Short Book Reviews: Volume V

Byung-Chul Han on burnout, marriage advocacy, dieting, Labatut, my quest to master the Holy Roman Empire, Murakami, and far too much Shirtaloon.

1. The Burnout Society by: Byung-Chul Han

2. Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization by: Brad Wilcox

3. The MANIAC by: Benjamín Labatut

4. Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire by: Peter Wilson

5. You Can’t Screw This Up: Why Eating Takeout, Enjoying Dessert, and Taking the Stress out of Dieting Leads to Weight Loss That Lasts by: Adam Bornstein 

6. Norwegian Wood by: Haruki Murakami

7. He Who Fights with Monsters 2: A LitRPG Adventure by: Shirtaloon

8. He Who Fights with Monsters 3: A LitRPG Adventure by: Shirtaloon

So I have this problem, and I’m wondering if I’m the only one. For most things if X needs to happen then I know the activity I need to engage in to bring about X. The activity may be difficult. It may be expensive. I may need help to do it. I may eventually fail, but I know which direction to head in. 

If someone wants a specific piece of software, I know how to either create that software or how to delegate its creation to someone else. If I need to be more awake and alert, I know how to sleep. If I seek information, I know how to read a book to get it. But somehow I don’t know how to recreate. Allow me to elaborate:

You know how when you’re all done with your work and you say to yourself “Okay! Now it’s time to do something fun!” I don’t know what that something should be. There are things that are restorative, like going for a walk. But I’d like something that is also really enjoyable. And while I derive a certain amount of pleasure from walking I don’t think “Oh man! That was so fun!” Spending time with friends, for example playing D&D, is fun, but I can’t do it whenever I feel like it. I schedule as much of it as I can get away with (probably too much) but it’s not something I can decide to do on a whim.

For many people the answer is some kind of screen based activity. TV, movies, video games, etc. And occasionally I’ll hit on the perfect alchemy where I’m listening to a podcast, while playing a video game. Or I’m watching a reality tv show in the background while I work on something fun on my computer. But those moments are always fleeting. Video games gradually transition from escapism to drudgery. And it turns out only a very limited selection of reality TV works as background—actually it’s only The Great British Bake Off. 

I think it’s a problem of attention, which is where we finally arrive at my brokenness. Even when I’m having fun I don’t want to feel like I’m wasting my time (first because of the aforementioned brokenness and second because the time I have available for fun is so limited). Consequently having fun involves the perfect level of attention. I’m not straining to pay attention, but nor do I feel there’s some amount of attention that’s going to waste. You might say I’m in the attention zone, or sweet spot. And as near as I can tell that spot is pretty small. Clearly one obvious answer is to make the spot bigger. Why do I have to be doing at least two things to really feel like I’m having fun? Another answer, which I’ve seriously considered, is just to abandon the whole idea that I might be able to have fun. If I can’t find success there, then there are a lot of other places I can find success. 

It’s possible that this can all be reduced to the idea of accomplishment. Whatever I’m doing I feel like I need to have accomplished something. This is not a great way to live a balanced and healthy life, but it does take me to my first review:

Non-Fiction Reviews

The Burnout Society

by: Byung-Chul Han

Published: 2015

68 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The big difference between now and every other point in human history is that in the past all societies have been disciplinary societies whereas modern societies are achievement societies. Accordingly, whereas we used to experience too much negativity, now we experience too much positivity. We no longer suffer, we burnout.

What's the author's angle?

Han is a Korean philosopher living in Germany, and the book was originally written in German. All of these layers of foreignness make his biases pretty opaque to me.

Who should read this book?

This book is short but dense. The former quality mitigates the latter. Furthermore if you like philosophy, then you’re used to denseness. This leaves only a short, powerful book, which you should definitely read.

Specific thoughts: Supernormal stimuli under a different name?

I’ve been entranced by the idea of supernormal stimuli since I first encountered the idea in Stephen Guyenet’s The Hungry Brain. This is the idea that evolution built in numerous measures to protect us in the event of scarcity, because that’s what’s happening the majority of the time, but it didn’t build in any protection against abundance, because long term abundance was non-existent. As it has been said, we’re built to suffer, we’re not built for relentless achievement.

Guyenet examined this issue through a behavioral lens, Han views it through a philosophical one. Han ends up being just as compelling. For example consider this quote describing the move from “disciplinary society” to “achievement society”:

Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation. Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.

Perhaps it’s just me but this felt like Han was seeing straight into the soul of society.

If our society has made this switch, from discipline to achievement, from suffering to burning out, what does it look like? One might imagine that it’s a curve which gently slopes upward. As it rises, suffering gradually decreases till it hits zero. As it crosses the axis we start to focus more and more on achievement. At first glance this may seem like a small switch, and not only that but a positive one as well. But the longer it goes, the more it appears to be a complete re-ordering of the world.

Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization

By: Brad Wilcox

Published: 2024

320 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

That the surest route to wealth and happiness is getting married. 

What's the author's angle?

Wilcox is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, so he’s not exactly a disinterested observer, but he has collected a lot of data.

Who should read this book?

It’s nice that books like this are getting more attention, but I’m not sure that anyone should read them. I guess if you have someone who’s doubtful about marriage, but nevertheless persuadable, they would be the ideal candidate, but how many of those people are actually out there?

Specific thoughts: It’s interesting what’s considered radical these days.

I’m not sure if I’ve expressed this observation before in this space, but if so it bears repeating. In 1995 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”. At the time it seemed like the blandest, most inoffensive advice that an organization could dispense. Certainly there were people even then who violently disagreed with it, but it seemed self evident that this was the Church’s position, and it was weird that they felt the need to spell it out. But now, nearly 30 years on, writing a book advocating for marriage is seen as a vaguely radical act. What will things look like in another 30 years?

The MANIAC

By: Benjamín Labatut (lah-bah-TOOT)

Published: 2023

368 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A semi-fictionalized history connecting Paul Erhenfest, John von Neumann, and Lee Sedol into a history of irrationality and artificiality. 

What's the author's angle?

This is the second book I’ve read by Labatut (see the review of his other book, When We Cease to Understand the World here) and he definitely has a very specific point of view. I would describe it as: the more advanced the science the closer it gets to “secrets man was not meant to know.” 

Who should read this book?

If you’re interested in von Neumann, computers, AI or Lovecraft then you will probably enjoy this book. 

Specific thoughts: It’s interesting, but is it true?

As someone who feels that things have definitely gone off the rails recently—in ways that are both depressingly familiar and also profoundly strange—I’m very interested in explorations of this phenomenon. I’m particularly drawn to people who examine the insane edges of things. But how many people are talking about quantum mechanics driving people insane?

Labatut is and he’s taken a unique but sometimes frustrating approach to this exploration. He does historical fiction, but if you didn’t know it was fiction you’d mistake it for fact, and indeed a great deal of it is factual, particularly in this book (unlike his last one).

The problem is that you’d really like to know what’s fact, what’s embellishment, and what’s outright fabrication, but this is not easy to do. As far as I can tell there’s not a giant list. (The closest thing I found was this.) So instead you have to do your own research, which is time consuming, as you might imagine. 

For example take this scene which opens the section on von Neumann:

When cancer spread to his brain and began to destroy his mind, he was sequestered by the United States military and confined to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Two armed guards stood outside his door. No one was allowed to see him without express permission from the Pentagon. An Air Force colonel and eight airmen with top secret clearance were assigned to assist him full-time, even though there were days he could do nothing but rage like a madman. He was a fifty-three-year-old Jewish mathematician who had emigrated from Hungary to America in 1937, and yet at his bedside, hanging on his every word, sat Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission; the Secretary of Defense; the Deputy Secretary of Defense; the Secretaries of Air, Army, and Navy; and the military Chiefs of Staff—all waiting for a final spark, one more idea from the individual who had birthed the modern computer, laid down the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, written the equations for the implosion of the atomic bomb, fathered the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, heralded the arrival of digital life, self-reproducing machines, artificial intelligence, and the technological singularity, and promised them godlike control over the Earth’s climate, now wasting away before their eyes, screaming in agony, lost in delirium, dying, just like any other man.

As near as I can tell all the people listed in the excerpt did in fact visit von Neumann as he lay dying, which is definitely remarkable, but I don’t know if all of them were sitting around his bed at the same time. But figuring that out took a fair amount of time. So if this sort of thing is going to trouble you I would avoid the book, but if your desire for a great story allows you to overlook the “liberties” Labatut takes with the truth, then this is a very engaging and thought provoking book.

Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire 

By: Peter H. Wilson

Published: 2016

1008 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A history of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) broken up into topical slices. Some example topics: Lands, Identity, Dynasty, Justice. This is not a narrative, chronological history.

What's the author's angle?

Wilson is an academic focused on German history. This is no small fraction of his life’s work. 

Who should read this book?

Who? And how? And whether? Are in fact the big questions, read on…

Specific thoughts: So you want to learn about the Holy Roman Empire…

Last year my wife and I took a cruise down the Rhine River, and as we toured the various cities the HRE got mentioned a lot. I realized I didn’t know much about it, and so I resolved to learn more.

As it turns out I knew more than I thought, what I didn’t have is a framework. A model for how the HRE worked and what it was. It’s a weird entity. As Voltaire famously said, “This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” The emperor of the HRE was very different from other monarchs and the HRE was very different from other empires. 

While there were long periods where the job of emperor was basically hereditary, it was always technically an elected position. There weren’t a lot of electors. (Seven after the Golden Bull was issued in 1356 reaching a maximum of 10 in 1803, but then the whole thing ended in 1806. They didn’t even get a chance to participate in an election.¹) It wasn’t a popular election, but even so the fact that there was an election at all made the position unusual.  

The empire itself was also strange. Unlike most empires which gradually expand and develop from a small kingdom into their full imperial splendor. This empire started as the Frankish Kingdom of Charlemagne and then the rest of its 800+ years of existence was spent trying to keep that kingdom/empire from fracturing more than it already had. The inception of the empire also represented the peak of its power and unity. After that, while there were peaks and valleys the general trend was down. 

The point is it was a weird political organization. one I wanted to know more about and understand better. So, in typical fashion, I found a book, purchased it from Audible, and ten months later it made it to the top of my list. So how well did this 34 hour audiobook do at fulfilling my goal? Or to put it another way, was listening to this book the best way to learn about the Holy Roman Empire? I’m going to say “no”. Does that mean that reading it was a mistake?

I’m fully aware of the fact that listening to a dense history book is not the best way to consume it. This is particularly true if the book is organized by subject, as was the case with this book, rather than chronologically and narratively. The question which then arises: would my HRE education time have been better spent doing something else? We can all agree that if I had carefully read a physical copy of the book, marking things up as I went along, checking the index, etc. That would have been better, but that wasn’t going to happen. The queue of books I want to give that treatment to is far too long already. So the choice is spend 13 hours listening to this book (I think I averaged a listening speed of around 2.6) or spend 13 hours engaged in some other activity that produced HRE knowledge. Some possibilities:

• Reading Wikipedia articles: Here we return to the asymmetry between the time I have to listen to books and the time I have for using my eyes to read. Also there are going to be all manner of details in a 1000 page book that aren’t in a 22,000 word Wikipedia article (the main HRE article). And what if the information you’re really interested in takes you down a rabbit hole and you end up having to read a dozen articles? You could quickly arrive in a situation where it was a bad tradeoff. Nevertheless I’m not sure how much information I retained from the book that wouldn’t have also featured in the articles.

• Asking questions on ChatGPT (or similar): If you’re just interested in a specific question, like: “How did electors work in the Holy Roman Empire?” then using ChatGPT or something similar is a great way to go, and you can take things in whatever direction you want, so rather than slogging through the 1000 page book or the 22,000 word article, you can just focus on the questions you’re really interested in. But once again there are some issues. For example, knowing what questions to ask. I can guarantee that I have a whole host of questions after reading this book that I never even considered beforehand. Also despite the hype around ChatGPT-4o it still screws up more than is ideal. As an example I decided to ask it about electors. At one point in our discussion it said that when the HRE ended in 1806 there were ten electors and then proceeded to supply me with a list of eleven nobles. I could have figured out which one was extra or duplicated, but that kind of defeats the point.

• Hiring an expert to talk to me: This idea only occurred to me as I was writing this review, but in this day and age you could probably find someone who was an expert on the HRE and pay them to talk to you about the HRE. As Tyler Cowen says, there’s a market for everything, presumably that includes HRE knowledge. I haven’t tried this, so I have no idea on cost, effectiveness or enjoyability, but now that it’s occurred to me I’ll definitely try it in the future.

• Finding a movie to watch: This doesn’t appear to be an option for this topic, but it is for many other topics. And it’s one that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. 

I do know a lot more about the HRE than I used to. And I think this book is a great resource, and I’m glad to have it on my shelf. (Yes I listened to it, but I also bought a physical copy.) But in retrospect, I think a combination of reading wikipedia, and asking chatgpt would have yielded better results in less time. 

You Can’t Screw This Up: Why Eating Takeout, Enjoying Dessert, and Taking the Stress out of Dieting Leads to Weight Loss That Lasts 

By: Adam Bornstein 

Published: 2023

352 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A better way to approach eating and weight-loss that doesn’t involve being miserable. 

What's the author's angle?

Bornstein worked with Tim Ferris for five years and he mentions Ryan Holiday quite a bit as well. If either of those names mean anything to you then perhaps you have some sense of his “angle”. If not, don’t worry about it.

Who should read this book?

If you’re trying to lose weight and nothing else is working then you might as well read this book, what do you have to lose?

Specific thoughts: What would it look like if this was easy?

As is unfortunately so often the case, I’m not sure how this book ended up on my list. I would like to lose some weight, but I’m more blessed than some. I’m in that “if I could just shed 10 lbs, maybe 15 my weight would be perfect” group. Still, even if that’s all I’m dealing with this is in that category of books where if it works it’s worth all the time you spent reading it and then some. And if it doesn’t, you haven’t given up much.

Bornstein’s central premise is: given most diets don’t work, we need to try something different, and in this sense he reminds me a lot of some of the other books I’ve read on the subject. There was Younger Next Year from a couple of posts back, and the Hungry Brain from a few years ago.  All three recommend that we establish more of a mindset of attentiveness to what we eat rather than setting up super restrictive regimes. Bornstein’s advice is to be mostly good most of the time:

Great health is accomplished by being “good enough.” When I think about making healthy decisions, I assume that approximately 25 percent of my days are going to be a struggle, 50 percent of my days are nothing special (but lead to small positive changes), and 25 percent of my days I’ll feel like I’m doing great.

On paper, this doesn’t look like a recipe for success, but the math works in your favor. The crappy weeks are crappy, but they are better than nothing. The 50 percent weeks are when you’re making those small incremental changes that are the foundation of success in anything. And the 25 percent of the time when you are better than average gives you that extra boost and motivation.

All three books also share the advice (to varying degrees) of avoiding ultra-processed foods. The Hungry Brain is the best for going into the science and identifies that these ultra-processed foods act as supernormal stimuli, also called hyperpalatable. Follow this link if you want to know more about that, but suffice it to say food companies are hacking our brains, and while there are many reasons why people are significantly more obese now than they were historically, the creation of hyperpalatable food is among the most insidious.

Fiction Reviews

Norwegian Wood

By: Haruki Murakami

Published: 1987 (in Japanese)

296 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The life, the loves, and the many adjacent suicides of a boy named Toru Watanabe in 1960s Japan. 

Who should read this book?

If your fiction reading mostly consists of science fiction and fantasy, like me, then it’s nice to be reminded from time to time that the average well regarded piece of contemporary fiction is going to be better written and have more engaging characters than the average SF&F novel. This is because the average SF&F has other ways of being good. It can have annoying characters but amazing world building, or an incredibly interesting premise, and to be fair this also means that it ends up being spread a little bit thin. Contemporary fiction can’t take advantage of this crutch, and it doesn’t suffer from this weakness, which means if it’s going to be well regarded it has to be for the writing, plot and characters—as such these elements are generally stronger. If this observation speaks to you, you should read this book.

Specific thoughts: For a introspective nerd Watanabe sure sleeps with a lot of girls

The one caveat to my recommendation above is that this is a pretty adult book. There are a fair number of sex scenes and while they’re not super explicit, they’re not “fade to black” sex scenes either. Also suicide is central to the book, and there are several of them. Having said all that, I really enjoyed this book, particularly the characters. Yes, Watanabe’s magnetism is a little unbelievable, but all of the characters are so well crafted that you can’t help but love them to death. (Is that tasteless? As hard as it is to believe it was actually unintentional.) 

He Who Fights with Monsters Series

By: Shirtaloon

Book 2

Published: 2021

564 Pages

Book 3

Published: 2021

722 Pages

Briefly, what is this series about?

The main character, Jason Asano, is accidentally summoned to a world of magic. Once there he becomes an adventurer slaying monsters, vanquishing cultists, and in general being a smug, albeit generally amusing, ass.

Who should read this series?

This series is similar to Dungeon Crawler Carl (search the site for my reviews of that series), so if you liked that you’ll probably like this. Also anyone who likes pulpy fantasy stuff, should enjoy this.

Specific thoughts: Gods are real and he does what?!?

There are many things to like about this series: The characters are pretty good. The world building is great (and takes a big step up at the end of Book 3). The action is well written. But there is a Mary-Sue atheism to the endeavor that would be annoying if it wasn’t so ridiculous.

Allow me to explain, one can perhaps be forgiven for being an atheist in the modern world. As such it’s understandable that the main character, Jason, would start out as an atheist. But when he’s transported to a world where not only are gods real, but, unlike most fantasy worlds, they show up all the time. (If you hang out in the religious district of a small town then you’re likely to see one or the other of the gods on a daily basis.) 

Given this you would expect a dramatic revision in Jason’s beliefs, but no, instead he treats gods as you might treat an annoying boss if you had zero fear of being fired. And rather than being smitten, or cursed or educated, the gods all deeply respect him for his iconoclasm. 

Other than that it’s pretty enjoyable, and reasonably clever. It’s just too bad that it has this one absurd, and completely unrealistic conceit.  

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I know I said that the next thing I posted would not be a book review. I was wrong, but I do have something that is all but ready to go, so it should come out in the next few days. And then I have a bunch of other stuff that’s close so I hope to enter a period of higher volume very soon. Though I do have a lot of travel scheduled for the summer, so we’ll have to see…

1. I’m reminded of the amazing sketch about Admiral Karl Dönitz, the last leader of Nazi Germany, from That Mitchell and Webb Look.