Robin's Bookstack Issue #1

The ever-growing pile on my nightstand

When I started A Mug of Insights, I wanted to write summaries of what I’ve been reading. But then people started showing up to read my pieces. Some of them even paid to subscribe to this otherwise free newsletter.

So I started thinking: what can I possibly offer paid subscribers? Essay readings? My embarrassing short stories I wrote when I was in the 10th Grade? A video clip of me doing a little Russian dance every month?

Since my YouTube career blew up, I have gotten clockwork comments asking me to recommend books. Sometimes I’d recommend some discretely, but the comment-catalogue-upkeeping quickly became unsustainable. I tried a little book club on Patreon, but it was so much work that it took time away from reading.

So here’s another experiment. From now on, I will send out a monthly book recommendation newsletter for paid subscribers. These newsletters will not be dry and stiff book reviews you might read from New York Times, but my honest, no BS takes on them.

The books will not follow any categories besides the category of my interests. As a start we will start with some books from Feb and March.

#1: Being and Time by Martin Heidegger: A Book You Should Buy Someone To Torture Them

I remember how the bookseller looked at me when I picked up this book a while ago.

“Are you really gonna read that?” He scanned it and popped it into a paper bag.

“I’m buddy reading this with my friend Hannah.” I took the paper bag and met up with Hannah at a cafe. That marked the beginning of my jiujitsu with one of the scariest philosophy books of all time: Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.

After a few months of wrestling with it, the copy became so destroyed that pages started falling out. Discussions of the book with Hannah turned into a training camp for insufferable people. “Do you think we’re being-ahead-of-ourselves when we discuss the ontico nature of this coffee in idle talk?”

And this is the thing with Heidegger. His investigation was into the nature of “being.” But to reach down into being, he decided to invent his own vocabulary. On top of that, there are untranslated German and Ancient Greek passages throughout the book. At some point, I had to consult my German friend Winter who majored in Classics, who was baffled by my request for her to translate: αποφαίνεσθαι into English. “Did you skip your appointment with your shrink last week?” She texted.

After finishing the book in February, I told Hannah, “I wouldn’t gift this book to my worst enemy.” It was too cruel even for them.

But I digress. Maybe Winter was Right. I did skip a few shrink visits. But right now, my goal is to survey all the cornerstones of Western Philosophy thoroughly. I just wasn’t sure why I thought Heidegger was a good starting point.

#2 The Subversive Simone Weil by Robert Zaretsky: A Pleasant Interlude