Sid

Probably one of the best books (or plays) I've ever read. Wilde's style is infectiously delightful, and almost every paragraph had me in splits. His grasp of the very upper class he was later part of for a while is unparalleled, and the satire is all the more perfect for it. The characters are a blast, the story's premise is so ludicrous that it reads like a Bollywood masala movie (except infinitely better), and the ending is such a cute one too!
It's such a short and simple read that I'd recommend this to anyone of any age, no matter what your preferences in reading are.

Demian waxes and wanes poetically about the human spirit, but in contrast to Siddhartha, it is surprisingly direct in its focus on individualism and self-reliance.
The story is relatively simple – a bullied, questioning, and morally grey protagonist encounters an aloof individual named Demian, who takes a peculiar interest in him and makes him question Biblical allegories. He gains such an outsized influence in the protagonist's life that even his dreams and art are dictated by him. It is worth mentioning that the novel contains so much Freudian influence that it should list him as a second author.
However, the meat of the story lies in its subtext – its glorification of individualism to insufferability, the “Mark of Cain” through which society's disaffected individuals find each other, and its focus on dreams as a tool for discovering oneself. While it is hard to disagree with the novel's aims and its unsubtle hints for people to start finding spiritual meaning, Demian sometimes becomes too heavy-handed, and it doesn't have nearly as interesting characters, monologues, and plotlines as those in Siddhartha. I'd recommend Demian only because it makes note of the fact that solitude is important in one's life and cannot be found in the company of others, however evident this sounds.

Tim Urban's “What's Our Problem?” asks two very important questions: what is fundamentally broken with our society at present, and how can we fix it? As it turns out, Urban has a framework for looking at the world that, albeit devoid of any foundation, works to an extent. He suggests adding a vertical axis (up vs down) to the horizontal axis of politics (left vs right), where your place on the ladder denotes how rational or irrational you're acting. He argues that the world is slipping into low-rung thinking, where confirmation bias leads people to favour one ideology over another, or they become completely closed off to others' viewpoints, creating an echo chamber called a golem. This unchecked golem absorbs high-rung people who can't or won't speak up.
To be honest, that's where the book's good parts end. After some amazing, nuanced discussion, it becomes annoyingly USA-centered – astounding for a book that claims to know our problems, not just the USA's in particular. The next chapter is a short, emotionally-detached Wikipedia-style summary of how Republicans in the US are forming their own low-rung golem, with little to no detail as to the why.
The meat of the book, however, focuses on wokeism and social justice fundamentalism, which Urban sees as a huge problem disintegrating society. I've encountered this topic online numerous times (mostly discussed by right-wingers and “enlightened” centrists), and I have never found a convincing argument in support of it - and Urban fails to provide one. Believing that inequality is not only structural is one thing, but pretending that it is not structural at all is another. Maybe it's just me, but I think high-rung thinking should also involve not becoming excessively angry when confronted with topics one dislikes, a fact that Urban conveniently forgot.
After an excruciating discussion on how progressives are responsible for the US's downfall and how (renamed) social justice warriors are bad for everyone, and why even progressives who believe in social justice should stop doing so, the book concludes with a contemplative redemption. It suggests that people should strive to find common ground even when it doesn't exist, treat political opponents as humans, and remember that we're all in this together.
All idealistic and logical and sufficiently high-rung of you, Tim. Wish the rest of the book was like that, though.

Siddhartha Mukherjee has that rare quality of making it sound like he's cramming a bucketload of information in his words, all the while not losing brevity. In The Emperor of All Maladies, this quality was suppressed – the topic of cancer is weighty, and thus brevity was preserved over information density. This quality is out in full force in Gene, so you must take a breather every fifty or sixty pages.
Genecovers so much information about genetics that after finishing it, you will feel that you have absorbed those information pellets sometimes found in science fiction. It follows a similar pathway to The Emperor, with Mukherjee tracking the story of genetics from its ancestors (including debunked theories such as the sperm-containing mini-children) to the present, where we're making quantum leaps in the field every few years.
Aside from its remarkable history, the novel delves into the gene and what makes it tick. For example - how mutations mess with (or improve) a genome, how DNA can be combined to form recombinant DNA not generally found on a genome, how gene editing works, and how our genome can have a genetic ‘memory' of sorts.
More soberly, however, Mukherjee illuminates the reader with digressions centred on his family – and how mental illness was so pervasive in his family. It lends the entire novel a human touch that you cannot help but reflect on. Saying that the gene has been at the forefront of modern is something else, but saying that it has impacted the author's life brings it into some perspective – not missing the trees for the forest, if you will.
Gene is a rich and illuminating history of genetics and digressions into its probable future. I am not sure where genetics will land in even twenty years – but I now know watching the field progress will be breathtaking.

Mathematical education is in dire straits - this is a fact. But this book is not something I'd recommend for people who have always struggled to get into Math or for people who were good at Math but didn't necessarily like it.
The very issue with trying to please everyone is you end up pleasing no one. This book overextends itself in trying to court the seasoned amateur and the professional, not to mention trying to help people who loathe the field. Spoon-feeding the latter the absolute basics (what is multiplication, what is a circle, etc.) would hardly work as the basics are also the most tedious part of Math.
Paul Lockhart puts it aptly when he suggests that Math education needs to be fixed down-to-top - giving students time to come up with proofs by themselves and not simply giving them the absolute basics through flowery details. This is my opinion, of course, and if more people are interested in Maths because of this, then it's all the better - this is not how I would recommend starting your journey.
This is a breeze, so you could quickly finish this throughout a single afternoon. I'd recommend this if you have free time to whittle away, doubly if you're even slightly interested in the field.

I've not read much poetry, and I consider myself an atheist for now. These two things, however, did not make my experience of reading Gitanjali any less marvellous.
Tagore is the only person to have contributed to the national anthems of two countries, but he's also equally known for being the (then) first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. When I lived in Muscat, ~2005, we had ‘Into That Heaven of Freedom' as a school hymn, and I always looked forward to singing that – but seventeen years later, the sonnet I revisited in this collection has not diminished a bit for me.
Tagore finds joy in the divine, death, life, and everything in between – to the extent you wonder if he was ever sad, even for a moment. His life seems filled with bystanders who laugh at him for believing in the divine to this extent, but he can't be bothered to care about trivial things, such as his reputation regarding the all-powerful. His sense of self is nothing compared to God's benevolence, and his yearning to merge with God is all there is. Tagore finds God everywhere – the rivers, the seasons, the chirping of birds, the night and the day, and even a street procession. There are also beautiful pieces about the soul, the country and his belief that he loves death as much as life because death is simply an occasion to cast aside all superficiality and merge with God.
The best thing about Gitanjali is the sense of wonderment you feel throughout the poems. Yeats' translation of the work must have cut most of the marvel in Bengali, yet beauty still radiates from the prose to the extent I was left spellbound.

Masterpiece, only sold short by its abrupt ending.
There's so much to talk about in this particular omnibus (only the second horror manga I've ever read) - body horror, cannibalism, and so on - that you must read it to believe it. A small coastal town in Japan is cursed (hence the name, which means spiral in Japanese), and everything goes to hell. There are short stories on everything - such as mosquitoes (whose flying pattern is similar), snails (with the shape of their backs), and even tornadoes.
There's little to no characterization here, and I didn't know beforehand that this was a loose collection of short stories with a joining narrative, but that didn't detract from my immersion. There are the usual tropes here - a slightly unhinged deuteragonist with a gory past, the protagonist who's somehow not affected by the mania happening, and so on. Where Uzumaki shines is in creating a sense of helplessness - at no point do you feel that the characters are in control of what's happening, and this is different from the horror we're used to (the main character saving the day). I'd recommend this only for second-hand helplessness if nothing else.

Although it lives up to its title (‘Concise History since 1945'), I could not help but think that a concise view of history, by definition, excludes a lot of narratives - which was the case here.
For example, there's a very shallow treatment of the horrors of colonialism. Since this is US-centric - there's a tendency to go off on tangents lambasting communism and its lack of ‘innovative' character, and capitalism's superiority is treated as a fact. The USA interfering with elected governments to bring about anti-communist governments is hand-waved as ‘yeah, that happened, get over it - at least we're better now!'. In contrast, USSR's successes till the 70s/80s are ignored as coming from an authoritarian regime.
There's no problem with history being brief and to the point, but there is a problem when your bias is evident. This is still immensely readable, and it's worthwhile to read it in full to get to know Africa/Asia's history, which is generally missing from many history books. Plus, it's funny when Spellman's hope for world unity in the conclusion aged like milk.

Readers familiar with xkcd, Randall Munroe, What If, How-To or anyone with a passing interest in physics will be well-served by this book. The TL;DR version of this book would be questions of the sort of ‘what if..' put forward on a site, where a former NASA robotics engineer with a penchant for dry humor answers these questions with more than a tinge of sarcasm.
Questions range from the genuinely curious (can we burn a piece of paper using moonlight?), to the slightly macabre (how much sunscreen would you need for landing on the surface of the Sun?). In case you're wondering, the answers are no, and not that much.
On a tangential note, many researchers and engineers I talk to on a daily basis are disenchanted by the field, either by the difference between their expectations and reality, or because they're disillusioned by the assumption that science and maths are tough, and it's not possible to understand them in detail, unless you put in disproportionate amounts of effort.
Randall is one of the only people I've encountered (who's not a researcher) that still displays an infectious, childlike wonder for STEM, and distills advanced concepts to their essence. This book is a great read for that alone, along with the fact that it's also a good source for collecting bucketloads of trivia.

TL;DR - a true blue masterpiece, and one that is going to make me start a classics binge shortly.
Whether it is the characterisation, the heady Faustian themes, and a surprisingly great plot - my first foray into Wilde's literature was nothing short of spectacular. Lord Henry's cynicism was laugh-at-loud at parts, and somewhat deep at others, but where the novel truly shines is in depicting Dorian's corruption - first as a charming and uncorrupted seventeen-year old, but then whose countenance grows darker the more he revels in his senses. What I liked the most in this depiction is that we get to know about Dorian's behaviour second-hand, and that too in parts - thus the misuse of the omniscient PoV is kept to a minimum.
A slight addendum - there are slight socialist undertones I got from this (for example, the depiction of vacuousness of the people having inherited wealth is unsubtle), to the point where I began to wonder if Wilde was a socialist - which he was? Unsurprising, but it only added to my appreciation of the text.

This novel was a solid read but was slightly let down by its long-winded commentary on unrelated topics and the insistence that economics expects rationality from humans. Yes, I got it the first time!
It is striking how much even slightly-well-off people will argue about the irrationality of the masses and how much ‘thinking' instead of ‘feeling' they are - only to expose themselves as hypocrites in the next five minutes of conversation. Thinking, Fast and Slow tells us why. It is heartening to find that it's possible to improve these facets of our personality to the point where we're not dictated solely by our intuition. In good news for pedants everywhere, Kahneman concludes that it's difficult, albeit doable, to spot yourself slipping into a hasty decision - but you can ask others to check if you're doing so.
The analogy of system 1 (‘gut feeling') vs system 2 (rational, but lazy) and the experiencing self vs remembering self were remarkable psychological constructions, and I could see how Kahneman got his Nobel. All in all, this is not just a read for economists and psychologists - it should be essential reading for everyone if you can get past the verbiage.

How do you feel after waking up? There is disorientation and irritability, and you're trying to remember what you dreamed about - but it all slips away. If you could distil that feeling of disorientation and grudging acceptance that comes when you have awoken and compressed it into a novel - it would be The Memory Police.
There's so much and yet so little to talk about this. You could say that the novel has its own Kafkaesque and Orwellian sense of prose and humour, true, but that would be doing it a disservice - Ogawa has her unique brand of melancholy that has to be seen to be believed.
Then again, many questions are left unanswered - how and where does this island exist? How was the technology for selectively discarding people's memories made in an environment where even aeroplanes and mobiles are not present? Why do some people remember everything? What is the moral, if any, of the story-within-a-story? Ogawa doesn't bother answering these questions, and for a good reason - her focus is on the characters more than the setting.
The characters are the fulcrum of the story - but the mute girl and the typing teacher, the Memory Police and the island have a life of their own. I think that is what Ogawa's entire point is, about how inanimate objects and sensations dictate our life. “Hole in the heart” and “hollow soul” are terms that repeatedly pop up when even something like calendars disappear - and I began to wonder if these weren't hyperbolic terms after all.
As a story, The Memory Police is amazing - but as a thought experiment, it is even better - I would rank it amongst the classics of dystopian fiction. Reading this amid a rewriting of history through politics around the world imbued me with a sense of nervous energy I didn't know I had.

On the surface of it, The Code Book is a very unglamorous book - a somewhat analytical book filled with technical jargon on the history of cryptography, starting from its first mentions in written record to the somewhat confusing introduction to quantum computing and quantum cryptography.
But on a deeper glance, Simon Singh reveals himself as a passionate and intense geek who wants to explain how our communication is encrypted and decrypted to laypeople, who might not know what algorithms and modulus functions are but who deserve to know what cryptography is. It is telling that most of the concepts he teaches are through stories - why a particular cypher was invented and how history could have been much different if a few specific messages were still secure. It was heartening to note that even knowing all the basics - there was a lot of stuff to absorb - including the inner workings of Enigma used in WW2, the decryption of Linear B, an extinct Mediterranean language.
The Code Book's ending chapters have dated horribly, though. Simon envisioned a future where the public would need cryptography because they would be emailing forms containing their credit card information to retailers for e-commerce. Amazon took this concept to a hitherto unforeseen level. Moore's Law has stagnated, the debate on cryptography has changed immensely, for better or worse - and quantum computing remains as nascent as ever. Still, the basics of cryptography have remained the same - for that alone; this is a fine read.

Vonnegut's second piece I'm getting around to (after Slaughterhouse Five) is a witty and satirical post-modernist piece that is about nothing and everything. The prose takes time to get used to, there is little to no plot to speak of, and there's no point to the novel, which Vonnegut himself indirectly admits at one point, telling us that the worst books are one which do have a lesson - because there's no such thing in real life.
BoC follows a uniquely original medley of characters and backstories who live in a town colloquially known as “the asshole of America”, as they go about their everyday lives. The satire ranges from Trout's stories poking fun at how seriously we take our arbitrary notions, to pointing out ingrained and internalised sexism, racism, consumerism and even some throwaway discussions on the environment.
Vonnegut's self-insertion, the amateurish drawings on display (always prefaced with “they look something like this”), and his warped worldview make for quite the ride. Even though I can understand why some might deride this, it made for brutal, maximalist and hilariously poignant reading. You go from “how the fuck did someone think of this?” to “yeah, I'm going to hell for laughing at this” in five seconds flat, and those are the best kinds of novels, as we all know. And so on.

7/10
Although I've never seen My Fair Lady (a travesty, I know), I've heard of it quite a bit - so reading the source play made a lot of sense when I picked this up.
The story is simple enough - two bachelors making a bet to themselves that they could pass off a flower girl as a princess in six months - and the younger of the two falling in love (or not, it's never made clear) with the flower girl in the process.
I'll not spoil it for others who've never read it, but the ending was a welcome surprise. There are two endings in the version I read, along with a sequel of sorts - in which Shaw elaborates why he chose the ending he did (which is rife with casual sexism), but if you can get past that - I suppose it does make sense.
Pygmalion was a pleasant and short read, with some laugh-out-loud moments - I couldn't have asked for anything more.

It is recognisable for its influence, and the “don't aspire beyond the human limits of knowledge” is a tale as old as time itself, but this still holds up magnificently, which I wasn't expecting.
A play written in blank verse with the theme of a repentant God, an unrepentant Devil, and a human having sold his soul to the latter in exchange for knowledge and relief from boredom sounds (and is) exciting. It helps that Marlowe keeps it simple, doesn't get too preachy, and fills up the gaps nicely even with a foregone conclusion.
TL;DR - don't sell your soul to the Devil, with a capital D - who would have guessed?

Capitalist Realism was thought-provoking and somewhat deserved its status as a classic introduction to post-Marxism.
Fisher rightly highlights how capitalism portrays itself as having no alternative, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and terms this as inherently anti-utopian ‘Capitalist Realism'. It doesn't matter that the rise of free markets means ever-increasing inequality, the demise of public education and healthcare, and growing disillusionment and apathy - all that matters is capitalism cannot be allowed to perish. Consequently, capitalism is not constrained by politics anymore - instead, political systems fight amongst themselves to carve a space within capitalism.
Fisher also highlights capitalist realism as encouraging interpassivity (or protesting capitalism through media consumption). He also tries to view mental health through the lens of his theory (coining a term called reflexive impotence). People recognise that capitalism is inherently flawed, but they also believe they can do nothing about it -leading to a lack of self-worth and depression. I somewhat disagree with this argument because not every mental health issue can be laid at capitalism's doorstep, but I digress.
It is frighteningly easy to get lost in the doom-and-gloom. Still, to Fisher's credit, he's not a (complete) doomer - he provides meaningful criticism, added on with a warning not to get too cynical about democracy and the State because what good has ever come of handing over the entire public sphere to the industry?
All in all, an eye-opening experience and one which I wish I had read much sooner. Must-read.

This book taught me two things - the first being that there's always something new to be gained from novels, and sometimes to the point that it could be life-changing. The second would be the fact that there is always some half-forgotten books lying around in your home, just waiting for your attention - finish it, before buying something new.
This book was a gift to Mom by Dad back in 2005 - and it's been with us ever since. I don't know why I suddenly got the urge to read it a week ago, but I found this collection of blank verses at the perfect time in my life.
Apart from a few pages scattered with tidbits that have not aged well at all - Hugh Prather was really on to something here. Orwell said that “The best books are those that tell you what you know already.”, and I feel that this holds here - there's nothing that feels inaccessible, pandering, or otherworldly - in fact, Notes to Myself is utterly readable and a solid work of art. I won't spoil it, but suffice to say, there's something here for everyone.

What is one supposed to do with this book? It was the literary equivalent of cotton candy - full to the brim with sweetness but with a very faint aftertaste, and you begin to wonder if it was even worth it. But then again, it was interesting in the moment, right?
Outliers is also spectacularly optimistic (‘successful' people become that way because of luck and destiny, and not only because they are geniuses! The traditional notion of modern genius is antiquated. It probably needs to be quashed altogether) or pessimistic (if it's going to take so much luck and embracing your cultural heritage and being born in January for success, then I might as well not bother), depending on how you look at it. Plus, the fact that the author's claims that not having summer vacation is good for learning outcomes for poor students just annoyed me because apparently - good teachers and learning paradigms are not good enough? And some ‘sacrifice' is expected?
Here, you always get the feeling the author is working backwards - starting from wanting to quash the notion of outliers, and cherrypicking his way into feel-good neoliberal ‘meritocratic' discussions, without offering or even hinting at a structural change. I also didn't feel the topic was deep enough to warrant a book written on it. Magazine article in the Economist? Sure. But a 300-page book? Not the best idea.

8.5/10
Hard-hitting in all the right ways, Maus is as equally focused on the victims of the Holocaust as they suffered through it, as well on what happened after. Plus, I liked Spiegelman's depictions of humans from different races/nationalities being portrayed as various species of animals - because, after all, isn't that why the Second World War took place? I was also sold on the distinctions more or less breaking down near the end, which is what Spiegelman was going for - how arbitrary and fragile the differences we create are.
Truly one of the great graphic novels. An immensely readable and accessible account of the horrors of the 1930s and 40s, I'd highly recommend this.

7/10
Grand in scope but let down in part by the medium and some baffling decisions by the creators, Logicomix is still a fascinating read.
I've always loved it when serious topics are explored visually, whether in animation or books - but Logicomix overextends and underextends itself in turn. At the altar of brevity and mass appeal, it sacrifices accuracy, but this wouldn't have mattered so much if the crucial details covered were at the least in-depth, which they were sadly not.
A case in point is that Apostolos mentions Godel, Wittgenstein, Hilbert, von Neumann, and other giants, but he annoyingly glosses over their contributions. The book also repeatedly jumps out and into Athens or the ‘real world' instead of the comic world to explain some of its decisions to the reader - but this breaking the fourth wall is only partially effective since its novelty wears off quickly. It is utilized to excellent effect only near the end.
Where the book shines the most is letting its audience know, through comics, about Godel's incompleteness theorem of the first and second-order, Russell's paradox, and Wittgenstein's metaphysical theories - a sentence I could not imagine writing a day ago. And that fact alone is worth most, in not all of, the acclaim.

9/10
It's so easy to get lost in the Iranian media making up stories about the West and vice versa. In Iran's view, everything was going great till the West intervened because of the potential of oil and ruined the region forever. In the West's view, Iran was a repressive region that knew only one thing - to brutalise its citizens, and it had to intervene. But what is the truth, really?
Marjane Satrapi, the great-granddaughter of Iran's last emperor, brings a lot of light to the issue through her memoir. Still, at the same time, you have to be a simpleton to misconstrue the autobiography as a study on the history of Iran. Partially it is that, yes, but it is so much more.
Marjane bares it all - her vulnerabilities; her acts of stupidity; her views on religion, Iran and feminism; but most of all - her bravery. Islam and liberalism are neither glorified nor portrayed as the be-all-end-all of everything - there's a nuanced portrayal visible. No act of courage is great or small - whether it's making trousers partially visible outside the veil or whether it's protesting for human rights along with your family.
There's so much to take away from this masterpiece - whether it's the multifaceted interpretation of human ‘rights' or how intersectional feminism plays out in real life. It's incredible just how many topics Marjane touches upon, but the topic that touched me the most would be Marjane's relationship with her parents. Her parents don't ask her if anything is wrong if she looks troubled, and they respect her privacy. They let her make her own choices, regardless of the possible outcome, as seen when Marjane's father admitted that he knew she would get separated from Reza. Marjane wholeheartedly admits that her own family is not perfect but still loves them all the same - I think that should be the real takeaway from the novel. Must-read.

9/10
To give a brief introduction, Leibniz was an Enlightenment-era philosopher whose mantra could be simplified to ‘This is the best of all possible worlds.' Now, anyone who has stepped outside the bounds of their homes knows that this is not the case. Another philosopher of the same era, Voltaire, seemed to be infuriated with it – Candide was written to attack Leibnizian optimism and ridiculed government, military, religion, money, and the concept of honour itself.
When things seem to be getting better, Candide jumps to an entirely new plotline which makes you lose hope. That, to me, is Voltaire's genius. He leaves no holds barred in his unrelenting attack on optimism, so much so that each person takes for granted the horrors of our existence, even when confronted with it first-hand. Cunégonde's caretaker narrates the act of her buttocks being eaten by slavers for survival with an astounding lack of interest in the matter. Candide, the eponymous character, undergoes almost every calamity possible – ranging from being thrown out from his residence to nearly being hanged and even narrowly escaping from cannibals. There are dozens of such tales scattered across the text, and at some point, I just started laughing at Voltaire's ‘show, don't tell' philosophy – this novella might be the best example of the phrase I've ever seen.
Although abrupt, the ending felt perfect – primarily because of what it took for Candide to realise that we cannot always view the world through rose-tinted glasses – it helps to have a sense of realism, however tiny. Philosophy apart, Candide is a beautiful read, and it deserves its place in the Western canon.

Don't panic.
Only rarely does any media manage to merge sci-fi with humour - for most other genres, they can meet sci-fi somewhere in between, but it isn't easy to meld comedy, from my experience.
H2G2 towers above the rest when it comes to this - through a spectacular mixture of humour in the vein of Monty Python, surrealism/absurdism and excellent quotes.
There's little to no plot, considering the novel takes its hitchhiking aspects seriously - so the book is just characters meeting, interacting and then moving on. This lack of story can understandably be a dealbreaker to many (the destruction of Earth takes place within the first few chapters, and it's just glossed over). But if you can read beyond that, H2G2 begins to take a life of its own. Another plot point I loved was the treatment of sentience - and the iconic ‘the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.'
All in all, as an intro to the series, I couldn't have asked for anything better - and even read as a standalone piece, the humour is amazing - well worth reading for, and I'm looking forward to reading the entire series soon.

I have no idea whom this book (collection of essays, to be more accurate) is aimed at. The liberals and leftists who might be swayed over to anarchism? Something for the centrist or conservative to ponder over? For the politically-inclined language theorist? Or all of the above?
Keeping aside the stream-of-consciousness narrative (this is a common feature of all Chomsky texts, but it is most apparent here) made it a vaguely illuminating read. As an idealist at heart - Chomsky raises a valid point in saying that anarchism is the belief of questioning those in authority as to how they got their power in the first place - if they can't prove that there is a reason for their existence, then they should be dismantled. More strikingly, it doesn't simply apply to businesses - but also for the government.
To most, this all sounds very romantic, not in the ‘this will take a lot of time to be achieved' way but in the ‘unicorns will fart rainbows before this ever happens' way. To assuage these concerns, Chomsky assures the reader that this is possible - it was seen before in large swathes of Spain in the Spanish civil war, during 1936. Revolutionary Catalonia didn't implode - the then-government crushed the spontaneous revolution with the help of Russia.
So there you have it. A primer to anarchism as a viable philosophy? It sounds like fun reading!
But that is sadly not the case. The book is sometimes too nuanced, name-dropping terms that the reader is expected to know. Then, on the other hand, there are some very simplistic interviews, all saying more or less the same thing - the book feels to drag even with its short length. But the simplicity of Chomsky's arguments is so magnificent that when you're reading it, all of this will not strike you.
This book is probably not the best first read if you're looking to get familiar with anarchism as a philosophy, but as someone looking to read up more on the topic, it's not exactly a bad read. I would recommend it solely because it's a breeze to go through, and it raises some hard questions.