The world is a book

I've half a dozen books on the go and, not atypically, I'm making little progress with any of them. They all suggest some kind of world view which I attempt to summarise here without pretension, in case you should want to follow up and in case I forget what I'm reading.

• Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore: the world is full of clandestine mysticism and illogical aggression.


• Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony: the world is lonely and unpleasant, though a few have sufficient fortune to ensure that they evade suffering.


• Albert Einstein, Relativity: the special and general theory: it is difficult to make a true measure of the world from our vantage point without it being based on axiom.


• Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics: while we cannot know what is good about the world, all our actions may aim at something good.


• Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism: what the world is not but may be is far more important than what it is now.


• Gavin Menzies, 1421: most of the world was discovered by the Chinese before the Europeans, but the evidence for this was subsequently destroyed.