39 Book Reviews
My Reviews
These are the 39 books I managed to get to on Goodreads, pecked into my phone in an attempt to create some sort of record of my mental literary catalog. It is not inaccurate to say that many books read on this journey never got written up. I had an LLM whip up the summaries, ai-drawn from the language in my reviews, as a shorthand reference. But rest assured, every review you decide to read was written by me.
Money, Bitcoin, and Financial Power
Hidden Repression by Alex Gladstein
Pernicious IMF and World Bank lending that guts the Global South via odious debt, without the consent of the governed. Fact-heavy, bullet-rich, incredibly valuable.
The Great Taking by David Webb
The powers that control the financial system are preparing for a global heist of the assets held in all the banks by regular people. Well-backed, unsettling.
The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous
The seminal introduction to bitcoin. Required reading.
The Bitcoin Miner's Almanac by Robert Warren
Fresh, sharp tone carrying peak signal at high efficiency. Part one especially.
Consciousness, PSI, and the Paranormal
ESP in Life and Lab by Louisa E. Rhine
Like watching paint dry, if you happen to enjoy the color of its paint. A framework for everyday ESP: precognitive dreams, psychokinesis, telepathy, and unclassified psi occurrences.
The End of Suffering by James J. Hurtak
A synthesis of Buddhist teaching and quantum theory. Limitless mind, expanded non-local awareness, and the co-arising consequences of such states.
The Sun and the Shadow by Kenneth Kelzer
Fact-based lucid dreaming research from the Edgar Cayce Foundation. Important, fringe, and largely unknown.
How to Walk Through Walls
An experiment in pushing the algorithm. Enjoyed its zany dimensions.
Spiritual Paths and Teachings
The Holy Science by Swami Sri Yukteswar
Scientists and sages are the same. Yukteswar was both. Best for those who have read Autobiography of a Yogi and want the enlightened mechanical wisdom of his teacher.
Be Here Now by Ram Dass
The journey from Harvard professor to devotee of Maharaj-ji. A highly evolved being covering serious ground.
Meetings with Remarkable Men by G.I. Gurdjieff
Journey with Gurdjieff across the Far East to a school for adepts. Stilts across the Gobi Desert included.
The Essene Gospel of Peace, Book 1
A jewel of insight, including the Earth's Prayer, the Essene counterpart to the Lord's Prayer.
Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path by Rudolf Steiner
A road to freedom. On why moral misunderstanding is impossible between people who think for themselves.
The Cloud upon the Sanctuary by Karl von Eckartshausen
Five letters of Christian mysticism. An excellent piece of meditative literature.
How to Know Higher Worlds by Rudolf Steiner
An illumined exposition on the path to initiation. For anyone who wants to be a servant of the world.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
Open this oyster and find a pearl of wisdom.
Literature and Fiction
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by J.D. Salinger
A title that frustrated me for years, appeased and dismissed in 107 pages. Seemingly verbose, secretly cathartic.
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
An inverted timeline: the Axis won WWII. Dick leans on the I Ching, the Tao, and Wu. Written in pigeon-English.
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
High-concept psi-fi seedlings. Half-lifers, psi-wars, image engineering. Disjointed but foundational to everything after.
VALIS by Philip K. Dick
PKD's last published novel. A philosophical treatise on the Vast Active Living Intelligence System that beamed Phil with a pink light in 1974.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
Not Dick's best, but the parallel-reality tension is real. Phil said parts were a facsimile of Acts, which he had never read.
The Trial by Franz Kafka
A book that wound its way into my heart, much like the journey through an exhausting labyrinth towards an unapproachable center.
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Borges shrink-wraps the riddles of our universe into paragraphs. His sentences move like shrapnel from a landmine.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
Ahh, to delve into the musings of a poet in Paris. Brigge is a facet of Rilke, not to be ignored.
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Pales next to Slaughterhouse-Five. Occasionally funny, mostly sad. The illustrations and Americana make the book.
The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver
Touted as a bitcoin book, the manuscript only mentions the word once. Despite this, a kaleidoscope of sound money spawned literary themes.
The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tiny nuggets of intellectual gold. Read in any order. More profound than Thoreau, his popular pupil.
How to Slay a Wizard by Owen Benjamin
Benjamin's field guide to word magic: how language gets weaponized for manipulation, from the Wizard of Oz through Bernays to contemporary politics.
Five Great Modern Irish Plays
Riders to the Sea alone is one of the strongest one-act plays I have ever read.
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ah to be young, brilliant and in love.
Candide by Voltaire
DIY garden.
Nineteen Stories by Joseph Voelbel
I loved it and should because I wrote it.
Philosophy, Power, and Systems
Propaganda by Edward Bernays
A skimpy little yellow book that takes the mystique off the wizard behind the curtain. Bernays on the hidden ruling body that controls the minds of the masses.
Reclaim Your Sovereignty by David E. Robinson
The strawman game with teethy citations. We are not our all-caps name; the corp USA is in debt to the Crown.
Novum Organum by Francis Bacon
Bacon was a top notch observationalist. His analysis of heat and cold puts to shame any Wikipedia entry. Rigorous faith alongside earnest science.
The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
A wonderfully gnostic work written by a Roman dignitary falsely imprisoned for treason. On how bad things happen to good people.
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
On moral freedom: to be governed by appetite alone is slavery. Succinct, well-constructed.
Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough
An entirely new vision of design: technical nutrients return to the technical cycle, biological nutrients return to the earth.
The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler
Three biographies, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and a sense of the marvelous and stupid in how we came to see the universe.
![Francis Bacon's Novum Organum [A Review]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f5/8a/f58a0e4c-adb6-4bf2-af7b-1f99298af144/content/images/2026/04/feature-bacon-1.png)
articles straight to your inbox. unsubscribe anytime.
Joseph Voelbel designs learning curriculum and writes about money, systems, and meaning. Author of Pay Attention to Bitcoin (2024), a crash-course primer on sound money, Nineteen Stories (2017), an exploration of the unknown, and This Plant Will Grow (2026), a children's book about a plant that becomes a rainforest.