David W. Stowe's 3 favorite reads in 2023

• 2023
• 2024

I read this book over the summer, a few months after it seemed that every pundit and podcaster was ruminating about A.I. Would ChatGPT take over vast swaths of creative industries, making most of us obsolete or relegating us to the galleys? Would A.I. even doom us as a species? 

This book came out a couple of years earlier, but it helped me get my head around all the suddenly urgent questions about human minds, consciousness, and technology. O’Gieblyn brings to bear the insights of major figures in Western philosophy on some fairly abstruse issues in a way that sets a new standard for lucidity. She convinced me that the current crisis over A.I. has been in the works for a while. 

And within her elegant reflections on modern philosophy and cybernetics, O’Gieblyn nestles a compelling memoir. She traces her own evolution from a conservative Christian upbringing to atheism, a background that helped her recognize traces of fundamentalist religion in the wild speculations of the visionaries of the transhuman.

You will learn a lot from this book and feel much smarter afterward.

Western Buddhism has had more than its share of fine explicators, from Stephen Batchelor to Sharon Salzberg, but this volume ranks with the most informative of them. It collects the best writings published over recent decades by the very wise Jewish-American Zen priest Norman Fischer. 

For me, these far-ranging articles make better sense of Zen than anything I've ever read. In humorous, down-to-earth prose, these essays unpack some of the thorniest issues raised by Zen, that bundle of paradoxes.

Using personal examples drawn from his long activity in and around various Buddhist centers, Fischer makes Zen sound both approachable and worth approaching. In the final section, he thinks through how a religion that stresses the fluid nature of the self can speak to an era that places fixed identity (racial, sexual, ethnic, gendered) at the center of our personhood. 

It's too late now, but this book made me want to start my adulthood over and experience the same Zen education that Fischer has (in some of the most beautiful locations in California!)

I admit that I picked up this book mainly because I’m researching the musical scene of revolutionary-era Boston. I figured this new book would offer some state-of-the-art context I could learn from. But even apart from my pragmatic motive, it was a stimulating read.

Wheatley is such an unlikely figure you would almost have to make her up. Kidnapped at around age seven from West Africa, she was shipped to America and purchased by a genteel Boston couple. They quickly recognized her genius.

Within a few years, she was reading the Bible, of course, but also English poets Pope and Milton, not to mention Virgil, Ovid, Terence, and Homer. All the while working as an enslaved servant. 

Wheatley’s first poem was published when she was thirteen. She received national acclaim three years later for an elegy she wrote for the British evangelist George Whitefield. At eighteen, Wheatley sailed to London to find a publisher for her first poetry collection, published in 1773, the year of the Boston Tea Party. She was the talk of literary Boston, praised by George Washington but disparaged as a poet by Thomas Jefferson. 

Waldstreicher does a superb job teasing out Wheatley’s subtle engagement in anti-slavery efforts through very careful readings of her poems and social interactions. The book is an inspiring reminder of how creativity can flourish even in the most difficult life circumstances.