All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - Adam Curtis

This is actually a series of three BBC documentaries.  It is actually a critical history of most, if not all, the important cultural, intellectual and social factors/powers/themes of the past 60 years.
Kind of disturbing, as I am personally familiar with most of what he examines...
The first one is called Love and Power, and looks at how computer logic coupled with the extreme rationalism (supposedly) of Ayn Rand's philosophy combine to distort our understanding of society, ourselves, and the world around us.  It traces the emergence of the model of the "machine" and how it has come to be applied to more and more areas of life.  The concept of systems and how it simplifies and distorts our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.
A fascinating but complex film - ties in Silicon Valley with Buckminster Fuller, the commune movement and the 60's counterculture, the rise of Wall Street, the demise of the political class, the ties between the Federal Reserve and Wall Street - Curtis just hits on everything, even Richard Brautigan!  The concept of decentralized social order based on direct communication and crowd sourcing of social evolution, as currently embodied in the internet, formerly in the idea of communes.  How the disenchantment with politics, coupled with the Ayn Rand extreme individualism and the concept of materialism applied to people and society, has empowered business elites and left most of us in a position of powerlessness.  Our refusal to deal with issues of politics and power (and class) in our social discourse - the issue that seems to have scuppered commune movement - you can only wonder who's interest it is in to make such discussion and analysis socially unacceptable...

All told with many great clips from the BBC archives.  As a film in itself, cry creatively executed.

Brings back lots of memories of Sue and her friends, and other hippy types I hung out with when I was 16, 17, 18.

This concept of systems - yes, the systems Curtis looks at are false, simplified.  They are not, nor can be, the truth.  In line with that saying, "The menu is not the meal."  But this goes back to the idea that all systems in the end are false.  They are constructs of our intellect, therefore limited by who and what we are, what we know (R.D. Lang - our understanding is limited by what we don't know, and because we don't know what we don't know, there's not much we can do about it.  Which leads to Robert Andon Wilson's "Maybe Logic".)  Maybe the problem is in the wanting to find a system that explains everything, in the need to develop the overarching theory, the desire to eliminate contradiction, opacity and inconsistency.  The desire to Understand with a capital U - Dr. Faust.   The desire for certainty.  Any system contains within itself its own seeds of destruction - the phenomena it can't contain. Worship of reason leading to a kind of hubris leading to what is essentially a tragedy - many of the scientists Curtis looks at were pretty weird fucks...  Science as the new religion in the sense that it promotes and produces all the same evils and negative effects that grow out of dogmatic religion.

Any Human Heart - William Boyd

Any Human Heart is a very entertaining read and an ambitious book.  The story follows the life of Logan Mountstuart, whose life spans most of the 20th century.  As a novelist, and later and art dealer, as a character he has access to many of the important literary and art figures and movements of the 20th century.  He lives at times in London, at times in Paris and for a while in New York.
This character and structure allows Boyd to use the book as an exploration of some of the major artistic movements of the 20th century as well as some of the changes in social conditions in England in particular, as well as in the U.S.  (there are some hilarious scenes with Logan as a senior living in poverty in Thatcher's England).  Mix in politics and the various wars of the 20th century, and you have a sprawling book.
It is not academic - I suspect Boyd chose to include his own favourite figures and artistic movements rather than go for an encyclopaedic approach.  Fortunately we have similar tastes.
Everything Boyd writes is both entertaining and dense.

Dark Age Ahead - Jane Jacobs

Jacobs is an interesting thinker in that she is writing about many of the key issues of the late 20th century, but not as an expert.  She writes as a knowledgeable, thinking person who is living and acting in the context of these issues:  family and social breakdown, the growing but dysfunctional urban environment more and more of us live in, perversion of public dialogue by self-seeking experts, domination of the social and political sphere by the interests of elites and the wealthy, the erosion of meaningful education.
The other think that makes her interesting is that she is writing within the context of Canada and Toronto, as well as the U.S.
While her style is at times a bit painful, the book is worth reading for its ideas.

The Literary Life of Cairo - Samia Mehrez ed.

This books is a collection of extracts from novels and stories of the 20th century.  Useful primarily as a source for Egyptian novelists and famous novels to try and dig up.

Maybe Logic - Robert Anton Wilson

A DVD by a very interesting character from the 60s who recently died.  A great look into some of the underlying philosophy and thinking from the more interesting fringes of the 60s.  The idea of "reality tunnels" and many other philosophical (ontological) speculations.  Worth watching again.

The Widow's Son - Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson is an interesting figure I recently discovered somehow.  His roots go back to that very seminal time of the 60s, a time who's threads seem to have largely evaporated.  I recently watched his DVD, Maybe Logic.  He is a figure I would like to explore more - he raises issues and questions about what was at the heart of that strange period of the 60s and 70s.  The easy explanation is that it was essentially the result of an unprecedented surge in demographics.  Maybe so, but that doesn't have anything to do with the validity of some of the ideas explored at the time - Barthes, Leary, R D Lang, Alan Watts and many others.  I feel an urge to go back and look at all of this, to look beneath the caricature and media hype that blew up around all of this like an obscuring dust storm.
The book itself, The Widow's Son, was not a great read.  One of those Idea oriented books, with tonnes of footnotes pulled from a rather peculiar early 20th century figure, de Selby (real person...)
I would rather read an open exploration of the ideas themselves.

October 1970 - Louis Hamelin

An excellent novelistic look at the October Crisis in Quebec.  Hamelin has spent a lot of time with the accounts and research material around this historical event.  He sees the novel as a hypothesis to explain certain holes, inconsistencies and lacunae in the historical record.  His version of the story is highly plausible when you consider some of the manipulative political shenanigans that were going on around the world at that time.  This book also links in with some of the other cultural figures from the 60s and 70s that I have been thinking about lately.  Very well-written.  Makes you want to go and look into that time period.
I wish I had read it in French - I tried to find it but the title is so unlike the English version:  La Constellation du lynx.  This title puts a completely different spin on the book.  The English title focuses on the historical side of the novel.  The French title puts the focus on a symbol, a metaphor, a trope that repeats throughout the book - the recurring presence of a lynx.
To reread in French later.

Dance Dance Dance - Haruki Murakami

Not sure where I picked up the reference to this author - wish I could, as the novel was quite quirky and a good read.  Murakami is a modern Japanese author who seems to have been strongly influenced stylistically and tonally by the noir genre of American detective novels.  While the main character is not a detective, he spends most of the book trying to unravel a mystery, or series of linked mysteries introduced into his life through some kind of paranormal experience.   There is something of the Paul Auster mysteries in this book, but it is more disturbing and unpredictable, less of a philosophical or existential exercise.

It's hard to say in any sense what the book is really about, either story-wise or theme-wise.  It hangs together though, partly as a look at some kind of life experience existing beneath or outside the normal surfaces of existence.  Almost like some kind of parallel universe.  I suspect I may have gotten the reference from Robert Anton Wilson, as there is something of the idea of reality tunnels at the heart of this book.

I would like to find more by this author to see if he carries through with this approach.