by Aseem Gupta | Dec 31, 2021 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Kitty Flanagan’s More Rules for Life: A Special Volume for Enthusiasts begins with a premise that should, in theory, have been impossible. Her previous book had already offered hundreds of instructions for behaving correctly, yet ordinary life kept producing new...
by Aseem Gupta | Dec 24, 2021 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Mario Puzo’s 1996 novel The Last Don returns to the world that made him famous—Mafia families, inherited loyalties, private systems of justice, and men who can move comfortably between affection and murder—but its central problem is different from the one that...
by Aseem Gupta | Dec 20, 2021 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Beowulf survives from a world more than a thousand years distant from ours, yet its central problem is immediately recognizable: what happens to a society that depends on extraordinary individuals when even its greatest protector must die? The poem begins with the...
by Aseem Gupta | Dec 15, 2021 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Aaron Clarey’s The Book of Numbers: Analyzing the ROI on the Pursuit of Women begins with a deliberately unusual premise: what would happen if a man treated his romantic life as an economist might treat an investment? Instead of assuming that dating, marriage, and...
by Aseem Gupta | Dec 10, 2021 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Pablo Neruda is so closely associated with love poetry that it is easy to encounter only a fraction of what he became. The young poet who turns a woman’s body into landscape in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is recognizably related to the later Neruda...