tests, because it makes the whole thing about ten times more difficult to decode.

To sum up, MBTI is used to categorise people according to their cognitive functions: the mechanics of the manner in which they perceive and process information, how they perceive the world (by observing or by abstracting?) and how they make decisions (thinking their way out or doing what feels right?).

Nevertheless, the MBTI isn’t even what this book is about; I just wanted to illustrate the difference between it and the Enneagram, which is a different school of typology, and what Personality Types is about. Riso and Hudson did an excellent job with it of presenting the Enneagram as a more organic form of typology than MBTI. Sometimes the latter feels as if it’s somehow constructed or artificial; the Enneagram, on the other hand, is very convincingly presented in this book as something that does exist out there, that it is what had been attempted to be captured by the first known typologists in ancient times up to Freud, and consequently it is something that absolutely has to be part of modern psychology and psychotherapy. They make a convincing case that the Enneagram’s the culmination of everything that’s been done before in the field, the most perfected and complete system that has been developed to this day. And after reading the book, I do stand convinced.

Here’s a small sample of what the types are about and our problems:

Twos spend their whole lives searching for love from others and still feel that they are unloved.
Threes endlessly pursue achievement and recognition but still feel worthless and empty.
Fours spend their entire lives trying to discover the meaning of their personal identity and still do not know who they are.
Fives endlessly accumulate knowledge and skills to build up their confidence but still feel helpless and incapable.
Sixes toil endlessly to create security for themselves and still feel anxious and fearful about the world.
Sevens look high and low for happiness [through new experiences] but still feel unhappy and frustrated.
Eights do everything in their power to protect themselves and their interests but still feel vulnerable and threatened.
Nines sacrifice a great deal to achieve inner peace and stability but still feel ungrounded and insecure.
And finally, Ones strive to maintain personal integrity but still feel divided and at war with themselves.

The way out of these self-defeating patterns is to see that they cannot bring us the happiness that we seek because our personality does not have the power to create happiness. As wisdom has always recognized, it is only by dying to ourselves—that is, to our ego and its strategies—that we find life.

Apart from this small sample, here are some of the reasons I think the Enneagram is an excellent tool and theoretical system:

• The Enneagram is based on triads, just as the MBTI is based on pairs. Each Enneagram type is the combination of thinking, feeling or instinct with a modality of overexpression, underexpression or repression, which in turn represents each type’s fundamental characteristic: all at once, its main weakness, the bane of its existence, what it strives to overcome, as well as what it’s ambitions are aimed at and what it thinks it lacks. That makes 3 times 3, three modalities for three fundamental aspects of humanity.
• The wing system adds more depth and intricacy.
• On top of that, the fact that if as a person you’re expressing your type well you’re “integrating” into another type and if you’re not you’re disintegrating into yet another makes it clear what each type can strive for or can expect to happen if it doesn’t remain healthy.
• The system is made even more complex by the fact that for each type there are essentially nine sub-types according to the level of development of the type. That also goes for the wings and directions of integration/disintegration.
• All the above combined make the Enneagram not only a great tool for self-discovery, empathy and understanding, but also quite revealing and useful for self-development as well.
• While reading the lengthy descriptions for each of the types, I had very clear images of real people I know or friends of mine who appear to be embodiments of their types. Imagine the symbol above but with the faces of people in my social network at each end. My personal Enneagram became these 9 friends of family of mine, and now I believe I can understand their possible fears, troubles and priorities much better, as well as see reflections of those characteristics on myself.

This stuff is real and I want to get deeper into it. I would heartily recommend you do as well, and there’s no better place to start than Reddit’s Enneagram Subreddit which has all the information and links to tests you might need. When you get the basics, reading an actual book, this one or another good one by Riso and Hudson or other personality psychologists and distinguished writers on the subject, will be the way to go. Good luck!

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REVIEW: FAHRENHEIT 451

Fahrenheit 451Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another post-war American dystopian classic scratched off the (small) part of my to-read list that’s dedicated to… *pensive look*… older books.

Fahrenheit 451 impressed me. I expected it to be good, but, dutifully as I do when the proper time comes, I made all the right connections that proved in my eyes how a 70-year-old book might as well be speaking about today.

They say that “the past is a foreign country”, yet at some unique moments of lucky insight we can get to realise how much we do share with the people from foreign countries, who at first might seem distant, locked away by the fences of culture, yet at some point we take notice that there’s still the gap between the bars through which we can see the other side. Replace the Parlors with tablets and the Firemen with… I don’t know, the NSA, and there you have it.

While it would be a wild stretch to say that books are even slightly hated or feared in today’s society, I would argue that they’re increasingly insignificant. No, actually, it is not books we’re talking about here—just as Faber told Montag that it wasn’t the books themselves, as in the scrawled, bound sheets of paper, that he wanted to save. What we, in the company of Montag and Faber, are talking about, is books as symbols of mindful dedication, a capacity to pay attention to detail and a thinking or intuiting mind behind the scrolling eyes able to connect with what it reads and care about it.

Some minor spoilers ahead.

In the scene where Montag and Mildred go through the books Montag has saved, try to read them and find they are unable to understand them, I was reminded of young Greeks today unable to understand ancient Greek or even Katharevousa, or me trying to read Dostoyevsky a couple of years back and giving up because “I can’t stand the classics.” Beatty’s admission that books were essentially banned (or, to phrase it more precisely, reading was slowly abolished by the government by discouraging literacy) in order to avoid conflicts of opinion that could make people invested in some idea or its counterargument, brought to mind how there exists now a dominant mainstream narrative that requires from people globally to accept it more or less at face value, while every discordant (rational?) opinion is painted as crazy. It’s got to the point where if one does not believe the official story, they are a conspiracy theorist, which seems to be the broad-brush contemporary insult of substantial equivalence to “communist”.

You can go to Reddit these days to get an idea of what’s allowed and not allowed to be discussed in mainstream discourse, although I like the idea that the more taboo a subject is, the closer it is to our cultural blindspot, what people in the future will laugh at us (or curse us) for failing to see, and in a way to the truth—if we can speak of such a thing without missing the point.

I can’t say whether Bradbury was ahead of his time—this would imply a linear, rational process of how the progress of humanity works I don’t agree with—but what I’ll say is that in certain respects, the times themselves have not changed all that much since when Bradbury was fresh out of school and was typing away in the basement of UCLA on penny-operated, time-constrained typewriters. In certain respects. And that includes man’s (and woman’s! {and genderqueer’s! {{[and other terrestrial and extraterrestrial sentient beings!}}}]) thirst for meaning, and the survival, or the continual re-imagining in the aftermath of disaster, of what truly matters.

In short, yes, you should read this book—as another step to protect its family and heritage from their slide to insignificance. Alternatively, you could listen to the unabridged audiobook like I did. It’s just over 5 hours long and the narrator is good.

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REVIEW: SWEET TOOTH

Sweet ToothSweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed Sweet Tooth‘s insight into ’60s and ’70s British life more than I did any of the characters, who I honestly didn’t care about all that much. It happens to me a lot, enjoying the setting and background more than the actual story, and it happens to me not only with books, but also with movies, games, sometimes even with people. Often I feel as if everything else apart from the protagonists, the setting, the situations, the world events taking place somewhere unseen and the emotional backdrop are the real centrepieces of a story. Here, it wasn’t Serena Plome or any of her lovers: it was MI5 and the world of domestic intelligence, the Cold War and the sides the public, or rather intellectuals, would pick in the “war of ideas”, be it consciously or subconsciously. Or somewhere in between.

Yes, I definitely enjoyed being transported to that era as a little observer; an era when a lot of things were the same as now, but they didn’t have phones or the internet. However, they did have a growing eco movement. They did have rock—in fact a lot of the rock stars we’re still idolising were alive back then, like my father often observes, who incidentally gifted me this book the Christmas before last; they did have marijuana, leftist movements and activists, they did have secret government services running the show in ways which will probably never be disclosed. A lot of what is still part of public discourse had its roots in that era. We think we’re being original, when we just haven’t done our homework. Am I ranting? I think I’m ranting.

What truly surprised me was the meta ending. I wasn’t expecting it to come from a story such as this, but then again, and this is probably another reason why I enjoyed it, Sweet Tooth was a book about books, authors and literature.

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174 PEARLS OF WISDOM I’VE GLEANED FROM READING 174 BOOKS (LINK)

From my favourite Julien Smith, that guy who’d definitely be invited to the cool people party. Posting here for future reference and inspiration:

I recently realized that I’d been reading a book every week now for  5 years straight.

It kind of made me wonder: what did I really learn? Am I smarter than I used to be?

I started to wonder, and this is what happened. 140 characters per book, for 174 books… 174 things you may not know.

Are you curious? I sure was when I started. Here we go.

REVIEW: DUNE MESSIAH

Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles, #2)Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’d heard that the second part of the Dune saga is a bit of a disappointment after the grandiose first part, and as I do hate to admit it, I struggled to finish it. I couldn’t exactly follow what was happening, the characters’ motivations, their positions and the parts they were playing in Muad’Dib’s empire. Most of all, I couldn’t visualize how he was visualizing what was happening to him and the intrigue that was taking place around him… or if I did, which I might have, I thought it was confusing and not very interesting. The whole ghola/Idaho subplot (subplot? wasn’t that the book’s main storyline?) left me terribly indifferent.

I’m happy to have put Dune Messiah behind me. I can start seeing why a sci-fi fiend acquaintance of mine told me that he dropped the series because of “way too much religion and mysticism.” Messiah indeed went overboard in this regard compared to its predecessor, but I’m still curious what might happen in the next books and whether the mysticism and religion at least in the rest of the story might prove to be a bit less hazy and interesting. Mind, in the first book, it was a big part of what made it feel so alive.

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