Currently Reading

February 10, 2026 / Benn Bell / Leave a comment

The Existentialist’s Survival Guide – How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age by Gordon Marino, PhD. It is a pretty good book on existentialism. I was a little skeptical at first because the author writes through the lens of Soren Kierkegaard. It’s not that I don’t like Kierkegaard; it’s that Kierkegaard doesn’t particularly resonate with me like the other existentialists. Not to worry, there were heavy doses of these other authors that I like, like Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

As a matter of fact, he checks all the boxes of some of my favorite authors, with mentions from the works of Camus: The Fall and The Stranger. Sartre: Nausea, No Exit, and Being and Nothingness. Dostevsky: Notes From Underground. These books are the touchstones of my life, and I was grateful for their inclusion.

Finally, this book was well written with many anecdotes from the author’s colorful past to illustrate his points and help inform the reader. It is more than just a self-help book. It is indeed a survival guide for living authentically.

Reading Blood Meridian for the second time, I picked up a lot that I missed the first time around 20 years ago. 20 years ago, when I first read it, I could not believe my eyes at what I saw on the page. I literally could not put the book down. I carried it with me everywhere I went until I finished reading it. In the intervening years, I read every other book Cormac McCarthy ever wrote. He is unquestionably one of America’s finest writers.

Blood Meridian shocks one’s consciousness with its scenes of violence and haunts the imagination with its vivid descriptions of the Old West in Mexico and Texas.

Thematically, it is about the primacy of violence. The nature of good and evil, and fate vs. agency. The story follows a character known as “the kid,” who joins a group of scalp hunters known as the Glanton Gang. They are hired by the Mexican government to hunt down Apache Indians and collect their scalps for a bounty. They soon descend into madness as they stop distinguishing enemies from foes and start slaughtering everything in their path.

Another character in the gang is Judge Holden, who may or not be the devil. His philosophy is “War is God,” and combat is the ultimate truth. He refers to “the dance” by which he means a commitment to violence and the will to power. If you aren’t dancing, you aren’t truly alive.

The kid has a spark of mercy in him, and the judge views him as his natural enemy. The final confrontation takes place in an outhouse. What happens there is not mentioned but the reaction of those who look inside would suggest something awful.

Blood Meridian is not for everyone, but it is a masterpiece of storytelling, somewhere on the level of Moby Dick. It is the telling of the end of the Old West and the beginning of the New and so-called civilization.

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

January 30, 2025February 21, 2025 / Benn Bell / 1 Comment

A book review

Timequake is a novel about free will. Vonnegut freely intersperses throughout the novel his own stream of consciousness. Oh, and there is also his alter ego, Kilgore Trout, who exclaims, “Oh Lordy, I am much too old experienced to start playing Russian Roulette with free will again.”

The premise of Timequake is that a Timequake, a sudden glitch in the time-space continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly what they’d done during the past decade a second time. It was déjà vu all over again for 10 years. The timeframe Vonnegut chose was February 13, 2001 – February 17, 1991. The Timequake would zapp everyone back in an instant to 1991. They had to “live” their way forward to 2001. Or you might say, back to the future again. Only when people got back to 2001 did they stop being robots of their past. Kilgore Trout would say, “Only when free will kicked in could they stop running an obstacle course of their own construction.” Free will. That is what the novel is about. Do we have it or not? That is the question. You would think that because the author mentions “when free will kicks back in” some 20-odd times he was arguing for free will. But no! Not so fast! I’m not so sure.

Other pithy comments by Kilgore Trout would include, “If brains were dynamite, there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off!” and “Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch!” which is the punch line to a variation on a joke having to do with Chinese doorbells.

So, it goes.

Vonnegut goes on to say, in his own peculiar voice, that writers of his generation had reason to be optimistic because of things like the Magna Carter, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, The Emancipation Proclamation, and Article XIX of the Constitution giving women the right to vote. He advocated for two more amendments that he would like to add: Article XXIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity. And Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do at a living wage.

Another pithy saying he was fond of throwing around was, “I never asked to be born in the first place!”

Photo by the author.

https://amzn.to/42BZP58

Top 10 Books Read 2019

February 3, 2020February 3, 2020 / Benn Bell / 4 Comments

I only read 17 books in 2019. Short of my goal, but most of what I read was challenging and on the longish side. I vow to read more this year. My goal is 36. I’ve already read four, so I am on track.

Here are my top 10 books for 2019:

Look Homeward Angel – Thomas Wolfe
The Big Sleep (Annotated) – Raymond Chandler
The Clown – Heinrich Boll
Ulysses – James Joyce
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Cities of the Plain – Cormac McCarthy
Dream of Fair to Middling Women – Samuel Beckett
Quichotte – Salman Rushdie
Will in the World – Stephen Greenblatt

Some of these books I have been wanting to read all my life but never got around to, like Look Homeward Angel, which inspired a trip to Aheville NC,and Ulysses which was I must say the most challenging of all. Love in Time of Cholera was a pure pleasure to read. Beloved was Toni Morrison’s masterpiece. So sad we lost her last year. Cities of the Plain completed the Border Trilogy. I try to read at least one Cormac McCarthy book each year. Terrific writer! Quichotte by Salman Rushdie was was a pleasant surprise. First one of his I’ve read in a while. I remember reading Satanic Verses when it first came out and created such a stir. The Big Sleep was pure pleasure. If you have never read anything Heinrich Boll, I highly recommend him to you. One of my favorites for a long time. The Clown is a good one! Dream of Fair to Middling Women was Samuel Beckett’s first novel and was not published during his lifetime. It is very instructive to read it and see some of the characters and themes introduced early on that we see later in more mature works. Highly entertaining. And, finally, Will in the World. I learned so much about William Shakespeare and Elizabethan England reading this book.

Angels Over America

February 9, 2019 / Benn Bell / 3 Comments

The Big Sleep and Look Homeward Angel

I just finished reading Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe. It was a monumental mountain of beautiful prose. Now I turn my attention to a different sort of angel. A slumming angel. Of course I am speaking of none other than Raymond Chandler. I have read The Big Sleep before, but not the new annotated edition. Chandler’s prose is a bit more hard boiled than Wolfe’s but it is no less poetic. I can’t wait to get started!

Of Cell Phones, Lap Tops, and Books

July 11, 2017 / Benn Bell / 13 Comments

Young Parisian couple, about a generation apart, one reading a book the other a cell phone.

Before there were cell phones there were laptops. Before there were laptops there were TV screens. Before there were TV screens there were books. I’m reading a book right now, which is what I am usually doing. You would be surprised how much trouble I used to get into just for reading books. I have been called anti-social. Bosses didn’t like it. One of my wives tossed my books out into the backyard into a mud puddle. And my own mother come into my room one day, and tipped my bookcase over, spilling my books out onto the floor. What was a poor boy to do?

Most of the time nowadays people don’t seem to care much if I am reading a book. They are too busy with their own noses stuck into their cell phones.

Next time you get a chance, try reading a book. Remember, Mark Twain once said, those who do not read have no advantage over those who can’t read.

Ghost Dog

Notes From the Underground

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