Hello. I shall begin with a disclaimer (like all great first impressions): this is not a book review.
In retrospect, I should’ve called this article no.0; I didn’t. What’s beautifully terrifying about starting something new is that itchy awareness that your early branding decisions might reveal themselves to be tantamount to Cameron’s choice of Papyrus for Avatar. Except, unlike Cameron, mine would actually be mistakes. C'est la vie.
This is a review of Book Rambles (a preview of what might amount from what’s currently a black hole) or what my About won’t be—a constant in an ocean of variabilities.
My About is evergreen, watered quite often as any farmer would, chary to the teething buds in her new plantation. This will go neglected as soon as I hit publish; buried one day, but up for digs; like finding an old photo of yourself, you’ve absolutely grown out of those adorable kicks but you’re still you.
Book Rambles is a (bi/)weekly newsletter subscription of book reviews—ish. Imagine majoring in literature with a philosophy minor, but with the cheshire cat as your humble professor.
The internet is blessed(/cursed) with a wizardry of resources… Wikipedia for synopsis, SparkNotes for analysis, Goodreads for status, Amazon for purchase, and every other slant rhyme; amongst a gazillion literary blogs that concoct the aforementioned into bewitching cauldrons of subjective objectivity. Book Rambles will go on a tangent. It will merely touch upon that delicious curve of a trembling circle (the book’s ideas) before flying off into some strange trajectory of passionate musings. It’ll be fun—for me and, hopefully, for you too.
But the tangent will land on a satellite of sorts. Each piece will latch on to some literary concept and delayer it in parallel orbit, full centrifugal against gravity. Fiction helps you vicariously experience not only conscious sensations and abstractions, but also that curious world of unconscious reveries. Hence, rambles, a stream of consciousness, an antidote to perfectionism—not as an excuse to be sloppy, but to humbly relinquish one’s ability to fully explicate unconscious experiences. Any conscious expression of the unconscious (redacted streams of consciousness) simultaneously rescinds the nature of its unconscious source (they are no longer redacted), not to mention what’s literally unknowable (a formidable blank page with infinite possibilities). Any call upon the thing-in-itself, is still not, well, the thing-in-itself. That’s why phenomenal works of art don’t try to be noumenal circles, they conjure circles in circular ideals.
Selection-wise: just classics, with a proclivity for dark satire, categorically generic with intent. All the must-reads for those who are wont to lean into relatively uncomfortable concepts/perspectives that would’ve otherwise been neglected without a peculiar sense of comedic disposition. I’ll only review books I recommend, oft the same ones I enjoy.
Book Rambles will also be a weekly attempt at making videos, but they won’t be tangents, they’ll be triangular representations that brazenly identify as circles.
But enough about shapes. If this ends up becoming a newsletter about why Cameron didn’t say no to Papyrus, we can laugh about why I skipped squares altogether.
