Once again it’s time to discuss my three books of the month, featuring the book of the Soul, the book of the Mind and the book of the Heart. I think it becomes evident that my choices were safe this time, and as it happens, I could have made them better. I do not wish to spoil the next paragraph, but even the best of them was sort of okay, and even then it was mostly because the book was copying its homework from another book I had already read. It is interesting, though, that this time the choices feature a book that I did not finish but retrospectively regret ever picking up and giving the author money for. Without further ado, here come the books two… plus another one.

For my Soul book I decided to play safe and bought a book by an author I already like, namely No Mud, No Lotus by Thich Nhat Hanh. A short read compared to his books I’ve read previously, which is not a problem at all. What attracts me to Thich Nhat Hanh’s books are his philosophy and how he writes, even if the writing has gone through translation into English. Mindfulness is something I’d like to give a more serious try one of these days. Speaking of, the book goes into great lengths about the benefits of practising mindfulness, but also therein lies the problem. In my opinion No Mud, No Lotus as a book is so close to Mr. Thich’s earlier book Peace is Every Step that after reading it I was not much more educated on mindfulness than before reading the book, since it pretty much goes through the same motions. No Mud, No Lotus does include some practical exercise sets on mindfulness that Peace is Every Step lacks, but when it comes to theory, I would rather recommend the latter. All in all, still a very enjoyable read, and I already have my eyes on my next Thich Nhat Hanh book.

You probably are aware that I am a fan of the absurd. Catch-22, A Confederacy of Dunces and Naked Lunch all stand proud on my new bookshelf. Again, playing it safe, I went for a rather new book of absurdist fiction called Antkind: a Novel for my Heart book. The book is authored by Charlie Kaufman of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fame. Being John Malkovich is a movie I like and I would even classify as Kafkaesque, if I was feeling particularly pretentious. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie that exists to me, and I have no problem with it. It’s nice to see Jim Carrey try something serious for a change. It’s alright.

Antkind really evokes the spirit of the former, in my opinion. It is absurd, I’ll give it that. And thick; spanning over seven hundred pages. It’s sad for me to say, but for my Heart book Antkind really breaks it by being really tedious and somehow dated for a book that was published in 2020. Okay, it had some laugh-out-loud funny moments, but mathematically speaking seven funny pages out of seven hundred only amounts to one percent of fun and ninety-nine percent of boredom. It did tickle my absurdist bone the right way; the book is about an unlikeable film critic named B, who comes across what he thinks is the best movie ever made, called Antkind, before accidentally destroying it and having the chance to show it to the world. B then proceeds to try to reconstruct the movie from memory, which is harder than it seems since he also suffers from a case of amnesia.

There are some really funny chapters about B’s encounters with psychiatrists, and the book piqued my interest at themes when it broke the fourth wall, but then there are several really unfunny chapters about, I kid you not, an army of robots all of whom resemble former president Donald Trump, and who also behave like sexual deviants. As I mentioned the book being dated, for even for the memelordiest forum posters of the internet Donald Trump in 2020 is a pretty old hat. I guess these chapters are funny to you if you think Donald Trump is inherently funny and not the epitome of everything that is wrong with Western democracy and the patron saint of the downfall of the civilised world. If that’s the case then good for you, this is your book. I, on the other hand, am not going to recommend it.

If you thought that Antkind was the low point of these books three then guess again. Antkind was a slog to get through but I still finished it. For my Mind book I chose a book titled How to Build a Billion Dollar App by George Berkowski. I would like to praise every book I read at least a little bit, even for the smallest achievements. No Mud, No Lotus was still educational and well written, and Antkind was occasionally funny. What I have to praise about HtBaMDA (I can’t bring myself to write out the whole title) is that it validates the habit of judging a book by its cover.

I know the title sounds cheesy and like one of those million get-rich-quick-scheme books. I was ready to give it the benefit of the doubt. I thought the book was going to give me some insight into mobile app development; how does one set up and maintain the infrastructure, employ external contractors, plan out a technical roadmap for future features, things like that. What a fool I was. As you could probably guess, the book was all anecdotes about known successful mobile apps and zero technical or financial advice. The teachings of the book boiled down to: Have a million-dollar idea and build your app. Case closed. I wasn’t even in it to make a million dollars; I just wanted to build an app and learn how to do all the other things besides programming which I already know how to do. I believe I caught wind of the book’s true intentions and I left it unfinished around the midway point.

So, yeah, not a great month for books. The Soul book was pretty alright, and I guess I’m happy that I finished my Heart book. I would have been better having left my Mind book in the store, though. Thankfully the next three books I’ll talk about are better, and I did finish them all, but that’s a story for another time.