THE CHAOS THEORY

“In Praise of Shadows” by Junichiro Tanizaki

This is a fascinating book about traditional Japanese architecture. In this short book, the author Junichiro Tanizaki discusses about the philosophy behind the ancient design, the usage of space, the combination with modern everyday equipments, and most intriguingly on the use of shadows to create a powerful contrast and an aesthetically pleasing minimalist style. Never thought that a book about shadows can be this interesting, and can cover such a diverse angle from temples, to Geisha, ghost, music, to even toilet.

“White Nights” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is a story about the unnamed narrator of the book, a man who lives a lonely introverted life.

He begins the narration by describing the everyday sceneries of St. Petersburg, where he walks around the city alone observing his surroundings. All the familiar faces that he never actually spoke with, the polite non-greetings with each others, the stories he build up about them in his head, all contributed in setting up a gentle tone of the book.

And then he met Nastenka. The book is largely about the 3 proceeding nights that the narrator get to spend talking with Nastenka, after their first encounter on night number 1. And the conversation and quotes over these 4 nights are what make this book a classic.

It is a deep talk over sorrow and loneliness, on falling in love and heart break, about regret over the past and over missed chances in life. All wrapped in a relatively short story.

They say that you don’t know love until you read White Nights. I guess I get it, but not the way I thought it would look like (as the cliche “greatest love story ever told”). But instead it is the expression of many different types of love, from the good, to the bad, to the naive.

“The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults” by Frances E. Jensen, MD with Amy Ellis Nutt

This is a very important book about teenage behaviour from their neurological stand point, written by Frances Jensen, a neuroscientist specializing in children’s brain. The book consist of what it feels like 60-65% of crash course about the mechanism of teenage brain, which becomes the crucial framework for the book to explain the intricate details of adolescence behaviour.

“The brain was essentially built by nature from the ground up”, remarks Dr. Jensen, “from the cellar to the attic, from back to front. Remarkably, the brain also wires itself starting in the back with the structures that mediate our interaction with the environment and regulate our sensory processes—vision, hearing, balance, touch, and sense of space.”

And here’s the kicker, “The more complex areas of the brain, especially the frontal lobes, take much, much longer and are not finished until a person is well into his or her twenties.” In other words, teenage brain is still lacking the sufficient development in the frontal lobes, the area of the brain where “actions are weighed, situations judged, and decisions made.”

Hence, the actually-true expression of being young and stupid, a time when some of the craziest (and sometime fatal) stories occurred.

The book then proceeded to tell many real-life stories about incidents with teenagers, and shows their neurological response to different type of situations, which brings some light to plenty of misunderstandings about teenage behaviour, the risks of adolescence brain, the potential of adolescence brain, on addiction, alcohol and substance abuse, on stress, mental illness, digital invasion, gender matters, brain injuries from contact sports, and many more.

And perhaps most crucially, it also teaches us what we can do with these knowledge, in order to help our teenager kids navigate their adolescence life. This is where the parenting aspect of the book comes to play, where Dr. Jensen says “you need to be your teens’ frontal lobes until their brains are fully wired and hooked up and ready to go on their own.”

Dr. Jensen herself has 2 “former teenagers”, one of whom graduated from Wesleyan University with a combined MA-BA degree in quantum physics and now enrolled in a joint MD-PhD program, and the other graduated from Harvard and landed in a business consulting job in New York City. Both of whom have a loving relationship with their single-mom. I mean, what more credentials do you need?

Here are 54 of the most important quotes from the book:

1. The more I studied the emerging scientific literature on adolescents, the more I understood how mistaken it was to look at the teenage brain through the prism of adult neurobiology. Functioning, wiring, capacity—all are different in adolescents, I learned.
2. Granville Stanley Hall, the founder of the child study movement, wrote in 1904 about the exuberance of adolescence: These years are the best decade of life. No age is so responsive to all the best and wisest adult endeavor. In no psychic soil, too, does seed, bad as well as good, strike such deep root, grow so rankly or bear fruit so quickly or so surely.
3. Hall said optimistically of adolescence that it was “the birthday of the imagination,” but he also knew this age of exhilaration has dangers, including impulsivity, risk-taking, mood swings, lack of insight, and poor judgment.
4. Children’s brains continue to be molded by their environment, physiologically, well past their midtwenties. So in addition to being a time of great promise, adolescence is also a time of unique hazards.
5. Part of the problem in truly understanding our teenagers lies with us, the adults. Too often we send them mixed messages. We assume that when our kid begins to physically look like an adult—she develops breasts; he has facial hair—then our teenager should act like, and be treated as, an adult with all the adult responsibilities we assign to our own peers.
6. Let them experiment with these more harmless things rather than have them rebel and get into much more serious trouble. Try not to focus on winning the battles when you should be winning the war—the endgame is to help get them through the necessary experimentation that they instinctively need without any long-term adverse effects.
7. The teen years are a great time to test where a kid’s strengths are, and to even out weaknesses that need attention.
8. What you don’t want to do is ridicule, or be judgmental or disapproving or dismissive. Instead, you have to get inside your kid’s head. Kids all have something they’re struggling with that you can try to help.
9. Our best tool as they enter and move through their adolescent years is our ability to advise and explain, and also to be good role models.
10. So what happens when they reach fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen years old?…. These are a few of things I say to parents right off the bat: The sense of whiplash you are feeling is not unusual. Your children are changing, and also trying to figure themselves out; their brains and bodies are undergoing extensive reorganization; and their apparent recklessness, rudeness, and cluelessness are not totally their fault! Almost all of this is neurologically, psychologically, and physiologically explainable. As a parent or educator, you need to remind yourself of this daily, often hourly!
11. But we are truly blaming the messenger when we cite hormones as the culprit. Think about it: When your three-year-old has a temper tantrum, do you blame it on raging hormones? Of course not. We know, simply, that three-year-olds haven’t yet figured out how to control themselves.
12. Scientists now know that the main sex hormones—testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone—trigger physical changes in adolescents such as a deepening of the voice and the growth of facial hair in boys and the development of breasts and the beginning of menstruation in girls. These sex hormones are present in both sexes throughout childhood. With the onset of puberty, however, the concentrations of these chemicals change dramatically. In girls, estrogen and progesterone will fluctuate with the menstrual cycle. Because both hormones are linked to chemicals in the brain that control mood, a happy, laughing fourteen-year-old can have an emotional meltdown in the time it takes her to close her bedroom door. With boys, testosterone finds particularly friendly receptors in the amygdala, the structure in the brain that controls the fight-or-flight response—that is, aggression or fear. Before leaving adolescence behind, a boy can have thirty times as much testosterone in his body as he had before puberty began.
13. Sex hormones are particularly active in the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain. That explains in part why adolescents not only are emotionally volatile but may even seek out emotionally charged experiences—everything from a book that makes her sob to a roller coaster that makes him scream. This double whammy—a jacked-up, stimulus-seeking brain not yet fully capable of making mature decisions—hits teens pretty hard, and the consequences to them, and their families, can sometimes be catastrophic.
14. Teenagers don’t have higher hormone levels than young adults—they just react differently to hormones. For instance, adolescence is a time of increased response to stress, which may in part be why anxiety disorders, including panic disorder, typically arise during puberty. Teens simply don’t have the same tolerance for stress that we see in adults. Teens are much more likely to exhibit stress-induced illnesses and physical problems, such as colds, headaches, and upset stomachs.
15. While hormones can explain some of what is going on, there is much more at play in the teenage brain, where new connections between brain areas are being built and many chemicals, especially neurotransmitters, the brain’s “messengers,” are in flux. This is why adolescence is a time of true wonder. Because of the flexibility and growth of the brain, adolescents have a window of opportunity with an increased capacity for remarkable accomplishments.
16. But flexibility, growth, and exuberance are a double-edged sword because an “open” and excitable brain also can be adversely affected by stress, drugs, chemical substances, and any number of changes in the environment. And because of an adolescent’s often overactive brain, those influences can result in problems dramatically more serious than they are for adults.
17. A baby brain is not just a small adult brain, and brain growth, unlike the growth of most other organs in the body, is not simply a process of getting larger. The brain changes as it grows, going through special stages that take advantage of the childhood years and the protection of the family, then, toward the end of the teen years, the surge toward independence. Childhood and teen brains are “impressionable,” and for good reason, too. Just as baby chicks can imprint on the mother hen, human children and teens can “imprint” on experiences they have, and these can influence what they choose to do as adults.
18. The brain of an adolescent is nothing short of a paradox. It has an overabundance of gray matter (the neurons that form the basic building blocks of the brain) and an undersupply of white matter (the connective wiring that helps information flow efficiently from one part of the brain to the other)—which is why the teenage brain is almost like a brand-new Ferrari: it’s primed and pumped, but it hasn’t been road tested yet. In other words, it’s all revved up but doesn’t quite know where to go.
19. One of the reasons that repetition is so important lies in your teenager’s brain development. One of the frontal lobes’ executive functions includes something called prospective memory, which is the ability to hold in your mind the intention to perform a certain action at a future time.
20. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, however, studies reveal no significant improvement. It’s as if that part of the brain—the ability to remember to do something—is simply not keeping up with the rest of a teenager’s growth and development.
21. Parents quickly blame themselves for a teen’s poor behavior, even though they’re not exactly sure how or why they’re to blame. With biological parents, the guilt may come from passing on flawed DNA; and with biological and nonbiological parents or guardians, the guilt comes from questioning how they raised the child. In either case, you, the parent, are to blame, right? Yes, the two scenarios are different, but no, it’s not because of the genes or anything you did or didn’t do or because the teenager was somehow struck on the head and woke up as an alien species from the planet Adolescent.
22. The brain is programmed to pay special attention to the acquisition of novel information, which is what learning really is. The more activity or excitation between a specific set of neurons, the stronger the synapse. Thus, brain growth is a result of activity. In fact, the young brain has more excitatory synapses than inhibitory synapses. The more a piece of information is repeated or relearned, the stronger the neurons become, and the connection becomes like a well-worn path through the woods.
23. In later life gray matter declines as a function of degenerative processes, that is, cell shrinkage and death, whereas in adolescence gray matter decline is a product of the brain’s plasticity. (“Use it or lose it.”). So what this means is that memories are easier to make and last longer when acquired in teen years compared with adult years.
24. Remember, although they look as though they can multitask, in truth they’re not very good at it. Even just encouraging them to stop and think about what they need to do and when they need to do it will help increase blood flow to the areas of the brain involved in multitasking and slowly strengthen them.
25. This goes for giving instructions and directions, too. Write them down for your teens in addition to giving them orally, and limit the instructions to one or two points, not three, four, or five. You can also help your teenagers better manage time and organize tasks by giving them calendars and suggesting they write down their daily schedules. By doing so on a regular basis, they train their own brains.
26. Perhaps most important of all, set limits—with everything. This is what their overexuberant brains can’t do for themselves. So be clear about the amount of time you will allow your teenager to socialize “virtually,” either on the Internet or through texting. Best-case scenario: limit the digital socializing to just one to two hours a day. And if your teenager fails to comply, take away the phone or the iPod, or limit computer use to homework. Also, insist on knowing the user names and passwords for all their accounts.
27. In fact, it’s virtually a certainty that there will at least be occasional slip-ups, perhaps a lot of them. That’s why it’s up to you to keep tabs, to check on teenagers as they do their homework and spend time on the computer. The more on top of it you are, the fewer the temptations for your adolescents, and the fewer the temptations, the more their brains will learn how to do without the constant distractions.
28. Adolescents have less ability to process negative information than adults do, and so they are less inclined not to do something risky, and less likely to learn from the ensuing mistake or misadventure, than adults are.
29. On sleep: Infants and children are “larks”; that is, they wake up early and go to sleep early. Adolescents are “owls,” waking late and staying up until the wee hours of the morning.
30. Because so much is going on in adolescents’ brains, and they are learning so much and at such a fast pace, teenagers need more sleep than either their parents or their much younger siblings. In an earlier chapter I told you about the pruning that takes place in the teenage brain during puberty. When do you think that actually takes place? Yep, that’s right, when they’re asleep.
31. Sleep isn’t a luxury. Memory and learning are thought to be consolidated during sleep, so it’s a requirement for adolescents and as vital to their health as the air they breathe and the food they eat. In fact, sleep helps teens eat better. It also allows them to manage stress.
32. Beginning at around ages ten to twelve, young people’s biological clock shifts forward, revving them up by about seven and eight o’clock at night and creating a “no sleep” zone around nine or ten o’clock at night, just when parents are starting to feel drowsy. One reason is that melatonin, a hormone critical to inducing sleep, is released two hours later at night in a teenager’s brain than it is in an adult’s.
33. Downtime, whether it is a good night’s sleep, a nap, or simply a few quiet moments of relaxation in the middle of the day, is important for turning learning into long-term memories. This is why it is so important for teens to get more than just a good night’s sleep before an exam. They need to get that good night’s sleep right after studying for the exam.
34. Studies have shown that teenagers who report sleep disturbances have more often consumed soft drinks, fried food, sweets, and caffeine. They also report less physical activity and more time in front of TV and computers. Another study found that teenagers who had trouble sleeping at ages twelve to fourteen were two and a half times more likely to report suicidal thoughts at ages fifteen to seventeen than adolescents with good sleep habits.
35. Adolescence is the time of life when the young separate from the comfort and safety of their parents in order to explore the world and find independence. Experimental behavior is actually important for adolescents to engage in because it helps them establish their autonomy. The problem for teens is that their underdeveloped frontal cortex means they have trouble seeing ahead, or understanding the consequences of their independent acts, and are therefore ill equipped to weigh the relative harms of risky behavior.
36. So why do teens do some of the crazy things they do? In general, teen brains get more of a sense of reward than adult brains, and as we learned earlier, the release of, and response to, dopamine is enhanced in the teen brain. This is why sensation-seeking is correlated with puberty, a time when the neural systems that control arousal and reward are particularly sensitive. But because the frontal lobes are still only loosely connected to other parts of the teen brain, adolescents have a harder time exerting cognitive control over potentially dangerous situations.
37. Adults are also better at learning from their mistakes, courtesy of areas in and around the frontal lobes including their developed anterior cingulate cortex, which can act as a kind of behavioral monitor and help detect mistakes. During fMRI experiments, when adult subjects make an error, their cingulate cortex lights up as if to say, “Oh boy, I’d better make sure not to do that again.” This part of the brain is still being wired in teenagers, making it more difficult for them, even when they recognize a mistake, to learn from it.
38. The chief predictor of adolescent behavior, studies show, is not the perception of the risk, but the anticipation of the reward despite the risk. In other words, gratification is at the heart of an adolescent’s impulsivity, and adolescents who engage in risky behavior and who have never, or rarely, experienced negative consequences are more likely to keep repeating that reckless behavior in search of further gratification.
39. Because adolescents are hypersensitive to dopamine, even small rewards, if they are immediate, trigger greater nucleus accumbens activity than larger, delayed rewards. Immediacy and emotion, in other words, are linked in the decision to take a risk and in the teen brain’s inability to delay gratification.
40. So here’s the paradox: Adolescence is a stage of development in which teens have superb cognitive abilities and high rates of learning and memory because they are still riding on the heightened synaptic plasticity of childhood. These abilities give them a distinct advantage over adults, but because they are so primed to learn, they are also exceedingly vulnerable to learning the wrong things.
41. It’s difficult for teenagers to look into the future because their brains are not yet wired to consider distant consequences, but that shouldn’t stop you from bringing up those consequences and drilling them into your teens.
42. Adolescents with only short exposure to cannabis show cognitive deficits similar to those of chronic adult users, but with continued use their cognitive impairment does not completely resolve and in some cases can last for months, even years.
43. Negative emotions—stress, worry, anxiety, anger—have all been significantly associated with higher levels of cortisol. So, too, has loneliness; and this is why in adolescents being alone is also associated with increased anxiety and stress.
44. Stress is terrible for learning. You know what I mean. A little pressure can be motivating, but once you pass beyond that, stress contributes to inattention and a real inability to learn.
45. Teenagers as well as children suffering from PTSD are likely to reenact their traumas in their artwork, with toys, or in the games they play. They are also more likely than adult sufferers of PTSD to be impulsive and aggressive.
46. Research from late 2011 also revealed that adolescents who suffered physical or emotional abuse or neglect had evidence of brain damage, even in the absence of a diagnosable mental illness. Scientists at Yale University found that adolescents had less gray matter in the prefrontal cortex if they’d been physically abused or emotionally neglected. Reduction of activity in the prefrontal cortex in these abused youths could interfere with their motivation and impulse control, as well as their ability to focus, remember, and learn. Adolescents who were emotionally neglected also showed decreased activity in the parts of the brain that regulate emotions.
47. There are two rules of thumb parents should remember: Number one, behavioral changes that seem to cluster or are associated with other symptoms should raise your level of suspicion that you might be dealing with something more than just a difficult teenager going through a phase. And number two, it is better to be safe than sorry. If you have any concern that radical or progressive changes are happening to your adolescent, then you must seek help for your child.
48. By nature, adolescents already have fairly overactive amygdalae, which means they really need their prefrontal cortices to exert even greater control. For teens at risk of an anxiety disorder, however, their still-maturing brains are not yet able to exert that kind of top-down control. For that to occur, brain regions need to “talk” to one another, and there is evidence in animal studies that adolescent brains aren’t doing as much “talking” as adult brains.
49. Chinese researchers have discovered changes in the brains of college students who spend approximately ten hours a day, six days a week, playing online games. In these online gamers, the Chinese scientists found changes in small regions of gray matter responsible for everything from speech, memory, motor control, and emotion to goal direction and inhibition of impulsive and inappropriate behavior.
50. Not only is multitasking an impediment to learning, say scientists, it also can prompt the release of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Chronically high levels of cortisol have been associated with increased aggression and impulsivity, loss of short-term memory, and even cardiovascular disease. In other words, multitasking can wear us down, causing confusion, fatigue, and inflexibility.
51. The ability to fire off the words actually relies on two distinct brain areas: the parietotemporal area, where speech and language are processed; and the frontal lobe, which controls decision-making. The task the two teens were asked to perform requires both language and rapid decision-making, and at the age of thirteen, girls are simply further along in having those two required brain areas wired together.
52. Over the past few years, scientists have slowly begun to realize that brain damage can result even from non-concussive blows to the head. All it takes are repetitive strikes of moderate intensity. In other words, thousands of kids playing contact sports who have never had to sit out a game because of a concussion could be at risk of brain damage—brain damage that is going undetected and undiagnosed and will be likely to cause cognitive impairment later in life.
53. When teenage brains take a hit, the injury isn’t static. Because the teenage brain is still developing, the injury is a trauma not just to a piece of gray matter but also to what would have been had the brain continued to develop without incident.
54. Teens, we now know, engage the hippocampus and right amygdala when faced with a threat or a dangerous situation—this is why they are prone to being emotional and impulsive—whereas adults engage the prefrontal cortex, which allows them to more reasonably assess the threat.

And here are the 4 messages that Dr. Jensen wrote at the concluding chapter:

1. Be tolerant of your teens’ misadventures, but make sure you talk to them calmly about their mistakes.
2. Don’t be shocked when your teens do something stupid and then say they don’t know why. You now know why, but explain that to them—how their prefrontal lobes haven’t quite come online yet. And remember, even the smartest, most obedient, meekest kids will do something stupid before “graduating” from adolescence.
3. Communicate and relate: Emphasize the positive things in your teens’ lives and encourage them to try different activities and new ways of thinking about things. Reinforce that you are there for them when they need advice.
4. Social networking tools and websites are an important avenue of communication with your teens. Some parents report that their most successful and meaningful “conversations” with their teens occurred while texting back and forth with them. And if you don’t know how to text yet, ask your teenager.

I’ve purchased this book a while ago, and thought that it will take years before I need to read this as a preparation of my kids entering adolescence. Well, the dreaded [or exciting] moment is finally here. And this book is exactly what I need right now.

It’s been such an eye-opening read filled with abundance of directly applicable information, one that I will surely visit and re-visit in the next couple of years and will highly recommend to other fellow parents.

“More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop” by Satoshi Yagisawa

This is the sequel to the international bestseller “Days at the Morisaki Bookshop”, which I read just less than a month ago, one week before I travelled to Tokyo.

And naturally when I was there, I just had to visit the Jimbocho area. Among others, I first visited the most iconic Yaguchi Shoten book store, with the female shopkeeper I swear have an aura like Takako (or maybe not). And then I visited Kitazawa bookstore with the 2nd floor filled with vintage English books (I bought 3 rare books there, naturally). But the most memorable for me was Anegawa Nyankodo, the store selling everything imaginable related to cats, from books, to magazines, to merchandises.

But of course I didn’t find the Morisaki bookstore nor Saveur coffee shop, the main fictitious venues in the book, although I wish the places really do exist. Nevertheless, the first book captured the feel of the real-life area so brilliantly that I strangely felt already at home when I was there.

This second book begins with a description of the Jimbocho as I experienced it, and as the first book described it. And the narrator didn’t take long to reveal herself after only few pages: It’s Takako! Yes, the second book is still about her, her uncle Satoru, Momoko, Tomo, Takano, Sabu, Wada, and other endearing characters. It perfectly filled-in the gaps left in the first book where it explains things a little bit more, as well as offering more elaborate stories from the characters that we’ve become familiarized with.

Alongside the narration for the character’s stories, this second book also elaborates on the nature of bookshops and the different kinds of customers: from casual buyers, to brokers, to rare book collectors. It is also a beautiful portrayal of what reading means for many different people: Some resort to reading as a way to open up to the world, other sees literature as a consolation and a retreat from the world, while some just mysteriously collect them with no time to read them like the old guy with a weird dress sense.

And then of course, there’s the [Japanese] book recommendations. From “The Chieko Poems” by Kotaro Takamura, to “Train of Fools” by Hyakken Uchida, to several others, including the mysterious book “The Golden Dream” that got the characters looking after it all over the city.

Unfortunately, however, the majority of these wonderful books are only available in Japanese language. But I am pleased to found and purchased the kindle version of “In Praise of Shadows” by Junichiro Tanizaki (which has an English translation), the book that uncle Satoshi puts in Takako’s hand and insisted that she reads it on the spot, a book that the English translator of the book also highly praised in the last note.

All in all, this is a well-written and heart-warming book, the most appropriate sequel for Days at the Morisaki Bookstore that makes the entire story even richer and deeper. I absolutely love it.

“Right Things, Right Now: Good Values, Good Character, Good Deeds” by Ryan Holiday

This is the third book out of the four-part Stoic virtue series of Courage, Discipline, Justice, and Wisdom.

In this neatly organized book, the author, Ryan Holiday, breaks down the trait of justice into several chapters with the following themes: keep your words, tell the truth, take responsibility, be your own referee, be good and not great, be an open book or transparent, be decent, do your job, keep your hands clean, integrity is everything, realize your potential, be loyal, choose a north star (something to reach towards), the importance of timing, the importance of being kind, see how the other half lives, you have to help, start small, create alliances, be powerful and sometimes show power, practice pragmatism, develop competence, the importance of giving, grow a coaching tree, look out for the little guy, make good trouble, climb your second mountain (second act in life), don’t do things for the recognition, give them hope, be an angel, on forgiveness, make amends, the great oneness, expand the circle, find the good in everyone, give the full measure of devotion, love wins, and pay it forward.

As usual for his writing style, Holiday uses plenty historical examples to make his excellent points, from political figures as Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Mahatma Gandhi; to writers and poets like Walker Percy, Hesiod; sportsperson like golfer Patrick Reed, runners Abel Kiprop Mutai and Ivan Fernandez Anaya, tennis player Arthur Ashe; whistleblower like Frank Serpico and Cynthia Cooper; dancer Martha Graham; architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller; to many more historical figures such as Mother Teresa, Carl Jung, Ponticus, Florence Nightingale; and of course the usual Stoic heroes Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Chrysippus, Cato, and others.

This time around, however, the book feels too repetitive, rushed, and while he mentions a lot of historical figures Holiday only uses the same selection of US-centric historical examples for his core arguments. Most notably Harry Truman, who is mentioned almost in every single chapter of the book, even more so than the Stoics, and so much so that the book could become a semi-autobiography of him.

And what’s with the extra effort to portray Truman as a near-saint figure? The truth is, Truman remains the only world leader in history that decided to use atomic bomb to inflict mass casualties on the enemy’s population. He is also responsible for “curbing” the spread of communism in Greece and Turkey, or in an unfiltered words, he’s staged a war in Europe to kill the organic spread of an ideology that happens to oppose US interests. But of course these huge chunk of Truman’s history are not mentioned in the book.

Moreover, throughout the book Truman is characterized as a principled man who champions justice, honesty, and selflessness, among others, which are undoubtedly true. But there’s also another side of the man, one that made a controversial decision based on the lobbying by a close friend Jacobson, which turned him into an accomplice to a brutal neo-colonial project. But in the book, it got brushed off under the label of “loyalty” to a friend. Also not mentioned in the book is Truman’s racist tendencies, where he often used racial slurs, told racist jokes, and called Martin Luther King Jr. a troublemaker. Pretty ironic since the Civil War movement is the second most dominating story in the book. What’s with the whitewashing?

If I didn’t follow Holiday for years and read 12 out of 15 of his books, I would probably get easily misled to think that he’s building up Truman’s image only to justify some of his sins and their spillover effect till today, most specifically his one decision told in the chapter “create alliances.” Decision that becomes this one elephant in the room that Holiday didn’t mention but addresses everything around it: like the chapter “keep going back” that lists all of the brutal events throughout history, which was even elaborated in chapter “make amends”, but Holiday then conveniently forgot to mention this 1 brutal event in both cases (an event that other modern Stoic Donald Robertson is boldly vocal about).

I mean, if you don’t want to discuss current affairs, that’s understandable. But why discuss everything about current world politics, also saying that you’re divesting from Belarus because the country supports Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, even went to a great length to paint this victimhood picture of one side, only to completely ignore what they’ve done ever since? The things written in chapters “be an angel”, “you have to help”, “the great oneness”, and “find the good in everyone” confirm this.

What happened with all the things preached in the book about courage in the face of unfairness, about not being indifferent and not choosing the safe option of being “neutral” while ignoring the huge injustice that is actually happening? Is this why the book was delayed by half a year after something happened just before the usual launch date for the Stoic virtue series? Is this why the content (not the organizational) of this book is kind of messy and unlike his other works that are meticulously researched and neatly written with good flow, because it was heavily edited halfway through?

Nevertheless, to be fair it isn’t so much about what has been said, but what has NOT been said. And Holiday already has a big deposit in my credibility bank that he deserves the benefit of the doubt. And when we see the book from a personal-development lens, in the end of the day it is a good book. It teaches us to ultimately become a decent human being with a clear conscience, someone who has integrity and a great sense of fairness, and will act accordingly even though sometimes our actions to do the right things will cost us.

“It’s not virtue signaling to push back against cruelty and indifference,” Holiday remarks at his conclusion. “It doesn’t make you a “social justice warrior” to speak out for kindness and fairness and inalienable rights. But even if it was, is anything better to be a warrior for than justice and or anything better to signal than virtue? What has to happen to your brain to be opposed to those things?” Yes Ryan, what has to happen?

“What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” by Haruki Murakami

This book is a wonderful autobiography that focuses on his love of running. Why he picks up the running habit at 33, his gradual training from zero to running a marathon, why and how he makes running one of his daily habits, his struggle during sluggish days when he didn’t feel like running, his most enjoyable runs, his worst marathon race, his experience on several ultra marathon race, and many more, all of which are poured into this very honest memoir.

The book is also a part of a memoir of his other love, writing. It is inserted between his stories of training and races, as a big part of his life, which is so very fascinating as we can see the daily routine of a novelist, including his thought process, how he process inspiration into a written words, and the everyday nitty gritty as a writer.

It is a short book, but filled with a lot of gems. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

They call the area Jimbocho. It is a neighbourhood in Tokyo that is home to more than 170 bookshops, which makes it the largest book store area in the world. And deep inside Jimbocho there’s a little wooden building where 25-year-old Takako once lived for months at the 2nd floor of her uncle’s bookshop.

Takako never liked reading books, she instead stays there mending a broken heart while struggling to get out of bed most of the time after breaking up with her cheating boyfriend and quitting her job altogether. But then as summer turns to autumn she begins to get to know her eccentric uncle, the regular customers, the people in the neighbourhood coffee shop filled with gossip and friendly banters, and the many books that have become a part of her daily life.

It is a heartwarming novel about a journey of getting lost and self-discovery, with twists revealed slowly as the book progresses, like what happens with her uncle’s wife who abruptly left 5 years ago. It is truly hard to put down once we start reading it, such a beautifully-written book.

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama

This is a short novel about 5 different walks of lives: a shopkeeper, a furniture manufacturer, a former magazine editor, an unemployed person, and a retired person. Each single one of them have a very different life from one another, but they all have 1 thing in common, the same community library that turns their lives for the better after a recommendation of the perfect book by the librarian. It is such a charming and heart-warming book, filled with the everyday scenes of a life in Japan.

The Religions Book (DK Big Ideas) by DK

This is an impressive book about the evolution of religion, written in a concise manner that sums up everything in short articles format.

The book covers the most primitive forms of beliefs scattered around the world in the early days of humanity, like those practiced by the Chewong tribe in indigenous Malaysia, the belief of the Quechua Indians, the belief of the Dogon people in Bandiagara Plateu in Mali, and so much more.

It also addresses the ubiquitous rise of sophisticated philosophies everywhere, from the era of pioneering Axial age to the complicated web of schisms among major religions in latter centuries in human history.

Moreover, the book then dives deep into the few surviving modern global religion that we know in the world today, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

It’s astonishing to see how humans have always reflect the image of their respective deities in their customs and rituals, and it’s even more fascinating to see how cultures evolve through time alongside the evolution of their respective religion.

Even today. Where at the last part, the book also shows the ongoing evolution of the modern religion, such as Rastafarianism, Mormonism, Sikhism, Santeria, Baha’i, and many more, who are one way or another a reflection of an ever growing natural progress from the major modern religion.

In short, this is without a doubt one of the most complete books about world religion, presented in the most digestible ways.

“World Travel: An Irreverent Guide” by Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever

This is a book about world travels through the eyes of Anthony Bourdain, written by his long-time collaborator Laurie Woolever.

Laurie was no stranger for Tony. They met a while back ago in 2002, when she was hired to edit and test the recipes for Tony’s Les Halles Cookbook. She then started to work as his assistant in 2009 where she also became involved with numerous editing and writing projects, alongside the ground-level tasks of an assistant, and they also collaborated in writing another cookbook in 2015 called Appetites.

This book was supposed to be their third collaboration. However, Tony’s busy travelling schedules meant that the project got postponed several times, that is, until Tony’s shocking death.

Now, I love Tony. I’ve watched almost all of his travel shows, from No Reservations to Parts Unknown, I watch them when I’m happy and when I’m sad, I watch them when I’m ill, sometimes I just put them as a background as I do other stuffs around the house, I even showed his shows to my kids since they were toddlers. We love his no-bullshit and brutally honest approach on life and travel. And I was pretty heartbroken when hearing about his death.

This travel book, in many ways, has a nostalgic feel about Tony. It is written by Laurie with the intention to re-live all the things that Tony himself had said about these places, in a style that Laurie would know best as one of the closest person ever lived with Tony.

As Laurie remarks, “I’d spent enough time in daily correspondence with Tony to have a good sense of the way he’d choose his words and set his rhythm. He wrote nearly impeccable prose, but on the occasion when it needed a bit of tidying or fleshing out, I was able to do that, I think, without detection.”

All the countries, the sights, the art, the food, the people are all vividly described just like it was in Tony’s shows. And in a way, the book seems to be intended as the complimentary show notes for the shows, where we get more of the details such as the name of the places, the addresses, how to get there, the prices, the short history, etc.

And along the way, Laurie provides so many quotations from Tony that is fitting with the country that is being covered, which makes it feel as if Tony is still alive and well. Such an enjoyable book to read, loving every minute of reading it.