THE CHAOS THEORY

“Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board” by Vince Houghton

This is a hilarious book about things that never happened. It is about those weird inventions that were almost created by America’s first intelligence agency (Office of Strategic Services (1942-1945)), its successor the CIA, as well as the bizarre operations ideas by the military, all during the fight against the Axis forces in World War 2 and the proceeding Cold War.

Yes, intelligence weapons. We’re talking about James Bond’s Q type of gadgets and military grade weaponries that have the invention of U-2 and SR-71 spy planes among the rare success stories (relative to the sheer amount of ideas), with “rare” as the key word here.

““Outcome history” is the traditional way of viewing historical events,” the author Vince Houghton remarks, “but it leaves much to be desired. It has severe limitations, primarily because its lessons are predicated on things that cannot be accurately quantified: fate, luck, misfortune, whatever you want to call it.”

Houghton then elaborates, “if the D-Day invasion of Normandy had failed because of a freak weather system, or a lucky shot from a German soldier that took out a key American leader on the beach (or any number of other misfortunate scenarios), would we think any less of Eisenhower’s plan? Using outcome-based history: yes. And therein lies the problem. Intent can be a very powerful tool for historians.”

Hence, the fresh approach of this book that uses not the outcome of history, not the alternate version of history, but the intent of what could have happened but never did. And the list of intent is long (like long, long). And reading it is like having a wild journey into the wacky and bizarre that will make us think “what the hell were they thinking?”

We’re talking about projects, missions, operations, and technology that they were seriously thinking about, but they’re either too risky, too expensive, too dangerous, way ahead of their time, or simply too dumb.

Inventions and operations such as: acoustic kitty, synthetic goat poop, cat suicide bomber, bat missiles, sun gun, giant inflatable balloon that looks like an omen in Shintoism, a chicken utilized as a thermoregulated weapon, an idea to create artificial tsunami, an operation involving digging a tunnel near the Soviet embassy, or covert air bases using not giant ships but floating icebergs.

It is also about the staggering 638 times the CIA tried (and failed) to assassinate Fidel Castro, plan to spike Hitler’s food with female hormones to make “his mustache fall out and his voice turn soprano”, a device they called Dyna-Soar (yeah I know, dinosaur), another one called the Ballistic Missile Boost Intercepts Project (or BaMBI), and many, many more, including the most bizarre idea of them all that becomes the title of the book, the plan to nuke the moon (with a contribution by Carl Sagan. Yes, THAT Carl Sagan).

And you know what the messed up part is? They’re all true stories!

Perhaps the most unsuspecting part of the book is where Houghton actually explains the science and technicality of the devices and operations, while also providing the full historical context for the intent of usage of the devices. Which makes this book not only highly amusing, but also very informative.

He is, after all, the historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, who earned a PhD in Diplomatic and Military History from the University of Maryland. And it shows in the quality of the book, a mix of expertise and madness that made me learn a lot and laugh a lot along the way. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book.

“Wahyu Yang Hilang Negeri Yang Guncang” by Ong Hok Ham

This is an excellent book on Indonesian history, broken down into 70 angles from 70 different articles that the author Ong Hok Ham wrote for Tempo magazine, in the span of 26 years from 1976 to 2002.

The articles consist of Ong’s signature blend of wide range of knowledge, skepticism, and wit, as well as his ability to make dull subjects into exciting stories that will make the reading experience truly enjoyable.

They tell the tales of sorcery for leaders, how some sultans are treated like a deity, the structures and customs of Javanese kingdoms, Jayabaya prophecies, the difference between agrarian kingdom and coastal kingdom, who are those “priayi” (or nobility class) really are, the complicated succession plans in different kingdoms (and the Dutch’s involvements), how the Dutch created the Chinese capitalist class in Hindia, on taxation, and a lot more in between, including the clearest ever explanation about the geopolitics of World War 1.

Moreover, although the 70 articles were stand-alone writings, the editor of the book has somehow brilliantly managed to organized them up into a connected flow under several major themes: 1. The concept and myth of power 2. Corruption and bureaucracy among those in power 3. Economy 4. Political changes and violence 5. Military and war 6. Indonesian nationalism 7. Other countries’ affairs 8. Social changes and other matters.

Overall, it is one of the most complete historical accounts of Indonesia, simply due to the format of article that allows Ong the freedom away from the usual structure of beginning-till-now narrative that most historical books are tied to. And instead, he was able to build a big picture view of Indonesia, from covering multiple topics and analyze them one by one.

“Influence” by Robert Cialdini

I first learned about this book from none other than Charlie Munger (it’s his favourite book), which prompted me to start listening to few podcast interviews with Dr. Robert Cialdini to get the sense of who he is and what this magnum opus of his is all about. Suffice to say that I was intrigued and instantly bought this book.

That was 7 years ago. Life flashes by, and I somehow “never had the time” to read this book, although I had time to read literally hundreds others. But I guess I wasn’t ready to read this book back then, no matter how much I wanted to. But my God it was worth the wait.

This is a very scientific book, which evolves around Dr. Cialdini’s profession as an experimental social psychologist specializing on the psychology of compliance. It serves to answer “which psychological principles influence the tendency to comply with a request.”

And in what I suspect interested Charlie Munger the most is that Dr. Cialdini broaden the scope of this “investigation” into the business world, where he interviewed and closely observed compliance professionals, in sales, advertising, public relations and even charity organization, to make his findings not just limited in the proximity of university testing but directly applicable in the market place.

And the result? “Although there are thousands of different tactics that compliance practitioners employ to produce yes,” Dr. Cialdini remarks, “the majority fall within six basic categories. Each of these categories is governed by a fundamental psychological principle that directs human behavior and, in so doing, gives the tactics their power.”

The 6 categories are: reciprocation, consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity (note: in the updated version of the book the principles are changed into 7: the original reciprocation, consistency, social proof, authority, scarcity; and he edited liking into unity and sympathy. But for this review I will stick with the original 6 because I read the earlier version of the book).

Dr. Cialdini then provides a lot of intriguing stories that highlight these 6 categories in real life action – from the inner workings of a religious cult, to the social approval of using pre-recorded laughter at a sit-com, how to rig a horse race bet using fake social validation, to the methods used to indoctrinate a prisoner of war, and many more – and explains them using psychological experiments (and not those cliche psychological anecdotes like the Marshmallow Test) with an equally incredible elaboration on the findings.

The result is a well-rounded in-depth analysis over these 6 categories that made my head hurts when reading this book (in a good way).

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

1. A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.
2. Retail clothiers are a good example. Suppose a man enters a fashionable men’s store and says that he wants to buy a three-piece suit and a sweater. If you were the salesperson, which would you show him first to make him likely to spend the most money? Clothing stores instruct their sales personnel to sell the costly item first. Common sense might suggest the reverse: If a man has just spent a lot of money to purchase a suit, he may be reluctant to spend very much more on the purchase of a sweater. But the clothiers know better. They behave in accordance with what the contrast principle would suggest: Sell the suit first, because when it comes time to look at sweaters, even expensive ones, their prices will not seem as high in comparison.
3. One thing I quickly noticed was that whenever Phil began showing a new set of customers potential buys, he would start with a couple of undesirable houses. I asked him about it, and he laughed. They were what he called “setup” properties. The company maintained a run-down house or two on its lists at inflated prices. These houses were not intended to be sold to customers but to be shown to them, so that the genuine properties in the company’s inventory would benefit from the comparison.
4. Automobile dealers use the contrast principle by waiting until the price for a new car has been negotiated before suggesting one option after another that might be added.
5. While small in scope, this study nicely shows the action of one of the most potent of the weapons of influence around us—the rule for reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.
6. Despite the enormous needs prevailing in Ethiopia, the money was being sent because Mexico had sent aid to Ethiopia in 1935, when it was invaded by Italy. So informed, I remained awed, but I was no longer puzzled. The need to reciprocate had transcended great cultural differences, long distances, acute famine, and immediate self-interest. Quite simply, a half century later, against all countervailing forces, obligation triumphed.
7. People we might ordinarily dislike—unsavory or unwelcome sales operators, disagreeable acquaintances, representatives of strange or unpopular organizations—can greatly increase the chance that we will do what they wish merely by providing us with a small favor prior to their requests.
8. Political analysts were amazed at Lyndon Johnson’s ability to get so many of his programs through Congress during his early administration. Even members of congress who were thought to be strongly opposed to the proposals were voting for them. Close examination by political scientists has found the cause to be not so much Johnson’s political savvy as the large score of favors he had been able to provide to other legislators during his many years of power in the House and Senate. As President, he was able to produce a truly remarkable amount of legislation in a short time by calling in those favors.
9. It is interesting that this same process may account for the problems Jimmy Carter had in getting his programs through Congress during his early administration, despite heavy Democratic majorities in both House and Senate. Carter came to the presidency from outside the Capitol Hill establishment. He campaigned on his outside-Washington identity, saying that he was indebted to no one there. Much of his legislative difficulty upon arriving may be traced to the fact that no one there was indebted to him.
10. The beauty of the free sample, however, is that it is also a gift and, as such, can engage the reciprocity rule.
11. A highly effective variation on this marketing procedure is illustrated in the case, cited by Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders, of the Indiana supermarket operator who sold an astounding one thousand pounds of cheese in a few hours one day by putting out the cheese and inviting customers to cut off slivers for themselves as free samples.
12. The frightened captive with only a piece of bread in his hand then performed what may have been the most important act of his life. He gave his enemy some of the bread. So affected was the German by this gift that he could not complete his mission. He turned from his benefactor and recrossed the no-man’s-land empty-handed to face the wrath of his superiors.
13. There is another aspect of the rule, besides its power, that allows this phenomenon to occur. Another person can trigger a feeling of indebtedness by doing us an uninvited favor.
14. A person who violates the reciprocity rule by accepting without attempting to return the good acts of others is actively disliked by the social group.
15. Another consequence of the rule, however, is an obligation to make a concession to someone who has made a concession to us.
16. The percentage of successful door-to-door sales increases impressively when the sales operator is able to mention the name of a familiar person who “recommended” the sales visit.
17. If I want you to lend me five dollars, I can make it seem like a smaller request by first asking you to lend me ten dollars. One of the beauties of this tactic is that by first requesting ten dollars and then retreating to five dollars, I will have simultaneously engaged the force of the reciprocity rule and the contrast principle. Not only will my five-dollar request be viewed as a concession to be reciprocated, it will also look to you like a smaller request than if I had just asked for it straightaway.
18. A person who feels responsible for the terms of a contract will be more likely to live up to that contract.
19. It is essential to recognize that the requester who invokes the reciprocation rule (or any other weapon of influence) to gain our compliance is not the real opponent. Such a requester has chosen to become a jujitsu warrior who aligns himself with the sweeping power of reciprocation and then merely releases that power by providing a first favor or concession. The real opponent is the rule.
20. Perhaps we can avoid a confrontation with the rule by refusing to allow the requester to commission its force against us in the first place.
21. The rule says that favors are to be met with favors; it does not require that tricks be met with favors.
22. Psychologists have long understood the power of the consistency principle to direct human action. Prominent theorists such as Leon Festinger, Fritz Hieder, and Theodore Newcomb have viewed the desire for consistency as a central motivator of our behavior. But is this tendency to be consistent really strong enough to compel us to do what we ordinarily would not want to do? There is no question about it.
23. The drive to be (and look) consistent constitutes a highly potent weapon of social influence, often causing us to act in ways that are clearly contrary to our own best interests.
24. In these incidents, before taking his stroll, the accomplice would simply ask the subject to please “watch my things,” which each of them agreed to do. Now, propelled by the rule for consistency, nineteen of the twenty subjects became virtual vigilantes, running after and stopping the thief, demanding an explanation, and often restraining the thief physically or snatching the radio away.
25. But because it is so typically in our best interests to be consistent, we easily fall into the habit of being automatically so, even in situations where it is not the sensible way to be. When it occurs unthinkingly, consistency can be disastrous. Nonetheless, even blind consistency has its attractions.
26. First, like most other forms of automatic responding, it offers a shortcut through the density of modern life. Once we have made up our minds about an issue, stubborn consistency allows us a very appealing luxury: We really don’t have to think hard about the issue anymore. We don’t have to sift through the blizzard of information we encounter every day to identify relevant facts; we don’t have to expend the mental energy to weigh the pros and cons; we don’t have to make any further tough decisions.
27. The allure of such a luxury is not to be minimized. It allows us a convenient, relatively effortless, and efficient method for dealing with complex daily environments that make severe demands on our mental energies and capacities. It is not hard to understand, then, why automatic consistency is a difficult reaction to curb. It offers us a way to evade the rigors of continuing thought.
28. There is a second, more perverse attraction of mechanical consistency as well. Sometimes it is not the effort of hard, cognitive work that makes us shirk thoughtful activity, but the harsh consequences of that activity. Sometimes it is the cursedly clear and unwelcome set of answers provided by straight thinking that makes us mental slackers. There are certain disturbing things we simply would rather not realize.
29. If, as it appears, automatic consistency functions as a shield against thought, it should not be surprising that such consistency can also be exploited by those who would prefer that we not think too much in response to their requests for our compliance.
30. “No psychic powers; I just happen to know how several of the big toy companies jack up their January and February sales. They start prior to Christmas with attractive TV ads for certain special toys. The kids, naturally, want what they see and extract Christmas promises for these items from their parents. Now here’s where the genius of the companies’ plan comes in: They undersupply the stores with the toys they’ve gotten the parents to promise. Most parents find those things sold out and are forced to substitute other toys of equal value. The toy manufacturers, of course, make a point of supplying the stores with plenty of these substitutes. Then, after Christmas, the companies start running the ads again for the other, special toys. That juices up the kids to want those toys more than ever. They go running to their parents whining, ‘You promised, you promised,’ and the adults go trudging off to the store to live up dutifully to their words.”
31. For instance, prisoners were frequently asked to make statements so mildly anti-American or pro-Communist as to seem inconsequential (“The United States is not perfect.” “In a Communist country, unemployment is not a problem.”). But once these minor requests were complied with, the men found themselves pushed to submit to related yet more substantive requests. A man who had just agreed with his Chinese interrogator that the United States is not perfect might then be asked to indicate some of the ways in which he thought this was the case. Once he had so explained himself, he might be asked to make a list of these “problems with America” and to sign his name to it. Later he might be asked to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners. “After all, it’s what you really believe, isn’t it?” Still later he might be asked to write an essay expanding on his list and discussing these problems in greater detail.
32. The tactic of starting with a little request in order to gain eventual compliance with related larger requests has a name: the foot-in-the-door technique.
33. What may occur is a change in the person’s feelings about getting involved or taking action. Once he has agreed to a request, his attitude may change, he may become, in his own eyes, the kind of person who does this sort of thing, who agrees to requests made by strangers, who takes action on things he believes in, who cooperates with good causes.
34. What the Freedman and Fraser findings tell us, then, is to be very careful about agreeing to trivial requests. Such an agreement can not only increase our compliance with very similar, much larger requests, it can also make us more willing to perform a variety of larger favors that are only remotely connected to the little one we did earlier.
35. Notice that all of the foot-in-the-door experts seem to be excited about the same thing: You can use small commitments to manipulate a person’s self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into “public servants,” prospects into “customers,” prisoners into “collaborators.” And once you’ve got a man’s self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself.
36. A second advantage of a written testament is that it can be shown to other people. Of course, that means it can be used to persuade those people. It can persuade them to change their own attitudes in the direction of the statement. But more important for the purpose of commitment, it can persuade them that the author genuinely believes what was written.
37. People have a natural tendency to think that a statement reflects the true attitude of the person who made it. What is surprising is that they continue to think so even when they know that the person did not freely choose to make the statement.
38. Even though they had committed themselves under the most anonymous of circumstances, the act of writing down their first judgments caused them to resist the influence of contradictory new data and to remain consistent with the preliminary choices.
39. Now the harassments, the exertions, even the beatings of initiation rituals begin to make sense. The Thonga tribesman watching, with tears in his eyes, his ten-year-old son tremble through a night on the cold ground of the “yard of mysteries,” the college sophomore punctuating his Hell Night paddling of his fraternity “little brother” with bursts of nervous laughter—these are not acts of sadism. They are acts of group survival. They function, oddly enough, to spur future society members to find the group more attractive and worthwhile. As long as it is the case that people like and believe in what they have struggled to get, these groups will continue to arrange effortful and troublesome initiation rites. The loyalty and dedication of those who emerge will increase to a great degree the chances of group cohesiveness and survival.
40. Indeed, one study of fifty-four tribal cultures found that those with the most dramatic and stringent initiation ceremonies were those with the greatest group solidarity.
41. It appears that commitments are most effective in changing a person’s self-image and future behavior when they are active, public, and effortful.
42. Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. A large reward is one such external pressure. It may get us to perform a certain action, but it won’t get us to accept inner responsibility for the act. Consequently, we won’t feel committed to it. The same is true of a strong threat; it may motivate immediate compliance, but it is unlikely to produce long-term commitment.
43. All this has important implications for rearing children. It suggests that we should never heavily bribe or threaten our children to do the things we want them truly to believe in. Such pressures will probably produce temporary compliance with our wishes. However, if we want more than just that, if we want the children to believe in the correctness of what they have done, if we want them to continue to perform the desired behavior when we are not present to apply those outside pressures, then we must somehow arrange for them to accept inner responsibility for the actions we want them to take.
44. No matter which variety of lowballing is used, the sequence is the same: An advantage is offered that induces a favorable purchase decision; then, sometime after the decision has been made but before the bargain is sealed, the original purchase advantage is deftly removed.
45. As a general guiding principle, more information is always better than less information.
46. The first sort of signal is easy to recognize. It occurs right in the pit of our stomachs when we realize we are trapped into complying with a request we know we don’t want to perform.
47. The reason this tactic worked so effectively is because once small commitments have been made (in this case, giving a kiss), people tend to add justifications to support the commitment and then are willing to commit themselves further.
48. The introduction of laugh tracks into their comic programming will increase the humorous and appreciative responses of an audience, even—and especially—when the material is of poor quality.
49. To discover why canned laughter is so effective, we first need to understand the nature of yet another potent weapon of influence: the principle of social proof. It states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct.
50. Usually, when a lot of people are doing something, it is the right thing to do. This feature of the principle of social proof is simultaneously its major strength and its major weakness.
51. Bartenders often “salt” their tip jars with a few dollar bills at the beginning of the evening to simulate tips left by prior customers and thereby to give the impression that tipping with folding money is proper barroom behavior. Church ushers sometimes salt collection baskets for the same reason and with the same positive effect on proceeds.
52. Advertisers love to inform us when a product is the “fastest-growing” or “largest-selling” because they don’t have to convince us directly that the product is good, they need only say that many others think so, which seems proof enough.
53. Sales and motivation consultant Cavett Robert captures the principle nicely in his advice to sales trainees: “Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.”
54. The principle of social proof says so: The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.
55. In general, when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct.
56. We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves.
57. We most prefer to say yes to the requests of someone we know and like. What might be startling to note, however, is that this simple rule is used in hundreds of ways by total strangers to get us to comply with their requests.
58. By providing the hostess with a percentage of the take, the Tupperware Home Parties Corporation arranges for its customers to buy from and for a friend rather than an unknown salesperson. In this way, the attraction, the warmth, the security, and the obligation of friendship are brought to bear on the sales setting.
59. For twelve years straight, he won the title as the “number one car salesman”; he averaged more than five cars and trucks sold every day he worked; and he has been called the world’s “greatest car salesman” by the Guinness Book of World Records. For all his success, the formula he employed was surprisingly simple. It consisted of offering people just two things: a fair price and someone they liked to buy from. “And that’s it,” he claimed in an interview. “Finding the salesman they like, plus the price; put them both together, and you get a deal.”
60. One researcher who examined the sales records of insurance companies found that customers were more likely to buy insurance when the salesperson was like them in such areas as age, religion, politics, and cigarette-smoking habits.
61. Joe understands an important fact about human nature: We are phenomenal suckers for flattery. Although there are limits to our gullibility—especially when we can be sure that the flatterer is trying to manipulate us—we tend, as a rule, to believe praise and to like those who provide it, oftentimes when it is clearly false.
62. A fact that is as true today as it was in the time of ancient Persia, or, for that matter, in the time of Shakespeare, who captured the essence of it with one vivid line. “The nature of bad news,” he said, “infects the teller.”
63. There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news. The simple association with it is enough to stimulate our dislike.
64. It is possible to attach this pleasant feeling, this positive attitude, to anything (political statements being only an example) that is closely associated with good food.
65. If it is true that, to make ourselves look good, we try to bask in the reflected glory of the successes we are even remotely associated with, a provocative implication emerges: We will be most likely to use this approach when we feel that we don’t look so good. Whenever our public image is damaged, we will experience an increased desire to restore that image by trumpeting our ties to successful others.
66. According to Milgram, the real culprit in the experiments was his subject’s inability to defy the wishes of the boss of the study—the lab-coated researcher who urged and, if need be, directed the subjects to perform their duties, despite the emotional and physical mayhem they were causing.
67. In half of the instances, the requester—a young man—was dressed in normal street clothes; the rest of the time, he was dressed in a security guard’s uniform. Regardless of the type of request, many more people obeyed the requester when he wore the guard costume.
68. The idea of potential loss plays a large role in human decision making. In fact, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.
69. whenever free choice is limited or threatened, the need to retain our freedoms makes us desire them (as well as the goods and services associated with them) significantly more than previously. So when increasing scarcity—or anything else—interferes with our prior access to some item, we will react against the interference by wanting and trying to possess the item more than before.

Subsequently, this book is now in my personal hall of fame for understanding human behaviour, alongside the likes of Thinking Fast and Slow (on decision making), Quiet (to understand about the introvert-extrovert spectrum), Never Split the Difference (on negotiating), Win Every Argument (on debating), Triggers (on, well, triggers), and of course all Robert Greene’s books (on power play, strategy, mastery, warfare, seduction, and human nature).

Special mention to that reader’s note from the parent of a college coed (chapter 1), whose daughter use the contrasting effect to make her bad grades seems pale in comparison to the made up disastrous story that she preceded before telling her college results, which involve fire, meeting an undesirable guy, and getting pregnant. Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she indeed get an A in psychology.

“Short Stories in Japanese: New Penguin Parallel Text” edited by Michael Emmerich

Right from the introduction, editor Michael Emmerich provides his impressive knowledge about the history of Japanese literature and mentions about the “different ways of constructing sentences, different ways of representing dialogue and thought, all kinds of grammatical patterns, and lots of vocabulary.”

He then proceeded to present us with his selection of Japanese short stories to illustrate these points, 8 stories to be exact, written by some of the best in Japanese literature that encapsulate the unorthodox writing styles. The authors are: Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Masayo Koike, Yūko Tsushima, Hiromo Kawakami, Kazushige Abe, Shinji Ishii, and Sueko Yoshida.

As Emmerich remarks, “[a] trip to the gym affects more than just particular muscles, of course: it makes you feel good all over. It makes your whole body work. And that’s what this book tries to do as well.” “In fact,” Emmerich continues, “I would go so far as to say that the main point of this volume is to help you build up your overall health, strength, and endurance as an English-speaking student of Japanese or a Japanese-speaking student of English.”

This is shown by the organization of the book, where it is written in two languages, English on the left side and Japanese on the right side, which could indeed be very handy for those English-speaker who want to learn Japanese, and vice versa.

Emmerich then elaborates, “[b]y the time you arrive at the end of this collection, you will undoubtedly have picked up lots of new words and grammar, but more important, you will have had the opportunity to practice getting along on your own as a reader, without relying on detailed notes, simply using the translations to figure out why the original means what it does, and how it means it, or vice versa.”

Now I’m not planning to learn Japanese Kanji letters anytime soon, but the English side of the book is enough to teach me one or two things about Japanese literature, not to mention plenty of fresh new writing styles.

And in the end of the day I came for the stories, and these 8 stories by 8 authors did not disappoint one bit. Every single one of them contributed to the overall uniqueness of the book, and they show the fresh vantage points of life in the Japanese society. Especially the story of the weird creature and the war-time prostitute, not to mention the shortest story by Haruki Murakami that blew me away right from the beginning of the book. Great selection of stories, they perfectly fulfill my new obsession of Japanese literature.

“Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service” by Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal

I began to read this book on 31 July 2024, just after Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran. While Israel chose not to comment on the huge historical moment, all fingers still pointed towards Mossad, some to condemn and some to support.

So my immediate reaction was, I got to read more about this notoriously efficient spy agency! As proven yet again by the effectiveness of killing an enemy leader in a different hostile enemy territory, by planted the bomb 2 months in advance. I mean, that took some diligent planning, organizing, and execution.

Now, I’m not in any shape or form a Zionist supporter. In fact I fervently against the land grab colonialism, the brutal apartheid regime, and the horrific genocide taking place in Gaza (which are big topics for other books). But I thought I can learn a lot about Israel by looking from the inside, through their perspectives.

And what better way to see their inner-workings than a book about its most prized weapon, the intelligence agency, which glorifies all of its crimes? A 2012 book at that, which shows the mentality of untouchability from any accountability, and an air of cocky confidence that their Hasbara PR machine will whitewash their wrongdoings into heroic tales. You know, the usual stuff.

Hence, the juicy details in this tell-all book that name names (the main author – a former Knesset member – interviewed plenty of Israeli leaders and Mossad agents), and re-create 21 true stories that are broken down into 21 chapters, complete with all the dangers, the rescue missions, the failed disaster, the hunting down enemies, the legendary characters showing their admittedly impressive methodologies, and most importantly the book shows Israel’s atrocities all over Europe, Latin America, North America, Africa, and of course the Middle East.

It is everything that you imagine a spy novel would look like, with all the fighting, the bomb plotting, the honey trap, the double agent, Trojan Horse virus, and much more, which makes this book a gripping read.

That is, of course, until I remember that all of these events really did occur in real life and the authors had the audacity to brag about Mossad’s crimes and reveal how they can get away with their sh*t. In details. This, makes the book an ever better one, a reference for future evidence that the authors gift-wrapped to the world and for the international courts to see in the future. Excellent work.

“Siddhartha” by Herman Hesse

I first read this book in September 2017, after I learned about it from the many guests in the Tim Ferriss Show, who said that this is their favourite book.

So naturally, I just got to read it! But only to quickly found out that I didn’t like it at all. Initially because it was not the story of Siddhartha Gautama that I familiar with, an annoying occurrence that quite a lot of people in the review section are experiencing and something that kept confusing me after about 1/4 of the book when young Siddhartha indeed crossed path with the REAL Siddhartha Gautama.

But I read on, with the hope that this fiction narrative could become better as I go along. That did not happen, and I finished the book feeling disliking it even more, although to be fair I didn’t like reading fiction back then.

Now, 7 years later, I have since developed an appetite for reading fiction and I thought I should give the book a second try. You know that phrase when the student is ready, the teacher will appear? Or when you’re ready, the book will finally make sense?

Yeah, that doesn’t happen either this time around. At this 2nd attempt, this 1922 novel is still too hippie dippie for my taste. While I love reading about mythology, religion, and spirituality, this book kinda miss the mark for its spirituality. Heck, it doesn’t even explain about Buddhism, but rather suspiciously have what it appears to be Christian messages wrapped under Hindu elements.

Now, I’m very aware of the popularity of this book, and the spiritual impact that it has over many people. Which is good for them, and I don’t want to argue anything here. Different people matched with different books, and I might also grown into liking it someday.

But at the moment, after reading authors such as Joseph Campbell, Karen Armstrong, and Paramahansa Yogananda, this book just feels light in comparison for me. If we contrast it with other authors on Buddhism – such as Sogyal Rinpoche, Joseph Goldstein, and Haemin Sunim – this book looks elementary in comparison. And you could actually come out better informed spiritually if reading books by Sadhguru or Jay Shetty, even though they only use Hindu lessons in a secular way.

Moreover, the narrative itself is not strong enough to be a good regular story, with no real depth in the characters and no concrete lessons to be learned other than this one quote that represents the essence of the book: “Knowledge can be transferred, but not wisdom. It can be found and lived, and it is possible to be carried by it. Miracles can be performed with it, but it can’t be expressed and taught with words.”

Indeed, the book attempts to show through its story that experience is the best way to gain wisdom, and Siddhartha’s wisdom was intended to look like something aquired after a long up-and-down journey. But unfortunately, it was expressed through a pretty dull story-telling with anti-climactic ending, filled with spiritual gimmicks that would’ve made Thich Nhat Hanh cringe.

Hence, I’m sticking with my 3 stars from 7 years ago.

“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.