John Walters's Blog, page 2

Book Review: The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature by Charlie English

This true story of spying and smuggling takes place in the 1980s, when Poland, as a part of the Soviet-dominated East Bloc, suffered brutal repression. Its citizens had very little personal freedom; most books from the outside were banned, and the only media people had access to were government-sponsored publications and radio spewing out crass propaganda. Realizing that the battle for freedom must first be fought in the minds of their countrymen, to counter the all-pervasive despair brought on by this subjugation, teams of rebels printed underground journals and distributed them along with provocative books smuggled in from the West. In 1980, the Polish trade union Solidarity made its first appearance during a strike at a major shipyard; for a time it appeared as if it would herald greater freedom in the country. However, in late 1981, a military coup led by General Jaruzelski imposed martial law and began arresting union leaders and other dissidents. It became more difficult than ever to smuggle in vitally-needed literature as well as the presses and other equipment that kept the underground journals in print.

The title of this book is a bit of a misnomer. The CIA’s only role in the operation was assisting with financing. This was crucial, of course, but the organizational work, as well as the on-the-ground smuggling itself, was carried out by Polish people within the country who were in constant danger of arrest and imprisonment; Poles in exile in France, England, Belgium, and Sweden; and other sympathetic Europeans. These are the true heroes of this story.

What I find fascinating about this account is the emphasis on the value of works of literature as weapons to sway the hearts and minds of people attempting to survive under a traumatic political situation. Those who produced and distributed these works were aware that they were in great danger and might be arrested and imprisoned at any moment, and yet they nevertheless continued their vital work. They knew that if they didn’t, people would despair, and the flame of insurrection might die. So they persevered, and some of them were caught, and beaten, and tortured.

The book starts off in the first chapter with a harrowing account of a prison experience of a man, Miroslaw Chojecki, who becomes one of the most important expatriate smugglers. The account is so excruciating, in fact, that I almost stopped reading. Hang in there, though; the author launches into an explanation of the book program in the second chapter, and the tale of subterfuge and chicanery begins. It’s an exciting story, full of triumphs and setbacks and regroupings and heroism. It ends, of course, with the fall of the East Bloc and victory for the Polish people. The main revelation, though, in the retelling of this history is in the power of printed words to shape minds. During the decades of communist oppression, literature was much more important than weapons to the underground. And it was the ideas expressed in literature that ultimately won the war.

Thoughts on This Immortal by Roger Zelazny

Recently I needed a book that I could take with me on a journey by plane without adding much to the weight and volume of my carry-on luggage. It also had to be well-written and absorbing, something that would hold my attention despite the uncomfortable circumstances of modern plane travel. My thoughts turned quickly to this perennial favorite, a novel that I always keep on my shelf for whenever I need the comfort, excitement, and satisfaction of reading a true classic.

I’m not sure exactly how many times I have read This Immortal. At least three times, and maybe four. I’ve written two previous reviews of the novel, which you can find here and here. It’s one of my favorite science fiction novels of all time. To put it in perspective, in 1966 it won the Hugo Award for best novel of 1965 in a tie with Frank Herbert’s Dune – and I like This Immortal better. Dune, of course, became an acknowledged classic and has experienced a revival with the new award-winning two-part film, while This Immortal remains much more obscure. Despite the imbalance of popularity, here are some reasons I find Zelazny’s amazing novel so alluring.

First of all, Zelazny was a brilliant writer with a unique, intelligent, fast-paced, and poetic style. (I speak in the past tense because he died of cancer at the age of 58 in 1995.) No one has ever written like him before or since. His stories are action-packed and larger than life, yes, but they are also imbued with mythological and literary references that give them great depth and emotional resonance. Despite these references, though, the prose is never ponderous or slow; it is obvious that Zelazny had great fun writing it, and the ebullience is infectious.

And much of This Immortal is set in Greece, where I raised my family with my Greek wife. This is an added attraction for me. The main character, who tells the story in first person, the “immortal” of the title, has lived for several centuries under various guises. Much of Earth has been devastated by an apocalyptic nuclear holocaust that has left large portions of the planet almost uninhabitable, and the majority of humankind has left for other planets and solar systems. In irradiated hot spots mutants have arisen that are uncannily similar to mythological creatures. The protagonist leads a team of humans and an alien observer to historic sites in Haiti, Egypt, and Greece while evading perils and attempting to discover what the alien’s motives are.

Another advantage of this novel is that it is short. I don’t mean to say that length determines quality; however, many modern novels encapsulate a novella’s worth of story in a gigantic, ponderous door-stopper of a book that would be more effective if it was a third of the length. Zelazny’s novel is lean yet strong, the exact length it needs to be to tell the story well and not a word longer. Reading it once again made me long for the days when writers didn’t feel the need to pad their prose with extraneous bullshit on the supposition that longer stories will sell better. Gone are the days, it seems, when writers can simply tell their stories and then stop rather than stuff them with an abundance of cloying superfluities.

All that to say that This Immortal is one of those tales that gets better and better with each rereading. In my reviews I often say that I “highly recommend” this book or that, but even that superlative is inadequate. This Immortal is a classic. You can read it once, twice, thrice, and experience greater pleasure every time. So what are you waiting for? Find a copy and get started.

Not a Tourist

This week in my newsletter The Perennial Nomad: For Those Who Wander with Intent I discuss the differences between nomads and tourists.

I can’t emphasize this enough: a perennial nomad is not a tourist. This has nothing to do with how long you are gone or the distance you travel. If you even consider these measurements to assess your qualifications as a nomad, you are missing the point. A tourist has deep roots in a place called home, and whether the trip is planned down to the day or has a looser format, the objective is always to return to the point of origin. A perennial nomad, on the other hand, has no itinerary and no timetable because the journey is lifelong.

Click on this link to read the rest.

Book Review: Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet by Kate Marvel

For days I have been immersed in this fascinating new book on the environmental impact of human activities. Marvel is a climate scientist with a PhD in theoretical physics who works with computerized climate models to study climate change. At first glance this may all sound dry and distant from everyday life as we know it, but in fact the opposite is true. She has the academic credentials to give clout to her research, but she does not approach climate science from some lofty perch but rather from a visceral level. She is concerned about the impact of climate change on all of us.

She is not only insightful, but also clear in her explanations of what causes climate change – so clear, in fact, that it is impossible for me not to picture climate change deniers as those three monkeys in a row covering their eyes, ears, and mouths. You know: “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” In other words, turn a blind eye to uncomfortable truths.

And Marvel takes her explanations beyond mere fact-finding. She acknowledges the impact on humans of climate change by dividing her book into nine chapters conforming to nine possible emotional reactions to its ramifications: wonder, anger, guilt, fear, grief, surprise, pride, hope, and love. In her introduction she states: “Isn’t this unscientific? Aren’t researchers supposed to be perfectly objective, unemotional, and neutral about the world we study? I can’t be.” And: “Pretending we feel nothing about our changing world doesn’t make us objective. It makes us liars.” She goes on to explain that she wrote the book to “share some of the science behind climate change,” but also to “explain a little about how it feels to do this science in a rapidly changing world.” Her speculations about the uncertainty of a future she is sending her children into cannot help but elicit deep feelings.

Throughout her analyses of what climate change is and does, she enriches her explanations with examples from history and mythology. For instance, she says that “there is an obvious comparison between the mythical Cassandra and modern-day climate scientists like me.” Why? Because according to Greek mythology, Cassandra was a priestess who could make accurate predictions about the future, but no one believed her – just as there is no doubt that human-caused climate change is happening, but many people, especially in positions of power, scoff at the predictions of climate scientists because they do not fit into their selfish predetermined world view. As she expresses in her chapter on anger: “Yes, it’s real. Yes, it’s us. Yes, it’s bad. Yes, we’re sure.” As she goes on to say: “There has been an incredibly long history of this nonsense: scientists finding things out, others pretending we didn’t.” Fossil fuel companies know the truth, because they have done studies that corroborate it, but for fiscal reasons they deliberate obfuscate these findings. Our rampant fuel consumption produces greenhouse gases, and “all of the warming trend we’ve experienced in recent decades is due to greenhouse gases.” Anyone who follows the news encounters daily evidence of the results of global warming: catastrophic weather events, plagues, and rising sea levels, to mention some of the most obvious.

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Acknowledging that there is a problem is not the same as finding a way to put everything right again. Marvel discusses several possible solutions, but they are all complex, and at this stage it is impossible to fully assess their efficacy. Meanwhile, the Earth continues to warm; what has been set in motion cannot be wholly undone, at least not easily or quickly. It involves weaning ourselves completely off fossil fuels, but even that is only one step of many. Still, we must do what we can. After all, we cannot afford to think only of ourselves; we have to consider our children and grandchildren and generations beyond. Long after we are gone, they will continue to inhabit the world we have built for them. Maybe it will never be the same as it used to be, but we can do what we can to leave it in the best shape we can. It’s true that each of us is only one among billions, and it’s easy to use the excuse that what we do won’t make a difference, but that’s how the human race is set up: we all have to make our own decisions to do what is right or not. If we all paid more attention to books such as Human Nature, we could at least find the right path, though it may be a long and difficult one, to reclaiming our planet and its wondrous natural treasures.

Book Review: Team Dog: How to Train Your Dog – the Navy SEAL Way by Mike Ritland

If you consider Team Dog a departure from the type of books I usually review, you’d be right. After all, I don’t even own a dog. However, there is a reason for this deviation. And in the interests of all the millions of dog owners around the world, all will be made clear as we proceed.

One of my sons earned a master’s degree in mathematical engineering at Stanford University and then had an internship at a financial institution in Pennsylvania. Although he was offered an ongoing position, he decided instead to pursue his doctorate at the University of Maine. As a prelude to his doctoral studies, he decided to take a road trip around the States and promote his recently published novella. As companion on his journey, he obtained a rescue dog. But he did not choose a standard cute, cuddly, and playful puppy. Instead, he walked out of the shelter with an adolescent Belgian Malinois that had been rejected and returned by several other people. The Belgian Malinois is a large breed similar to a German shepherd that is often used as a guard dog, guide dog, military or police dog, and in search and rescue.

My son bonded early with his rescue dog, which he named Rider in honor of his shotgun role on the road trip. The dog was strong, intelligent, and energetic; however, he was also a handful that obviously needed much training. My son studied dog training in books, took Rider to in-person trainers, and took classes online. Some sources were helpful, while others were expensive wastes of time. Wanting to assist him any way I could, I searched online for specialized books that might help. That’s when I came across Team Dog and thought that it might be an essential key to training Rider. After all, my son could relate to its background. Before attending Stanford he’d spent ten years in the Navy, including four years as a SEAL. And at Stanford, he’d volunteered at a dog program for veterans.

My son was already on the road, but I ordered a copy of the book to be sent to a place I knew he’d soon be. In short, he told me he read it from cover to cover, and it was of great assistance in helping him get a handle on how to train Rider. In fact, he said it was the greatest single source on dog training he’d come across. The videos my son afterwards shared online showed a very well-behaved, though still highly energetic dog. When he and Rider came to visit me at my small one-bedroom apartment in Seattle, I was very impressed at my son’s affection for but also control of his dog.

The occasion that prompted me to read Team Dog is an upcoming trip I’m taking to visit my son and his dog now that they are settled near the University of Maine. I want to be able to get along well with Rider and even be able to dog-sit in the future if necessary.

The book is thorough in its descriptions of various aspects of dog ownership, including how to select the right type of dog for your situation, building trust, training principles, maintaining health, proper nutrition, and how to reward good behavior. However, what makes this book extraordinarily useful are the chapters on subjects such as establishing yourself as the team leader in the human/dog relationship and understanding and working with the differences between dogs and humans. These principles help you take command and achieve control, and this is essential if you want to maintain a healthy relationship with your canine companion. As Ritland explains, “One of the key methods of my training is to put yourself in your dog’s position and try to see the world through his eyes.” He brings out the point that “dogs respect and seek (with a few exceptions) someone who will exert power and control over them.” And: “Mastering your voice and your body in interacting with dogs to project confidence, power, and authority is absolutely essential…” When Ritland writes about asserting control, though, he does not promulgate an attitude of harshness. The overriding attitude to instill in your dog is not one of fear but of respect, and “the responsibility for developing that ideal relationship is on your shoulders.” That’s the main message of this book. “If you can master yourself you will then be the kind of master your dog is looking for and provide him with everything he wants and needs in his life.”

I recommend this book, then, for anyone who owns a dog or is considering acquiring one. In fact, even if you have no intention of obtaining a dog, reading this will vastly increase your empathy for dog owners and their canine friends.

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As a postscript, I would like to emphasize that after spending a week in Maine with my son and Rider, I realize even more the value of this book. Not only did its counsel and tips help me get along with and bond with Rider, but also when I suggested the book to a friend of my son’s who also has recently acquired a large rescue dog, he later expressed his appreciation for this valuable resource. Highly recommended for dog owners and also anyone else who wants to understand the human/dog relationship.

Book Review: The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson

I wouldn’t say I have a particular penchant for Civil War stories, but this book caught my attention due to its relevance to the modern era of political antagonism and uncertainty. The author researched and wrote the book during the COVID pandemic and writes in his acknowledgements notes at the end of the book that “political unrest had heightened the chaos of the pandemic, and for whatever reason I began wondering, Exactly how did the Civil War begin? What really happened at Fort Sumter?” That’s not to say that Larson considers the confusion of the last half-decade or so to be similar to the state of the Union when it was about to plunge into civil war, but rather that as he wrote this compelling book he was also witnessing our modern nation in turmoil. As a result, the prose and story structure carry an intensity and immediacy that serves as a warning: our nation’s government and people should remain together on the path of freedom and unity upon which the country was founded.

In The Demon of Unrest, Larson uses the buildup leading to the attack on Fort Sumter, a fortress on an artificial island at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, an attack that ignited the war between the northern and southern states, as the focal point of his story. In fact, South Carolina, where the city of Charleston is located, was the first state to secede from the Union. As tensions mounted, more states followed. The overwhelming issue, as Larson explains, was that of slavery. The wealthy members of the southern aristocracy were fully aware that their affluent lifestyles were dependent on their ability to enslave their fellow humans. Without the Black slaves that they depended on, they felt, they would be unable to sustain and profit from the vast cotton plantations that were the mainstay of the southern economy. And they deeply resented northern abolitionists who thought otherwise. As Larson puts it, “the thing that the South most resented was the inalterable fact that the North, like the rest of the modern world, condemned slavery as a fundamental evil. In so doing, abolitionists and their allies impugned the honor of the entire Southern white race, for if slavery was indeed evil, then the South itself was evil, and its echelons of gentlemen, the chivalry, were nothing more than moral felons.” In hindsight we can see the grievous error in this logic, as could the North and the rest of the world at the time, but the southern aristocracy were fully convinced of their righteousness and were willing to fight and die to preserve their top-heavy status quo.

Another important factor that raised the southerners’ ire was the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. Despite his initial reassurances, they were sure that he was going to join the abolitionists in abolishing slavery. At the same time that the situation at Fort Sumter became increasingly nerve-racking, Lincoln, while awaiting the formality of the final electoral count, was making the long journey from Illinois to Washington D.C. for his inauguration. As he did, rumors of assassination conspiracies abounded.

Larson masterfully cuts from the preparations of the small Union garrison at Fort Sumter to Lincoln’s journey to key players in the southern government and military, all the time leading up to the final spark that ignited the war, the actual southern attack on Fort Sumter. Once that happened, the war began in earnest.

This book is a vivid reminder that regardless of how much fiction we can conjure up, the truth of the past and present trumps it. Larson did extensive meticulous research to put together this story, including diving into old letters, journals, and diaries. As hard as some of it is to believe, it’s all true. It serves as a significant cautionary tale: no matter what our political differences are, we need to remain united and respectful of the rights and needs of all our compatriots and, for that matter, of all humankind. Highly recommended.

Journey to Maine

For the past two weeks in my newsletter The Perennial Nomad: For Those Who Wander with Intent I have been sharing insights acquired during my recent trip to Maine. These include observations on traveling with an open mind, changing time zones, airlines then and now, the indomitability of the nomadic spirit, the value of taking time to ponder alternatives, weather extremes, and Arcadia National Park.

It always gives me a unique rush to journey to a new location. I had never been to the state of Maine, so I was thrilled when one of my sons, who is studying for his doctoral degree at the University of Maine, invited me to visit.

Click on this link to read part one, and this link to read part two.

Book Review: The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna

The year 2023 saw the publication of The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow, which explains how big tech creates monopolies for their products so that consumers needing to access them have a dearth of options. This exclusivity allows tech companies to charge exorbitant prices for goods and services that should be widely available to all. Now, in 2025, comes The AI Con, which strips away the cover-ups and hype surrounding artificial intelligence, tech’s new darling and cash cow. AI is touted as the great hope of the future, a tool that will make calculations, creativity, scientific discovery, legal reasoning, and newsgathering available to all. As the authors point out, though, it is all illusion, smoke and mirrors, to enable billionaire techies to get even richer. As the authors of this fascinating book put it, “Artificial intelligence, if we’re being frank, is a con: a bill of goods you are being sold to line someone’s pockets.”

According to the authors, what they refer to as AI hype, which is the promotion of artificial intelligence as the hope of the future in virtually every commercial, social, engineering, and artistic field in existence, is merely a marketing tool. The insinuation that sophisticated algorithms can take over so many areas of endeavor is a diminution of what it means to be human. It impies that humans are merely organic machines. However, human complexity cannot be reduced to algorithms. The authors bring this out in a discussion of intelligence tests and how they are inherently racist. Despite all the claims of machine intelligence, “claims around consciousness and sentience are a tactic to sell you on AI.” Of course, AI large language model outputs are full of errors, but “for corporations and venture capitalists, the appeal of AI is not that it is sentient or technologically revolutionary, but that it promises to make the jobs of huge swaths of labor redundant and unnecessary.” Instead of hiring specialists that can turn out quality content for them, businesses can use so-called AI, despite its mistake-ridden output, and then hire gig workers at a fraction of the salaries of their former employees to fix the mistakes. The result, in comparison with human-created work, is trash, but corporations don’t care.

I have to confess that I have been forced to do this gig work myself, for terrible pay, on Amazon Mechanical Turk and other internet job platforms, because the writing work I used to do online has all but disappeared. For almost a decade I supplemented my income from short story sales and book royalties by ghostwriting online articles and blog posts on travel, business, education, literature, and all sorts of other topics. The pay wasn’t great but it was not bad. And then these markets all started to dry up as content purchasers switched over to AI-generated text. The results are easily detected for what they are: indescribably bad, not to mention vague, untrustworthy, and devoid of insight, but the purveyors and purchasers of this crap don’t seem to care. They’re after quantity, not quality; they merely want to attract consumers to their goods and services.

The situation becomes even more sinister when large language model output is used in deeply human endeavors such as social services, creative works, legal decisions, scientific research, and journalism. AI hype attempts to justify substituting the shallow extrusions of algorithmic machines for the thoughtful, finely crafted work of humans. In social services, for example, so-called AI demeans and marginalizes the elderly, the homeless, Black and Indigenous families, and others. As the authors put it: “These tools are positioned as commonsense efficiencies, but in practice they are cheap stopgaps that allow us to shirk our collective responsibility to repair the holes in the social safety net.”

In the realm of creative endeavors, large language models subvert copyright by siphoning, without permission, copyrighted works off the internet. I personally have searched comprehensive databases and found out that several of my books have been used for algorithmic training without my permission and without remuneration. Those creative works by me and others are behind pay walls, and when my books are accessed, I expect to be paid. In fact, there are numerous pending lawsuits against big tech for stealing copyrighted works without permission.

Other areas that AI has intruded into include legal practices and education. These intrusions are dumbing down these fields, and tech billionaires are well aware that AI cannot effectively replace human lawyers and teachers. The fakes are intended to be cheap stopgaps in lieu of proper funding for struggling populations. As the authors point out, the rich themselves would never resort to such measures. When they need legal assistance, they hire human lawyers, and when they need to educate their children, they send them to elite private schools with human instructors.

Journalism, too, is being inundated by tawdry AI knockoffs. The authors point out “how people and companies seeking profit by churning out suspect media are ruining journalism (and the web, more broadly) by flooding search results with AI-generated trash, by supplanting real journalism with fake authors, and by directing even more of the energy away from real journalism towards cheap SEO gimmicks to shore up declining advertising revenues for legacy publications.”

The authors point out that contrary to what tech hype would have you believe, further AI development is not inevitable. In fact, “these technologies serve as a means of centralizing power, amassing data, and generating profit, rather than providing technology that is socially beneficial.” The threat is not the doomsday scenario of AI taking over the world; it is rather “rampant financial speculation, the degradation of informational trust and environments, the normalization of data theft and exploitation, and the data harmonization systems that punish the people who have the least power in our society by tracking them through pervasive policing systems.” And that’s not all. The big tech companies have forsaken their climate pledges in favor of developing AI systems at any cost, and the cost to the environment of all the power needed to run all those data-processing machines is horrendous.

In the last chapter, the authors ask a number of pertinent questions that we all should be asking ourselves and each other about the dangers of AI. They also warn of the dangers of anthropomorphizing AI. Its algorithms are not human-like. Large language models are tools, nothing more, and should be treated as such. And regulation does not stifle innovation; instead, it “channels innovation towards what is broadly beneficial rather than just what makes the rich richer.” The authors emphasize that they are not anti-technology, but rather they want to see technology used for the good of all and not only for the good of a few mega-rich exploiters.

Although in my review I have provided numerous examples of the arguments of the authors, I have really only skimmed the surface of the riches of this book. It is a valuable, even vital read to help us all cut through the bullshit of so-called AI so that we can separate its true merit from the hype. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

I have already read and appreciated several of Murakami’s books, including the novels Kafka on the Shore and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and short story collections Men Without Women and First Person Singular. I like his pleasant yet elegant writing style and his frequent plunges into surrealism. I was excited, therefore, when I heard that his new novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, had recently been published in English.

The novel is told in three parts. In the first part, the unnamed narrator begins by recounting a teenage love affair that he has with a mysterious girl who explains that she is, in fact, only a shadow and that her real persona lives in an enigmatic city inhabited by humans and unicorns, which is surrounded by an impenetrable wall. Years after the girl disappears, the narrator manages to reach the city and enter, but to be able to do so, his shadow has to be ripped away from him, as shadows are not allowed inside. His shadow, kept in a guard-post at the city gate, weakens day by day, and before it dies the narrator decides to help it escape.

Part two takes place in the world outside the city, where the narrator has resumed his life, but it is unclear, or at least never stated, whether it is the narrator himself or his shadow telling the story in this section. Part three returns to the city within the wall. I’m not really giving much away by sharing this bare-bones outline; there is plenty left to discover as you read, including the appearance of ghosts, the vital yet cryptic task of dream-reading, the shifting nature of the city’s surrounding walls, and the inexplicable disappearance of a young boy who can recall every word in every book he has ever read.

Murakami never clarifies the relationship between the so-called “real” world in which the narrator begins his tale and the walled city he is drawn to; he leaves it up to the reader to figure out. By way of explanation, near the end of part two the narrator has a conversation with a woman he is attracted to about magic realism, using Columbian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an example. The woman says that “in his stories the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one, like that’s an ordinary, everyday thing.” She adds that “for Garcia Marquez himself it’s just ordinary realism. In the world he inhabits the real and the unreal coexist and he just describes those scenes the way he sees them.” I think that in this passage, Murakami is explaining the way he approaches his material, at least in this novel. The real and the imaginary mix and mingle so that they are difficult to differentiate.

I like Murakami’s voice. He has a gentle way of storytelling that is enchanting, and a deft method of inserting the unexpected in the midst of the mundane. He allows the story to unfold in a leisurely manner, which up to a point is acceptable. On the other hand, I feel that parts one and three are tightly written and compelling, while part two, which is by far the longest section in the book, does too much meandering. For whole chapters nothing really happens, and activities are repeated over and over. I think that if a couple hundred pages could have been edited out of the middle, the novel as a whole would have been stronger. Despite the slow pace, though, Murakami had already managed to hook me, and I hung on to find out what would happen in the end.

Would I recommend it? Sure, why not? As I said before, Murakami has an endearing style, and though sometimes I was frustrated that he didn’t just get on with the story, slow-paced Murakami is more entertaining than faster-paced most other writers.

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Book Review: The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life by Suleika Jaouad

In a literary marketplace that is surfeited with imitations and imitations of imitations, The Book of Alchemy is a startlingly original book. It concerns the value of journaling, both as a therapeutic device and as an art form. However, it is not a mere explanation of how valuable journaling is to writers; instead, it takes a practical, hands-on approach. Besides writing an introduction to the overall book and to each of the ten sections, Jaouad has assembled one hundred authors, musicians, artists, and other fascinating contributors, each of whom not only provides an essay, but also a prompt to stimulate the imaginations of fellow journalists.

As Jaouad explains, she began keeping a journal when she was diagnosed with life-threatening leukemia at the age of twenty-two and told that she had only a thirty-five percent chance of survival. There followed years of torment as she suffered through multiple rounds of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. As her hair fell out and her body became more and more emaciated, as she lost friends, her then boyfriend, and her previous dreams and ambitions, journaling was a creative outlet that helped her cling to her sanity and her hopes for the future.  She writes that “journaling through illness gave me a productive way to engage with my new reality. Rather than shutting down or surrendering to hopelessness, I could trace the contours of what I was thinking and feeling and gain a sense of agency over it.” It was a long and difficult path to healing, which she recounts in her awesome book Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. And when she was deemed cured, she made a solo road trip around the country in a camper van to visit many of the people she had corresponded with during her illness.

Jaouad began the project that became The Book of Alchemy shortly after the COVID lockdown in 2020. She says: “I launched a project that combined all of the elements that had helped me: a daily journaling practice, done communally, with a short essay for inspiration and a prompt to get started. I reached out to the most remarkable people I knew, asking them to contribute an essay and an accompanying prompt.” Besides compiling material for the book, she also started a newsletter on Substack called the Isolation Journals.

Some of the contributors to The Book of Alchemy are celebrity authors such as Elizabeth Gilbert, George Saunders, and Pico Iyer, while others are cancer survivors, professional surfers, and even convicts. All have stories to tell, and they use these stories as springboards to prompt you, the readers, to become storytellers as well.

I would have been content to read and absorb and be inspired by the book without the prompts, but the prompts provide immeasurable added value. As I read through the book, I made notes on the prompts that I thought I could use for personal inspiration, and when I had time I made a paraphrased list. (In my penurious state, I got the book out of the library so once I returned it I would not have it to refer to later. Besides, I find that having the prompts in a list works well for me. If I am ready to begin a writing session and I need an inspirational nudge, I can skim the prompts until one leaps out at me, clings to my psyche, and won’t let go. From there I can take it anywhere my mind and heart lead.)

In short, I highly recommend this book, not only for writers who need story and essay ideas, but for anyone who wants to attempt journaling for fun and therapy.

As an afterword, I should share that Jaouad confides that while preparing The Book of Alchemy, she had a relapse and had to undergo another bone marrow transplant. The point is not that journaling in some magical way takes away the pain, but it enables you to make sense of it and convert whatever you are going through into art.