In the past, I’ve done yearly round-ups where I reviewed a couple of books that I have read in the past year (#reading/retrospective ), but I learned over time that memory fades and recency bias is real, so I thought for this year I would try to write a quick recap every month.
One of my new year resolutions to is actually finish all the books I’ve bought and now are sitting on my bookshelf, waiting to be picked up. A lot of the books I hadn’t read were books that I picked up when I went to Indonesia last January, and I finished them all this month.
The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut
Growing up, I’ve read many books and Wikipedia entries about scientific geniuses and their world-changing discoveries, but few have left me as unsettled as Labatut’s “The MANIAC.” The book isn’t merely a biography of John von Neumann—it’s a haunting exploration that weaves fact and fiction to show what happens when a mind operates so far beyond ordinary human limitations that it begins to reshape reality itself. Von Neumann was a mathematical prodigy whose work birthed both modern computing and nuclear weapons, and the book shows us how the same brilliance that solves humanity’s problems can simultaneously create our greatest threats.
What pulled me in wasn’t just von Neumann himself, but how Labatut reveals him through the eyes of others—colleagues, friends, family. It’s almost comical to call them “side characters” when many were themselves revolutionary scientists of the twentieth century—Feynman, Turing, Oppenheimer—and yet in von Neumann’s presence, even these giants seemed to shrink slightly, becoming witnesses to something that exceeded even their considerable understanding. They became my guides through the labyrinth of genius, watching this mind at work with both awe and unease. They notice things about von Neumann that he can’t see in himself, mainly his moral blind spots and the humanity that he can’t seem to comprehend, or maybe refuses to acknowledge, for the sake of scientific advancement. They are witnesses to history, but also to the human being behind the calculations. I wonder if they saw what was coming, carrying pieces of our future in their collective understanding, not fully grasping what would grow from it. Neither do we, I suppose.
Pulang by Leila S. Chudori
Pulang pulled me through time and across continents, from the 1965 anti-communist purges to the 1998 student protests, following Indonesian journalist Dimas Suryo from Jakarta to his exile in Paris. Chudori weaves together food, memory, and politics in a way that made me hungry in multiple senses: for Indonesian cuisine, for understanding, for reconciliation with the past. It’s clearly a well-researched novel, and the writing flows nicely despite navigating decades of complex political history. My only critique is that I struggled with the various points of view that seemed to blend together; all characters seemed to share the same sensibilities, referencing the same authors and expressing similar talking points. The only differences seemed to be in the choices they make in life, while internally they felt like variations of the same character. I’m not sure if this was intentional—perhaps instead of an oversight, it was a subtle criticism of people belonging to the same intellectual circles and political movements, who knows.
The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada
A book for the Curious Box book club, even though for some reason I ended up not attending the meeting itself, but I loved this book. In just over 100 pages, this book does what three years of therapy couldn’t—it made me realize I’m not crazy for finding office life surreal. The story follows three employees with meaningless jobs at an enormous factory complex: one shreds papers nobody reads, another proofs documents she doesn’t understand, and the third studies moss growing on the factory grounds. The beauty of Oyamada’s prose is how it normalizes the strange until you find yourself accepting paper shredding, moss growing, and bird watching as perfectly reasonable occupations. I found this an easy read despite the absurdity because I could immediately recognize the pointless rituals of workplaces I’ve been in—the reports no one reads, the meetings that circle back on themselves—and sometimes I’ve wondered if I too was being slowly absorbed into some incomprehensible organism. The book’s dreamlike quality doesn’t even bother to clarify what era it takes place in, and by the end I didn’t even need to know what the factory manufactures or what these people actually do. In reality, work can be—and is often—just as absurd.
Besides the three books above, I also read The Book of Jakarta: A City in Short Fiction edited by Maesy Ang & Teddy W. Kusuma, Jakarta - A History of a Misunderstood City by Herald van der Linde, and Mimi Lemon by Chyntia Haryadi.