There's a certain serendipity in finding the perfect book at the perfect time. After a long immersion in the grim landscapes of crime and horror, where every story began to feel like a variation on the same dark theme, I found myself craving something radically different. Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha found its way into my hands.

Siddhartha immediately calls to mind a book like The Alchemist, though Hesse's novel arrived first. Both are deceptively simple tales of young men on a quest for the ultimate answers to life. We follow Siddhartha from his privileged life as a Brahmin's son, through the ascetic rigors of Samana life, into the worldly pleasures of commerce, sensuality, and wealth, and finally to a state of quiet desperation that ultimately leads him to the banks of a river.

The book's central wisdom, that truth is not a doctrine to be learned but an experience to be lived, is a philosophy I already held dear.

Hesse's prose is never bogged down in preachy monologues or philosophical tangents. Every scene and encounter with the half-dozen key characters who weave in and out of Siddhartha's life feels purposeful and fluid. They complete different facets of the protagonist, each one a mirror reflecting a part of the path he must walk.

I limited myself to a chapter or two a day, and the space between readings became as important as the reading itself. It gave me time to reflect in my journal and to discuss his journey with a like-minded friend.

Siddhartha doesn't leave you with the aching sadness of a Norwegian Wood or the raw, bitter alienation of The Catcher in the Rye. It made me happy to wake up the next morning, eager to talk about it, to turn its lessons over in the light of a new day. It is a book that reminds you of the peace found not in seeking, but in stopping. For anyone needing to step back from the noise of the world and listen to a simpler, deeper current, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

If you like very dense fantasy, this is probably an absolute legendary classic, but I can not say I enjoyed my read of this. The prose are excellent, I was very invested in it for a good 150 pages telling myself "this will come together" but it never did, at least for me. It's so plodding, meandering, never ending in it's description of lore, places, and characters and their role in this sprawling universe and after 650 pages I can honestly say outside of Achamian and Esmenet I can't tell you what the hell any one else in this book is doing, thinks, or feels. The book comes off as lifeless, cardboard characters on a board.

My track record with anthologies isn't good.

Usually the first 1 or 2 stories are bangin, lots of ideas and shocks, and leave you wanting more. Then it's all down hill from there.

The first story here is a great hook about a world where men have vanished due to the toxic atmosphere and women keep men in these zoos to study and gawk at, there's a twist, a main character trying to piece it together, then it ends. And no story after that was close to as engaging.

None of the other stories are interesting, frankly. It's not an awful book, but very, very dull. I would've rather read a novella based on the first story.

Blindsight is an insightful, at times terrifying sci-fi book with a creative premise of human engineering, vampires in space, the dark forest beyond, but good lord is it a slog to get through. The characters are intriguing in premise but have no personality and blend together. It's HARD sci-fi done right but it's not for me.

This pains me to say it but... I'm Ellroy'd out.

This was more focused than L.A. Confidential, better than Black Dhalia, but The Big Nowhere is hands down the best of the L.A. Quartet.

White Jazz is focused on one character, David Klein, and all around mob Superman who has the cops and the gangsters wrapped around his finger. The plot moves all over the place with nasty implications of STD's, drugs everywhere, incest, prostitutes, prostitutes, prostitutes! And it never seems to find a thread to stick to.

It's still good. If you've never read Ellroy before it'll smack you in the mouth. If you find yourself wavering maybe come back later. It is what it is.

This mystery novel starts with a bang, an incredibly engrossing set up with two bodies int he first fifty pages and a fantastic main character in Nikki, a member of a special NCIS-like US military investigation unit in Naples, Italy... then nothing much happens for a while. It drifts between personal issues with her family, some history with her boyfriend, zig zags back to the investigation, a lot of characters that get muddled up, and I was flipping through whole sections to get back to the story beats. 200 really good pages stretched out to make a novel.

It's not bad, but nothing memorable either.

There’s something about The Parable of the Sower that left me wanting. The opening is very YA with a main character who’s stern, commanding, charismatic, and also has some weird magical “empathy” power that doesn’t seem to be worth anything. She’s writing a New Testament about the Earthseeds while the world, an opaque crumbling America, descends into chaos.

There are gripping scenes violence and shock followed by pages and pages of wandering. It’s not sultry enough to be sexy, it’s not violent enough to be horrific, and I couldn’t find that deep metaphor for civilization I got from other novels. In fact, the whole time I just wanted to read The Road.

I want give Dawn by Octavia Butler a try but this just wasn’t hitting for me.

DEBORD’S HAMMER: The Spectacle as the Hammer

I finished Comments on The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, the day Alex Pretti was murdered in the streets of Minneapolis by masked ICE agents. My Youtube channel went from a Twitch streamer racking up huge points in Balatro to a Bellingcat analysis of the shooting (several shots to the back of Alex as he lay face down on the ground) and then a video essay by @rewboss called “I don’t think ICE is the Gestapo “where he outlined that ICE more closely resembles the Secret Police of the Third Reich while the FBI will take the place of the Gestapo.

“Does it really matter? Does it really anti-matter?” - The Tick

The Society of the Spectacle, or just The Spectacle, has become my hammer in the modern world of nails. Everything I see is viewed through this lens, and I am in perpetual argument with everyone around me about “what to do” or even “what’s going on”.

The Spectacle is written about and argued about incessantly online, so excuse me if my interpretation doesn’t jive with yours, but I think we can find some common ground: We live in a world of images, more every day. AI-generated content has surpassed human-made content in just 3 years. My wife showed me a Sky News screencap that used a fake AI-generated video of Alex Pretti holding a gun, in place of a camera, before he was murdered. Our world is no longer reliable or relatable. Society now functions as a series of excuses for base impulses and unfounded, violent urges.

Every chapter of Comments on The Society of the Spectacle felt prescient. Most smart people can see the ICE raids in most cities as a game of chicken to entice the protesting masses to set off the spark that justifies their madness.

“Yet the highest ambition of the integrated spectacle is still to turn secret agents into revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into secret agents.” (Debord, 2002, p. 11)

Seeing Trump and his cronies alongside the PayPal Mafia and techno-barons while we watch the world burn under the weight of AI data farms producing millions of images of pornography for no discernible reason makes society feel like an out-of-control Lovecraftian or Fight Club monster.

“THE society whose modernisation has reached the stage of the integrated spectacle is characterised by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalised secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present.” (Debord, 2002, p. 11)

We are told that AI will take all of our jobs, exacerbate the concentration-destruction we can all see with our eyes, and integrate into a clearly evil military.

You’d better like it or else.

“A GENERAL working rule of the integrated Spectacle, at least for those who manage its affairs, is that in this framework, everything which can be done, must be done. This means that every new instrument must be employed, whatever the cost. New machinery everywhere becomes the goal and the driving force of the system. It is the only thing that can significantly modify its progress, every time its use is imposed without further reflection. Society’s owners indeed want, above all, to maintain a certain ‘social relation between people’, but they must also sustain continual technological innovation; for that was one of the obligations that came with their inheritance. This law must thus also apply to the services that safeguard domination. When an instrument has been perfected, it must be used, and its use will reinforce the very conditions that favour this use. Thus it is that emergency procedures become standard procedures.” (Debord, 2002, p. 79)

The Dictatorship of the criminally insane.

Like Marcus Aurelius’ Stoic Philosophy a decade ago, Guy Debord and The Society of the Spectacle are ideas whose time has come, and expect to see them all over your timelines and feeds.

Feel free to find me on Substack where I post a few times a year https://stevenayy.substack.com/p/debords-hammer-the-spectacle-as-the