I finished reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance today. It’s an excellent book, covering a broad swathe of life in India during The Emergency, a period of what was essentially dictatorship form 1975 to 1977. It’s also extremely depressing.
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I finished Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal yesterday. In summary, the book is a statement of Krugman’s views on a modern society’s optimal economic setup, the fact that he believes that the United States of the 1950s–1970s was much closer to that setup than it was before or has been since, and his theories on how that state was reached, lost, and can be reached again.
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Last Monday I went to a Long Now Foundation seminar by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan—both books I would recommend to just about everyone. The title of the talk was “The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought”, and while Taleb did talk about our historic inability to predict what was going to happen in the future, I didn’t feel that ‘future craziness’ was actually a major theme. (If you change “Crazier” to “More Unpredictable” you get a more accurate title.)
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This is a fourth-order post, a post about a post about a review of a book. Such are the times we live in. Which times, according to the book, are not necessarily cut off from much of human existence by the division of the past into history and ‘prehistory’. The blog post is Internal Affairs: Biochemistry and the Body Politic, the review is Steve Mithen in the London Review of Books on Daniel Lord Smail’s Deep History and the Brain.
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Radegund recently posted a “book meme”, listing the 106 (no idea why that number, but hey) books most listed as “unread” by users on LibraryThing (a kind of book version of Last.fm). I hadn’t known about LibraryThing before, and it looks interesting. In any case the idea is to list how many of the 106 you’ve read, so I did that.
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The Pale Blue Eye is a historical thriller set in 1830s America, at West Point Military Academy. A murder there brings a retired police constable, Augustus Landor, back to work, and in the course of his duties he becomes friendly with one of the cadets—Edgar Allan Poe.
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I’m not a Harry Potter fan, and so haven’t been caught up in the hype surrounding the movie or the release of the final book. I read the first one, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, in 2000 and didn’t enjoy it. I felt it was lacking something, possibly depth. Yes, it was aimed at children, but so was the His Dark Materials trilogy, which displayed no such lack. That being said, I don’t have anything against the books per se, apart from occasional irritation at the hype (and the copyright-law heavy-handedness from the publishers). Apparently a significant number of groups feel rather differently.
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I loved Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I consider an extremely important book for understanding how the world came to be the way it is. Collapse is more important for understanding where we may be going.
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I haven’t been reading very much recently. I did finish The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Four Pillars of Investing recently, but overall it’s been a rather slow year, almost half gone already and only nine books finished.
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On the Grannan family’s recommendation, I recently read William Bernstein’s The Four Pillars of Investing. It’s really good, and I see no reason not to recommend it to more or less everyone.
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I tend to buy too many books when I go to bookstores. Today Jamie wanted to check out what the Modern Times bookstore had, so I tagged along, clearly a foolish move.
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Last month I wrote about wanting to change my reading habits, so that I would think more while reading, and read more critically. Since resolving to do this, the main difference is that I’ve been reading far less.
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It’s been a little over a year since Seth and I started reading Sartre’s Essays in Existentialism. We haven’t met quite every week, but probably haven’t missed more than six or so sessions.
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The Malazan Book of the Fallen is a series of fantasy novels by Steven Erikson (and possibly also by Ian Cameron Esslemont). I started reading it way back in late 2000/early 2001.
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I tend to read a lot, and I tend to read very quickly. I’m wondering if I should alter my approach.
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He died last week, after a long illness. His work has been a big influence on my life, so I wanted to mark his passing.
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So this is only about six years late…
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I picked up K. J. Bishop’s debut novel in Stacey’s the other day, based on an employee recommendation, and started reading it on the flight. So far I’ve been very impressed, and the writing has made me sit up and take notice.
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I was thinking about this at a party I was at this evening, and commented that sharing books is one of the pleasures in life. Upon reflection, I think this is really true, that I do absolutely love sharing books with friends.
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Closer, closer to this millennium…
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Century Rain doesn’t take place in the same universe as the other Alastair Reynolds books I’ve read (Redemption Ark, Revelation Space, Chasm City). This universe posits an Earth abandoned by humans after a nanotechnological disaster.
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Slightly late, but getting closer… soon I might reach books I read this millennium.
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Not sure how many fans of his read my blog, but he’s dying and is apparently in need of cash. If you appreciated his work, you can donate money via PayPal (details can be found at that link). He’s certainly added a lot to the richness of my life through his work, and I wish him all the best.