On the Shelf
Books I have read and what stuck with me. Reviews with a point of view, not a summary.
Jason A BellFollow On the Shelf
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- 01PublishedJune 9, 2025
The Little Black Classics: Eve of St Agnes by John Keats
A slim Penguin volume of Keats brings together five poems that, read side by side, map the full range of his Romantic vision: love and beauty, imagination and its limits, passion and permanence.
- 02PublishedOctober 17, 2025
The Terrifying Cost of Genius: A Review of When We Cease to Understand the World
A review of Benjamin Labatut's genre-bending "non-fiction novel," which humanizes the titans of 20th-century physics and forces us to sit with the high price of discovery.
- 03PublishedDecember 21, 2025
The Technological Republic: All Diagnosis, No Cure
Alexander Karp's manifesto is a sharp, necessary critique of Silicon Valley's lost ambition, but it is all complaints and no solutions: a rallying cry that goes nowhere.
- 04PublishedDecember 31, 2025
Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green
A review of John Green's Everything Is Tuberculosis, a book that argues our deadliest infection persists not for lack of science, but because of the historical and social stigmas we still refuse to confront.