Thwap's Reading Achievements for 2026

 Here's links to 2025 Books I & II.  2024's readings.  2023.  September 2021 to December 2022.

Anyway, a few days ago I finished Fresh Green Life by Sebastian Castillo.  

I knew that it was about a guy in his thirties who has been living in self-imposed isolation for a year who goes to a News Year's Eve party with friends and colleagues from his university days.  You can read the linked review if you want.  But I will just say that I enjoyed the book.  If held a few surprises for me as it went along.  I found the language of the narrator a little pompous at first.  I wasn't sure if that was intentional on the part of the writer to mock the narrator, or whether it was the writer's own voice.  Whatever it was, it faded and the rest of the time was smooth sailing.  In the end it was (for me) a hilarious send-up of the lives of academics.  [Here's a link to the narrator's favourite film.]

2026-01-18

Today I finished Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine:

Pappe argues that Israel's creation involved deliberate ethnic-cleansing:

In his latest work, renowned Israeli author and academic Pappe (A History of Modern Palestine ) does not mince words, doing Jimmy Carter one better (or worse, depending on one's point of view) by accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, beginning in the 1948 war for independence and continuing through the present. Focusing primarily on Plan D (Dalet , in Hebrew), conceived on March 10, 1948, Pappe demonstrates how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but rather a deliberate goal of combat for early Israeli military units organized by David Ben-Gurion, whom Pappe labels the “architect of ethnic cleansing. The forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948 and 1949, Pappe argues, was part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. 

It's depressing reading Pappe's conclusion, written in 2006, about the slim possibilities for peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, knowing how far from that outcome the reality in 2026 is.  

I didn't know much about the "war" between Israel and the Palestinians and other Arab states.  I had been raised to believe that the Arab states told the Palestinians to temporarily leave so as to be out of the way while they crushed the Israeli state as it was being born.  I never thought that their leaving justified not letting them return, but I learned a long time ago from Christopher Hitchens that there had never been such an order.

The reality is that the Palestinians were hardly armed.  They weren't happy with the UN partition plan but those within the borders of what was to be Israel had resigned themselves to living in "Israel" when the time came.  They weren't prepared for what the Israelis had planned for them.

Iraq, Syria and Jordan sent troops that never left the lands that had been allotted to Palestine by the UN.

Egypt sent a mostly untrained militia into Gaza with little preparation and bombed Tel Aviv and some other towns for a few days.

Jordan's King planned to take the West Bank for himself in return for allowing Israel to take the rest of all that it wanted.

And all of this ethnic cleansing had been planned long before WWII and The Holocaust.  

2026-02-21

I read a fair bit of "OSHO"'s Coming Home to Yourself: A Meditator's Guide to Blissful Living.  And I don't plan on reading more of this book.

 

Some work colleagues recommended this guy.  You can read about him in the link.  I think I'll find books where he talks about other religions and other stuff that actually exists in the world.  Some people swear by meditation and maybe there's something to it.  But OSHO and another guy I read last year say stuff like:

"Maybe it will take six months, maybe a year, but eventually clearing your mind and sitting at peace WILL have a profound effect and your life will be positively transformed."

Either that, or your subconscious makes a deal with your conscious mind (which is worried about the sunk-cost fallacy) and you'll delude yourself that turning off your brain and taking the advice of charlatans HAS led to self-improvement. 

A lot of it is just vague stuff about love and openness and oneness and bliss.  Nothing is described concretely.  The universe didn't make us to feel permanent joy.  I just don't subscribe to this stuff and I'm not going to work hard at turning off my thinking so as to make the suggestions of a cult leader more acceptable to me.

2026-03-10

Last week I finished John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. 

 

The man was a great talent.  The language is magnificent.  It almost redeems the silly story that it's based on.  I'm not the sort of reader that Milton intended the work for.  I haven't even read the Bible.  And I have only a cursory knowledge of the Greek and Roman classics.

Parts of the story that irritated me:  A)  The animals in Eden are just invented by God and named by Adam.  Darwin's Theory of Evolution was hundreds of years in the future, so I can't fault Milton for not inventing any coherent reason for the variety of animals in Eden.  It's just that it reminds one of how empty present-day "creationism" is.  B)  The numerous entreaties of God or His angels to tell humanity not to try to think too hard or question too much.  When you think of the wasted centuries when people were told to focus on their imaginary God and to avoid trying to understand the world.  C) The grotesque misogyny.  Eve doesn't need to be told that she is incapable of understanding stuff about the moon and the stars or any of the other deep concepts that Adam thinks about or discusses with God or the Angels. That the woman Eve is the source of humanity's downfall is obviously the product of a patriarchal religion of a patriarchal society.  All the evil and abuse that men have inflicted on women when inspired by this bullshit story.  D)  Milton's God sets everything up and he knows what's going to happen.  He knew that Satan would escape from Hell and manage to slip past the angels guarding the perimeter of Eden and then seduce Eve into violating the one commandment to not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  What supposedly save God from being a sadistic maniac is that human beings have Free Will.  Except that we don't.  E) Milton's hatred of other Christians he doesn't agree with.  Especially Catholic.  I could see him not liking the Dominicans.  But to think that a Franciscan monk, inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi, especially one who lived and died before the Protestant Reformation, was going to go to Hell as an infidel, ... it's too much.

 

All that having been said, as someone who believed in this stuff as a child, Milton's language manages to capture the beauty of the idea of the Garden of Eden.  There are parts when he discusses the love of Adam and Eve and it does sound beautiful.  And, the scenes with Satan and the rebel angels have a horrible grandeur.

Here's a quote from the review:

 When reading this epic poem, it’s clear why it has become a classic. There are numerous references to Greek and Roman mythology and to ancient history. I had to check the notes frequently to understand the allusions. It made me wish I knew the classics better. It also made me read slowly. Though we all know the story of the Fall, Milton speculates on many of the issues the biblical account doesn’t explicitly address. We wonder why God allows Satan to remain free to deceive people. We ponder the relationship between the spirit world and the material world. We question what motivates Satan and his forces to oppose almighty God. We are also baffled how people living in a paradise could ever be convinced that God is being cruel and unfair to them. Even though Milton speculates, he at least offers food for thought.

Good times.