Read a book, you fucking barbarians.

Have a little fucking culture.

Pictured here: culture.

I’m planning to turn out a book recommendation every week or two, but in the meantime, I’ve got a big backlog of books I’ve wanted to urge everyone to pick up, and it feels like cheating to just space them all out over the next few months instead of actually recommending new books as I find them.

I read stupidly fast. I get through your average 250-so page nonfiction in a few hours, which translates to about half a week if I’m just reading at bedtime, or one or two good sittings. So I read a lot, and I try to keep a queue going because otherwise it means I end up buying myself some stupid Dilbert or Far Side collection on Kindle just because I need something to fall asleep, which sucks because A) Fuck Scott Adams and B) Fuck Amazon.

I’m not going to bother counting the books on here you’ve probably all already heard of, like Pandemia and Fauci. Nonetheless, the stuff I’m selecting is “stuff that has been at least tangentially valuable in understanding COVID tyranny, the sociology of mass formation, and coping with my own mental state thereof.”

Presented in no particular order.

1. The Seamus O’Mahoney “series”

These aren’t a series of three explicitly-linked books, but O’Mahony was writing them more or less simultaneously because they summarize his thoughts on the state of public health as seen at the end of a 40-year career with the NHS and Irish health care systems. They don’t specifically address COVID; the last book, Bodies, came out at the very beginning of the pandemic and he makes brief mention of it.

O’Mahony comes from a pretty fatalistic, pessimistic, and atheistic position; he’s also (justifiably) extremely cynical about any prospects public health has for turning itself around. These books are better described as a look at the trajectory of the decline of healthcare, especially public health, from WW2 onward and the specific agents that made it happen. He writes largely from the perspective of the NHS but explicitly describes where these problems are transferable to the U.S. and other western nations.

The Way We Die Now deals specifically with the medicalization of death; the absurd extent to which healthcare goes to continue the lives of the elderly or terminally ill beyond any reasonable measure, the extent to which emotionality, litigiousness, bureaucracy, and profit motivate these ridiculous measures, and how bad it really is- it’s not that O’Mahony doesn’t care about saving lives, or doesn’t understand that people don’t want loved ones to die, but that an irrational sentimentality has led to ultimately cruel protocols that don’t make anyone happier in the end.

You will come away from this book wanting to make sure at least a few specific things he mentions don’t happen when you die or are dying.

Can Medicine Be Cured? is the most challenging read of the bunch as it goes directly into case reviews and analyses of published research over the past 50 years, as well as some of the big names in wholesale medical fuckery (including some real pieces of shit you will recognize from COVID biofascism like Ferguson and friends). He spends the most time making deep dives into the three biggest culprits of a completely broken system: the incestuous relationships to Big Pharma, the complete and systematic corruption of published research, and the inseparable tether of public health policy to the winds of political bullshit, especially in catering to the emotions of hypochondriacs (you don’t get elected by realistically telling voters that not everyone can have all the healthcare they want, all the time, etc.). Sound familiar?

You will come away from this book being really pissed off and probably despairing that it will only get more Kafkaesque and grim from here as he doesn’t offer any hopeful solutions beyond “X must stop, but it probably won’t.”

The Ministry of Bodies is a nice light read; it’s a series of short journal scribblings, some as brief as a sentence and most no longer than one paragraph, of O’Mahony’s final year as a doctor at the hospital he’s worked at since it was first called simply The Ministry, hence the name. If you’ve already read the first two books, you’ll see firsthand anecdotes of all the same problems he addresses in them in Ministry, and how hopeless the institution is and how it will probably continue sliding into the ocean after he leaves.

You will come away from this book a little sad and mainly just want to give O’Mahony a hug and probably pretty pissed off at the various abusers of the healthcare system in the anecdotes of specific patients he names and their shitty fates.

2. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

This is one of the sorts of non-fiction books I tend to like best: histories created from collections of interviews (or “interviews”) with examples of primary source documents to stitch together the background of the place or time. It’s written entirely in normal prose- no word-for-word interviews or photos of long official documents- which makes it flow like any good history.

Ordinary Men is about a police battalion of Germans in occupied Poland who were ostensibly a non-combatant battalion responsible for specifically rounding up Jews for deportation or simply executing them on the spot and not much else. The point of the ‘story’ is that as he researched the battalion and the interviews with its members, it became clear that a breakdown much like the 30-40-30 of mass formation emerged: there were a smaller group of enthusiastic killers, a bigger group of unenthusiastic troops that did what they told as they were pushed along every step of the way, and another smaller group that subverted their orders as much as possible while still saving their own skins.

You will come away from this book, hopefully, with a more nuanced perspective on how the right conditions can make pretty much anyone do anything.

3. Donald Robertson’s How To Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.

I came upon this book about a year and a half ago shortly after I suffered a major emotional meltdown over COVID. We were still living in NYC, lockdowns were still at their most brutal stage, our neighborhood businesses were being annihilated and everything we liked was dying, I was losing all my friends, and Fauci gave some kind of fucking speech where he said (I forget the exact words) in what I took to be this gleefully sociopathic tone, “we need to accept that we may have to live this way forever.”

I was briefly on Reddit at the time (I have and continue to eschew all social media, and my Reddit foray was short) and someone recommended pursuing Stoic philosophy as a very good way of coping with COVID fascism if you found your mental health in a very bad place and were on the skeptic side.

It absolutely did its job, and I’ve read it twice again in the intervening year or so. Robertson is also a practicing clinician, and like me, he incorporates a lot of philosophy and other behavioral sources like military science and personal training into the techniques he advances. This makes the book read like a simultaneous introduction to Stoicism as a philosophy course, a history course on Aurelius’ era of the Roman Empire, and a self-help book to utilize the principles.

You will come away from this book with at least one personal practice you will implement, if you don’t already do it.

4. Sebastian Rushworth’s COVID: Why Most of What You Know is Wrong

I came upon this book already subscribed to Rushworth’s blog and newsletter which I cannot recommend enough. Rushworth is a Swedish doctor with a particular focus on nutrition and an incredibly, rigorously critical approach to understanding and interpreting data. He’s also a bit of a hobbyist medical historian, which frequently emerges in his newsletters, with lots of salient and well-detailed examples of how medicine as an institution has been making huge, deadly mistakes forever and ever and has a vigorous culture of denying and displacing fault and covering up costly mistakes that is nothing new. His particular enemies are those “modern medicine knows that..” canards that lead to public health policy and mandates that are seen as above question, despite being proven thoroughly erroneous and harmful decades later, especially links between diet, lifestyle, and long-term health.

The COVID book reads like his blog: well-presented anecdotes of statements, models, predictions, and “research” forming the basis of COVID policy, and how frequently the “experts say”-backed arguments are built on the flimsiest or explicitly deceptive underpinnings.

You will come away from this book with better fluency in specific arguments you will likely get into with Covidians about “the science.”

5. Colleen Huber’s The Defeat of COVID: 500+ medical studies show what works and what doesn’t.

This one may be a gimme for a lot of you, but on the off-chance it isn’t (Huber is lower profile than some of the louder, brand-focused authors like Berenson, largely by choice), you should know about it.

Dr. Huber is author of the substack that bears her book’s name, where she (among other things) shares preprints of research she’s been writing since the beginning of the pandemic. Defeat’s main value is as an eminently shareable book, the kind you offer to your open-minded friend or parent that they’ll actually get through and understand. While she does present plenty of supporting research and make use of medical terminology, it is very carefully crafted (as is her stack) for interested laypeople to understand; you won’t put it down because of a headache or boredom.

You will come away from this book, hopefully, with actual practical advice you can give other skeptical or open-minded connections.

Hopefully the majority of these are introductions to new and interesting titles for you. I promise there will be more posts like this.

If not, hey, it was free, asswipe.