The 5 Books I Read in May 2022: Reviewed

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick: 5/5, must read if you like sci-fi or the Blade Runner movies
• Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari: 3/5, a few really good chapters but a lot of familiar ground
• Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri: 4/5, Jhumpa haunts my soul
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck: 5/5, I see why they usually make you read this in high school
• In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell: 5/5, 1930s hot takes that somehow are even more relevant today

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

I recently watched Blade Runner 2049 and felt it was important to revisit the source material here. If you’re into Star Wars / Dune, AI, biology, etc. this will be right up your alley. The book is way ahead of it’s time — conceptualizing consumeristic entropy as the never-ending march of “kipple” (junk that people buy and leave behind when they jet off to Mars), long-distance emotional communion through empathy boxes, and dial-up emotions (“mood organs”) way before modern discourse. Honestly the pacing is kind of wonky (the “big third act battle” goes down in <2 pages)… but it only takes a few days to read so well worth the time.

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari

I respect Johann Hari a ton for the passion he brings to his work — Lost Connections and Chasing the Scream are both phenomenal. For me personally though, Stolen Focus is not quite as remarkable, largely due to the the fact that the key discourse in the novel (“modern technology and business models are killing our attention span”) is now well-trodden territory. There are a couple stand-out chapters (one on pollution/microirritants and one on ADHD), but these are offset by frustrating refrains about technology, including “ask/force Facebook to change its business model” (???) and “fix the algorithm” (separate take on this coming soon). If you’ve followed Cal Newport, The Social Dilemma, or any of the other work on the attention economy (including many, many podcast episodes that seem to rehash the same material), you’ve likely encountered a lot of these ideas before.

Whereabouts, by Jhumpa Lahiri

It’s no Namesake or Interpreter of Maladies, but Jhumpa doesn’t miss! Lahiri originally wrote this series of vignettes in Italian, but even once translated to English the stories are haunting, melancholic, with some truly beautiful refrains and mini-narratives that left me wanting more. Solitude is prominent in the work, sometimes comfortingly and sometimes unnervingly. Again, this is a short one — so if you sometimes find yourself “pensively sad, often without apparent cause” (apparently that is the definition of melancholic and I am all for it), this is another must-read.

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck

I read East of Eden last year, and Of Mice and Men does not disappoint as a second foray into Steinbeck. No big fancy words or complex plotlines here, but I’m still thinking about the ending days later…

I don’t doubt there will be more Steinbeck to come in the months/years ahead.

In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell

A bit of a cop-out to count this as one of the 5 “books” I read since this is really a collection of three fairly-short essays…

I had no idea Bertrand Russell was so funny — “ I hope that,
after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a
campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not
have lived in vain.”

But he is also wickedly sharp, packing 20+ arguments around workism, the errors of capitalism, human rights, and even feminism into half as many pages. At the core of his argument is the notion that American & British societies in the postwar era produce enough consumer surplus such that average workers should have double as much freedom from work. What would be required to convert this surplus into freedom is pulling back on production, more intelligent social organization (he points to the war effort as an example of hyperefficient organization), and importantly, disabusing ourselves of the notion that work is virtuous.

One of Russell’s most interesting points is that this idea that “work is virtuous” is inherently feudal — the earliest proponents of the idea that “a life filled with toil is a good life” were feudal landlords who depended upon serfs to power their economic engine. (“We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect.”) .Makes me wonder: what other narratives do I implicitly believe that run counter to my individual benefit?

Russell was hopeful that communism might provide some of the solutions to the malaise of overwork — and he would be disappointed to see that American society of 2022 has moved even further away from the ideas he lays out in In Praise of Idleness. (Particularly interesting and difficult is translating his ideas over to the middle-class, knowledge work economy.) Taken together, if you are interested in the philosophy of work, this is an important and valuable piece to read and ponder.