tiny book review.2025.n3 -- mating in captivity by Esther Perel

Esther Perel has been around for a while (this book was published in 2006), but may be having a bit of a moment presently, or I'm just catching up. She has a podcast (apparently; I haven't listened), she is a guest on many other podcasts (where I was first introduced to her) and people (in my circle, at least) just seem to be talking about her. So I decided I'd read her book. Or this book of hers. 

My review: It was good. Really good. Good enough that I'm now recommending it to all my married friends, or at least those friends with whom I have the sort of relationship that I can use the word "sex" in conversation with them. Because that's what this book is about. Sex. In marriage (or the equivalent). 

And...given that's the topic, I'm hesitant to offer too much more regarding my specific thoughts and/or insights. But let me say this: I found her ideas challenging, in the best of ways. Though, I was skeptical at first. 

She starts by explicitly challenging the status quo of the relationship between sex and intimacy in marriage (tell me how things are in the bedroom and I'll tell you how things are otherwise), and for the first couple of chapters I guess I was unconvinced--thinking her explanation of the status quo sounded just about right. However, by the third chapter I was coming around, and each chapter thereafter I found increasingly insightful, so that by the end I was questioning everything I thought I knew about long-term healthy sexual relationships. 

So, I liked that. 

Also, the topic of sex in marriage highlights what we should already know: there is just so much variance among the human population. In fact, at one point I was reminded of the marriage (non)advice that I give when called upon to give advice--that all marriage advice is useless, because everyone's arrangement is their own, and what works for one couple will not likely work for another, so you've gotta just figure it out for yourselves.

As I said, I'm recommending it...to all my married friends. 

4.5 of 5 stars. 

tiny book reviews.2025.n2 — you are here, by David Nicholls

A nice thing about branding this exercise “tiny book reviews” is that I can read a book, post its picture, write only a couple of not-very-descriptive-or-informative sentences about it, and I’ve still fulfilled the vision, thus protecting me both from the self-criticism of not doing something more impressive and the potential critique of some reader who might complain that I’m not really providing any useful information about the book.

To whit:

A friend (hi, Lansing!) gifted this book to Valerie and I. His review (shared without permission): 

“We…really liked it…. [I]t was so well written and hilarious and enjoyable to listen to together.”

So, Valerie and I read it. (Well, Valerie read it, I listened to it.) My review:

Fun. Enjoyable entertainment. And impossibly witty dialogue (does any human speak or has any human in the history of time spoke as cleverly as the characters in this book?). 

There you go. Reading this book is unlikely to change your life, but doing it will be fun!

tiny book reviews.2025.n1 — when we cease to understand the world, by Benjamin Labatut

 

I suppose the point might be overstated, but I often feel something a little other-worldly when reading a novel written by someone from a very different culture. It can be disorienting. Especially, I find, with a translation.

Anyone I’ve pestered with conversations about books has listened to me talk of Hakuki Murakami, and how in reading his novels I feel like I’m missing…things, important things, things just under the surface that are invisible to me, the outsider, because I don’t share or really have any context for understanding his cultural background (and this, from reading a Japanese author whose writing is criticized as being “too western” and “not Japanese enough”).

I’m starting here, because there was an undertone of this in reading When We Cease to Understand the World. An undertone, like I’d wonder if what I just read, and the meaning I took from what I just read, should have been taken at the level and texture that I took it. 

This feeling, this subtle confusion, I feel it more now that I’ve finished the book than when I was reading it. And that right there, the observation that I’ve finished, but that the book keeps tumbling around in the washing machine of my brain, that I revisit and revise how I think I feel about this or that part…well, I think that’s a pretty good indicator that I just read a book that was worth reading.

My BIL recommended the book, texting something to the effect, “I’ve been reading this weird book…” My texted response to him once I’d finished: “Idk how to describe it, but I thought it was a great read. I’m moved. And a little distraught.” Kafka tells us the books we need should affect us like a disaster, that they should leave us to grieve deeply, that the book should be like an “axe for the frozen sea within us.” I think this book qualifies.

So, what is this book about? 

I’m still not sure.

On the surface, it’s a series of stories of stupidly smart men in the first half of the 20th century whose genius led to discoveries and technology that have impacted humanity massively and irreversibly, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. But that’s putting too black-and-white a moral point on it; the book is certainly trying to make a moral point of some kind, but probably not one that overt.

On a deeper level, the book is about genius, specifically the genius of the most genius mathematicians and physicists of the past century, and the madness that seems to walk hand-in-hand with that genius. I mean, it’s sounds almost trite to say it like this, but the book forces the reader to ask if genius is even possible without accompanying madness. (Coincidently, I’ve been rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book that’s forces the reader to ask similar questions.) However, we’re also asked to question whether the madness is madness at all, or if what we perceive as madness is an understanding of things that is closer to “true,” an understanding that transcends what the merely ‘very intelligent’ are able to absorb. If that’s the case, then these tortured souls are doing something akin to Toto gripping the Wizard’s curtain with his teeth, pulling it back for humanity to see, but instead of the secret machinations of the smoke and light show becoming immediately obvious, we’re left scratching our heads, unsure if we see what Toto sees, unsure if the disordered tableau is real or illusory, if Toto is a genius…or just a dumb dog.

Like the feeling you get when you’re staring at troubling piece of art. It’s the struggle to understand that makes it worth it.

“…the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

5 of 5 stars.