So I picked up Stoicism and the Art of Happiness in hopes of finding a more thorough and structured rendering of this topic. Robertson certainly delivers there. The book is structured like a text book with well-organized chapters that build on each other. Important points are highlighted and summarized throughout.

On top of being a solid general introduction, the book draws connections between Stoicism, modern psychotherapy (particularly CBT), and religion (particularly Buddhism). As someone who hasn’t studied philosophy academically, it was interesting to learn that ancient philosophy was used much more as a pragmatic approach to the “art of living” than it is today. It was the self-help and psychology of its time. Modern philosophy feels more like an academic exercise than a handbook for living the good life. Meanwhile, religion and psychotherapy have tried to fill the role of helping guide people towards happiness and fulfillment.

Robertson draws parallels between the concepts of mindfulness in Buddhism and the cardinal virtue of wisdom in Stoicism. Both encourage the act of catching emotions as they arise before they take control and paying close attention to the space between an event and our reaction. The event is not within our control, only our reaction is.

Connections are also made between the Buddhist practice of loving-kindness and the cardinal virtue of justice, specifically Stoic cosmopolitanism and Hierocles’s concentric circles. Without overtly making it his goal, Robertson presents Stoicism as a comprehensive and completely rational replacement for religion. It’s not a big part of the book, but I found that angle helped pull Stoicism into a more modern and relatable context.

While Buddhism and Stoicism seem to have developed independently, they are remarkably similar in both goals and practice. Conversely, CBT is very much directly inspired by Stoic teachings and happens to be the gold standard for modern evidence-based psychotherapy.

I enjoyed learning a lot more about Stoicism and appreciated this book’s pragmatic “handbook” style. It’s the kind of book I can see myself referring back to frequently in the future.

The reader is left to wonder at the character’s resignation and calm acceptance of their gruesome fate, until it eventually becomes clear that their situation is not so unique. The students know they’re going to die, but they don’t know exactly how or when, or what it will be like. And they’re left to figure out how to live with this knowledge. Sound familiar?

I was also intrigued by Tommy’s animals. Searching for images around this topic yields some interesting visual interpretations, like this one. The book questions the point of art if we’re all going to die. What is the point of anything, really? While it doesn’t give us the answer, it provides a lot of interesting context to weigh in on the conversation.

My Amazon exit strategy for books started with Kobo, a Canadian e‑book retailer with associated hardware and mobile app that gives Amazon some much-needed competition. I liked Kobo and read a few books on it, but the relationship soured when I tried to read on an airplane and found that Kobo would not let me read without an Internet connection. Not even Kindle does that.

It was then that I suffered through renewing my expired library card (it took me all of 15 minutes) and gave Libby a chance. The mobile app is a pleasure to use, it works offline and best of all, the books are free. Libby is definitely my first stop for books going forward.

There’s just one problem: I’m a very slow reader. Not only do I actually read slow — sounding out the words in my head as I read them — I also seldom read for more than an hour a day. For Intermezzo, I scrambled to finish the book before the end of my first renewal period. This book wasn’t in high demand, so I could have renewed a second time. But I was close, so I powered through. A silver lining of library lending periods is motivation to actually finish a book within a reasonable amount of time. However, the next book I wanted to read, actually the next 3 books, all have a wait list.

Libraries only own so many copies of each e‑book, and can only lend out the number they own at any one time. This means popular books — especially new ones — often have a wait list. This isn’t so terrible, except that books with a wait list cannot be renewed. My library lends e‑books for 2 weeks, but it usually takes me at least a month or two to finish a book. Without a wait list, I can renew a book twice for a total of 6 weeks, which should generally be doable. But if I borrow a wait-listed book, I’ll only have 2 weeks to read it unless I’m the last person on the wait-list and nobody else requests it while I’m reading.

This caused me to search for a backup I could turn to for books that are in high demand. That led me to Bookshop.org. Like Kobo, Bookshop.org sells e‑books at very reasonable prices and has a capable mobile app for reading. Unlike Kobo, the mobile app works without an Internet connection once the book is downloaded. The icing on the cake is that Bookshop.org is a Benefit Corporation, giving 80% of its profit directly to brick-and-mortar book stores.

So it’s Libby for me going forward if the book isn’t wait-listed at my library and if I think I can get through it in under 6 weeks. Otherwise it’s Bookshop.org. I just purchased Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro for $2.99. Definitely worth three bucks to not feel pressured to finish the book in 2 weeks.

So do the book industry a favor and give Amazon’s competition some love. And do us all a favor by supporting local libraries and bookstores.

The title is borrowed from a musical piece by Toshi Ichiyanagi. You can hear this work on Spotify across tracks 2–4 from Japanese Piano Music by Yukie Nagai. Worth a listen.

What I mostly look for in any novel is beautiful writing. I want to be surprised and delighted by words. I want to forget the book and be immersed in another place and time. Across six narrator styles and eras of human existence real and imagined, David Mitchel hits the mark. I enjoyed every page of this book, but perhaps none more than the first context switch — literally mid-sentence. Even knowing that’s how this book worked going into it, it still caught me off guard and I had to double check there wasn’t an error in my reader app. That’s rock and roll.

I haven’t watched the movie yet. It’s a 3 hour commitment, so we’ll see. I look forward to it, though.