Topi Kettunen

What I Read in September 2023

During September I seemed to spend quite a bit of time by reading books about addiction due to personal reasons.

Judtih Grisel: Never Enough

Grisel’s book focused mainly on how different substances work and how they cause addictions offering wonderful knowledge about the drug use and the development of human brain. Great book!

Gabor Maté: In the Realm of Hungry Ghost

Maté’s book approached addiction from the point of view of trying to answer why people become addicts. One of the most common factors between hard addicts seems to be, according to Maté, some form of trauma that causes them to seek chemical satisfaction from various substances. Book also raises a great point that addiction is really a spectrum. Everyone of us lies in some place in this spectrum.

Dr. Tom O. Bryan: You Can Fix Your Brain

While fixing somebody’s brain is definitely a hard task, it is not impossible. Bryan raises a point in this book that there is no silver-bullet for fixing your brain, but it is possible with small wins in multiple small areas. He calls these four faces of brain health pyramid, which are structure, mindset, biochemistry and electromagnetism, with what you can design a protocol for yourself.

Herman Hesse: Siddhartha (reread, but this time in German)

I’ve been tremendously interested in Buddhism ever since I was a teenager and I would consider myself being a practicing Buddhist. I have decided to start taking this practice more and more serious to try to fix somethings in my life. Siddhartha Gautama’s story is obviously a crucial part of the whole thing and Hesse’s book is a great novel for painting a picture of this. I’ve read this book earlier but in Finnish and English. Since last year I moved to Germany, I’ve been practicing my German and, at the same time, I’ve never been a huge fan of translations in books since I always feel that something always gets lost during the translation. So to improve my German I decided to read this book in its original language, German! While I’m very familiar with the story, from reading this book earlier but also from stuff like Pali canon, it’s still one of my favorite books!