March 2023 Book Report

In an effort to get myself blogging more regularly, I've decided to start posting a sort of monthly book report, which will consist of my thoughts on the list of books I read during the previous month. The idea is that I might sometimes have enough thoughts on some of the books for them to become a full-fledged book review, but we'll see. At any rate, here is my book report for March 2023.  

The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, by Corey Robin. This book was more theoretical than I had expected, and made me feel like a lightweight. I know embarrassingly little about classical political theory. However, I found Robin’s ideas about conservatism as a reactionary modern phenomenon interesting (not that this was new idea to me), and I quite enjoyed his scathing chapters on Ayn Rand, Antonin Scalia, and Donald Trump. “Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.” Hee!

A Complete Guide to Manicure & Pedicure, by Leigh Toselli. I bought a copy of this book for my grandniece Cauliflower in 2022, and then another for myself in January of this year, thinking it was time that I upgraded my own very basic manicure skills. The book seems to be a good basic primer on manicure and pedicure techniques, and I discovered I'd been doing a number of things wrong, sigh. And I concluded that while I am certain I will never venture into any sort of fake nails, I am definitely willing to make a foray into what has been for me the previously unknown French manicure territory.   

Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy. I'm not one to enjoy novels in which the characters insist on making one fatefully foolish life choice after another, but though this is one of those, and it all ends in horrific tragedy, I still found it worth reading. Hardy makes it very clear that Victorian society weighed like a ton of bricks on those who flouted its conventions regarding marriage, both inwardly (in terms of social conditioning) and outwardly (in terms of social consequences), and that Jude and the love of his life Sue were up against crushing impediments in their efforts to find happiness together. When I considered the times in my life that I've made self-destructive choices because false views I'd been schooled in growing up had me convinced that I was doing the right thing morally, I realized how facile it was of me to judge the characters from my vantage point of a 21st century perspective on marriage. I did enjoy Arabella's character, as her briskly opportunistic take on the institution of marriage was often darkly hilarious, if more than a little sociopathic.             

The Stress-Proof Brain: Master Your Emotional Response to Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity, by Melanie Greenberg. I've never been good at dealing with stress, and right now I face a legal situation that I very much need to get moving on but has me petrified like a deer in headlights, so it seemed like a good idea to read a book on this topic. I didn't learn much that was new from this one -- I've figured out the general principles of dealing with stress on my own over the years -- but reviewing them and learning more about the scientific basis for them didn't hurt.