THE CHAOS THEORY

“Laut Bercerita” by Leila S. Chudori

In a glimpse, the cover of this book has this pretty illustration of a scene under the sea, with the book’s title written underneath: “Laut Bercerita” (or roughly translated to “the sea is telling a story”). But this is not a book about the sea, and right at the bottom left of the illustration there’s a drawing of a chained foot.

The owner of the foot is a student named “Biru Laut” (or “Blue Sea”), and he’s the narrator of his own story in this novel. At the beginning of the story Laut is being kidnapped by unknown men, tied to something heavy, and got thrown into the bottom of the sea where he was left to die. This book is like the flashbacks of his life that appear in his dying last seconds.

So, what did he do to get himself into that position? Laut was a student activist in the 1990s Indonesia, during the time where the monetary crisis puts a political pressure towards president Suharto’s 32-years dictatorship, which was reaching a boiling point in 1998 with plenty of student protests (during the time when protesting was absolutely prohibited) that turned real ugly after the killing of students in Trisakti University by the police in the attempt to curb them. And the fictionalised novel shows how Laut and his fellow activists were at the epicentrum of the protests, until one day, at the heat of the chaos, they were kidnapped, interrogated, tortured, and eventually made “disappear”, just like what happened with the student activists in real life.

The chapters in the book go back and forth between 1998 when Laut was captured, and years before during high school, during family gathering, during first time entering university, during their activism days, etc; all of which are designed to humanise Laut and his family and friends. It is such a historically accurate novel, written in very detailed manner in the way the author build up the intellectual arguments, the organizing of the protests, even the gruesome torture that Laut later endures. It really provides a similar hauting feel like the tense days of the protests, which turned into massive riots (with systemic lootings and mass rape), with Suharto eventually forced to step down.

The novel was said to be initially inspired by the testimony by activist Nezar Patria in Tempo magazine in 2008, and further provided with the details by fellow activists Rahardjo Waluya Jati, Mugiyanto Sipin, and a woman activist Lilik HS. Moreover, the character Kasih Kinanti is inspired by another woman activist simply called Lili, while some other characters are inspired by activists who were also interviewed by the author: Budiman Sudjatmiko (who inspired the character of Arifin Bramantyo), Andi Arief, and Munir (through the records from KontraS). And it didn’t take long for the readers to notice that Sang Penyair (“the poet”) is a character inspired by the activist-poet Wiji Thukul.

The book also shows the author’s journalistic capacity by referencing some other student activism throughout world history, such as in France in May 1968, Chile in 1973, and ESDA revolution in Philippines 1986 against Ferdinand Marcos, among others.

But perhaps my favourite parts of the book are when it shows the references that are read or mentioned by the characters in the book, such as books by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Tan Malaka, Amir Hamzah, Chairil Anwar, Rendra, Djoko Lelono, NH Dini, Budi Darma, and more, including foreign authors such as Charles Dickens, Anton Chekov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, Mark Twain, Orhan Pamuk, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Isabelle Allende. In particular, I love how the activists are copying and spreading among them Pramoedya’s banned books like “Bumi Manusia”, “Anak Semua Bangsa”, and “Jejak Langkah”, which are the most apropriate books to read in these kind of circumstances.

The story ends in a somber note, however, with the inevitable death of Laut under the sea but with the family never received any confirmation of their son’s situation after disappearance (despite us, the readers, know exactly what happened). It mimicks the real-world tragedy where more than a dozen activists disappeared in 1998 and never really found even today 28 years later.

The narrative later switched to Laut’s sister, Asmara, where we flash forward to the year 2000 where she and her parents (alongside the family and friends of other missing activists) still fighting for answer and justice for their missing sons, and ended up regularly going to the front of the presidential palace every Kamis (or Thursday) to protest about it. In real-life Jakarta, this very action is dubbed “Kamisan.”

Interestingly, the book pointed out that the “Kamisan” ritual was originally inspired by Argentinian mothers who began to protest every Thursday since 1977, in Plaza de Mayo that is directly in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires. Dubbed the Ronda de los Jueves, the protests occur to demand answer for their sons and daughters who went missing, in a similar kind of activist kidnapping move by then military dictatorship.

But the difference is, in Argentina a truth commission (CONADEP) was formed immediately after the dictatorship fell in 1983, with plenty of perpetrators were tried and convicted for their crimes, despite there’s still no closure for what happened with the activists bodies.

But in Indonesia, despite the resignation of Suharto, a lot of political analysts and historians argue that the regime never really changed (only change of “clothing”), proven by the absence of truth commission investigating what happened with the activists, the attempt to re-write historical school book to erase the event of 1998, while those who claim to know what’s going on never really reveal it to the public and some of the alledged perpetrators are now even establishing themselves as very well-connected politicians.

“Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation” by Bill Nye

Who doesn’t know Bill Nye the Science Guy? He’s making science more popular with his easygoing approach on the otherwise highly complex subject. This book is no different. It is broken down into easily digestible 37 chapters, talking about all sorts of stuff related with science.

It is mainly talking about evolution vs creationism, where Nye makes the case for evolution as the undeniable reality. It is partly written around his debate against creationist Ken Ham in 2014, where in his argument he provides the evidence for evolution, such as fossil records, genetics and DNA, observed speciation, and geographic distribution. He also points out that things like human appendix or panda’s thumb suggest descent with modification instead of optimal design by a creator/designer.

Nye further disproves creationism’s arguments using evidences such as the ice cores, tree rings, radiometric dating, and starlight distances, all of which show that the Earth (and the universe) is far older than 6000 years as claimed by creationists. He also did the math on the story of global flooding (Noah’s story in the Bible), and how Noah’s Ark landed in Mount Ararat (in modern-day Turkey) with every single species in the world, but yet, for example, there’s not a single trace of kangaroo in Turkey all the way to Asia, and the animal only ever naturally exist in Australia.

Moreover, the book also covers the Big Bang, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the “Big Freeze”, weird chapters about sex, the evolution of dogs, viruses, biodiversity, mass extinction, dinosaurs, the evolution of medicine, human cloning, alien life, and many more.

It is quite an entertaining read with awkward jokes every now and then, although compared with the other science books that I’ve read so far – from Stephen Hawking, to Bill Bryson, Henry Gee, Richard Feynman, Charles C. Mann, Edward Dolnick, Nicholas Spencer, Harriet Swain, Gillian Turner, Terry Breverton, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, among others – this book is a bit pale in comparison. Even an introductory book by New Scientists that cover 132 science questions feels more in depth than this book.

It is because it replaced brevity and clarity with a warmer style of writing with more gibberish and folksy anecdotes, like how his dad is a great boy scout and his brother usually beats him in the game of cards.

Afterall Bill is not a scientist, per se. Although he studied math, physics, and chemistry for his Bachelor’s degree in engineering at Cornell (and during his time there, studied astronomy from astrophysicist Carl Sagan) he is not your typical scientist who has a PhD degree over one sprecific specialty. He doesn’t even have a master’s degree and never published any scientific paper himself. Instead, he build up his credentials by working as a mechanical engineer at Boeing, and being Bill Nye the Science Guy that teaches pop science on TV.

I guess nothing’s wrong for being a TV personality, as long as the science checks out. This is why in the science community he is regarded as an aly who brings science to the public. But it also perhaps explains why, in the absence of in-depth knowledge, the book can get repetitive at times with the same surface-level facts. And it’s funny how a 2014 book can feel so outdated, a testament to the lightning speed progress in science in the past decade.

“When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine” by Francesca Albanese

Francesca Albanese is an Italian human rights lawyer who serves as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. She was appointed to the role by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2022, the first woman to hold the position.

She graduated with a law degree from University of Pisa, before moving to London’s SOAS for her Master’s of Law focusing on human rights. Upon graduating – and before moving to Washington DC, Jakarta, and Tunis – for 10 years she worked for various UN agencies such as OHCHR (in Geneve), UNDP (Morocco), including moving to Jerusalem to work with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), living there among the Palestinians and saw first hand what’s happening on the ground.

It is through her first-hand experience there that we really get to know the people of Palestine.

The book is a mixture of gruesome facts about Israel’s occupation in Palestine (based on the official UN data), the history of Palestine and Israel, and the human stories behind it (most of whom Francesca met herself). It is told through 10 stories from 10 people who represent a wider range of human stories. The 10 different points of view are:

1. Hind Rajab: This chapter shows us what it is like to be children in Palestine, living in a constant fear of harassment, eviction from house, parents killed, imprisonment for bullshit reasons, etc. With perhaps one of the most famous cases in Hind Rajab, who was killed at the age of 6 for the crime of being a Palestinian.
2. Abu Hassan: A local Palestinian man in Jerusalem, who shows Francesca and her husband Max what the city was really about and how the apartheid system looks like at work, the consequences of the occupation, as well as the places that reveal their fatigue and oppression.
3. George: A very intelligent Palestinian engineer who studied in the US, worked for years in Silicon Valley, but after 20 years decided to return home to Jerusalem. He is one of Francesca’s (and Max’s) closest friends in the city. He introduces them to the streets on both sides of the city (the Israeli west, and the Palestinian east), among the beautiful houses of the past (that have now being seized by Israel and their owners evicted), the lovely local bookstore that became the meet up place for foreigners, and the club where until few years ago was possible for Arab-Israelis (a.k.a. Palestinians) to go dancing alongside those same Israeli boys that would later join the IDF. The chapter also cover the history of Zionism and how the apartheid system is imposed in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
4. Alon Confino: On the gross violation of the definition of antisemitism. Alon is an Italian Israeli university professor who taught history and Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and also the director of the American Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. He loves Israel but stands against everything the state of Israel is doing, and he helped Francesca to navigate the enormous attacks she has received using the corrupted label of antisemitism. This chapter is also about the other Jewish (and Israeli) scholars such as Amos Goldberg and Avi Shlaim.
5. Ingrid Jaradat Gassner: About the legal battle to defend Palestine. Ingrid is a longtime expert on Palestine, a Dutch woman who has been living in Palestine for a long time, in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank. In 1998 she, along with his husband Mohammed Jaradat, were among the founders of BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. And in 2005 she cofounded the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. This chapter also mentions other human rights activists such as Omar Barghouti, Yuval Abraham, and Awdah Hathaleen.
6. Ghassan Abu Sitta: A surgeon who is a naturalized British citizen. The chapter shows how far can the cruelty of genocide go. Ghassan went from London to Gaza in late 2023 to enter the ground zero of the most unimaginable horror in the first months of the genocide, by working directly at the hospitals (that were being bombed by IDF).
7. Eyal Weizman: An Israeli forensic architect and author (Hollow Land, a book that traces the history of the Israeli occupation in Palestine between 1967 and 2007, using architectural tools and digital technologies to reconstruct past events). He left Israel long ago because he felt that he has no right to return until he can travel with a Palestinian passport as a single and democratic state. The chapter touches on the legal technicalities of a genocide, and the complexity of the physical and material conditions that help to create the environment for genocide.
8. Malak Mattar: A young painter who left Gaza and eventually lives in London to tell the story of her people through her art. The chapter highlights the number 1 objective for Israel: to get rid of the Palestinians from the land; whether by making them uncomfortable to live in a dire condition, constantly being scared of harrassments, and/or even get killed. While a lot of them persevere and stay on their lands, Malak’s story represents the others who had enough and decided to flee.
9. Gabor Maté: A doctor and psychotherapist of Canadian nationality and Jewish Hungarian origin. He is an expert on trauma and healing, who is very vocal on the Israeli occupation. This chapter is about the collective trauma, from both sides, that create their respective biased views on what’s going on, and why, for example, Europe tend to be supporting Israel and the global south (ex colonies) are supporting Palestine.
10. Massimiliano Cali (Max): Francesca’s own husband, who has been besides her throughout everything. He is a force of his own, a senior economist with illustrious career at the World Bank. He is also a staunch pro-Palestine activist, who joined protests on the streets of Palestine getting tear-gassed. She couldn’t possibly become the face of Palestinian efffort if it’s not accompanied by the total support of her husband. And in this chapter, Francesca shows exactly how.

The key messages from this book is: based on UN charters on Genocide, what Israel is doing in Gaza is without a doubt an act of a genocide. However, this is not only an asymmetric struggle between the weak Palestine and the settler-colonialist Israel, instead there’s also the West with their interest to have a colony in the Middle East, and the corrupted Arab neighbours with their own agendas. Or as Francesca puts it, “If this story could be staged as a Greek tragedy, the main characters would be the Palestinians, the Israelis, and Western imperialism, the latter supported by a chorus representing the vassalage and oligarchic selfishness of various Arab governments.”

The media are also complicit, by their non-reporting or reporting from a biased angle that favors Israel. Even humanitarian organisations also complicit because they help to fix an effect that should have been the responsibility of Israel (as the perpetrator) to fix. Hence in a way humanitarian NGOs are aiding Israel by normalizing the war crimes as a catastrophe, as if it’s a natural disaster that the rest of us who have conscience should help.

The book also shows how the apartheid system is really implemented in Jerusalem and the West Bank. And how these places become the deliberate construction to: 1. Create unhabitable place for the Palestinians 2. Create a positive incentive for the Jewish diaspora to come to Israel. With the sole intention to force the natives to flee the land, leaving them to the Jews so that they will have a supreme Jewish-only state. This is also what is more or less happening in Gaza, although the past few years have demonstrated a more drastic measure for the ethnic cleansing.

Indeed, the stories are brutal, very painful to read, but weirdly heart warming at the same time to see the real humans of Palestine. Because it is not only the statistics anymore, but the young children playing in Francesca’s neighbourhood in Jerusalem picking mulberies, one of whom later became a journalist. It is the friendly locals who took Francesca and Max around to the off beated paths, to hang out in the local bookstore and going clubbing at the other side of town.

It is also about the refugees who came out of the hell hole, the doctor who deliberately came in into the hell hole to help as many people as possible. It is the Israeli historians and experts who stand up for the Palestinians, the many diplomats and the activists, that somehow soothes me when seeing there are still a lot of good people at the right positions that fight for humanity. Francesca has done an excellent job at humanizing all of them.

In a perfect world, there’s arguably no better person who deserved to win the Nobel Peace Prize 2025 than Francesca Albanese, for her strong voice for Palestinians in a turbulent wave of Israeli genocide and propaganda. But we’re not living in a perfect world. In fact, as we have witnessed more clearly since October 2023, we are living in a highly unequal world where a politically-connected Western aly can get away with genocide, even when it is happening and recorded in real time in front of our eyes. Thus, the apartheid system is apparently not only applied by Israel government in Palestinian territories, but also in the world where one set of rules is applicable for Israel, US and their allies; and another rule-based laws applicable for everyone else.

And instead, the actual winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2025 was a deranged opposition figure in Venezuela who pleaded Donald Trump to bomb and invade her own country, giving pseudo-credibility to Donald Trump’s illegal actions on Venezuela in January 2026. Meanwhile, since 9 July 2025 Francesca is being sanctioned by the US (executive order no. 14203) due to her work that puts light into Israel’s crimes. With this sanction, no American person or company can conduct a business with her, and it froze her access to US-based financial infrastructure. What a joke Western-controlled world we live in.

But still, through the likes of Francesca and the people that we come to know in this book, we can see that there are still good people out there. Francesca doesn’t pretend to know the one grand solution for all this mess, but she demostrates a deep understanding on the rootcauses of the problems and their complications, and can point out the very experts that can solve them one by one.

And thus, somehow, this book gives me a small hope for Palestine. Keep fighting the good fight, Frenci Kbire.

Notable quotes from the book:

1. Yet even as these stories present a picture of pain and despair, it is my hope that they will also bring an understanding that peace in Palestine and in the entire region is possible — that this land can be a home for Jews, Christians, Muslims, and anyone who calls the Holy Land home, regardless of whatever name the land goes by — through a grounding in universal justice and accountability for all. Each story offers a different, complementary lens from which to view the ongoing genocide and the global missteps that brought us to this point, and presents the raw human experiences from which we might fashion an alternative, shared future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
2. Even for the most sophisticated doublespeak experts, it is no longer possible to deny the truth about Palestine. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice has found beyond a reasonable doubt that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem since 1967 is illegal and must be abandoned totally and unconditionally. The occupation is illegal because, by its very existence, it prevents the Palestinians from enjoying the right to self-determination: the right of a people to exist and to determine itself, that is, to choose for itself, without foreign control over the territory and the lives of the people who inhabit it. Yet this simple right to exist as a people and to live in freedom is still disputed by some or dangerously confused with the two-state solution.
3. True peace can only be built on equality and freedom for all, grounded in a vision of universal justice that affords equal rights and responsibilities to all, regardless of their race or nationality.
4. Ending Jewish Israeli domination will be a rehumanizing act. No one can oppress and brutalize others without themselves experiencing a loss of humanity in the process.
5. Some illustrious scholars, such as the historian Raz Segal, had spoken of genocide immediately after October 7th, but theirs were isolated voices. Ilan Pappé, another well-known Israeli historian, also denounced Israeli practices in the Gaza Strip as an incremental genocide in 2006: a genocide that gradually increases in violence and intensity. Yet within the United Nations no one dared to utter that forbidden word about Israel. No one except myself and a few other UN speakers, especially those from countries of the Global Majority (or Global South), for many of whom the trauma of colonization and genocide that Europeans have perpetrated over the course of half a millennium from Latin America to Africa to Asia is still alive.
6. Today, it is not uncommon to come across arguments such as: “But Israel doesn’t want to destroy the Palestinians. Israel just wants to eradicate Hamas,” or: “Israel wants to free the hostages. If only Hamas would free them…” I would like to point out that, first of all, if you go so far as to bomb a bakery, if you manage to kill tens of thousands of children, to mutilate or make orphans of ten times as many, it is evident that such actions are not in line with the stated objective of freeing hostages or eliminating Hamas, however dangerously vague such a purpose may be. After all, it is enough to think about it for a moment: Who is Hamas? Those who fought for Hamas in 2006? Those who worked in the hospitals under its authority? Who are resisting the occupation? Who are opposing genocide?
7. Given the impact this book has had in Italy, I was glad to hear that a US publisher was interested in bringing it out in English. All the more as the United States remains the main obstacle to a peaceful resolution of the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory because of unconditional US support for Israel. By shielding Israel from the proper consequences for its actions in front of the international community — whether diplomatically through its veto in the Security Council or materially through billions of dollars of arms shipments to Israel that allow it to maintain the status quo of occupation, or the sanctioning of people and institutions critical of Israel, as has happened to me and many others working for justice, from the International Criminal Court to Palestinian human rights organizations — the United States has fostered a culture of impunity for Israel that has allowed it to commit the worst of crimes.
8. I am afraid of a society in which the news coverage of killing, mutilation, torture, rape, hunger, and famine depends on who is the victim and who is the perpetrator.
9. Hind’s story, as atrocious as it is, is not an unusual one in Palestine. Mohammed Tamimi was two years old when, a few months before October 7, 2023, the Israeli occupation forces — formally known as the Israel Defense Forces — shot him in the head while he was in a car with his father in the occupied West Bank. No one has been held responsible, as usual. This is childhood in Palestine.
10. At that point in the autumn, the figures for Palestinian children killed by Israel in fifteen years (from 2008 to September 2023) were brutal: more than one thousand four hundred. Each of them, a small universe erased forever. From October 7, 2023 to March 2025, these already gruesome numbers have increased tenfold.
11. “They were bombing us from all sides, they were everywhere, we were very afraid that our parents could die,” Yasmine, sixteen, told me, who at that point had already experienced five wars in Gaza. And this is the story of Samer, eleven years old: “My father was killed near a settlement by soldiers. They said he was violent…Not only did I lose the most important person in my life but they also came to take our house. First I became an orphan, then they left me homeless.” Fares, age twelve, said: “Last year the soldiers attacked my school three or four times. They launched tear gas canisters and fired live ammunition. Many of the teachers and my classmates couldn’t breathe.” This is childhood in Palestine.
12. Today’s Palestinian children, who make up almost half of Gaza’s population, have lived their entire lives under occupation, like their parents before them.
13. When I was organizing the focus groups with Palestinian boys and girls, violence at checkpoints and armed raids night and day by the Israeli army in Palestinian villages were regular events. Israeli soldiers themselves, for example, members of Breaking the Silence — an organization of former Israeli soldiers who publicly denounce the abuses of the Israeli army in the occupied territory — candidly acknowledged that they had orders to invade the villages, sometimes every night for weeks on end, if not months. Their objective was to exhaust the population and to convince them to leave, in the name of “Israeli security.”
14. In Gaza, for example, even before the genocide, the land was polluted, overpopulated, full of the remains of unexploded ordnance, the water undrinkable. Contamination was everywhere and the number of people suffering from leukemia and cancer, even among minors, was very high. Several reports by the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations have documented tragic situations where children in Gaza, as young as four or five years old, have been forced to travel alone to receive medical care in the West Bank. Their parents did not have permission to accompany them.
15. To begin with, [Abu Hassan] took us to places in Jerusalem where families were divided by the wall and children had to crawl through sewage pipes to go to school because of the obstacles put in place by Israel. He gave us the lowdown on the archaeological tours like the one we had taken the day before. Thanks to him we met a priest who had been trained as an archaeologist and who explained to us in detail how much political-ideological manipulation there was behind that kind of historical narrative. Then Abu Hassan took us to see the houses that the settlers had just taken from the Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, throwing out those who lived there (including the family of Mohammed El-Kurd), along with most of the furniture and personal property.
16. The Palestinians, in fact, are divided according to four different legal identities: those with Israeli citizenship living in Israel (also known as Israeli Arabs, a nomenclature hated by the Palestinians, who prefer “Palestinians of ‘48”); residents of East Jerusalem, who are permanent residents but without Israeli citizenship; Palestinians in the West Bank; and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
17. The last two groups generally hold identity cards, formally issued by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) but de facto controlled by Israel, which regulates their issuance, renewal, and revocation, thus determining the holders’ rights to move, which is largely confined to the respective Gaza or West Bank enclaves for these groups, as well as the right to work and to access services. Each group has different rights, especially in terms of travel, access to services, and legal status and the status of Jerusalemites differs from that of residents in Gaza, the West Bank, or Israel. According to Amnesty International, “Under Israeli law, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are not Israeli citizens or residents of the West Bank. Instead, they receive precarious permanent residency status, which allows them to reside and work in the city, to benefit from social services provided by Israel’s National Insurance Institute and National Health Insurance, and to vote in municipal elections, but not in national elections.”
18. In 1994 an Israeli American settler, Baruch Goldstein, entered that holy site in military uniform, armed with a machine gun, and exterminated twenty-nine Palestinians who were praying, wounding a hundred. At last, someone managed to stop him and he was overpowered and killed, but in addition to the carnage caused by his intrusion, this event sparked an uprising in the city: More than twenty Palestinians and four Israelis died in clashes with the Israeli army. Yet, the Israelis do not consider that a massacre, or more simply they don’t remember it. Following the events, Israel closed off Al-Shuhada Street (which means “the street of the martyrs”), the main commercial road leading to the mosque, and carved out part of the mosque to establish a synagogue.
19. Shuhada Street, once crowded and full of life, remains sealed off to this day. Palestinians can live there but not walk there. The doors of houses and shops have been walled up by the army, so many residents have built bridges to be able to pass from one house to another. You see scenes resembling the theater of the absurd: children, late for school, climbing over gates, being chased and reprimanded or beaten by soldiers.
20. In 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, overcoming Fatah, the rival party founded in the late 1950s by Yasser Arafat and other Palestinian exiles. After the election result was disavowed by the international community, violent clashes broke out between Hamas and Fatah, at the height of which, in 2007, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, which it still maintains today despite the rampant destruction, while Fatah governs the West Bank.
21. After the Palestinians were driven from their homes in 1948 by Jewish militias who later merged into the army of the newly formed State of Israel, Balata and Jenin became the largest refugee camps in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Some of the displaced people from Galilee or the coast of Haifa moved to Lebanon, but many people settled in Balata and Jenin, waiting for the day when they could return home.
22. Palestinian resistance goes back to the time of the British Mandate. The resistance against Israel began in the late 1950s, when various movements were born, such as Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which then associated or federated into the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), becoming the core of the armed resistance. All these groups were strongly rooted in the refugee camps, which is why Balata and Jenin are among the areas ritually attacked by the Israeli army.
23. People are often jailed without charges or due process, and the Israeli judicial system, which applies the civil law to settlers in the colonies in the West Bank, applies military law to the Palestinians in the same area. Not to mention the absurd and degrading conditions to which children and young people are subjected, the special forms of violence and blackmail suffered by women and the LGBTQ+ community, or the widespread use of torture in prisons.
24. For a child, being arrested on charges such as throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, army vehicles, or settlers, and then being harassed and forced to provide information about the people of his city or neighborhood, is an experience that will mark him or her forever, triggering a series of life-changing consequences.
25. After such a nightmare, how can anyone be surprised that when jailed Palestinian children return home they are traumatized, do not want to go out, are afraid, wet the bed, and exhibit disturbances or violent behavior? We are talking about twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-year-old kids, but even younger kids are arrested. There were children as young as five or six being taken away by Israeli trucks; perhaps not detained but interrogated and then sent home.
26. But even if the Oslo Accords had been respected, they were still based on a marked asymmetry of power between the parties, which would allow Israel to maintain effective control of the territory, leaving the Palestinians only fragmented autonomy devoid of real sovereignty. This has been stated by many scholars, both Palestinian and Israeli, such as Edward Said, Tanya Reinhart, and Ilan Pappé, as well as American scholars such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, or even by reports by organizations such as the Israeli B’Tselem.
27. Geographically [Jerusalem] is a city like many others. Politically, however, it is divided in two and, if you know it well, is a shattered city, starting from Road Number One, which crosses it from north to south, marking the dividing line between the predominantly Arab areas to the east and the Jewish areas to the west. Today, the road is urbanized and incorporated into the city fabric (to the east, it passes near the Damascus Gate, Sheikh Jarrah, Musrara), but it was once an important physical, political, and cultural boundary line drawn by the 1948 war, and retains a strong symbolic and historical value.
28. IN 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved the so-called Partition Plan for Palestine, which provided for the division of Palestine into two states, assigning about 55 percent of the territories to the future Jewish state (although Jews were less than 35 percent of the population and owners of only 6 percent of the land) and the remaining 45 percent to the Palestinians, who individually or collectively owned 94 percent of the land at that time. The plan was rejected by Palestinian leaders and Arab countries, who considered it unjust, and this led to a civil war, which then resulted in the 1948 conflict with the neighboring Arab countries after the proclamation of the State of Israel.
29. In the UN partition plan, Jerusalem was envisioned as a corpus separatum, a city under international administration, but this has never actually come to pass. Israel had been allocated 55 percent of historic Palestine, but instead grabbed 78 percent by 1949, leaving the “Arab state” imagined by the UN, and opposed by the Arabs themselves, only 22 percent and thus grossly violating the terms of the partition.
30. During this period, clashes between Zionist militias and Palestinian armed resistance and attacks on villages, especially Palestinian ones, led to the expulsion or forced flight of about seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians (out of the one million originally inhabiting today’s Israel). This is the so-called Nakba, the Arabic term for catastrophe, which is still commemorated as such by Palestinians across the globe. Jerusalem was then divided into two parts: the west, under Israeli control, and the east, under Jordanian control, with the Old City rising just beyond the former Green Line (the other name of Road Number One, from the color with which the armistice line with Jordan was drawn).
31. Calling the people of Palestine generically “Arabs” — as is often done in Israeli textbooks or in mainstream media around the world — contributes to denying their national identity. Referring to Palestinians simply as “Arabs” risks subscribing to the idea that there is no such thing as a Palestine and that the Palestinians are temporary guests or, indeed, an invention.
32. But after 1948 most of these houses were attacked by Zionist militias, the Palestinian inhabitants forced to flee, with the hope of being able to return soon. But no, seventy-seven years later, with the houses still there, returning is not something even to be talked about.
33. I have heard this same story many times. Palestinians who manage to return to the places of their childhood, recounted to them by way of the memories of their displaced parents or grandparents — the survivors of the Nakba — and, when they arrive, they often find nothing. Sometimes the building has been razed to the ground, other times new structures have taken its place, but what happened to George may hurt even more: coming back and seeing his family’s house still standing, trying to enter even just to be able to look at it once and being gruffly turned away by the people who live there, who may not even be the new owners but are tenants.
34. I noticed that the idea of being there in the guise of the white savior prevented many of my colleagues and friends, especially those who worked for the United Nations, from questioning themselves, and I began to see in their work and in the very fact of living on that earth a part of the problem that we had ideally come to solve.
35. The aliyah, meaning “return” and used to describe Jewish immigration to the land of Israel, became central to the Zionist movement as early as the late nineteenth century. So it is correct to say that there was a pre-Zionist Jewish community in Palestine (equal to less than 10 percent of the population at the time); it is correct to say that most of the Jews who went to Palestine before and immediately after the creation of the State of Israel, especially the survivors of the Holocaust, had few or no alternatives because so many Western countries were reluctant to accept them, and thousands found themselves without shelter, with communities destroyed and families decimated.
36. It is equally correct to mention that today many of the Israelis living in the colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, occupying the homes and land of the Palestinians, have American, Belgian, French, Australian, Canadian, Argentinean names and accents. Often neither they nor their parents were born in Israel, but they come from cities where they often remain for most of the year: Although they reside abroad, they retain ownership or control of real estate in the occupied territory, contributing to the systematic dispossession of the Palestinians.
37. Ateret Cohanim essentially manages to evict Palestinians — often with highly questionable property titles — or to convince them to sell their homes. Some agree to do so out of desperation and, after being ostracized by the community, they sell in secret before fleeing abroad. Others are simply kicked out. Even when acquisitions are legal, they are still part of an occupation because they make use of vexatious tools.
38. This also contributes to the tense atmosphere in Jerusalem. When you cross the Arab Quarter of the Old City to go to the Western Wall or the Esplanade of the Mosques and you look up to the sky, you see many Israeli flags and Jewish symbols in houses that until recently had been inhabited by Palestinians. For a Palestinian, the possibility of returning home and finding settlers inside, as has happened to so many, is a source of permanent anguish.
39. Before the year 2000 Jerusalem was the central hub toward which everyone converged. Today it has been cut off, shut in by the wall, which Israel built officially to prevent Palestinian attacks from the West Bank, but which has effectively served to seize around 12 percent of the West Bank territory and to further undermine Palestinian territorial integrity (an opinion issued in 2004 by the International Court of Justice described the Western Wall as illegitimate and directed that it be dismantled, a directive that was never implemented). So today, Palestinians in Jerusalem and in Israel can go to the West Bank, but those who live in the West Bank can only enter the city with Israeli-issued permits, which are often difficult if not impossible to obtain.
40. This closure has catastrophically affected the local Palestinian economy, because shepherds, Bedouins, and many Palestinians engaged in rural and artisanal activities traded goods in the city and Jerusalem was a nerve center for the sale, for example, of dairy products, which were distributed from there throughout the region. Now it’s all over. As Amnesty International also highlighted in its 2022 report “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians,” Palestinians live under separate jurisdictions and are subject to strict permits that separate them from each other and isolate them from their lands and families.
41. In theory, UN Watch is an organism established to monitor compliance with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations, which promotes human rights on the part of governments within the system of the United Nations. In practice, however, it is purely and simply an instrument of Israeli propaganda inside the UN, an agency as charlatan in spirit and understanding of human rights as it is zealous in defaming anyone who dares to criticize the State of Israel.
42. In truth, the definition of anti-Semitism should be self-evident: It consists of hatred, discrimination, prejudice, violence against Jews as Jews, just as Islamophobia is hatred, discrimination, prejudice, violence against Muslims as Muslims…and so on. Instead, in 2016 the IHRA proposed a special definition of anti-Semitism that was verbose, complex, and mellifluous: “Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews that can be expressed as hatred for Jews. Manifestations of real and physical anti-Semitism are directed at Jews or non-Jews and/or their property, Jewish community institutions, and buildings used for worship.” The definition, which is apparently innocuous, is accompanied by eleven practical examples largely conflating anti-Semitism with criticism of the State of Israel and its policies.
43. As Alon often told me, confusing criticism of the State of Israel with anti-Semitism is very risky both for the people of Palestine and for Jews themselves because, by reasoning in these terms, one makes an immediate association between all Jews and the State of Israel. But this is not the case. Alon was Israeli, he loved Israel deeply, and like him there are many American and European Jews who want nothing to do with the crimes of the State of Israel. Many of these Jews are anti-Zionist, some are not openly so, some not at all.
44. I had [Alon] and his close friend Amos Goldberg — a professor of Jewish history and contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and one of the few Israelis who promptly denounced the post–October 7th genocide perpetrated against the Palestinians — read the report on self-determination that I was preparing in 2022 for the United Nations, my first as a Special Rapporteur, and they both said something like: “Good luck! The problem is not how you construct the idea of the right to self-determination but that you accuse Israel of being a colonial state.” “But it is…” “Yes, we know it is, but be prepared, because they will unload on you with everything they can.”
45. At the same time, thanks to Alon and Amos, I immersed myself in a world of Jewish — mainly Israeli, British, and American — scholars with whom I have collaborated to counter what has been happening at the United Nations, where pro-Israel pressure groups, using every means at their disposal, were pressuring the secretary-general and others so that the United Nations would adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. Those pressures have had real effects (such as the recent US sanctions against the International Criminal Court and myself).
46. Twenty-five of the twenty-seven European states to date have adopted this definition in some form, which though not legally binding has become a standard used by governments, universities, and even companies. In Italy, the Council of Ministers adopted the definition of the IHRA in 2020. Lufthansa and many other airlines have made it their own as well. This means that if you wear a keffiyeh or a pin with the flag of Palestine, you may one day be considered subject to sanctions, since according to those parameters the flag or other symbols of Palestinian identity could be seen as an affront to the State of Israel or a denial of its existence.
47. Yet, in many countries, attempts are made to block these legal proceedings, precisely because they are accused of being “anti-Semitic.” Therefore, on the one hand there is certainly more knowledge and awareness but on the other hand there is also a growing repression: a symptom of the global oppression of which the Palestinians are victims. And this is happening not only at the hands of Israel but also in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe, where Palestinians are often discriminated against precisely because their very existence is thought to be a detriment or an embarrassment to the State of Israel.
48. Holding my head high in the face of such fury on that occasion earned me the respect of many sectors of civil society, including various progressive Jewish groups and many intellectuals who have since often mobilized in my support against the incessant accusations that have rained down on me. For example, Avi Shlaim, a well-known Israeli historian and professor at Oxford University, published a letter a few days after that media assault in which he wrote: “The three main pillars of Judaism are truth, justice, and peace. Albanese embodies these values to a remarkably high degree. And there will be many Jews worldwide, disturbed by Israel’s betrayal of these core Jewish values.” In those difficult days, his words had a political and personal meaning that I will never forget. The whole affair only strengthened the collaboration and mutual esteem between Alon and me.
49. I spoke of self-determination as the right to exist as a people, a right that cannot be negotiated — as I wrote in my report, “violations of international law should not be subject to negotiation, since this would legitimize what is illegal” — stressing that for too long the Palestinian issue has been reduced to a humanitarian crisis, instead of being dealt with as a political issue to be resolved in accordance with international law. To confine ourselves to giving aid without addressing the structural causes of the crisis is to perpetuate injustice by normalizing it, rather than doing everything possible to eradicate it. Furthermore, I challenged the narrative that presents the situation in Palestine as a “conflict,” when in fact it is a structural condition of domination and oppression, which falls within the paradigm of settler colonialism.
50. The Israeli occupation is not temporary but is part of a broader project that combines settler colonialism, apartheid, and military occupation. It is not possible to talk about development or “economic peace” without first ending domination, and that continuing to inject money and humanitarian aid is comparable to trying to mop the floor without fixing the leak, and on this the international community has failed, by adopting inadequate paradigms that do not address the roots of the problem. The basis of everything is the Palestinian people’s fundamental right to self-determination, a collective right that has been violated continuously for decades.
51. [Alon’s] words were poignant. Since that conversation, I have always carried with me the thought that the State of Israel gave protection, legitimacy, visibility to the Jewish people and to European Jews during a historical phase in which a very strong and widespread anti-Semitism was still alive, making them, as a collective, feel they had a safe place for the first time in history.
52. Since 2006, it had been impossible for Palestinians to leave Gaza and almost nothing had entered without Israel’s consent, and this meant that no treatment was available for otherwise treatable diseases like diabetes. There have been children requiring special treatment that is unavailable in Gaza, who died within the walls of their homes because they did not have the necessary permission to go outside Gaza to be examined by a specialist or to receive the necessary medicines.
53. [Alon] and Amos, along with other scholars of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, had signed an article in The New York Review of Books in November 2023 in which they criticized the instrumental use of historical memory to justify the aggression in Gaza. They denounced efforts to equate Hamas to the “new Nazis,” to attribute to the Palestinians a collective responsibility, and discredit those who defended their rights. They stressed the importance of distinguishing between Hamas and the Palestinian population as a whole, and warned that “the confusion between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel” not only undermines the fight against real anti-Semitism but also legitimizes the repression of dissent and the erasure of the Palestinian cause from public debate.
54. Until a few years ago, the main — if not the only — legal framework of reference for many, in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, was that of IHL, that is, the laws of war and military occupation, according to which military occupation is accepted only if temporary, if it is linked to specific military needs, and if it takes place in full respect of the rights of the civilian population.
55. Israel, instead, has occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem since 1967 without time limits or valid justification. The United Nations itself had called for its withdrawal, with a resolution approved a few months after the beginning of the occupation (Security Council Resolution 242), recalling that it is never legitimate to acquire territories by force. Yet Israel not only has ignored that resolution but has extended its presence in the occupied territory, including the Syrian Golan Heights and recently swaths of southern Syria and Lebanon, none of which my UN mandate covers, replacing the local authorities with Israeli military personnel, imposing military law, expropriating land, demolishing homes, and building more than three hundred colonies, where about eight hundred thousand Israeli settlers live today. All this, even though such actions are recognized as illegal by international law.
56. Two of the fundamental principles of the Charter of the United Nations are respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples [article 1(2)] and the prohibition of the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state [Article 2(4)]. Accordingly, the International Court of Justice has repeatedly reiterated that an occupying power must guarantee the fundamental rights of the occupied population and cannot impede the realization of the right to self-determination. In Palestine, however, fundamental rights are not guaranteed, and the Palestinians are denied their right to self-determination.
57. To cover up its violations of international law, Israel has used terms such as “disputed” instead of “occupied” territory, of a “hostile” instead of an “occupied” population.
58. To make them collapse, oppressive regimes must be struck at their heart, that is, in their pockets, which is where they receive the proceeds of exploitation. This is the philosophy underpinning BDS, which in fact undertakes to publicly expose international complicity – not only political but also economic – with the apartheid regime imposed by the State of Israel on the Palestinians.
59. It is not up to you to choose who governs in Palestine. You just have to give a useful contribution to ending the occupation, so that there will be something left of Palestine. That is what international law requires.
60. Israel is an integral part of the Western imperialist project in that area: a colony linked to the West, like all the colonies of past centuries.
61. Ghassan: When I left Gaza and arrived in the United Kingdom, I realized that the genocide project was like an iceberg. Israel is only the visible tip, but the rest of the iceberg – which is not so clearly visible from Gaza – is the entire apparatus that makes genocide possible: the BBC, CNN, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the organizations that support it.
62. More than a thousand health workers have been killed between October 7, 2023, and January 2025, while over two hundred and fifty have been imprisoned.
63. In Hollow Land [book], it is evident that Israel has used architecture and geography as tools of power to consolidate its control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Urban space and the landscape have been modified to favor Israel’s military and political domination. Israeli colonies in the West Bank were strategically designed so that colonization would create territorial fragmentation. The management of infrastructure and mobility, through a system of roads, checkpoints, and separation walls, have been increasingly restricting the freedom of movement of Palestinians in every respect for decades. At the same time, the transportation infrastructure continues to guarantee safe and rapid access to Israeli settlers, under the vigilant and “neutral” eyes of the international community.
64. A concept that was crucial for me in reading Hollow Land is “vertical politics”: a fully three-dimensional use of space, which demonstrates unequivocally how the Israeli occupation is not limited only to horizontal borders but also addresses the control of airspace, the subsoil – for ex-ample, through tunnels and aqueducts — and the height of buildings. Thanks to his studies, his many inter-ests, and what I would later discover to be a polyhedric personality, Eyal recounts many things, but the gist of the book is how Israel has managed to box in the Palestinians politically by putting in place a geographical chaos “structured” to the Palestinians’ disadvantage.
65. One of the most brilliant ideas in [Eyal’s] book is the invitation to open our eyes to the risk of the “humanitarian paradox”: that humanitarian interventions may unwittingly end up supporting the military occupation rather than opposing it. Eyal believes that by correcting the consequences of certain decisions taken by the occupying force, these interventions could help rid Israel of its responsibilities, including legal responsibilities, allowing it to divert resources to other objectives, while making the occupation more tolerable in the eyes of public opinion.
66. Settler colonialism, Eyal explained, is a process that operates through a dual dynamic: construction and destruction. On the one hand, outposts, infrastructure, colonies are built; on the other hand, the conditions that make life possible for the colonized population are systematically destroyed.
67. “The Gaza Strip,” Eyal said, “is nothing more than the result of an engineering effort aimed at destroying the living conditions within it. It is a long experiment in which living conditions are degraded to the point of forcing the population to leave.”
68. During an event in which we were debating the situation in Palestine, I heard him say in no uncertain terms, but in a voice as quiet as a caress: “You have to be really ignorant not to know, not to understand, not to see colonialism in Palestine, or to deny that the Palestinians are the oppressed and the Israelis the oppressors.” There is something wrong, Gabor also believes, in those who fail to see how Judaism, his religion, is being exploited in the name of an ethno-nationalism that is based on the premise of a discriminatory ideology.
69. Trauma, according to Gabor, “changes one’s perception of the world.” When whole groups internalize a view of life influenced by their trauma, by their fear, this feeds a continuous sense of threat and mistrust in their collective view of the outside world. It is not difficult to imagine the importance of such dynamics for populations that have experienced oppression, wars, persecution, exile, and extermin-ation. That is the eternal point of contact between Jews and Palestinians.
70. In the prevailing debate in the West, it seems that one cannot talk about the violence that the Palestinians experience every day without first having to consider Israel and its right to defense, even when this right is claimed by the occupier on the very little land that the Palestinians have left, and therefore illegitimately.
71. Of course, like any member country of the United Nations, Israel can invoke the right to self-defense enshrined in Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, when the conditions are met: that is, when it is attacked by another state or when there is the authorization of the UN Security Council. Israel’s use of force in Gaza and the rest of occupied Palestine is illegitimate. As the Court of Justice reminds us, Israel cannot attack militarily the population it occupies.
72. Moreover, it seems that one cannot talk about the current situation in Palestine without starting from the horror of October 7, 2023, almost as though decades of unspeakable violence committed by Israel against Palestinians before that date — as well as the pain suffered by Israeli civilians on other occasions, such as the wave of suicide attacks during the second intifada — count for nothing any longer. This selective reading of history leaves entire generations in a state of continuous trauma. Their trauma is renewed every day, the value of their suffering is denied, and the intensification of the violence itself persists.
73. The almost total lack of understanding for the rights of the Palestinians often makes them invisible, in life and in death, forced into an inevitable subordination to the logic and claims of Israel, a state that, day after day, swallows up more and more of the land of another people. Meanwhile, Israel unfailingly manages to make other people discuss its sacrosanct right to exist. It, and it alone. Wherever it wants, as it wishes, by any means it deems appropriate.
74. Sometimes it seems to me that it is difficult for many people in Western countries to understand settler colonialism and what it entails. Most of the textbooks Western children study in school, for example, speak in neutral – if not heroic – terms of the acts of violent colonialism on which the Greek and Roman civilizations were founded, wiping out entire peoples and erasing the memory of their cultures, of their native languages, of all their knowledge. These cultural eliminations are taken for granted, not considered worthy of attention. The same is true of the most recent colonialism, the one that began with the three caravels led by the Genoese captain Christopher Columbus: an event, often romanticized as the “discovery of America,” which instead marked the beginning of an era of colonization and exploitation that led to the death of tens of millions of Indigenous peoples throughout the American continent.
75. No one is free until everyone is free. All of them. All those who have been made invisible on this Earth; all the peoples whose memory, traditions, and culture have been reduced to folklore; all those who still have the realization of freedom from oppression and need only as a horizon and not as a present.
76. Forty years from now, someone may be in a place once known as Palestine, but in a university lecture hall named after Donald Trump, offering tribute “to the Palestinians, the ancient inhabitants of this land,” when all that remains of Palestine will be ruins.
77. It is when the world sleeps that monsters are generated.

“Hear the Wind Sing” by Haruki Murakami

It is the summer break, and our 21 year-old unnamed narrator is coming home from a university in Tokyo to his coastal hometown.

The story begins on 8 August 1970 and it takes place over 18 days, where the narrator spends most of his days drinking beer, listening to the Beach Boys, and eating French fries at J’s Bar with his cynical friend (simply referred to as “the Rat”), where they talk about random observations and some recollections of their nostalgia.

It is indeed a whole lot of nothingness. It mimics a blurry summer vacation, where we hang out with friends all the time with no real purpose, change hangout places few times, but still talking gibberish, before going back to our separate lives.

But context is key here. The novel is set in 1970, immediately after the massive and violent collapse of the Japanese student protest movements, where a whole generation of idealistic young people went from believing they could change the world to feeling utterly powerless. Hence, the “nothingness” in the conversations that took place because talking about real and important issues still hurt.

The detached numbness can also be shown in the way the narrator casually mentions about his dead uncles who died at war; his 3 ex-girlfriends, one of whom committed suicide; and his summer fling with a troubled and mysterious girl that is missing a pinky finger, whom he meets after finding her passed out drunk on the bar’s bathroom floor.

The novel is a departure at the time from the common Japanese writing theme with a long tradition of highly serious and emotionally suffocating melodrama, or deeply personal autobiographical fiction filled with dark, self-pitying confessions of real-life misery. This novel, by contrast, is narrated by an unnamed person who tells you exactly what he’s doing and eating, but remains completely mysterious and emotionally detached.

It is fragmentedly structured, with no real tight plot, written in easy-to-digest short chapters amounted to 40 chapters within 152 pages. It is such a breath of fresh air that broke the rigid structure of post-war Japanese literature, which is exactly why this novel – Haruki Murakami’s first novel – became the winner of Japan’s Gunzo Prize for new writers in 1979 and launched Murakami’s career as a novelist.

But perhaps what makes this novel a compelling one is the hidden meaning of things, with the deep philosophical layers out of the seemingly bland conversations. It raises the issue of silent grief, existential crisis, and the cultural trauma of 1970s Japan. After all, sometimes spending a whole summer doing nothing can turn out to be the healing that we needed all along.

Few years has passed since that summer break. The narrator is now 29 years old, he got married and now lives permanently in Tokyo. Back home, the Rat now becomes a writer, while J’s Bar turned into a chick cafe. And the troubled girl with the missing finger? He did try to look for her when he came back during the winter, but she quit her job from the record store, vacated her apartment, and just vanished.

“All things pass”, the narrator remarks, “None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.”

“The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in “Healthy” Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain” by Steven R. Gundry

When it comes to health knowledge there’s arguably nothing worse than a pseudoscience that makes false claims. This book, as I discovered, is arguably one of them.

And it was quite a shocker because Dr. Steven Gundry is a medical doctor with a Yale degree, although in hindsight he’s a cardiothoracic (heart and lung) surgeon and not a nutritionist, gastroenterologist, or immunologist. And to make it worse, his findings in this book is not a peer-reviewed study done in a medical journal, but more like a presentation done in a medical conference by a doctor who is not an expert in the particular subject.

But let’s dig in to what he has to say.

The premise of his entire thesis is this: Proteins found in many plant-based foods (a.k.a., lectins) are the hidden cause of autoimmune diseases and even obesity.

Dr. Gundry arrived at this conclusion by pointing out that plants evolved to create lectins to be a natural toxin, to fight against predators that are trying to eat their seeds and leaves. And thus, when consumed, this toxic lectins binds carbohydrates in the gut, which can cause leaky gut and can trigger chronic inflammation and weight gain.

To be perfectly clear, lectins do exist and food such as raw kidney beans can indeed be toxic if consumed raw. But this is an incomplete fact, which is then used to draw exaggerated and unscientific conclusions (more on this below), and to promote a lectin-free diet.

And the list of foods to avoid is quite something: rice, wheat, potatoes, corn, beans, tomatoes, soy, eggplants, bell peppers, and certain dairy products. And here’s the list of food that is safe or even encouraged to consume: Leafy greens, sweet potatoes, avocadoes, cruciferous vegetables, olive oil, wild-caught fish, and pasture-raised meats. For dairy, sheep or goat milk is preferred.

And all of this are ideally prepared using pressure cookers, fermenting, and peeling foods to break down and reduce lectin content.

Make sense?

Plenty of nutritionists and medical professionals dispute the premise of this book, with some point out that lectin-containing foods (such as whole grains and beans) are staples in many of the “blue zones” in the world, which are strongly correlated with longevity and disease prevention.

And here’s why: Us human rarely eat high-lectin food raw, and instead our traditional method of cooking, boiling, sprouting, and fermenting actually dismantle almost all lectins in these banned (AND recommended) food list above. In other words, in truth it doesn’t really matter whether a food contains lectin or not, the important part is how you cook it.

Including our previous example raw kidney beans, where if we cooked it properly (specifically boiled) it neutralized the lectin and make it safe to eat. But even uncooked food such as fresh salad is not harmful, due to very low levels of lectin.

Furthermore, independent fact-checkers found that plenty of the book’s scientific references does not support the claims made by Dr. Gundry. For example, he cited a paper documenting how, under a microscope, lectins stain kidney tissue; and this was wrongly highlighted by him as proof that lectins cause kidney inflammation.

Experts are also providing a counter-argument: From their randomized controlled trials, mainstream medical organizations consistently found that consuming whole grains and nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplant) actually reduces systemic inflammation and lowers the risk of chronic illness; the exact opposite of the claim in this book.

But perhaps the most damaging of it all is, the fact that Dr. Gundry heavily promotes and sells an expensive “Lectin Shield” supplement line, to help us protect ourselves from the very dangers described in this book. Ho boy. Yup, I’m afraid it all comes down to this, promoting the product that he’s selling.

To be fair, of course in some cases new breakthroughs in science are met by skepticism by the industry players, and not so long ago things like functional medicine and biohacking were also looked down as nothing but pseudoscience, before proven to be a fresh new approach on health.

And there are indeed a lot of backlashes for this book, where independent evaluations by nutritional scientist rate the book exceptionally low for scientific accuracy, and Registered dietitians (such as Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health) have also written rebuttals that argued that his diet plan unnecessarily restrict nutrient-dense foods that are good for us, with the restriction come without solid evidence of the benefit.

So, the key question is: Is Dr. Gundry providing a new angle on health, or a borderline fraud?

Afterall the content of the book is very believable, and he claims that plenty of his patients who had used his diet to reverse coronary artery disease, hypertension, or diabetes have successfully done so. Even their arthritis quickly began to subside and their heartburn disappeared, their mood improved, and it also fixed fairly chronic bowel issues, and shed excess pounds along with food cravings.

But still, he also said, for example, that it is only safe to eat banana, mango, and papaya when they are still green. Which is true to some extend, because they contain less sugar and more resistance starch than a ripe one. But Dr. Gundry exaggerated this fact by saying that fructose is largely dangerous, and even claimed that it feeds cancer cells and damage kidneys. He also argued that ripe fruit’s lectins cause inflammation and signal our body to store fat.

This is something that mainstream nutrition science disagrees, where fructose in whole fruit – when eaten in normal amounts – isn’t considered dangerous, while the level of lectins in these ripe fruits are also small and won’t cause diseases even if eaten raw.

This, in the end, is why the book eventually falls into the pseudoscience category. Because Dr. Gundry is good at describing the factual mechanisms of the biology, but he then jumps into an exaggerated and unscientific conclusion that is so off the mark that it becomes misleading.

“How Google Works” by Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg, with Alan Eagle

This book is like an insider’s account of Google, written by Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Product Jonathan Rosenberg. It is an insight into Google’s corporate culture, strategy, and management style; or in short, how Google works.

The insights dwell around the notion that in order to survive today, businesses can no longer rely on traditional model of corporation with top-down management style. And instead they must design the company around a new philosophy, which, of course, imbedded in Google’s corporate culture.

The new philosophy is broken down in this book into 6 main categories:

1. Culture: The way they structure the office is the ultimate strategy. Google strives to keep offices “open” and crowded to encourage interaction, instead of separated by individual cubicles. Meanwhile, the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion” (aka high corporate rank) should not be granted extra weight, and instead decisions are made based on data and merit.
2. Strategy: Betting on insights and not plans. Create superior products based on breakthroughs, and optimize for growth and not instant revenue.
3. Talent: Hiring is the most important activity. Hire more people based on learning ability and not expertise, hire more diverse people with many different views of the world, while managers don’t unilaterally hire people and instead potential peers evaluate the candidates. The book also emphasize on the importance of having many small teams.
4. Decision-making by consensus. Decisions by consensus doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree, but everyone’s voice must be heard. This also means healthy debates is required, but once it is decided everyone must support and work together to execute it. Also, decisions should be made in a quick manner, using the data available. The lesson on how to organize efficient meetings, in particular, is insightful.
5. Communication. The rule in Google is all information should be shared with everyone, unless, of course, those with strict legal or regulatory reason to keep it confidential. Google also encourage people for repetitive communication to ensure everyone stays aware and aligned with the messages. Also important is knowing the details and healthy communication (that involves passionate arguments but unite afterwards).
6. Innovations: the 70/20.10 Rule. Innovation cannot be forced by the higher management, but can be systematically budgeted. As at the publication date of this book in 2014: 70% of budget is allocated to core business (search engine and ads), 20% to emerging successes (Gmail and Google Drive), and 10% to speculative bets (such as self-driving cars).

The book is filled with a lot of real-life examples from internal cases, on these 6 philosophies; all of which underline the ultimate takeaway that the job of a modern leader is not to micromanage, but to clear the obstacles out of the way in order for the “Smart Creatives” to have the freedom, the resources, and the psychological safety net to innovate.

The downside of this book is that it has this corporate ass-kissing vibe to it, which feels cringy. It also noticeably brushes off some of the controversies that the company have had – such as problems in user privacy, data tracking, antitrust issues, tax dodging, etc – making the book squeaky clean like a corporate PR production and lacking the real big picture of Google (with all the good, bad, and ugly).

But nevertheless, if you can endure and overlook the self-congratulating corporate asskissery, you’ll get a pretty decent [but one-sided] book describing the core determinants that make Google the tech giant that they are today, with the company’s models have now been replicated in a lot of corporations around the world.

“Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade” by Kurt Vonnegut

Meet Billy Pilgrim. He is a WW2 war veteran who becomes “unstuck in time”, where he often compulsively relive random episodes from his traumatizing past.

The narrative of the story follows a nonlinear pattern that jumps back and forth between 3 of his major timelines:

1. His time as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany (1944-1945), where he is locked with other prisoners in an underground meat locker called “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
2. His postwar, seemingly normal, life in a suburban New York, where he marries a wealthy woman, has children, and become an optometrist.
3. Alien abduction (1967) where he was abducted on the night of his daughter’s wedding, and was placed in a glass zoo by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore.

The randomness in the flashbacks and flashforwards are intended to show Billy’s severe PTSD, and shows the readers how it feels to live with it, which resonates with Kurt Vonnegut’s own real-life trauma from witnessing the 1945 Dresden bombing.

And by focusing on the PTSD of the war veteran rather than glorifying the heroics, Vonnegut is sending an anti-war message through this novel. In fact, as hinted in the subtitle of the book “The Children’s Crusade” he also points out that wars are mostly fought by frightened and inexperienced kids, not rugged heroes.

Equally interesting is the Tralfamadorian view, where they believe that all moments from past, present, and future coexist simultaneously. Hence, the phrase “so it goes” that is used repeatedly in this book, which shows an attitude of accepting deaths without being affected by it, because time is an illusion and death is never truly final. This numbness approach to life is also fully adopted by Billy Pilgrim, where he does not try to change anything or escape his fate and instead passively accepts whatever is happening in his life.

If you’re thinking that the Tralfamadorian view looks like more of a coping mechanism for his severe PTSD, it does look that way. Despite Vonnegut intentionally left it ambiguous, the alien race, the abduction, and the sanctuary planet indeed look more like a mental escape invented by Billy.

Especially when Billy doesn’t start to tell about his alien abduction until a year later in 1968, just after surviving a horrific plane crash that killed everyone else except him, and after his wife died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. The massive physical and emotional traumas are likely to worsen the war PTSD and trigger the alien sanctuary, which become the only thing that kept him from completely breaking down.

It can be an eerie novel that is uncomfortable to read at times. But after struggling for over 20 years on how to write it, Vonnegut resorted with plain prose, short sentences, and a dark sense of humor to counter-weight all the horrors. Which left us with a strange lingering after-taste, and a deep empathy towards the fragile, broken, and defenseless Billy.

This is exactly the intention of the book, and this is why it becomes one of the most celebrated anti-war novels of the 20th century.

“Novelist As a Vocation” by Haruki Murakami

This is a comprehensive book that shows how Haruki Murakami thinks and sees the world. It is a semi-autobiographical account that has this nice personal touch, with no hint of arrogance or ego whatsoever, where Murakami looks back into his glittering career as a novelist and provides an honest review.

It touches many topics, such as his serendipitous path to become a writer, his take on literally prizes, on inspirations and originality, his writing process, on education, on creating characters, who he is writing for, and more. It is a brutally honest account, which also shows the failures and doubts along the way, that makes him look human and realistically inspiring.

Murakami also lays out all the tools and methods that he often use to make his craft, revealing the way he receives and processes information, before writing it down into a novel. But perhaps more importantly, he shows us how he sees the world, observations that have given him all the fuel for his writings.

Oh there are so many lessons that can be learned from this book, as if Murakami poured in everything he has learnt from his decades of experience and observation.

Here are some of the most impactful quotes from the book:

1. The thing that makes novels different is that practically anybody can write one if they put their mind to it.
2. In my considered opinion, anyone with a quick mind or an inordinately rich store of knowledge is unlikely to become a novelist. That is because the writing of a novel, or the telling of a story, is an activity that takes place at a slow pace—in low gear, so to speak.
3. We spend our time behind closed doors doing the most intricate type of operations, day after day after day. The process is virtually endless. If you aren’t built for that sort of work and can’t shrug off all that it entails, there’s no way you’ll keep it up over the long haul.
4. A novelist, however, sees the idea of “a leisurely life” as practically synonymous with “the waning of one’s creativity.” For novelists are like certain types of fish. If they don’t keep swimming forward, they die.
5. A tenacious, persevering temperament that equips them to work long and lonely hours. It is my belief that these are the qualifications required of a professional novelist.
6. our futures, it seems, don’t always unfold in the ways that we expect.
7. Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles.
8. There is no basic change today—I feel the same pleasure and excitement I felt when I wrote my first novel. I wake up early, brew fresh coffee in the kitchen, pour some in a big mug, sit down at my desk, and boot up my computer (there are times, I must admit, when I miss the days of manuscript sheets and my fat Montblanc fountain pen). Then I sit there and muse about what to write that day. Such moments are pure bliss. To tell the truth, I have never found writing painful. Neither (thankfully) have I ever found myself unable to write. What’s the point of writing, anyway, if you’re not enjoying it? I can’t get my head around the idea of “the suffering writer.” Basically, I think, novels should emerge in a spontaneous flow.
9. Give me time, I thought, and I can turn out something much better. This may sound arrogant for someone who not long before had never given a thought to writing a novel. It even sounds arrogant to me. In all honesty, though, anyone who lacks that level of arrogance is unlikely to become a novelist.
10. I have a standard answer when interviewers ask me about literary prizes—this question invariably comes up, whether in Japan or abroad. “The most important thing,” I tell them, “is good readers. Nothing means as much as the people who dip into their pockets to buy my books—not prizes, or medals, or critical praise.” I repeat this answer over and over ad nauseam, yet it doesn’t seem to sink in. Most often it’s completely ignored.
11. I have never served on a selection jury for any literary prize. I have been asked, but have always politely refused. That is because I feel I am not qualified for the task. The reason is a simple one—I am just too much of an individualist. I am a person with a fixed vision and a fixed process for giving that vision shape. Unavoidably, sustaining that process entails an all-encompassing lifestyle. Without that, I cannot write.
12. If a fifteen-year-old boy were to hear the same music for the first time today, he might find it amazing, but it is doubtful it would strike him as “unprecedented” in the same dramatic way.
13. The same patterns characterize the realms of art and literature. Art lovers were shocked, on occasion even repulsed, when they first beheld the paintings of Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso. I doubt many still feel that way. To the contrary, their art is now found to be deeply moving, invigorating, even psychically healing. That’s not because it has lost its originality with time; rather, that originality has become one with our perception, so that, naturally, it has become a part of us, a reference point, as it were. Similarly, the literary styles of Natsume Sōseki and Ernest Hemingway are now celebrated. Yet both were criticized, at times even ridiculed, by their contemporaries.
14. It is my impression, in fact, that if Sōseki and Hemingway had never developed those styles, the literature that we read today in the West and in Japan would be somewhat different. Taking it a step further, I think it’s arguable that their styles have become part of the mental landscapes of Japanese and English readers.
15. In my opinion, an artist must fulfill the following three basic requirements to be deemed “original”: 1. The artist must possess a clearly unique and individual style (of sound, language, or color). Moreover, that uniqueness should be immediately perceivable on first sight (or hearing). 2. That style must have the power to update itself. It should grow with time, never resting in the same place for long, since it expresses an internal and spontaneous process of self-reinvention. 3. Over time, that characteristic style should become integrated within the psyche of its audience, to become a part of their basic standard of evaluation. Subsequent generations of artists should see that style as a rich resource from which they can draw.
16. Before we can say much about an artist’s style, we need to see an accumulated body of work. Otherwise there just isn’t enough to go on. We can’t really assess someone’s originality until we can line up a number of their works and examine them from a variety of angles.
17. The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert had this to say: “To reach the source, you have to swim against the current. Only trash swims downstream.” Lines like these can really buck up your spirits!
18. As someone who had lived through the student protests of the late 1960s, the years of rebellion, it went against my instincts to “sell out” to those in power. Most of all, however, as a writer I wanted to remain spiritually free, beholden to no one. To write my novels the way I wanted, according to the schedule I myself had laid out. This was my bottom line, my assertion of authorial independence.
19. From the outset, I had a pretty clear idea of the novels I wanted to create. I could even picture what they should look like, once I had developed my skills to the point where I could write them. The novels floated directly above me, shining in the sky like the North Star. If I felt lost, all I had to do was look up. They would give me my location, and point me in the right direction. Had they not been there, I might well have ended up wandering all over the place.
20. Speaking from experience, it seems that I discovered my “original” voice and style, at the outset, not adding to what I already knew but subtracting from it. Think how many—far too many—things we pick up in the course of living. Whether we choose to call it information overload or excess baggage, we have that multitude of options to choose from, so that when we try to express ourselves creatively, all those choices collide with each other and we shut down, like a stalled engine. We become paralyzed. Our best recourse is to clear out our information system by chucking all that is unnecessary into the garbage bin, allowing our mind to move freely again.
21. One rule of thumb is to ask yourself, “Am I having a good time doing this?” If you’re not enjoying yourself when you’re engaged in what seems important to you, if you can’t find spontaneous pleasure and joy in it, if your heart doesn’t leap with excitement, then there’s likely something wrong. When that happens, you have to go back to the beginning and start discarding any extraneous parts or unnatural elements.
22. In any event, that was how I began. I started with a simple style, light and breezy, and then took time fleshing it out bit by bit in later works.
23. The structure of my novels, too, was skeletal at first, but I built it up in stages, making it more three-dimensional and multilayered until it was strong enough to handle the heightened complexity of long narratives. In this fashion, my works grew in scale.
24. As I said before, I began with an internal image of what I eventually wanted to write, but the process of getting there happened naturally. No detailed planning was involved—only after I had arrived did it hit me, “So that’s how I got here!”
25. If there is indeed something original about my novels, I think it springs from the principle of freedom.
26. This is purely my opinion, but if you want to express yourself as freely as you can, it’s probably best not to start out by asking “What am I seeking?” Rather, it’s better to ask “Who would I be if I weren’t seeking anything?” and then try to visualize that aspect of yourself.
27. I never write unless I really want to, unless the desire to write is overwhelming. When I feel that desire, I sit down and set to work. When I don’t feel it, I usually turn to translating from English.
28. After a while, however, the desire to write begins to mount. I can feel my material building up within me, like spring melt pressing against a dam. Then one day (in a best-case scenario), when I can’t take that pressure anymore, I sit down at my desk and start to write.
29. I don’t make promises, so I don’t have deadlines. As a result, writer’s block and I are strangers to each other.
30. Originality is hard to define in words, but it is possible to describe and reproduce the emotional state it evokes. I try to attain that emotional state each time I sit down to write my novels. That’s because it feels so wonderfully invigorating. It’s as if a new and different day is being born from the day that is today. If possible, I would like my readers to savor that same emotion when they read my books. I want to open a window in their souls and let the fresh air in. This is what I think of, and hope for, as I write—purely and simply.
31. I think the first task for the aspiring novelist is to read tons of novels. Sorry to start with such a commonplace observation, but no training is more crucial. To write a novel, you must first understand at a physical level how one is put together. This point is as self-evident as the truism “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”
32. It is especially important to plow through as many novels as you can while you are still young. Everything you can get your hands on—great novels, not-so-great novels, crappy novels, it doesn’t matter (at all!) as long as you keep reading. Absorb as many stories as you physically can. Introduce yourself to lots of great writing. To lots of mediocre writing, too. This is your most important task. Through it you will develop the basic novelistic muscles that every novelist needs. Build up your foundation. Make it strong while you have time to spare and while your eyes are still good.
33. Writing is important, too, I guess, but it can come later—there is no need to rush.
34. Next, before you start writing your own stuff, make a habit of looking at things and events in more detail. Observe what is going on around you and the people you encounter as closely and as deeply as you can. Reflect on what you see.
35. Remember, though, that to reflect is not to rush to determine the rights and wrongs or merits and demerits of what and whom you are observing. Try to consciously refrain from value judgments—conclusions can come later. What’s important is not arriving at clear conclusions but retaining the specifics of a certain situation—in other words, your material—as fully as you can.
36. Some individuals decide what or who is right or wrong based on a quick analysis of people and events. Generally speaking, though (and this is purely my opinion), they don’t make good novelists. Instead, they are better suited to becoming critics or journalists. Or possibly academics of a certain kind. Someone cut out to be a novelist, on the other hand, will stop to question the conclusion he or she has just reached, or is about to reach. “It sure looks that way,” he or she will think, “but wait a minute. That might be only my preconceived notion. Maybe I should consider it more carefully. After all, things are never as simple as they seem. If down the road something new pops up, it could become a completely different story.”
37. That is why I don’t leap to judgment when something happens. My mind no longer works that way. Instead I strive to retain as complete an image as possible of the scene I have observed, the person I have met, the experience I have undergone, regarding it as a singular “sample,” a kind of test case, as it were. I can go back and look at it again later, when my feelings have settled down and there is less urgency, this time inspecting it from a variety of angles. Finally, if and when it seems called for, I can draw my own conclusions.
38. Nevertheless, based on my own experience, I have found that the occasions when conclusions must be drawn are far less numerous than we tend to assume. Indeed, the times when judgments are truly necessary—whether in the short or the long run—are few and far between. That’s the way I feel, anyway. This means that when I read the paper or watch the news on TV, I have a hard time swallowing the reporters’ rush to give opinions on anything and everything. “Come on, guys,” I feel like saying, “what’s the big hurry?”
39. When less time is taken between gathering information and acting on it, so that everyone becomes a critic or a news commentator, then the world becomes an edgier, less reflective place.
40. It is possible, of course, to jot them down on a notepad or something of the sort, but I prefer to trust my mind. It’s a real pain to carry a pad around, and I have found that once I have jotted something down I tend to relax and forget it. If I toss the bits into my mind, on the other hand, what needs to be remembered stays while the rest fades into oblivion. I like to leave things to this process of natural selection.
41. Come to think of it, there have been very few situations when I wished I had a notepad on me. Something truly important is not that easy to forget once you’ve entrusted it to your memory.
42. Your mental chest of drawers is a great asset when you set to work on a novel. Neatly put-together arguments and value judgments aren’t much use for those of us who write fiction. More often than not, they impede us by blocking the natural flow of the story. If you have stockpiled your chest with a rich variety of unrelated details, however, you will be amazed to see how naturally they pop up when the need arises, full of life and ready to be fit into the narrative.
43. James Joyce put it most succinctly when he said, “Imagination is memory.” I tend to agree with him. In fact, I think he was spot-on. What we call the imagination consists of fragments of memory that lack any clear connection with one another. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but when we bring such fragments together our intuition is sparked, and we sense what the future may hold in store. It is from their interaction that a novel’s true power emanates.
44. If I want to include the story of someone who starts sneezing whenever they get angry, for example, but have already published it in a weekly journal, it can be a real disappointment. Of course, there is no rule that says that the same material can’t be used in an essay and a story, but I have found that doubling up like that somehow weakens my fiction. My advice, then, is to hang a sign on your chest of drawers that says For Fiction Only when you are in the process of writing. You never know what you are going to need later, so it pays to be miserly. This is one piece of wisdom I have picked up in the course of my long career.
45. If something is really tasty, I save it for my main job—my next novel.
46. The key component is not the quality of the materials—what’s needed is magic. If that magic is present, the most basic daily matters and the plainest language can be turned into a device of surprising sophistication. First and foremost, though, is what’s packed away in your garage. Magic can’t work if your garage is empty. You’ve got to stash away a lot of junk to use if and when E.T. comes calling!
47. Two principles guided me. The first was to omit all explanations. Instead, I would toss a variety of fragments—episodes, images, scenes, phrases—into that container called the novel and then try to join them together in a three-dimensional way. Second, I would try to make those connections in a space set entirely apart from conventional logic and literary clichés. This was my basic scheme.
48. More than anything else, music helped move this process forward. I wrote as if I were performing a piece of music. Jazz was my main inspiration. As you know, the most important aspect of a jazz performance is rhythm. You have to sustain a solid rhythm from start to finish—when you fail, people stop listening. The next most important element is the chords, or harmony if you like. Beautiful chords, muddy chords, secondary chords, chords with the tonic removed. Bud Powell’s chords, Thelonious Monk’s chords, Bill Evans’s chords, Herbie Hancock’s chords. There are so many kinds. Though everyone is using a piano with the same eighty-eight keys, the sound varies to an amazing degree depending on who’s playing. This says something important about novel writing as well. The possibilities are limitless—or virtually limitless—even if we use the same limited material. The fact that a piano has only eighty-eight keys hardly means that nothing new can be done with it. Finally there is the matter of free improvisation, which lies at the root of jazz music. Once the rhythm and chord progression (or harmonic structure) have been established, the musician is able to weave notes freely into the composition.
49. From the beginning, therefore, my intention was to write as if I were playing an instrument. I still feel like that today. I sit tapping away at the keyboard searching for the right rhythm, the most suitable chords and tones. This is, and has always been, the most important element in my literature.
50. Your material may be lightweight, but if you can grasp how to link the pieces together so that magic results, you can go on to write as many novels as you wish. You will be astounded how the mastery of that technique can lead to the creation of works with both weight and depth—as long as, that is, you retain a healthy amount of writerly ambition.
51. In contrast, writers who from the first write about heavy topics may eventually—although, obviously, this does not occur in all cases—find themselves faltering under the very weight of that material.
52. Hemingway was the type of writer who took his strength from his material. This helps explain why he led the type of life he did, moving from one war to another (the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War), hunting big game in Africa, fishing for big fish, falling in love with bullfighting. He needed that external stimulus to write. The result was a legendary life; yet age gradually sapped him of the energy that his experiences had once provided.
53. Writers who do not rely on weighty material but instead reach inside themselves to spin their tales may, by contrast, have an easier time of it. That’s because they can draw on their daily lives—the events routinely taking place around them, the scenes they witness, the people they encounter—and then freely apply their imaginations to that material to construct their own fiction. In short, they use a form of renewable energy. They feel no need to fight on the battlefield or in the bullring, or to shoot lions.
54. Please do not misunderstand—I am not saying that direct personal involvement in things like war, bullfights, and big-game hunting has no meaning. Of course it can be meaningful. Experiences are crucial for a writer, of whatever kind. All I’m saying is that they needn’t be of the dramatic variety to make a good novel. Even the smallest, most nondramatic encounter can generate an astonishing amount of creative power, if you do it right.
55. Things the world sees as trivial can acquire weight over time, while other things broadly considered to be weighty can, quite suddenly, reveal themselves to be only hollow shells.
56. “I can’t write any other way, so take it or leave it,” was my response to the critics.
57. Novelists are people who happen to have the knack of discovering and refining that raw material. Even more wonderful: the process costs virtually nothing. If you are blessed with a pair of good eyes, you too can mine the ore you choose to your heart’s content! Can you think of a more wonderful way to make a living?
58. It strikes me that, at the risk of exaggeration, long novels are my lifeblood, while short stories and novellas are more like practice pieces, important and useful steps toward the construction of longer works. You could compare this to the way long-distance runners think—we may keep track of our records in the five-thousand- and ten-thousand-meter races, but our true standard is our time in the marathon.
59. When writing a novel, my rule is to produce roughly ten Japanese manuscript pages (the equivalent of sixteen hundred English words) every day. This works out to about two and a half pages on my computer, but I base my calculations on the old system out of habit. On days where I want to write more, I still stop after ten pages; when I don’t feel like writing, I force myself to somehow fulfill my quota. Why do I do it this way? Because it is especially important to maintain a steady pace when tackling a big project. That can’t work if you write a lot one day and nothing at all the next. So I punch in, write my ten pages, and then punch out, as if I’m working on a time card.
60. Ten pages a day means three hundred pages a month. That works out to eighteen hundred pages in six months. To give you a concrete sense of how much that is, the first draft of Kafka on the Shore was eighteen hundred manuscript pages long. I wrote most of that novel on the North Shore of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Not only was nothing there to distract me, it rained almost all the time, so the work progressed at a rapid pace. I started the draft in April and wrapped it up in October.
61. In the case of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I decided that a large chunk of what I had written didn’t fit into the whole, so I excised it and used it as the base for a subsequent novel, South of the Border, West of the Sun. That’s an extreme example, though—in most cases, the sections I cut out are gone forever.
62. Novels are, by definition, longer works, which means the reader can be stifled if the screws are too tight. Correspondingly, there are spots where I leave them loose, to allow the reader room to breathe. There must also be a balance between the novel as a whole and its parts. All these things require careful adjustment.
63. Once the novel has fully settled, it is time for another detailed and exhaustive run-through. Thanks to my time away, my impressions of the work will have changed quite a lot. Weaknesses I haven’t noticed before jump out at me. I can sense what has depth and what doesn’t. Just as the work has settled, so too has my state of mind.
64. Once the settling period is over and the subsequent rewrite completed, I move on to the next step. By this point, the novel has assumed what will be more or less its final form, so I can show it to a first reader—namely, my wife. This is a natural extension of the writing process, a station on the line that leads from inception to completion. My wife’s opinions are something like standard tuning in music. They are similar to the old speakers I have at home (sorry, dear!). I have listened to all my records on those speakers. They aren’t especially good, part of a JBL system I bought back in the 1970s. Big and bulky, their tonal range is more limited than the fancy new speakers available nowadays. The clarity of the sound isn’t as good, either. One could even call them antiques. Yet I have been listening to so many kinds of music on them for so long that they have become my standard of comparison. They are like a part of me.
65. Whichever course I have followed, once I have sat down and rewritten a given section I almost always find it much improved. It seems that when a reader has a problem, there is usually something that needs fixing, whether or not it corresponds to their suggestions. In short, the flow of their reading has been blocked. It is my job, then, to eliminate that blockage, to unclog the pipe, as it were. How to do that is up to me, the author.
66. At any rate, I spend as much time as I can on the rewriting process. I listen to the advice of the people around me (even if it makes me angry) and try to bear it in mind as I rework my novel. Their comments are valuable. Anyone who has just finished writing a long novel is bound to be in an emotional, overstimulated state. In a way, we are out of our minds.
67. Raymond Carver, a writer I love and respect, also enjoyed tinkering. He wrote, about another writer, that “he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places.” I know that feeling exactly, for I have had the same experience many times. You reach the limit. If you tinker any more you will only damage what you have written. It’s a subtle point, easy to miss. The bit about replacing commas hits it right on the head.
68. In my opinion, using your willpower to control time is what makes it your ally. You mustn’t let it go on controlling you. That just makes you passive. “Time and tide wait for no man,” they say, so if time isn’t going to wait for you, you have no choice but to take it to heart and actively construct your schedule on that principle. In other words, assume command of the situation and stop being passive!
69. In fact, I think I enjoy talking about my system much more than I do talking about the value and specific qualities of the various books I have written. I think this kind of talk has more practical value as well.
70. When I first started writing Norwegian Wood, I wrote at cafés in various places in Greece, on board ferry boats, in the waiting lobbies of airports, in shady spots in parks, and at desks in cheap hotels. Hauling around oversized, four-hundred-character-per-page Japanese manuscript paper was too much, so in Rome I bought a cheap notebook (the kind we used to call college-ruled notebooks) and wrote the novel down in tiny writing with a disposable Bic pen.
71. Essentially, I believe people don’t write novels because someone asks them to. They write because they have a personal desire to write.
72. Naturally, some writers write novels because they’ve been asked to do so. This might be true for the majority of professional writers. My own personal policy for many years has been not to write novels because I’ve been contracted to or requested to, but I might be a rare case. For most writers, editors will ask them to write a short story, for instance, for their company’s magazine, or a novel exclusively for their publishing company, and they’ll go from there. In these cases it’s usual to have a deadline, and depending on the situation, to receive a payment up front as a kind of advance.
73. It’s kind of a cliché to say it’s a lonely process, but writing a novel—especially a really long one—is exactly that: extremely lonely work. Sometimes I feel like I’m sitting all alone at the bottom of a well. Nobody will help me, and nobody’s there to pat me on the back and tell me I’ve done a great job. The novel I produce may be praised by people (if it turns out well), but no one seems to appreciate the process itself that led to it. That’s a burden the writer must carry alone.
74. you have to become physically fit. You need to become robust and physically strong. And make your body your ally.
75. I began running once I became a full-time writer (I started when I was writing A Wild Sheep Chase), and for thirty years running for an hour a day, or sometimes swimming, has been a regular part of my daily schedule. Perhaps I have an inherently strong constitution, but during this time I’ve never been seriously ill and never hurt my legs or back (though I did sustain a torn muscle once when playing squash), and I have continued to run every day with hardly ever taking a break. Once a year I run a full marathon, and I’ve participated in triathlons as well.
76. How have I been able to do it? It’s because I feel like the act of running represents, concretely and succinctly, some of the things I have to do in this life.
77. That sentence has become a kind of mantra for me: No matter what, this is something I have to do in my life.
78. I felt very strongly that paying close attention to what the body is feeling is, fundamentally, a critical process for someone involved in creative work. Whether it’s the emotions or the brain, they’re all equally part of our physical body. I don’t know what physiologists say about this, but to me, the lines separating the emotional, the mental, and the physical aren’t all that clearly defined.
79. This mental toughness—or at least the greater part of it—isn’t something I was born with; it was acquired. I obtained this by consciously training myself.
80. They were seriously upset that they’d been reading novels written by such a thoroughly boring man. Maybe ordinary people in nineteenth-century England had an idealized image of a novelist, or a novelist’s lifestyle, as unconventional. I get a little jumpy sometimes wondering if I’ll suffer the same fate as Trollope, seeing as how I also live this kind of ordinary life. Well, it’s a good thing, I guess, that in the twentieth century Trollope’s critical reputation has seen something of a reassessment…
81. Some people insist that if you’re truly talented at something, your talent will definitely blossom someday. But based on my own gut feelings—and I trust my gut—that won’t necessarily happen. If that talent lies buried in a relatively shallow place, it’s very possible it will emerge on its own. But if it’s buried deep down, you can’t discover it that easily. It can be the most abundant talent, but as long as there’s no one to actually pick up a shovel, say “Let’s dig here,” and start digging, it may remain forever unknown, buried in the earth.
82. As I’ve lived and matured, I’ve found, through much trial and error, the way that works best for me. Trollope found the way that works best for him, and so did Kafka. You should find what works best for you.
83. I’m the type of person who whenever I like something and am interested in it, puts everything I have into it and goes all in. I never stop halfway, thinking, “That’s good enough.” I do it until I’m convinced I’ve got it. But unless something really grabs me, I can’t put my heart into it. Or, more precisely, I just can’t work up the desire to do so.
84. In my own case, when I look back to when I was in school, the biggest saving grace for me was having some close friends, and reading tons of books. When it came to books, I greedily devoured a wide range, like I was busily shoveling coal into a blazing furnace. I was so busy every day enjoying one book after another, digesting them (in many cases not properly digesting them), that I didn’t have any time left to think about anything else. Sometimes I think that might actually have been a good thing for me.
85. Also, reading so widely helped to relativize my point of view, and I think that was very significant for me back when I was a teenager. I experienced all the emotions depicted in books almost as if they were my own; in my imagination I traveled freely through time and space, saw all kinds of amazing sights, and let all kinds of words pass right through my very body. Through all this, my perspective on life became a more composite view. In other words, I wasn’t gazing at the world just from the spot where I was standing, but was able to take a step back and take a more panoramic view.
86. If you always see things from your own standpoint, the world shrinks. Your body gets stiff, your footwork grows heavy, and you can no longer move. But if you’re able to view where you’re standing from other perspectives—to put it another way, if you can entrust your existence to some other system—the world will grow more three-dimensional, more supple. And I believe that as long as we live in this world, that kind of agile stance is extremely important. In my life this has been one of the biggest rewards of reading.
87. A novelist is a person who steadily fills his head with a world of his own.
88. In most cases, the characters who appear in my novels naturally emerge from the flow of the story. Except for a few rare cases, I never decide ahead of time that I’ll present a certain type of character. As I write, a kind of axis emerges that makes it possible for the appearance of certain char-acters, and I go ahead and add one detail after another as I see fit, like iron scraps attach to a magnet.
89. Naturally what I write isn’t neatly organized as a ready-to-go novel, so later I rework it a number of times, changing its form. That rewriting process is more conscious and logical. But the creation of the prototype is an unconscious and intuitive process. There’s no choice, really. I have to do it this way or my characters will turn out unnatural and dead. That’s why, in the beginning stage of the process, I leave everything up to these Automatic Dwarves.
90. IN ANY CASE, in the same way that you have to read a lot of books in order to write novels, to write about people you need to know a lot of them.
91. By “know” I don’t mean you have to comprehend them, or go so far as to really understand them deep down. All you need to do is glance at the person’s appearance, how they talk and act, their special charac-teristics. Those people you like, ones you’re not so fond of, ones that, frankly, you dis-like—it’s important to observe people with-out, as much as possible, choosing which ones you observe.
92. So you shouldn’t just avert your eyes when you decide you can’t stomach some-body, but instead ask yourself “What is it I don’t like about them?” and “Why don’t I like that?” Those are the main points to keep in mind.
93. Every time I went through these negative experiences, I tried to observe in detail the way the people involved looked and how they spoke and acted. If I’m going to have to go through all this, I figured, I should at least get something useful out of it (to get back what I put into it, you could say). Naturally these experiences hurt me, even made me depressed sometimes, but now I feel they provided a lot of nourishment for me as a novelist. Of course, I had plenty of wonderful, enjoyable experiences as well, but for whatever reason the ones I recall now are the negative ones.
94. But beyond being real, interesting, and somewhat unpredictable, I think what’s more important is the question of how far the novel’s characters advance the story. Of course it’s the writer who creates the char-acters; but characters who are—in a real sense-alive will eventually break free of the writer’s control and begin to act inde-pendently. I’m not the only one who feels this-many fiction writers acknowledge it. In fact, unless that phenomenon occurs, writing the novel becomes a strained, pain-ful, and trying process. When a novel is on the right track, characters take on a life of their own, the story moves forward by itself, and a very happy situation evolves whereby the novelist just ends up writing down what he sees happening in front of him. And in some cases the character takes the novelist by the hand and leads him or her to an unexpected destination.
95. One of the things I enjoy the most about writing novels is being able to become anyone I want. When I wrote Kafka on the Shore I was a little past fifty years old, yet I made the main character a fifteen-year-old boy. And all the time I was writing I felt like I was a fifteen-year-old.
96. As I wrote the novel, I was able to vividly relive inside me, almost as they were, the air I actually breathed at age fifteen, the light I actually saw. Through the power of writing I could draw out sensations and feelings that had long lain hidden deep inside. It was a truly wonderful experience. Perhaps the sort of sensation only a novelist can taste.
97. I might, at one time, become a twenty-year-old lesbian. Another time I’ll be a thirty-year-old unemployed househus-band. I put my feet into the shoes I’m given then, make my foot size fit those shoes, and then start to act. That’s all it is. I don’t make the shoes fit my foot size but, rather, make my feet fit the shoes. It’s not something you can do in reality, but if you toil for years as a novelist, you find you’re able to accomplish it. The reason being that it’s all imaginary.
98. And being imaginary, it’s like things that take place in dreams. In dreams—whether ones you have while asleep or dreams you have while awake-you have hardly any choice about it. Basically I just go with the flow.
99. The year before I made this decision, I read Ryu Murakami’s novel Coin Locker Babies and was really blown away. But this was something only Ryu Murakami could write. I also read some of Kenji Nakagami’s novels and was really impressed, but again only Nakagami could have written them. They were both different from what I wanted to write.
100. Enjoying yourself doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll produce an outstanding work of art. A process of rigorous self-examination is a crucial element. Also, as a professional, of course you need a minimum number of readers. But clear that hurdle and I think that your goal should be to enjoy yourself and write works that satisfy you. I mean, a life spent doing something you don’t find enjoyable can’t be much fun, right? I return again to our starting point: What’s wrong about feeling good?

“The Tale of Genji” by Murasaki Shikibu (translation by Edward G. Seidensticker)

This is the first novel ever written in history. It is written in the 11th century by a female writer, Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in the Heian court of Japan who served empress Akiko.

The novel shows a nuanced portrait of a refined society in 10th-11th century Heian period in Japan, where every casual romantic or sexual relationship is an act of political calculation. Chief among the players is Hikaru Genji, a handsome second son of the emperor Kiritsubo and a passionate man with impulses that often create great turmoil in his kingdom and very nearly destroy himself. This fictional story, which spans almost three-quarters of a century, is mainly about him and the people around him.

Genji was born into royalty but later demoted to a status of a commoner after the death of his mother, a low-ranking concubine. As he matures, he grows to become a master of all essential noble arts, such as calligraphy, poetry, playing the lite, scent-mixing, and courtly dance. And his handsome features and charismatic personality enables him to be entangled in complex love affairs with various women, including a scandalous affair with his stepmother.

It was a highly political era, with the kingdom fractured into the Left and Right, where some actions can lead to political exiles, deaths, and spiritual disillusionment.

This English-language translation by Edward G. Seidensticker was first published in 1976, and it is arguably the 2nd best translation that I found after hours of research comparing the reviews between the multiple translations available. Why settle for the 2nd best, and who is the best translation? Many sources are saying that the translation by Royall Tyler is the undisputed best one, and true to my tsundoku habit, I already have the physical copy of it when I bought this thick book in Japan in 2013 as a souvenir for my collection (the first ever novel, bought directly in Japan? Jackpot).

But why still buy and read this Seidensticker’s translation? The Tyler translation is the 1217 pages, fully complete, unabridged masterpiece that spans 54 chapters and traces multiple generations. Meanwhile, this Seidensticker translation is the 384 pages, abridged version with curated selection of 12 core chapters that strictly focus on Genji’s youth and early romances. Chapters 2, 3, 6, 15 and 16, for example, are omitted due to their stand apart nature that have no effect on the main narrative.

Furthermore, Seidensticker’s translation also focuses on direct and concise English prose style that chose clarity, compared to Tyler’s translation that replicates the long and winding style of classical Japanese syntax. Hence, it is the perfect introductory translation to read in order to fully understand the story.

I will eventually read the Tyler translation someday, which aimed to preserve the purity of the text, complete with the 795 poems, extensive scholar commentaries, and of course the entire narrative from the original text. But for now, anyone who wants to read the first ever novel without being discouraged before we even begun to read, due to its sheer size, this Seidensticker translation is the go-to book to read.

A little personal side note: I intentionally read this book while travelling to Japan, and visited the Uji area at the outskirt of Kyoto along the way, where the last 10 chapters of the original Tale of Genji are set. There’s something about the Uji calm environment that I really love, and reading this book there felt like a Zen experience.

“Kokoro” by Natsume Sōseki

This book is a classic Japanese literature, written by whom many consider as Japan’s leading novelist, Natsume Sōseki.

It was published in 1914, two years after Japan’s Meiji era ended after the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912, which was followed by the accession of his son, Emperor Taishō, who ruled the Taishō era from 1912 until his death in 1926.

The book portrays the transition period in Japanese society from the traditional early Meiji era, to the modernizing later Meiji era, to the Taishō era that was filled with even more modernity and assimilation with the Westernized world. And it is depicted in the story through the relationship between a young student and his mentor (or Sensei), with the student represents the hopeful new Taishō era while the Sensei has more of a Meiji era’s characteristics that is increasingly lost and felt out of place.

Interestingly, Sensei’s character is said to be similar with Sōseki’s own personality and upbringing. Sōseki was born in Edo in 1867, a year before Emperor Meiji took the throne and the Meiji era began (and Edo was renamed into Tokyo). He was educated in the Japanese and Chinese classics and in the Confucian moral code, still far from the Western concepts of individualism and individual rights.

Similarly, Sensei is of a similar age with Sōseki, with his references to the importance of old-fashioned moral education reflects Sōseki’s own preferences. For both Sōseki and Sensei, the Meiji period’s later embrace of Western individualism already triggered inner conflicts that haunted them trough their lives, which was then exacerbated in the Taishō era.

This is what the novel is about, the inner struggle in the transition, the isolation, the generational gap, the moral guilt, and ultimately the human connection. But there’s a twist, a Dostoevsky-esque type of moral story similar like Crime and Punishment.

But the difference is, this novel reveals it at the very last part of the story. Throughout the early parts of the novel the student (as the unnamed narrator of the story) keeps on portraying Sensei as a distant character with a mysterious past, with only glimpses of clues appear every now and then in the middle of their conversations and the student’s conversations with Sensei’s wife. But everything is eventually explained in part 3 by Sensei’s letter to the student, which I will not reveal here because it would become a spoiler for the entire build up.

All in all, the novel’s title “Kokoro” is a perfect reflection of the themes in this story, where it can be translated to “the thinking and feeling hearts.” Because following your logic does not mean a thing, if your action contradicts with what your heart is telling you.

The Meiji Era ended when Emperor Meiji passed away on 30 July 1912. And after the funeral on 13 September 1912, the very next day General Nogi Maresuke and his wife Shizuko committed a ritual suicide (seppuku), practicing a long-banned Samurai tradition to die with their lord. This event sent a shockwave throuhought Japan, and inspired Sōseki to write this novel.