I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking  for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

I just finished Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg. To tell the truth, I don’t have much to say about this book. I don’t normally read much poetry, so it was good to step outside of my comfort zone. I’ve read parts of Howl before, and I didn’t really get it. On this read through, I still didn’t get it, but I liked it a lot more.

It’s a very famous book with a lot of history (the court case, etc) and for people living in San Francisco I think it’s an important piece of history to be familiar with.

See the full list of books that I’ve read for this project here.

I just finished MacBeth (known in theater circles as “The Scottish Play” because it’s considered bad luck to say “MacBeth” outloud), and I have to say that the more of Shakespeare I read, the more I like him.

I don’t have a lot to say about this play that hasn’t been said more eloquently by someone much smarter than I, but I did really enjoy it. Of course, MacBeth is extensively quoted, so it was fun to read those famous lines (“out, damned spot!” and “double, double/toil and trouble” come to mind), but I also caught a quote from the BBC House of Cards that I didn’t realize was from Shakespeare.

MacBeth also really reminds me of the Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire books (Obviously, given the centuries difference in publishing dates, ASOIAF borrows from MacBeth rather than the other way around, but I still need to point this out or else people get mad at me and try to “correct” me that MacBeth came first. Duh.). Several of the characters in ASOIAF are driven by prophecy. They hear “You will be Queen” and go mad with power. George R.R. Martin also keeps his prophecies vague and makes them come true in unexpected ways, similar to the “no man of woman born” line in MacBeth.

I don’t have much more to say. It’s Shakespeare. It’s a classic. It was a fun read.

See the full list of books that I’ve read for this project here.

Last week I read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! a memoir by Richard Feynman. In case you don’t know who he is, Richard Feynman is one of the coolest people to live during the 20th century. Not only was he a Nobel-prize winning quantum physicist who helped invent the atomic bomb, he dabbled in biology, he was a professional musician (he played in an all-percussion ballet that competed in international choreography competitions, a safecracker, a professional artist (mostly sketches), and an all-around smart ass.

Dick Feynman had a great way of looking at the world: he was curious. He was always trying to figure out how things worked, and when he did, he would exploit that knowledge to mess with people just for fun. I really admire his ability to find literally any topic interesting – it’s really refreshing in a world where you see healthcare experts focusing only on healthcare because “everything else is boring,” and technology folks focusing only on technology because “that’s where the innovation is.” There are amazing things all around us and Feynman understood that it’s patently ridiculous to blind ourselves to that.

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