aeudaimonia's reviews
62 reviews

Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke

emotional inspiring reflective relaxing slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

Rilke competed both the Elegies and the Sonnets after a long period of depression; so have I read them. Existential dread and the terror of the divine and the daunted but resolute commitment to live.

“Earth, isn't this what you want: to resurrect 
in us invisibly? Isn't it your dream
to be invisible one day? Earth! Invisible!
What's your urgent charge, if not transformation?
Earth, my love, I will.”

Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen

emotional lighthearted reflective relaxing sad fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Leonard cohen save me

Why Be Jewish?: A Testament by Edgar M. Bronfman
Did not finish book. Stopped at 17%.

Nothing against the book, but my audio subscription ran out in the middle of it and I have no inclination to renew it. Will definitely finish the book when I can find another audio or physical copy.

Paradise Lost by John Milton

challenging reflective slow-paced

• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Misogyny

Minor: Sexual assault

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse

challenging reflective slow-paced

5.0

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault

challenging informative slow-paced

4.0

Anti-Judaism by David Nirenberg

challenging dark informative slow-paced

4.75

One of the best books I've read this year, Anti-Judaism takes an intellectual approach similar to Edward Said's Orientalism: tracing through history the development of anti-Judaism as a system of thought up to, as Nirenberg quotes Nietzsche, the "creeping calamity" of the Holocaust. While some chapters take us outside the Western Christian context, specifically those covering Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and early Islam, it should be required reading for anyone who is or was raised Christian. 

My only qualm is that each chapter could be its own 400-page book (currently it boasts of a little under 500 pages, excluding another 100 pages of notes). Fleshing out each time period could easily have taken 1000+ pages. Not everyone's cup of tea, but the last main chapter covered everything from Karl Marx and Max Weber to Joseph Goebbels and Nazi propaganda to the Cassirer/Heidegger debate and the perceived Judaization of mathematics. It needed more space to breathe. With that said, this book is an effective springboard for readers who want to study in more depth, and Nirenberg's bibliography provides literally hundreds of avenues to do so.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Antisemitism

Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life - In Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There) by Sarah Hurwitz

informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.5

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot

funny lighthearted relaxing fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.0

This book's kind of great. There are several racist parts because it was 1939. Highly uncomfortable lines notwithstanding, T. S. Eliot is master of English verse (especially how he plays with meter - very good) and the poems maintain their energy and intrigue throughout, despite all of them being about cats. They even manage to be hilarious. But the best part of the book by far is that it was clearly written by a cat lover for cat lovers. Poems like The Rum Tum Tugger, the Song of the Jellicles, Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, etc. are great and bizarre but also just dramatized versions of what it's like to have cats; we can read the Jellicle Ball, for example, as a poeticized take on when cats get the zoomies at three in the morning. I'm a major fan.

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Content Warnings

Minor: Racial slurs and Racism

What Is Communist Anarchism? by Alexander Berkman

informative slow-paced

2.0

I listened to the audiobook, which I normally don't do; maybe I'd think differently if I'd read it with my own two eyes. With that said, it's really not what I was looking for. I guess I had hoped for a real philosophical and scholarly treatment of communist anarchism (although maybe that would be too much for just an introduction). Berkman makes several sweeping and vaguely essentialist claims about human nature that I don't disagree with per se, but certainly wouldn't say with my full chest. And he frames these claims as appeals to "common sense" and "universal desires" so often that (especially in the earlier chapters) it came off as demagoguery. Berkman also approaches history through a progressivist lens that I always find really yucky and dangerous for a variety of reasons. Even though I'm sympathetic to and interested in communist anarchism, I don't vibe with the author's underlying ideological commitments to such an extent that they kind of ruined the whole book for me. Berkman's analysis of the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevists however was always interesting whenever relevant and a welcome break from the rest of the book.