Which of the Following Vitamins Is Important in a Woman's Diet Before She Conceives a Baby?
For an overview, it's probably easier to look on Goodreads.
Now
Fav
| Title |
|---|
| Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997) by Dave Hickey |
| Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (2004) by John Pilger |
| Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (1995) by Jeremy Bernstein |
| Selected Essays of Michel de Montaigne (1592) by Michel de Montaigne |
| Bad Science (2008) by Ben Goldacre |
| Meditations (180) by Marcus Aurelius |
| The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
| Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner (1987) by Alistair Reid |
| The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995) by Ted Honderich |
| How to Actually Change Your Mind (Rationality: From AI to Zombies) (2018) by Eliezer Yudkowsky |
| Ficciones (1944) by Jorge Luis Borges |
| Oxford Book of Essays (1991) by John Gross |
| Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) by Ludwig Wittgenstein |
| A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997) by David Foster Wallace |
| Rationality: From AI to Zombies (2015) by Eliezer Yudkowsky |
| What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (2014) by Randall Munroe |
| Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) by Ted Chiang |
| The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3) (2017) by Ada Palmer |
| The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) by Nick Bostrom |
| The Hedonistic Imperative (2015) by David Pearce |
| The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth (2016) by Robin Hanson |
| Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (2018) by Hans Rosling |
| Mortal Questions (1979) by Thomas Nagel |
| Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Help Others, Do Work that Matters, and Make Smarter Choices about Giving Back (2015) by William MacAskill |
| Library of Scott Alexandria (2015) by Scott Alexander |
| Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972) by Peter Singer |
| Save Yourself, Mammal!: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection (2011) by Zach Weinersmith |
| Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Antifragile, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, The Bed of Procrustes (2011) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
| The God That Failed (1949) by Richard Crossman |
| Brewer's Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics: An A-Z of Roguish Britons Through the Ages (2002) by William Donaldson |
| Guards! Guards! (Discworld, #8; City Watch #1) (1989) by Terry Pratchett |
| The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse by Robert Crawford |
| What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (1999) by Charles Bukowski |
| Tales from Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #5) (2001) by Ursula K. Le Guin |
| Map and Territory by Eliezer Yudkowsky |
| Computing machinery and intelligence (1950) by Alan Turing |
| Watchmen (1987) by Alan Moore |
| Beyond Good and Evil (1886) by Friedrich Nietzsche |
| The Penguin Book of English Verse (2000) by Paul Keegan |
| Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov |
| Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung (1987) by Lester Bangs |
| Blindsight (Firefall, #1) (2006) by Peter Watts |
| Small Gods (Discworld, #13) (1992) by Terry Pratchett |
| Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) by David Foster Wallace |
| Right Ho, Jeeves (Jeeves, #6) (1934) by P.G. Wodehouse |
| The Book of Disquiet (1982) by Fernando Pessoa |
| The Patrick Melrose Novels (2012) by Edward St. Aubyn |
| Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) by Herman Melville |
| Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace |
| The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life (2017) by Kevin Simler |
| Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) by Cormac McCarthy |
| The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975) by Ursula K. Le Guin |
| Poems of the Late T'ang (1965) by A.C. Graham |
| What Should We Be Worried About? Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night (2014) by John Brockman |
| Iain Crichton Smith: Selected Poems (1986) by Iain Crichton Smith |
| Collected Poems (1988) by Czesław Miłosz |
| Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo (2004) by Werner Herzog |
| Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007) by Clive James |
| Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (1962) by Jorge Luis Borges |
| Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James (2001) by Clive James |
| Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened (2013) by Allie Brosh |
| Travels With Myself and Another (1979) by Martha Gellhorn |
| Collected Poems (1988) by Philip Larkin |
Sort by controversy
Books I most disagree with others about:
| Title | My Rating | Average Rating |
|---|---|---|
| The Prophet | 1 | 4.22 |
| The Alexandria Quartet | 1 | 4.17 |
| The Gift of Death | 1 | 4.11 |
| The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness | 1 | 4.09 |
| How to Be an Existentialist: or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses | 1 | 3.95 |
| The Five People You Meet in Heaven | 1 | 3.94 |
| Night of the Living Trekkies | 1 | 3.91 |
| Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates | 1 | 3.89 |
| The Data Science Handbook | 1 | 3.88 |
| User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development | 1 | 3.88 |
| The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2) | 1 | 3.86 |
| The Art of Thinking Clearly | 1 | 3.86 |
| The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Martin Beck, #2) | 1 | 3.84 |
| Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction | 1 | 3.83 |
| The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality | 1 | 3.81 |
| The Bald Prima Donna: A Pseudo-Play in One Act | 1 | 3.81 |
| Prey | 1 | 3.76 |
| Social Identity | 1 | 3.75 |
| To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Purdue University Series in the History of Philosophy) | 1 | 3.72 |
| If You Take My Meaning | 1 | 3.71 |
| Hite Report on Male Sexuality | 1 | 3.70 |
| The Secret (The Secret, #1) | 1 | 3.69 |
| Questioning Identity: Gender, Class, Nation | 1 | 3.68 |
| Diamonds Are Forever (James Bond, #4) | 1 | 3.65 |
| Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4) | 2 | 4.56 |
| The New Testament in Scots | 2 | 4.53 |
| 僕のヒーローアカデミア 1 [Boku No Hero Academia 1] (My Hero Academia, #1) | 2 | 4.50 |
| Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power | 1 | 3.50 |
| Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Harry Potter, #1) | 2 | 4.47 |
| Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2) | 2 | 4.43 |
| Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst | 2 | 4.42 |
| High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication | 2 | 4.38 |
| Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams | 2 | 4.37 |
| The Shepherd's Crown (Discworld, #41; Tiffany Aching, #5) | 2 | 4.36 |
| When Nietzsche Wept | 2 | 4.34 |
| Matilda | 2 | 4.32 |
| The Serpent's Promise: The Bible Interpreted Through Modern Science | 1 | 3.31 |
| Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 | 2 | 4.31 |
| Another Country | 2 | 4.29 |
| The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1) | 2 | 4.28 |
| Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness | 2 | 4.28 |
| A Hat Full of Sky (Discworld, #32; Tiffany Aching, #2) | 2 | 4.27 |
| Lirael (Abhorsen, #2) | 2 | 4.26 |
| And Then There Were None | 2 | 4.26 |
| The Wee Free Men (Discworld, #30; Tiffany Aching, #1) | 2 | 4.25 |
| Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability | 2 | 4.25 |
| Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence | 2 | 4.25 |
| Abaddon's Gate (The Expanse, #3) | 2 | 4.24 |
| The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir | 2 | 4.24 |
| Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? | 2 | 4.23 |
| The Annotated Chronicles (Dragonlance: Dragonlance Chronicles) | 2 | 4.23 |
| The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, #1) | 2 | 4.22 |
| Old Man's War (Old Man's War, #1) | 2 | 4.21 |
Jump to
- 5/5: Will re-read until I die. 97th percentile+
- 4/5: Very impressed. 75th percentile+
- 3/5: Net likeable. 50th percentile.
- 2/5: Only for enthusiasts. 25th percentile.
- 1/5: False, ugly, evil, or vapid. 1st percentile.
Reviews
5/5: Will re-read until I die. 97th percentile+
| Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997) by Dave Hickey | None yet |
| Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs (2004) by John Pilger | I went into this with one eye on Pilger's ideology, but almost every piece is grounded and humane and appalling and beyond the reach of theory to pervert. (Only the Eduardo Galeano rant addresses too many targets at once and fades into zine-ish aspersion. But even that's about half true.) Gellhorn on Dachau. Cameron on North Vietnam. Hersh on My Lai. Lockerbie. Iraq. The overall target is the powerful who stand by or enable atrocities; Kissinger leers like a terrible wraith from more than a few of these pieces. I cried at this ten years ago and again now and again whenever. Data 2 - What does it imply about the world, that this could happen? & Values 2 - thought experiments to reflect on how you feel about something. |
| Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (1995) by Jeremy Bernstein |  </div>There are few, if any, other instances in recorded history where we have the conversations of leading figures as they complete one era, come to terms with it, and prepare their strategy for the next. It is as though these men were lifted out of history at a crucial turning point—from the age of conventional weapons to the nuclear era — placed within a timeless container and told to discuss their past and future as the recorders roll.- Jeremy Bernstein Astonishingly dramatic; also as pure as primary sources get. These reports were the result of months of secret eavesdropping on the German nuclear scientists, including after they hear of Hiroshima. Innocent of the microphones, the men concede their ignorance without ego, their character without any obfuscating propriety. (There are still two impurities: their words are both transcribed and translated by strangers. The physicists speak to us here in full sentences, with little of the fragmentariness and repetition of real speech. And it takes someone as highly trained as Bernstein to get us over the technical barrier.) Even so, this is as plain and self-interpreting as history gets. For six months they play madlibs, argue, and run around the garden, while the English and we listen in. Hahn is a sweetheart and von Laue a droopy hero. The Party functionary Diebner is comic, even though he has most responsibility for the Nazi weapons project. Harteck is the most technically astute by far: he guesses a huge amount correctly, all in the teeth of loud ignorance by his more prestigious peers. von Weizsacker is the slimiest. Heisenberg is just weird: he has a very faint echo of the strange clear-sight-and-moral-vacuum of Eichmann. Enormous intelligence and no sense. The morality of their wartime actions does not come up very much (except when raised by sweetheart Hahn or von Laue). They are mostly glad of the destruction of the Nazis, and Wirtz is horrified by the scale and singularity of SS murder. But the rest are more self-regarding than pro or anti Nazi. (Again, it is wonderful to read these and actually know they meant it.) (What about the morality of our reading the reports? I don't have a clear opinion, but doing so after their deaths seems mostly fair.) They very often speak about money, Heisenberg in particular. (Not just research funding or aid for their families in Occupied Germany, but dolla dolla bills.) On hearing that Hahn had won a Nobel: "it says that you are supposed to receive the Nobel Prize for 1944." The excitement that struck the ten detainees at this moment is hard to describe in a few words. Hahn did not believe it at first. In the beginning he turned away all the offers of congratulations. But gradually we broke through, with Heisenberg in the lead, who congratulated him heartily on the 6200 pounds. As you can see, Bernstein's editorial voice is a bit strong. But his other qualities are huge and unique: he knew some of the protagonists personally, and worked on nuclear weaponry himself. He is out to get Heisenberg, and overreads a few times. But this is because people (Powers, Frayn to a degree) persist in rose-tinting him: there's this idea that Heisenberg feigned incompetence at reactor-making as anti-Nazi activism. The transcripts make clear that he'd have made a bomb if he could, not because he is a Nazi or a German but because he was amorally curious, and hungry for primacy. Heisenberg does object to Nazism. But not very strongly. Bernstein's conclusion is that the project was pretty much a shambles. They had a two-year head start on the Allies, but failed for several reasons: they had < 1% of the funding of the Manhattan Project, an unbelievably bad administration and communication of data and ideas, and key resources like deuterium kept getting bombed. But Bernstein feels able to go for the jugular: reading this lecture, I am once again struck by the intellectual thinness of this group. Here are ten German nuclear scientists — nine if one does not count von Laue — who are supposed to be the cream of the crop, the intellectual elite, of German nuclear physics, men who had been working on these questions for several years. And look at the discussion it produced. Yet even with these handicaps, it looks like Harteck could have built a basic pile in 1940, if the project was headed by someone less arrogant than Heisenberg. And that pile would have brought all the funding, and maybe sorted out their many collective muddles and lack of engineering care. 5/5 for Bernstein's commentary and the hair-raising fact of their existence. |
| Selected Essays of Michel de Montaigne (1592) by Michel de Montaigne | None yet |
| Bad Science (2008) by Ben Goldacre | None yet |
| Meditations (180) by Marcus Aurelius | In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them.</i></td> </tr> |
| The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | None yet |
| Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner (1987) by Alistair Reid | In one sentence: Long essays on nations and nonbelonging, interspersed with really excellent poems. To be read when: home too long. A poet, Hispanicist, translator and long-time New Yorkerer. He was right there when the Latin American lit boom began, giving Neruda crash space in London - and mates with Marquez, insofar as anyone is. I like Reid's prose even better than his excellent poems.
I love his scepticism about group identity - the piece on returning "home" to Scotland is great because of his distance from it.
|
| The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995) by Ted Honderich | Amazing how far this took me, this bundle of short 9pt font columns. Many entries have the denseness of aphorism. Like a thousand dehydrated journal papers in one book. And hundreds of distinctive voices contributing. You could get very far through a philosophy degree with just this. Speaking strictly hypothetically, that is. |
| How to Actually Change Your Mind (Rationality: From AI to Zombies) (2018) by Eliezer Yudkowsky | Imagine someone great - I think of Bertrand Russell or Dan Dennett or CS Peirce or Alan Turing - writing really well about actually scientific self-help. Imagine they wrote most days for 2 years, and so distilled decades of trying to find the truth as a heavily biased primate barely out of the trees. Imagine it was empathic and well-justified with argument and experimental data. But imagine it turns out it wasn't a Canonical figure writing it, but instead some guy on the internet with no credentials and weird opinions. But imagine - or rather, I ask you to trust me, til you see for yourself - that the result matches what the greats achieved in the theory of practical reasoning. (Dennett actually wrote a practical-reason how-to book, and it isn't nearly as good.)These essays are fumbling attempts to put into words lessons better taught by experience. But at least there's underlying math, plus experimental evidence from cognitive psychology on how humans actually think. Maybe that will be enough to cross the stratospherically high threshold required for a discipline that lets you actually get it right, instead of just constraining you into interesting new mistakes. This is only one-sixth of Yudkowsky's enormous Sequences - an unusually scientifically accurate philosophical system covering statistics, physics, psychology, history, ethics, and, most importantly, the specific universal obstacles to your being rational. (As a brutal compression, the philosophy can be glossed as radical Bayesian-Quinean evidentialism.) I've read it three times in 10 years, and got more from it each time. Quite a lot of it seemed absurd the first time I read it, for instance his principle of Conservation of Expected Evidence, but I now know it to be mathematically safe. There are loads of great tools here. Just one example out of dozens: the idea of a pejorative Fully General Counterargument, a good-sounding objection which applies equally to all possible arguments, and which thus tells you nothing about the truth of the matter. Examples * "Oh he's an 'expert' is he? Experts are systematically miscalibrated" Along with Kant's Transcendental Analytic, The Great Gatsby (don't ask), and Marfarquhar's Strangers Drowning, it's one of the only books I've ever taken paragraph-by-paragraph notes on. Free, or by donation to his nonprofit, here. |
| Ficciones (1944) by Jorge Luis Borges | Deeply uncanny - without worshipping mystery. ("Tlön" is scarier to me than anything in Lovecraft. "Babel" is also horrifying in its way.) Playing at the limits of reason - without renouncing objectivity. (There is something of the unearthly drama and transcendence of higher mathematics in a couple of these stories.) Somehow it manages to be cryptic without being annoying, to use literary gossip and the droning of archivists straight. Some of this is 80 years old, and it's still completely fresh. He makes literature larger, by bringing new things into scope - bibliographic minutiae, English department arcana, salon gossip. There's something refreshing about his perfect fake book reviews. Gushing praise of nonexistent authors draws back the veil (as if our world's reviewers would say the same things whether or not the authors existed). Borges was not a postmodernist but these anyway have the best of what postmodernism is taken to mean: nonliteral play, generative scepticism about sense and reference and language-games, reasoning about the limits of reason. I'm not sure of the significance of some of Borges' sentences here. But for once the critic's working assumption of meaning seems sound: if I thought about it, I could find out. (And not just in the ordinary way, by projection. I expect to find Borges in them if I try.) I've some ideas about each story, but none that fit completely or exhaust them. Here's one: --- Here's a banal idea: "language is composite". Characters go into words into sentences into works into worldviews. In "The Library of Babel", Borges stretches this fact until you see the horror in it, the shocking vastness of exponentiation on the tiny scale of a human life. The simple idea of mechanically generating all strings of length n=1,312,000 leads to an incredibly claustrophobic closed system. The story is not 8 pages long but contains more than most books. There exists one truth; there are uncountably many falsehoods; but worse, there's a far larger infinity of nonsense, of things which make sense in no language, which don't make enough sense to be false, which never will. This is the horror of Platonism or Many-world physics or Meinong: that we could be invisibly boxed-in by garbled infinities, endless keyboard mashing. The "noosphere" - all the good ideas, all the bad ideas ever had - is a tiny pocket of meaning in a sea of meaninglessness. The stunning effect of "Babel" depends on its not being magic, not hand-wavy (merely monstrous, physically impossible for interesting reasons which violate no particular law). Ted Chiang is grasping at a similar titanic scale when he uses a truly alien language to explain variational physics. Remember that Borges was a librarian. But, while he said photogenic things about libraries, he didn't necessarily like being in them. "The Library of Babel" adds an extremely mordant overtone to that quotation, by imagining an otherworldly library which breaks men just by being there. Sturrock, his biographer: Borges had some reason to dislike libraries because for nine years "of solid unhappiness", from 1937 to 1946, he was obliged to work in one, as a quite junior librarian, in order to make money. The cataloguing work he did was futile... The alphabet used for the Babel books has 22 letters and no uppercase. We could try and look up human languages with that many letters, but better to take this as a hint that our narrator is not us - he can be a total alien, far from Earth, and the exact same library will still confound him the exact same way. The same geometry constrains all minds. What looks like meaning need not be, if your sample is large enough: This useless and wordy epistle itself already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves in one of the uncountable heaxgons - and so does its refutation. (And n possible languages make use of the same vocabulary; in some of them the symbol 'library' admits of the correct definition 'ubiquitous and everlasting system of hexagonal galleries', but 'library' is 'bread' or 'pyramid' of anything else... You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?) The narrator says that the fall from his floor "is infinite" (or indefinite), that the rooms are "uncountable", but we can do better than this quite easily, given only the text. There are 410*40*80 = 1312000 characters per book. The number of distinct books is thus (22 + 3)^{1312000} or about 2 followed by about 1.8 million zeroes. It is hard to give a reference for how large this is: if every atom in the universe contained as many atoms as are in the universe (10^80), and each of the nested atoms was a Babel book, this would still contain only a laughably tiny fraction of Babel, less than one googolplexth. There's 4*5*32 = 640 books per hexagon, so we need about 3 x 10^1834094 room-sized hexagons. This is the full implication of the simple thought "every book of length 1312000". It couldn't possibly be even fractionally built. And yet, through the power of maths, it has been built - "only implicitly, skeletally", but it still counts. (Borges notes this infinity/finity conflict on the last page, explaining that the Library is unbounded and periodic, a hypersphere.) There is a beautiful, inspiring lesson to be taken from it actually: think about what the incredible feat of writing any book - no matter how bad - actually entails. Our nervous system shields us from Babel, from the larger part of possible meanings and the overwhelming majority of string space. This is an astonishing act, in information-theory terms: the ultimate search, which we succeed at effortlessly, many times a day. Epic achievements in life-giving ignoring. |
| Oxford Book of Essays (1991) by John Gross | I've been reading this slowly for 6 months; it is a belter. Gross has given me tender feelings for a hundred dead people, and what is one to do with those, except what I'm doing right now? Great essays share something. These essayists wouldn't all agree on anything, I'm sure. But there's something about their voices: personal, rational, intimate, concise, forceful. The essay is in the process of being superceded by the article and the blogpost, but we shouldn't judge those two forms by the dross we are all seeing from day to day; surely most essays were also petty and inelegant. Just one example: I bear quite a lot of ill-will toward Churchill; but his entry here is just incredibly beautiful; a hallucinatory conversation with his dead father, with junior struggling to bridge the violent gap the last two generations made in culture and history. I would not have believed him so self-aware: I also find myself nodding in agreement with the likes of Cardinal Newman and Makepeace Thackaray. I will again, too. I went and got Gross' Oxford collection of aphorisms, ready for the slow treatment. |
| Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) by Ludwig Wittgenstein | You already know the key superficial facts: it's brief, poetic, cryptic, it glorifies language. (Or is it damning language?) You might not know that it's intentionally cryptic:This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it - or similar thoughts... I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own. - or that it's the most beautiful piece of metaphysics ever, or that its author repudiated it entirely ten years later, or that actually the book repudiates itself - My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. or that (aside from the pure logic results) it probably isn't true, or that few people can possibly understand it without a lot of scholarly context, like without explanations 5 times the length of the original text. I recommend Anat Biletzki and Roger White. Grayling is good for the language bit too. I spent maybe a year, on and off, trying to understand it. Some funny results here. 5 stars for poetry - not for its system, or its influence. (It has justified, or been appropriated in the service of, an awful lot of mystical poppycock. The author would be appalled to see this, while accepting that it was all his own fault.) |
| A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997) by David Foster Wallace | None yet |
| Rationality: From AI to Zombies (2015) by Eliezer Yudkowsky | These essays are fumbling attempts to put into words lessons that would be better taught by experience. But at least there's underlying math, plus experimental evidence from cognitive psychology on how humans actually think. Maybe that will be enough to cross the stratospherically high threshold required for a discipline that lets you actually get it right, instead of just constraining you to interesting new mistakes. everyone needs to learn at least one technical subject. Physics; computer science; evolutionary biology; or Bayesian probability theory, but something. Someone with no technical subjects under their belt has no referent for what it means to "explain" something. They may think "All is Fire" is an explanation. A very modern sort of rationalism, with buckets of scientific insights and a few genuine innovations* unified into a grand theory of reason and action: probability theory + decision theory. An ongoing concern. Yudkowsky's writing suffers from this thing where we incorporate the ideas, but everyone begrudges the insight they glean from him and forget they thought otherwise. This is perhaps because his site carried a heavy pall of nerdiness (fan-fiction and Streisanding), a status deficit which prevents people from according the ideas their actual merit. His dismissive attitude to high-status people and ideas also drives a lot of people crazy, sometimes making them unable to care if the ideas are right. So we minimise his contribution to the life of the new mind, some of the brightest prospects in the dark world. This is unfair but the new mind is the main thing, and broader than him already. The section intros by Rob Bensinger, written a decade later, are helpful, but this book may need refreshing every decade, because of the replication crisis. This is no insult. *Some of Yudkowsky's new ideas (not the mere popularisations): |
| What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (2014) by Randall Munroe | Completely rigorous whimsy, often the first time science has been applied to the thing at hand. Pure mind-candy - but, in the absence of real physics education, also improving. They are free here. |
| Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) by Ted Chiang | In one sentence: Stunning expansion of science fiction to very distant possible worlds and emotionally unusual near ones. Borgesian scifi. To be read when: annoyed by the sterility of median scifi and the folksy ignorance of median litfic; if disparaging scifi; if you think Black Mirror is deep... Astoundingly good. The stories are extremely miscellaneous (hard Sumerian mythology, linguistic-physics ethnography, singularitarian tragedy, Arabian Nights fantasy, mechanical-philosophy tragedy, misotheistic tragedy), but bear one heavy theme - that rationalism, materialism is not the enemy of humanism, but is much more able to accommodate us, our highest values, than is romantic supernaturalism. So he's an artistically successful Yudkowsky; Chiang's own presumable nerdiness disappears behind his powerful austere prose, even when characters are expounding the principle of least action or the details of ancient masonry. 'Story of Your Life' is so much more interesting, emotionally and scientifically, than the Arrival film it was made into. It is about how alien and repugnant amor fati is, and maybe variational physics. 'Tower of Babylon' is rousing minutiae. 'Hell is the Absence of God' takes the tired, speculative, stupid themes of the Abrahamic conversation - faith, will, love, persistence, atheism - and wrings out a new chord from them. Ah!
|
| The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3) (2017) by Ada Palmer | Sensational. Palmer starts in an Enlightenment utopia (post-war, post-nationalism, post-scarcity, post-gender, post-theocracy, post-fideism, post-meat, post-capital-punishment, post-nuclear-family, general justice via universal voluntary surveillance) and then shows what the tensions will do to any system that has to handle humans as we are. Many riches. There are constantly five or so subplots on the go, and when one ends it spawns two others. Best are its careful sketches of deep divides: Tradition vs progress, act vs rule, order vs freedom, safety vs optimum return. Some of the oppositions fall flat because I don't have the requisite respect for the other side. For instance Damnatio memoriae - the official expurgation of someone from history - is presented as an ultimate horror (the pain and execution preceding it is overwhelmingly more important). [the damned person is] neither slim nor mighty, stooped nor noble, just a shape... Somewhere in a dusty archive a baptismal registry records some Hildebrand, and, when that dry page molders... I can't look, I can't! Behind the shades, the broad gray plain, that sea of shapeless gloom extending on and on... all forgotten souls, minds empty of memory, smeared one into another... to this absolute dissolution Caesar damns his enemies... Not me! I will never let you take me! I will carve my memory into history, by work, by force, by guile, in swathes of blood and ashes if I must! I can admire Palmer's rendition of the old bad legacy code (it has driven quite a lot of history) but I admit it no part of a real morality. The dead are past caring. Elsewhere, the Aura (metaphysical identity) of art is used to devalue perfect replicas of the nuked Coliseum and Forum (which seems like magical thinking to me): All false. Our race cannot afford such losses again... On the Acropolis the tears we shed are still tears of connection: where I stand Socrates stood. In the [replica] Roman Forum, by the [replica] Coliseum or the [replica] Patheon, they are regret tears. Replicas cannot touch. That is what we all want, to touch what someone touched, a special someone... whose story reached forward through history... Speak for yourself; a perfect simulacrum is enough, though it screams depth to say otherwise. (I'm not actually salty: I love the breadth of ideologies on show here. No doubt someone else will grumble about how thin and unconvincing the utilitarian views presented here are. By writing so many good characters in disagreement, Palmer has passed about 10 Intellectual Turing Tests. ) On the other hand, I feel the horror of true deontology quite keenly: Dominic would happily watch the world burn if he could defile the blasphemer's corpse amid the coals. Much as I like Jedd Mason, his rise to the top of every state - the expressionless, motionless, Spectrumy king of the world - is implausible, even given his mother's scheming; it only makes sense with Intervention. Which is fine, because Palmer is committed to that, but it would still have been nice to have a natural path. Many potential irritants. You'll have to be fine with long fourth-wall violations, long passages in macaronic Latin, hallucinated philosophers reacting to C25th scenes by expositing their extrapolated view of the 25th Century, allusions that yell 'REMEMBER ME??' in your face (Hobbestown, the anarchist commune). I found Mycroft's madness engaging but it does divert every chapter a bit. The best so far, but you must read the first two. I donno, I'm just rambling now cos I know I'll rewrite this after I read it again in like one unripe year. Misc notes * Achilles is an actual hero here - where in the Iliad he is merely impressively violent. Actually as any fool knows, the ancient heroes are mostly morally small, beneath even us. ("Hero" meant "Big Man", not "saviour".) This is good news, that Achilles (and say Jahweh) are not paragons any more. * Miracles happen; Bridger is magical through and through, not even needing a virgin birth. So there was no need for JEDD to be born of woman and Spain. Except that this allows him to be a stark example of Hegelian becoming, which here is the way that God speaks. (And what filth he says.) * Next time you complain about how undemocratic your country is, consider: The Mitsubishi here are not only a planned plutocracy, they also have 4 orders of delegated authority: the voters elect representatives who elect representatives who elect representatives who elect the executive. * Oh Mycroft. I spent the first book and a half wondering exactly why he is so indispensable, hounded, beloved. This mostly answers it: it's a mixture of macaronic language, dog charisma, and weird athleticism. * Nice, surprising bit of anarchism: Hobbestown, the anarchist syndicate, is the 'safest' place in the world. OK, its because of the deterrent of capital punishment but still. * A decent portrayal of the burgeoning far-future-focussed ethics, in the otherworldly, post-political, arch-instrumentalist scientists, Utopia. Palmer clearly sympathises with them. One contradiction in her portrayal, though: the Utopians are monomanaical consequentialists, who'll do anything to prevent human extinction or stasis. But they're shown throwing massive resources at trivial uneconomic projects (trivial compared to WMD destruction, space colonization, and terraforming): an underwater city, a city on Antarctica, robots in the shape of mythical beasts. I suppose it's possible this is a PR thing, either to charm or recruit. Their oath actually inspired moral guilt in me, which is hard to do: I hereby renounce the right to complacency, and vow lifelong to take only what minimum of leisure is necessary to my productivity... I will commit the full produce of my labors to our collective effort to redirect the path of human life away from death and toward the stars. * Palmer knows about a lot of things: Hobbes, evolutionary history, the way a small boat makes waves. Her using this knowledge never felt contrived to me - but again I suspect this is a niche I happen to fall in. The fittest survived, but with the conquered within them, as conquered bacteria became the mitochondria which feed the cells that crawl through volvox, trilobite, and coelacanth toward Mars. * It suits me that the psychoanalyst Hive choose to be the enemies of the future: "War?" Utopia offered. * It's written with a future reader in mind, but then Mycroft explains too much; nothing is taken for granted, and this is obviously on our account, tainting the conceit. * Its gender dynamics don't constitute a polemic; instead the Hives' failing utopia shows what most feminist / Critical / international relations theory misses. 'Xenofeminism' (tech-positive, bioprogressive feminism) is a more complete answer to gender harms. But, hearteningly, even mainstream figures like Nussbaum seem to be on board with similar projects: this calls for the gradual formation of a world in which all species will enjoy cooperative and supportive relations with one another. Nature is not that way and has never been. So it calls for the gradual supplanting of the natural by the just. * A man may leap into the fray in the name of Liberty, Homeland, Human Rights, Justice, but never Economics. (more's the pity) *
* Mycroft's 'death' is immediately subverted by a footnote from him. But then the chapter plays out as if we hadn't seen that footnote, and so it loses most of its emotional charge. This is weird but obviously totally intentional. Twists the twist before the twist can begin. Not sure what's going on - maybe Palmer had tired of doing ordinary twists. (There are a lot of them.) |
| The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) by Nick Bostrom | None yet |
| The Hedonistic Imperative (2015) by David Pearce | Atrocious, agonising things are happening to people like you, me and our loved ones right now. The full horror of some sorts of suffering is literally unspeakable and unimaginably dreadful. Under a Darwinian regime of natural reproduction, truly horrible experiences - as well as endemic low-grade malaise - are both commonplace and inevitable. Chapter Two argues the moral case for stopping this nastiness. Since 'ought' implies 'can', however, it must first be established that scrapping unpleasant experience really is a biologically feasible option... from an information-theoretic perspective, what counts is not our absolute location on the pleasure-pain axis, but that we are "informationally sensitive" to fitness-relevant changes in our internal and external environment. Gradients of bliss can suffice both to motivate us and offer a rich network of feedback mechanisms; so alas today do gradients of Darwinian discontent. On what science is for, on the very most we could aim for. Late one evening, early one morning, I realised that I was not reading a crank on the internet. I'm not sure what exactly tipped me off: the page was called The Abolition of Suffering; the Naturalisation of Heaven. Maybe the extensive and thoughtful series of responses to objections. Not as late as the heart-stopping Alone Amongst the Zombies. Or the mixture of staggering ambition with modesty:
and philosophy with biochemistry. It is difficult to return to what you were studying - mealy-mouthed, apologist, naturalistic-fallacious bioconservative bioethics - after that. I hadn't considered wild-animal suffering before, the giant and at-best-ignored horror it is. People are at last starting to work on this, but Pearce was there decades ago. We have a long way to go before people stop making it worse even. More than {Singer, Ord, LessWrong}, Pearce set me on my way with an ideal ethics, which led quickly to effective altruism and AI safety. I'm not a negative utilitarian like him, but unlike almost everyone else I take that challenge seriously. I've met half a dozen people whose lives he affected this strongly, but the nonacademic setting limits his status. (The published collection Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering? is better, newer, covering more ground. I would have called it "The Molecular Biology of Paradise", a site header used elsewhere. Or "Better Living Through Chemistry".)
[Free! here] |
| The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth (2016) by Robin Hanson | Believe me that it's remarkable; it's easily in the top 5 most insightful books out of the 500 I have reviewed here. I called Superintelligence the most rigorous exploration of the nonreal I had ever read: this beats it by a lot. You will find yourself reading pages on the properties of coolant pipes and be utterly engrossed. It is imaginary sociology, imaginary economics, real fiction. (But it lacks an ethnography entirely: no em speaks to us themselves.) People tend to wrap Age of Em in ulterior motives and esoteric intentions, because they love it but see futurism as an unworthy goal for such an achievement. I am no different: this is the greatest compendium of real social science I have ever found. No review can do much justice, but here's one particularly hair-raising point in it: Hanson surveys the whole course of human history, and notes the many ways our culture is unprecedented and, in the evolutionary sense, nonadaptive: we live in the brief but important "dreamtime" when delusions [drive] history. Our descendants will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialed to the max. It's easy to read a radical critique of our liberal values in there, but I believe him when he says that he doesn't dislike dreamtime; he just predicts it cannot last, because we are fighting an old and inexorable tide. There are several thoughts this large, and a thousand other small insights in Age of Em. |
| Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (2018) by Hans Rosling | 1. In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school? Only 10% of people scored better than random guessing on these questions, the most important trends of the last hundred years. How can it be that we are both 1) a rabidly overconfident species and 2) an extremely pessimistic species that generally gets these simple, objective questions very wrong (doing far worse than random)? Sure, we could just be dogmatic nihilists or idiots, but that doesn't fit that well. A stunning 15% of humans managed to pick the wrong answer on all twelve questions. That's almost impossible for a monkey to achieve. It requires systematic misconceptions. The problem here is not the lack of correct knowledge. The problem is the presence of wrong "knowledge". To score this bad requires a false perception of the world, that make you pick the wrong answer systematically. Rosling explains it in terms of cognitive biases: we suffer from a dramatic worldview, binarised, conflict-obsessed, and blamey. People seem to find Development - the completely unprecedented explosion of survival, freedom, and dignity for the larger part of the entire world! - boring. (You could blame the media, but Rosling persuasively argues that they too are an epiphenomenon of our evolved fear and narrowness.) Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4 [the top 10% of global income]; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves nonrepresentative extraordinary events and shuns normality. On the shocking lack of empiricism even in the most important places like medicine and policy: In the 1960s, the success of the recovery position inspired new public health advice, against most traditional practices, to put babies to sleep on their tummies... Even though the data showed that sudden infant deaths went up, not down, it wasn't until 1985 that a group of pediatricians in Hong Kong actually suggested that the prone position might be the cause. Even then, doctors in Europe didn't pay much attention. It took Swedish authorities another seven years to accept their mistake and reverse the policy... Two hundred ninety-two brave young feminists had traveled to Stockholm from across the world to coordinate their struggle to improve women's access to education. But only 8 percent knew that 30-year-old women have spent on average only one year less in school than 30-year-old men. Bad incentives and noble lies are another reason for the stubborn gloom of intellectuals: There has been progress in human rights, animal protection, women's education, climate awareness, catastrophe relief, and many other areas where activists raise awareness by saying that things are getting worse. Relentlessly sensible: resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything. Because the problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. And it's almost always more complicated than that. It's almost always about multiple interacting causes—a system. If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face. I've been studying Development for years and this still taught me plenty. It should shock you into awareness and hopefully more. Paying too much attention to the individual visible victim rather than to the numbers can lead us to spend all our resources on a fraction of the problem, and therefore save many fewer lives. This principle applies anywhere we are prioritizing scarce resources. It is hard for people to talk about resources when it comes to saving lives, or prolonging or improving them Doing so is often taken for heartlessness. Yet so long as resources are not infinite—and they never are infinite—it is the most compassionate thing to do to use your brain and work out how to do the most good with what you have. One of the "five books that represent my worldview": moral passion, strict empiricism, psychological depth, existential hope. I picked this rather than Enlightenment Now or Rational Optimist or Doing Good Better or Our World In Data or Whole Earth Discipline (out of the contemporary literature of progress) because it also covers heuristics and biases - and so substitutes / complements Kahneman, Taleb, Hanson, and Yudkowsky, without (what people insist on seeing as) their self-superior wonkishness. Thank you industrialization, thank you steel mill, thank you power station, thank you chemical-processing industry, for giving us the time to read books. In a sense he stays on the surface - this isn't the full radical evolutionary account of Elephant in the Brain, instead just noting some bad epistemic practices and gesturing at evolutionary theory. But that said, there's a "charity is not about helping" bit: If I check the World Wildlife Fund I can see how, despite declines in some local populations, the total wild populations of tigers, giant pandas, and black rhinos have all increased over the past years. It was worth paying for all those pandas stickers on the doors all around Stockholm. Yet only 6% of the Swedish public knows that their support has had any effect. But despite all the suffering and error and backfiring efforts he describes, he is trying to make you realise how good things could be: Could everyone have a fact-based worldview one day? Big change is always difficult to imagine. But it is definitely possible, and I think it will happen, for two simple reasons. First: a fact-based worldview is more useful for navigating life, just like an accurate GPS is more useful for finding your way in the city. Second, and probably more important: a fact-based worldview is more comfortable. It creates less stress and hopelessness than the dramatic worldview, simply because the dramatic one is so negative and terrifying. This, then, is the same message as Sagan, 25 years ago: the emotional gain of reason. --- Misc notes - Binary categories are often unhelpful because they obscure continuum. Rosling ranted against "developed" / "developing" for 20 years. The World Bank has caught on but the UN haven't. - He is a better messenger for the cognitive bias alarm, for activists anyway, because of his deep credibility: he mucked in to anti-poverty measures for decades. Some of his anecdotes are chilling. I could tell you countless stories of the nonsense I saw in Cuba: the local moonshine, a toxic fluorescent concoction brewed inside TV tubes using water, sugar, and babies' poopy diapers to provide the yeast required for fermentation; the hotels that hadn't planned for any guests and so had no food, a problem we solved by driving to an old people's home and eating their leftovers from the standard adult food rations; my Cuban colleague who knew his children would be expelled from - "I do not believe that fake news is the major culprit for our distorted worldview: we haven't only just started to get the world wrong, I think we have always gotten it wrong." - "In the car industry, cars are recalled when a mistake is discovered. You get a letter from the manufacturer saying, "We would like to recall your vehicle and replace the brakes." When the facts about the world that you were taught in schools and universities become out of date, you should get a letter too: "Sorry, what we taught you is no longer true. Please return your brain for a free upgrade." " |
| Mortal Questions (1979) by Thomas Nagel | None yet |
| Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Help Others, Do Work that Matters, and Make Smarter Choices about Giving Back (2015) by William MacAskill | Best in class. (The class is "pop philosophy aimed at changing the world".) What you should do if you want to improve the world as much as you can: that is, he skips the soapbox moral suasion and spends the whole time explaining his impressive framework for getting shit done. (Includes a defence of foreign aid, achieving in two pages what my dissertation limped over the course of 40.) His rubric for assessing the optimality of an act is:
Too plainly written for my liking, but then it's not for me: it's for everyone else. You can mostly skip it if you read these: * His original careers paper, the best piece of practical ethics I've ever read. (encountered in 2013) |
| Library of Scott Alexandria (2015) by Scott Alexander | Not really a book. But he's been so important to me that I wanted to include him here. ePub version free here. |
| Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972) by Peter Singer | Changed my life, or, focussed the rays. |
| Save Yourself, Mammal!: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection (2011) by Zach Weinersmith | This review stands in for me reading everything Zach Weiner ever published online, including his reading lists (2005-13). More inspiring than a cartoonist has any right to be. An English graduate and physics dropout, his webcomic has an amazing wry view on basically every academic field. His jokes are sceptical and romantic, puerile and hyperintelligent. (There are not enough jokes about economists being bastards!) His science podcast with his wife is badly recorded but always worthwhile, his Youtube group is always funny and often transcendent, and even many of his blogged offcuts are charming- see in particular this one about the future of the library. /mancrush. Among the best internet intellectuals. |
| Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Antifragile, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, The Bed of Procrustes (2011) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | The most vibrant presentation of sceptical empiricism since Dawkins stopped being beautiful. Black Swan is a furious pompous attack on macroeconomics, journalism, and risk modelling via heuristics and biases; so it is an amazing introduction to modelling. But it's also an entire original worldview, applying to history, policy, science, and personal conduct. This is taken even further (too far?) in Antifragile, which is more or less a work of evolutionary epistemology, or evolutionary practical ethics. There's a lot of redundancy between them; Fooled by Randomness gives you the highest signal:rant ratio. The first three books are largely critical, hacking away at theory-blindness, model error, and the many kinds of people he sees as possessing unearned status (economists, journalists, consultants, business-book writers): this is the upswing, a chaotic attempt to give general positive advice in a world that dooms general positive advice. Every other page has something worth hearing, for its iconoclasm, or a Latin gobbet, or catty anecdote, if not something globally and evidently true. I think he is right about 30% of the time, which is among the highest credences I have for anyone. I only think I am 35% right, for instance. But a core point is that he thinks his approach should work even given our intractable ignorance. The core point, repeated a hundred times for various domains: In real life, many systems deteriorate without an irregular supply of stressors (non-fatal negative events), and actually benefit from them by constructively overreacting. By robbing such 'antifragile' systems of stressors, modern approaches to managing them do damage in the guise of helping out. Taleb was my introduction to the post-classical theory of reason, but the project overlaps a bit with the LessWrong school I now favour. Underneath (i.e. in the technical appendices), his approach is very similar but with more conservative goals. I think Taleb saved me years of synthesis and conceptual invention. His conduct on Twitter (ridiculous chest-beating, insulting anyone who disagrees with him, including great scholars like Tetlock and Thaler) is embarrassing, but does not detract from the accomplishment. In one sentence: Extraordinarily rude man marries classical ethics to modern mathematics and cognitive science. To be read when: young; if you have a news habit; when despairing of university economics.
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| The God That Failed (1949) by Richard Crossman | The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism</i></b> (1949) by Silone, Koestler, Fischer, Gide, Wright, and Spender. Remarkable accounts of conversion by the most independent, earliest ex-Communists. From where we stand, it's easy to downplay the conversions - because, well, "obviously Stalinism was fucked" - but many of the most brilliant people kept clinging on to it through Kronstadt, through Pitchfork, through the Volksaufstand, through Hungary, through Prague, and even today (Carr never acknowledged the genocides; Hobsbawm knew the death tolls and kept betting on red; Grover Furr is still teaching) even in Russia.
Foreword, by a peculiarly intellectual MP (by today's standards), is careful to set itself apart from the red-bashing of the time and lay out its humane purpose: to understand the emotional appeal of communism (: a religious one) and the disillusionment that the very most independent communists had already suffered. no one who has not wrestled with Communism as a philosophy, and Communists as political opponents, can really understand the values of Western democracy. The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one... The Communist novice, subjecting his soul to the canon law of the Kremlin, felt something of the release which Catholicism also brings to the intellectual, wearied and worried by the privilege of freedom. Silone's testimony about the Comintern's sick irrationality would be enough to make the book prescient. Richard Wright's account of the fucked-up parties outside Russia is another really chilling bit: the rot was deep and wide. This was my great-grandfather's copy. (Form warning: Arthur Koestler was himself a monstrous man.) |
| Brewer's Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics: An A-Z of Roguish Britons Through the Ages (2002) by William Donaldson | Addictive horrible hilarious biographies of British folly, banality and sin. A thousand years of tabloid gossip and popular madness, events too ephemeral for most serious historians: degradation, unchecked insanity and petty cruelty. But incredibly funny. The biographies are spaced out by Donaldson's wonderful little hooks, dry sentences that lead one on a wiki-walk:
I made the mistake of trying to read it over one week - so the endless succession of 18th century rapist officers being instantly pardoned and/or their victims being arrested kind of ran together. It is actually the best bog book ever and wants 4 slow months. I understand Britain a lot better now. The author would emphatically deserve an entry of his own in any future edition: astonishing wit, astonishing connections, astonishing potential, with little to show for it but a barrel of laughs and this.</td> </tr> |
| Guards! Guards! (Discworld, #8; City Watch #1) (1989) by Terry Pratchett | Even better than I remembered. Feudal-fantasy satire in the voice of pubs of C20th England, with dragons, wizards and pre-Peel police wheedling, appealing to genetics, sod's law. An incongruous, dogged self-awareness. The prose is quieter (less self-referential and wilfully surreal) than his peers – Adams, Holt, Rankin – and occasionally gets actually wise. Discworld is his noble funhouse mirror of Britain. Pratchett is very good at technology fads, social class, the duality of human nature, and the excruciating embarrassment of romance. Everything a growing boy needs. (Read aloud) |
| The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse () by Robert Crawford | None yet |
| What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (1999) by Charles Bukowski |
In one sentence: Just a man in a room - odd, then, that this is enough to make people read them voluntarily, religiously, unlike almost all contemporary poetry with their bigger brains and better politics and more eventful stories and uplifting messages. To be read when: you can't sleep and it's 2am and tomorrow's going to be a pain in the arse and you're alone in the house; no better book then. Unbeatable at sliding through the mind with zero friction, depositing emotional silt and cheap, warm style from a previously insane and helpfully hopeless man in you – whatever you want that for. More than any other poet, he just literally talks to you. You can roll your eyes at his gaucheness and despise his chauvinism and feel nothing all you like: that's fine. It doesn't matter. It's not the point. So it's barely art, but he knows it. Pity any academic working on CB: these poems don't invite analysis; they are worn on their own surface. They mean just what they first mean. Many of them are just about writing poems, but I cannot resent their hollowness, since emptiness is his brush. Its main virtue is complete honesty.
Everything that people mock Leonard Cohen for is much more true of Bukowski (misery, drawling, self-obsession, archness, chauvinism, treating the whole world as your confessional); he is just more direct and macho about it; that fact, and the very different crowd surrounding his medium is enough to earn him contempt rather than mockery. (And contempt is a kind of involuntary respect.) Backwards analogy: Bukowski is Tom Waits minus gospel, minus FX pedals, minus Brecht and Weill, minus one steady Kathleen peer. And minus metre of course. A grumpy adolescent old man; a sensitising misanthrope; a beautiful lech. He has only two modes: midnight countercultural raving and laconic woke-at-noon observation. Neither would work without his lecherousness and/or meanness and/or arrogance; they are the absolutely necessary breve before he blares out his concern.
(That ^ might have gotten your back up, because it pattern-matches to modern whining about women's choices. But it isn't that: remember, from above, that he is calling himself a pig and a dead soul.) This is three books written over thirty years, one sentence per ten lines as always, stapled together to give the impression of a late-life opus. It covers the whole lot: his Great Depression origin myth; his meaningless, crabbed middle years; and his long, long late period spent in contempt of the arty people who pay and applaud him. I am nothing like him, except maybe in sense of humour. He is not anti-modern - grew up through the Great Depression, a simulation of pre-modern subsistence; loves shit cars; lives for late night recorded music - but science, growth, and the expanding circle give him nothing of the sense of direction, transcendence and hope that it gives to me and mine. But still I "relate", as the disgusting verb puts it. I have read this a half-dozen times in a dozen years. (It isn't hard; it takes an hour.) I know of no better poet to begin to explain why poetry is good and unique and feeds life. This surely says something about my character, but I don't expect to stop reading it. PS: Bukowski's epitaph is "Don't try". On the face of it that's mean and funny and fine, but it also means what Yoda means by it: Don't force it; Don't betray your nature; Do only what you are absolutely aligned behind. Is that good advice? Maybe not, but it is epitomises the man more than the nihilistic joke.
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| Tales from Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #5) (2001) by Ursula K. Le Guin | My favourite, but you can't just jump in here; it gets its power from reprise and reprisal. |
| Map and Territory () by Eliezer Yudkowsky | None yet |
| Computing machinery and intelligence (1950) by Alan Turing | More scientific than it's given credit for: the claim about the Turing test wasConsider first the more accurate form of the question. I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9 [bits], to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. We failed him on this specific timeframe, but it won't be too long (2030?). |
| Watchmen (1987) by Alan Moore | None yet |
| Beyond Good and Evil (1886) by Friedrich Nietzsche | None yet |
| The Penguin Book of English Verse (2000) by Paul Keegan | None yet |
| Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov | None yet |
| Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung (1987) by Lester Bangs | Haven't read this since I was 16 but it left such a dent in my head and my prose. |
| Blindsight (Firefall, #1) (2006) by Peter Watts | There is a horror in neuroscience. It isn't inherent: it depends on subverting your sentimental sense of self, meaning, will, introspection, spirituality; if you don't have these, it won't register. The horror takes unthreatening academic names like "agnosia", "readiness potential", "interhemispheric intrusion", "neurotheology", "reconstructive memory", "Chinese room". (Also "executive psychopath" though.) The Blindsight ethos - Gothic, fatalist, Darwinist, one of the grandest pessimisms I've ever seen - is what you get when you take a traditional worldview (dualism, free will, work as what dignifies life, human exceptionalism, further-fact identity) and slam the great disenchanting science of a hundred years into it. And then add the coming century's automation and self-modification. Blindsight put me in a funk for a week - even though I don't hold any of the positions it sinks. I suppose this is evidence of Watt's talent. ("Art is a nonrational tool for persuasion: beware.") Not the least of its achievements is maintaining its murky nihilism in a world where friendly superintelligences exist. Because of its actual knowledge, this is weird realism, well beyond Lovecraft's. They're coming out of the walls: they're coming out of our best science. The vampires (and, to an extent, the Jovian von Neumann spikefest the plot is about) detract from this deeper horror a bit. Doom; unfixable aberration; people who have warped themselves. If you find Black Mirror a bit too disturbing you might want to give this a miss. Watts even tackles "illusionism" - uniquely I think! Is it strange that the giant lessons of the cognitive revolution are still rare in fiction? The only explanations I can think of are: simply "the Two Cultures" (i.e. novelists are ignorant); or, more discreditable, that novelists are shilling for traditional philosophy, maybe because it sells. (#1 giant lesson: we do not have introspective access to most of what our brains or minds do, on the level of information processing, action, motivation, or even emotion. You might say Freud found this out - but he didn't use reliable methods, made huge obvious errors, and created a closed unfalsifiable loop and so did not really have knowledge.) In contrast, Watts knows a great deal, uses it well, and takes seriously what he knows: for instance, readiness potentials are given all the emotional weight they deserve. This novel has 100 scientific papers listed in the back. The only people who cram quite as many ideas into their books as Watts are Stephenson and Banks. His scorn for the fumbling entendres of psychoanalysis is also extremely endearing: According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse — fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable. "So we're fishing for what, exactly? Repressed memories?" People diss the prose but I think it fits the ethos incredibly well: We fled like frightened children with brave faces. We left a base camp behind: Jack, still miraculously functional in its vestibule; a tunnel into the haunted mansion; forlorn magnetometers left to die in the faint hope they might not. Crude pyronometers and thermographs, antique radiation-proof devices that measured the world through the flex and stretch of metal tabs and etched their findings on rolls of plastic. Glow-globes and diving bells and guide ropes strung one to another... Siri, the sociopath pinhead, is a great character. But also often an infuriating Hollywood Rationalist, and several times he gets the last word which forces me to suspect Watts of it. Though the bit where his girlfriend is dying and he refuses to say anything because it would be cliched is clearly intentionally infuriating for the reader. So might be this stupid bit of game theory: "Well, according to game theory, you should never tell anyone when your birthday is." - this only follows if you have ridiculously strong error aversion, where the value of being certain about others' opinion of you overrules the pleasantness of ordinary interaction. He mentions (but then averts) the single most annoying error when talking about consciousness, which is that "maybe it's better for the p-zombie aliens to take over, since they are clearly fitter than us": "It doesn't bug you?" Sascha was saying. "Thinking that your mind, the very thing that makes you you, is nothing but some kind of parasite?" (Who cares about fitness? A world without qualia is 'Disneyland without children'.) His Mathesonian attempt to naturalise vampires is kinda clever (they are a subspecies of cannibal savants), and the exemplar vamp Jukka is one of the best characters in the book - but overall their presence is distracting and off-piste; the right-angles epilepsy thing, the revived-by-corporate-greed schtick, more generally holding that corporate culture is putting macroscopic selection pressure to psychopathic nonsentience: all these things jolt me out of his otherwise well-built world. Besides the vampires, there are a few more over-the-top ughs. His whole theme of technology as inherently dehumanising, Black Mirror / Event Horizon is just as cherry-picked and annoying as it always is. The idea that consciousness is unadaptive, and so a one-off aberration in a universe of blind replicators - which steamrolls all objections in the novel - is not obviously true. But it is certainly true either way that our society is currently unadaptive, in the sense of not maximising reproduction. (And thank god for that.) Wrenching but admirable. Great in spite of itself. For the nonangsty, post-dualist, post-further-fact version read Hanson and Simler instead. [Free! here] |
| Small Gods (Discworld, #13) (1992) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) by David Foster Wallace | Draining, scarifying, funny, hyperactive, elevating. 'Content warning', as we say now. For instance, the person described in this passage is one story's hero, a powerful agent:
i.e. He comes up with a perfect encapsulation of a facile social trend, but throws away his anger about it, makes us realise that our efforts to be tasteful / rational / grown-up are, here, making us small. DFW was an early mover in the revived 'Third Culture' we can all enjoy: i.e. writing about the highly technical in terms of its high meaning. But he was different: his syncretism came out of the negations of high postmodern theory, rather than the usual humanists with science backgrounds.
'On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand' made me cry a lot. |
| Right Ho, Jeeves (Jeeves, #6) (1934) by P.G. Wodehouse | Wodehouse belongs, not with Dickens or Tom Sharpe or Ben Elton, but with More, Morris, Roddenberry, and Banks. His Blandings is a utopia - just of the rarest kind, set in the present day. He is easy to dismiss as unserious - though actually he is anti-serious, his apparent deficit of gloom and pompousness a decision:I have it from her ladyship's own maid, who happened to overhear a conversation between her ladyship and one of the gentlemen staying here that it was her intention to start you almost immediately upon Nietzsche. You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound. (I don't think he is but this still brings me joy.) RHJ is the very best Jeeves book. It's the one where Wooster contemptuously sends Jeeves away and sets about fixing everything on his own, with fully predictable and fully joyous results. --- Wooster's taboo: |
| The Book of Disquiet (1982) by Fernando Pessoa | In one sentence: Eventless autobiographical sketches about working a shit job in a shit town, and but the beauty of self-obsession. To be read when: unable to sleep; e.g. at 3am or when travelling for more than 15 hours. I asked very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat. Pessoa's uniqueness was invisible during his life; this is a shining, astonishing instance of what we now call neuroatypicality and of the everyday sublime. He's obsessed with cute fatalism, with his own inadequacy, with nothingness and loneliness, but almost every passage is wise or funny or beautiful. I catch no despair off him. Turning shite to gold. Like Larkin if Larkin were likeable; like Montaigne if terser and darker.
Floreat inertia! the worker-poet distinctive and supreme. I first read this on a 22-hour international journey, unsleeping, undrinking, unreal; I prescribe the same conditions for you when you read him.
This paperback is a super-slim selection of the full chaotic archive he left behind; only a tenth of the full Desassossego archive has been translated in to English; this is a great temptation towards a language I presently have no other reason to learn.
I suppose no one truly admits the existence of another person. One might concede that the other person is alive and feels and thinks like oneself, but there will always be an element of difference, a perceptible discrepancy, that one cannot quite put one's finger on. There are figures from times past, fantasy-images in books that seem more real to us than these specimens of indifference-made-flesh who speak to us across the counters of bars, or catch our eye in trams, or brush past us in the empty randomness of the streets. The others are just part of the landscape for us, usually the invisible landscape of the familiar. I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I've seen in engravings, that with many supposedly real people, with that metaphysical absurdity known as 'flesh and blood'. In fact 'flesh and blood' describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid on the butcher's marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive, the sirloin steaks and cutlets of Fate. I'm not ashamed to feel this way because I know it's how everyone feels. The lack of respect between men, the indifference that allows them to kill others without compunction (as murderers do) or without thinking (as soldiers do), comes from the fact that no one pays due attention to the apparently abstruse idea that other people have souls too. |
| The Patrick Melrose Novels (2012) by Edward St. Aubyn | Marvelous. Even though: nearly filled-up with resentment and self-pity. Patrick's staggering detachment from and humour about his own inner life makes the books rise far above him - most of the series is not spent in Patrick's head but instead depicts his brutal gilded circle - and, every few pages, there is a moment of beautiful lucidity or unvoiced empathy. The prose, the humour, the sadness are enough to make you glad, with Patrick, that his parents are dead. The prose is wonderfully smooth, but I took my time, jolted out every few pages by something demanding reflection: "Evil is sickness celebrating itself";
Underneath the filth and irony, Patrick is someone for whom philosophical questions are natural and urgent. The long discursions are more motivated and seamless than in any novel I can think of. At one point, Mary dismisses the idea that her son's anxiety and angst, so like his father's, could have a genetic component - and assumes that it has inadvertently leaked out of Patrick's behaviour. (She goes on to leave him, actually making a damage-control argument about removing the children from his helpless influence.) Yes: For all his insight, wit, cynicism, contrarianism, St Aubyn is still stuck in a giant contemporary ideology: the nurture assumption, the culture of environment-only development and essential woundedness. Sure, people get wounded all the time, and being able to say so in public is a great gain, (for one thing, no one in a confessional culture has to assume that they are alone, that their defects are bizarrely theirs. But if trauma is the centre of some people's sense of self - if it is fetishised and even incentivised (e.g. misery memoirs and high-clap Medium posts)... The risks of centring such things are large and underreported: self-fulfilling prophecies, agonising rumination, and the loss of the peace and pleasure of gratitude. Fine, Aubyn is correct about our sad path-dependence - he's just too recent in placing the start of the path. Here are genetic markers for anxiety and PTSD, against the novel's tacit, almost Freudian emphasis on environment alone. Aubyn is obviously somewhat detached from his own trauma - you can't write prose this fair and glowing if you're not - which is lucky. Otherwise, the seeker after truth would be senselessly telling the vulnerable they're deluded about their own life. (As we all are, though not in the same ways.) *
More generally, Patrick actually wrestles with materialism, rather than using the usual literary tricks of caricature and omission on it. * Curious whether St Aubyn got his vicious rendition of Princess Margaret at first- or second-hand. * The first three chapters of Mother's Milk, told from the perspective of Patrick's first child, are just perfect writing. Robert sees only the benevolence and humour of his parents, not their exhaustion, rage, and bad faith. They are anonymous to him and us, just Robert's mother and Robert's father. It is a glory and a high echelon, though it gives giving the emotional arc of the rest of the book a very long way to fall.
The exaggeration of the wisdom of children is even stronger in Mother's Milk. This is no criticism because St Aubyn isn't very committed to realism, and because Robert's rich and sparkling inner life suits one of the themes: that children deserve to be treated well, taken relatively seriously, as we all do. And that purpose is not the same as result ('telos' indeed):
The art of kintsugi. |
| Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) by Herman Melville | One of the Frankensteins, those endlessly interpretable load-bearing columns dotted around literature. Of negation, dignity, irrationality, silence, impermeability. What is Bartleby, if not just depressed or hyper-lazy? Well there's the defensive Stoic catatonia, or wu wei; Bartleby as crypto-proto-Marxist; Bartleby as waning Übermensch, squatter monk, annoying Christ; Bartleby as dissociating schizophrene or autist; Bartleby as Death of Dead Letters; Bartleby as PTSD ghost; Bartleby as all our inarticulate idiosyncracy, as utter Other – "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!" Some people (e.g. Blanchot, Hardt & Negri, Setiya) view him as heroic, but he's more hallucinogenic and morbid: he lacks everything but refusal; he throws his life away. And that's a living death, a non-human void ("I never feel so private as when I know [Bartleby is] here"). So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it. That copyists are an extinct breed only adds to the seething flavour; it is possible that OCR and distributed Captchas could have minimised Bartleby's suffering - that the condition the piece wrangles with isn't eternal. What would Bartleby be today? Not, I think, an Occupier; rather a impassive backstreets bookshop owner, or a kombucha stallholder or whatnot. I prefer to read Melville's voice - waffling Victorian persiflage - as an assumed decoration for the windbag lawyer's voice (however much Moby Dick shouts otherwise). |
| Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace |
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| The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life (2017) by Kevin Simler | The best synthesis of the study of human nature (cognitive psychology, interactionist sociology, primatology, and economics) I've ever seen. Freud done right ("although the explanations in this book may seem Freudian at times, we follow mainstream cognitive psychology in rejecting most of Freud's methods and many of his conclusions"). It's introductory, laced with illustrative anecdotes but with much deeper scholarship underneath. The 'elephant in the brain' is our unwitting selfishness. We compete without knowing or admitting it, for we are social animals seeking power or status, and thereby sex.
Simler undertook the book in lieu of a PhD, and his work is a welcome modification of Hanson's usual relentlessly lucid style: he is more concrete, chattier, more personable.
You can probably skip this if you're familiar with Overcoming Bias / LessWrong / Econlog - but even then it's a pleasant read. I'm going to give this to every teenager I know. Armour and key. |
| Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) by Cormac McCarthy | Say it is 1985 A.P. (After Peckinpah). How can anyone write anything new about poor white psychopaths in the hot rural places of Victorian America? The answer turns out simple: just have prose so tight and freshening - a jet hose comprising one-third Bible, one-third Emerson, one-third Ballard - that you again uncover the elemental bones of the Western. Also savagely de-emphasise your characters. Place them in enormous, indifferent vistas; give us no inner monologue - nor even indirect report of subjective life; have no speech marks to set their words apart from the landscapes (do not draw the eye to their presumed humanity); have no apostrophes, no hyphens even, lest we remember; have as few names as possible, leave them as types - "kid" or "captain" or "mexican" or "brave"; set their incredible violence among such vast places it looks like little; have few capital letters but for God's. Lock your readers out; make everyone and everything opaque. As he says himself:
These cowboys and injuns punctuate the beautiful land of Central America with hanged babies; rings of decapitate heads; a four-eyed dog; a man calmly eating his own shit; endless thirsty hallucinogenic despair. This is exhausting, quite hard to read:
(As well as this Nabokovian trudge through the middle section, McCarthy sometimes steers close to the comical with sentences like 'Itinerant degenerates bleeding west like a heliotropic plague.') A typical human interaction in this book is "The kid looked at the man"; no more. There's plenty of grandeur - just not in humans. At the centre stands the Judge: Satan, Ahab and Moby Dick all in one. ("His skin is so pale as to have almost no pigment.") Racism, fear and poverty form the baseline. The Comanches, for instance, are here worse than demons - "at least demons are Christian"! Lots of descriptions of the stars, inbetween brutalities
For the first time I understand why Aristotle's physics divides the world into different celestial and terranean operations: from down here back then, the stars look so clean and permanent, they're just not of our world, dirty, unhinged, and endangered as it has been, for almost everyone. Galef type: Data 2 - What does it imply about the world, that X could happen?, & Style 3 - tickle your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker. |
| The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975) by Ursula K. Le Guin | Magnificent genre-breaking genre exemplification. She is to science fiction what the Elizabethans were to bawdy comedy. Aside from the two hippie stories, and the four fear-of-psychometrics stories, these will not age. |
| Poems of the Late T'ang (1965) by A.C. Graham | I've been playing at knowing China for years, but of course I do not. (For instance, I picked this calm, modest book up unwittingly, and learn it is the gold standard translation by the greatest Western sinologist of the day.) It's a great hook: supposedly, Chinese poetry (world poetry?) peaked in the Ninth Century. For almost their whole history, passion and violence were considered inappropriate topics for poetry! They resented melodrama and fantasy in their poets! I must be jaded to think this is great. The poets seem all to be old men trying not to care about death - "snail shell men", in Ancient Chinese. They are mainly ultra-concrete - lots of masterpieces about mountains and rice and fish. Graham is a droll, masterful guide, making the requisite comparisons to Baudelaire and Pound for me, the clunking reader. (I can only assume the strange meters he uses are good approximations to the original.) The war between Confucianism and Buddhism is prominent here, and is hard for me to imagine -probably because I have a Hollywood understanding of these two "serene" "coping" philosophies. Li Shangyin's (李商隐的) "On a Monastery Wall": They rejected life to seek the way. Their footprints are before us. Like a typical Westerner, I like the weirdoes: Li He (李賀), who's their wild fantasist (Blake?) and Meng Jiao (孟郊), barren kin of Poe. I enjoyed this, but don't really have the tools to judge: |
| What Should We Be Worried About? Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night (2014) by John Brockman | A portrait of the worst things in the world by some of the cleverest people in it. Loads of people went for the cheap way out and said "We should worry about too much worrying", which is true in one sense but not helpful. Quality varies: these are the most astonishing bits. Many of the entries are on far less important matters, but even those are valuable as evidence of expert disagreement / the deep human need for whimsy. [Free here] |
| Iain Crichton Smith: Selected Poems (1986) by Iain Crichton Smith | None yet |
| Collected Poems (1988) by Czesław Miłosz | Bought it for someone else, but couldn't give it away. Does much that I usually don't appreciate – both Holocaust musing and the relative innocence of nature. But his indirectness and attentiveness lift it way, way beyond the ordinary run of those themes. Never mawkish. Epochal. Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here. |
| Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo (2004) by Werner Herzog | Laplace [the set engineer] is talking about levelling the slope to a mere 45 percent grade; but that would look like the narrow strip of land that forms an isthmus. I told him I would not allow that, because we would lose the central metaphor of the film. 'Metaphor for what?' he asked. I said I did not know, just that it was a grand metaphor. Maybe, I said, it was an image slumbering in all of us, and I happened to be the one to introduce him to a brother he had never met… I have a weird relationship with Herzog. His films' typical tone and message (Nietzschean tragicomedy) doesn't really appeal to me. I watch them – and I watch them all, even since Dinotasia – for their literal and figurative voice: his relentless, Teutonic ecstatic absurdity. I wait for that voice to roll out and make me hurt or laugh. (Since his humour is only sometimes on show, I am often laughing at him – and yet, out of mawkish brutalism, through my irony, rise the most affecting scenes I've ever seen: the beach shot in Cobra Verde; the clouds in Heart of Glass; the wandering penguin in Encounters; above all the final shot of My Best Fiend.) These diaries show him to be more thoughtful, rational, contrived and poetic than I had guessed. His sincere interest in the locals' territorial plight, his physical participation in the set construction and management, his absorption in the suffering of jungle animals, his incongruous bright-eyed interest in mathematics, his astonishing codependency with Kinski, are all deeply disarming. The prose takes some getting used to, since the plain unflinching goth awe of it is the kind of thing we are primed to mock. The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin. The voices in the jungle are silent; nothing is stirring, and a languid, immobile anger hovers over everything. It is worth acclimating to: each entry is both bleak and hilarious, and Krishna Winston's translation is a thing of wonder, no doubt improving on WH. I recall experiencing a similar shiver of awe as a child in Sachrang, when I found a fried piece of bright blue plastic that had floated down the brook and got caught on an over hanging branch. At the time, I had never seen anything like it, and I kept it hidden for weeks, licked it, found it slightly stretchy, full of miraculous properties. Not until weeks later, when I had my fill of owning it, did I show it to anyone. Till and I discovered when you held a burning match to it, it melted; it gave black smoke and a nasty smell, but it was something we had never seen before, an emissary from a distant world high in the mountains, along the upper reaches of the brook, where it vanished into gorges and there were no people. So where did it come from? Had it blown into the mountains by the wind? Idid not know, but I gave the plastic a name-what I do not recall. I do know it had a nice sound, and was very secret, and since then I have often racked my brains, trying to remember that name, that word. I would give a lot to know it, but I do not, and I also do not have that delicate piece of weather-beaten plastic anymore. Having neither the secret word nor the plastic makes me poorer today than I was as a child. He certainly views the natural world right: as overwhelmingly a place of horrifying and pointless suffering, cooed over by pseuds from cars. Sweat, storm clouds overhead, sleeping dogs. There is a smell of stale urine. In my soup, ants and bugs were swimming among the globules of fat. Lord Almighty, send us an earthquake. There's not a lot of technical info here, or explanations of the crew's role or background; there's no timeline or context added; nor even very much about the film at all. But who cares? This is incredible as nature writing, dream journal, and logistical poetry. |
| Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007) by Clive James | I love James because, though he is a literary intellectual through and through, he makes room for the other half of the human mind. He is still an arts supremacist - this personal portrait of the century contains no scientists, and many actors and novelists and politicians, but he is at least aware of the narrowness of this. Cultural Amnesia is an invitation to the humanities; defence of philosophy and art against politics; an attack on the hypocrisy of the left (Kollontai, Sartre, Brecht, Saramago), on the heartlessness of the right (Junger, Brasillach, Pound, Heidegger); a dark, teeming biography of C20th humanism and its enemies; a reading list for all of us bewildered by the bullshit critical fortresses of serious writing about art and history. James is deeply opinionated, often funny and occasionally heartbreaking. Of "the relationship between Hitler's campaign on the eastern front and Richard Burton's pageboy haircut". It's full of faded and non-Anglophone stars (Egon Friedell, Arthur Schnitzler, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Paz, Urena), villains (Brassilach, Celine, Pound, Sartre, Brecht), pop-defining celebrities (Beatrix Potter, Dick Cavett, Michael Mann) and sad outrage. It's also or really an autobiography, a list of the people and one-liners that struck James as he travelled the century. WW2 and the Soviet Empire dominate as the most deadly instances of the theme "how politics invaded art and came close to killing it". Other themes: irrational violence, the nonconformist left, collaborators and fellow-travellers, Jewish achievements, the failure of totalitarian simplicity, 'the American century', rise and fall of jazz. He falls for clash-of-civilisation talk a bit, but he's never conservative without a reason. I think what I love about him is that he stands up for boring truths – 'it takes another power to keep a power in check', "the law's imperfections are tokens of its necessity" etc. For every villain we are given a counter exemplar: Marc Bloch, Sophie Scholl, Jorge Borges... This is my second read-through in five years; I expect to read it again in another five. |
| Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (1962) by Jorge Luis Borges | None yet |
| Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James (2001) by Clive James | Mostly haute subjects for once, but always bas on bs. He: brags about having spotted Heaney very early, points out the fatal ideological flaws in both Mailer and Greer, fiercely challenges translations from the Italian, the Russian, the German; summarises every major photography book of the late 70s; shows that liberalism and classicism remain standing, "less bad than all the others" even after the sustained insult of C20th Theory; and some other such generalist feats. The last two section titles – "Almost Literature" and "Practically Art" – are scale models of both his style and his critical mission: to raise the foully sunken, or shield the great assailed. Skip it, but only because you should be reading the full New Essays series these essays are lifted from. |
| Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened (2013) by Allie Brosh | None yet |
| Travels With Myself and Another (1979) by Martha Gellhorn | In one sentence: Great journalist goes on holiday to the shittest times and places on earth. To be read when: travelling; refusing to. Hilarious and patrician account of the worst of her many journeys, to: Guomindang China 1941, the U-boated Caribbean 1942, East through West Africa 1949, Russia 1966, hippie Israel 1971. She generalises a lot (e.g. she categorises each new tribe she comes across by their average attractiveness and prevailing smell; she often calls 'racial' what we'd deem 'cultural' traits). But her discrimination is more usually discriminating, making just distinctions. She's fair, keen to empathise -
– a point you can find in p'Bitek, among others. And she holds colonialists and bigots in far higher contempt ("it seems conceited to foist off our notions of religion, which we have never truly practised, onto people whose savagery is much more disorganised, personal and small-scale than ours"). My mate Paul – a noted cynic – believes, along with most of our generation, that travel is ennobling, inherently. It surely is not, but it certainly does put an edge on some folks' writing. Not their souls:
Generous, stylish, and a fine if not superior substitute for going there. Galef type: |
| Collected Poems (1988) by Philip Larkin | In one sentence: The apotheosis of perverse contentment or British miserabilism: Housman, if honest about his appetites; Lawrence with a sense of humour; Auden plus even more jazz.. To be read when: ill, heartbroken, very young, quite old, too cynical, too hopeful. Of the consuming fear of death, sexual frustration, impostor syndrome: Britain. He was forever overawed by lack of control over his life; we are left with his superlative control of form. Motifs are well-known: the hostile wind heard from the cold attic; the diminishing of strength; the fall of desire without a fall in the desire to desire; the conviction that age is not running out of time, but running out of self. These are not moans: he loves jazz and booze and other things that make death recede. He's vulgar, and wields it, but never as punchline; what starts "Groping back to bed after a piss" will end with the universe :
There's too much in this volume. I mean that as criticism of its editor, not as expression of Larkin's o'erflowing sublimity. But that too, actually: "Sad Steps", "Aubade", "For Sidney Bechet", "No Road", and "Continuing to Live" are among my favourites. By '72 his bitterness and fear had overcome his kindness, and he dried up, leaving doggerel for mates and nasty biz like "The Old Fools" or "The Card Players". And yet even after three years of this came "Aubade". I avoided the juvenilia, perhaps even out of superstitious respect.
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4/5: Very impressed. 75th percentile.
| CFAR Applied Rationality Workshop - Participant Handbook () by CFAR, Duncan Sabien | None yet | ||
| The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2001) by Vernor Vinge | More playful and miscellaneous than I was expecting. As always with him, there are grand gears turning in the background of his stories: there's more to his worlds than we see, and reasons beyond what the characters reason. But overall not as stunning as his novels, even accounting for scale. This is not surprising when you realise that the earliest of these was written when he was a teenager. He really hits his stride halfway through this, 1980. The main intellectual success is his depiction of anarchism, as stable, unstable, predatory, kind, natural, or requiring unnatural underpinning. I loved his forewords to each story: "The quality of the writing is about average for what I could manage in the 1960s... And the ideas? Ah, there's the problem. To date, "The Accomplice" is the most irritating combination of embarrassing gaffes and neat insights that I have ever created." Great fun but not as mind-bending as Egan or Chiang or Borges or Vinge. Ranked: | ||
| The Sellout (2015) by Paul Beatty | [Ta-Nehisi] Coates and [Michelle] Alexander have gained wide audiences; their books are bestsellers, and they are celebrated across liberal media outlets. Their animating idea — that to overcome racism, the United States must discard any pretense to colorblindness — has become accepted across broad swathes of the mainstream Left. For better or worse, however, it marks a stark departure from King's appeal that skin color should be ignored. The battle between colorblindness and active anti-racism will have enormous consequences for American society. - Christian Gonzalez
- a judge in The Sellout The Sellout is filled with racism and racists - for one thing, the nearly-nameless protagonist, the Sellout, brings back segregated busses and schools, and (reluctantly) owns a volunteer slave - but the book is clearly itself not racist. (I can even quantify how much racism's in it: at one point a pompous character counts the slurs in Huckleberry Finn, arguing for censoring it:
Well, including 'weren*r' and 'n*rized', etc, Beatty manages 146, or 0.52 a page. It feels like more.) That isn't the confusing bit; what is, is that none of the presented racists are white; in fact no substantial characters are. (The single named white person is present for all of seven pages, and is merely innocently patronising.) We could stretch and say that this is Beatty exclaiming at internalised racism. Or it could be a unusual claim about where racism (in the established sense of propositional or emotional racism, as opposed to structural racism) is openly expressed now: among nonwhites. (Or he could seriously just be trolling.) Further, it isn't just a Modest Proposal, despite the prevalence of this mistake of interpretation. A modest proposal is the deadpan presentation of a policy to make the reader realise that it is disgusting. In The Sellout, separatism and degradation work, they improve Dickens for the segregated: the policies are popular, grades go up, crime goes down, and people are polite within and without race categories. What is this saying? It's hard to work out Beatty's schtick, partly because the whole of the first 100 pages is a string of horrible and bravura one-liners, from "black literature sucks": I'm so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! to Maybe race had nothing to do with it. Maybe Rosa Parks didn't give up her seat because she knew the guy to be unapologetically gassy or one of those annoying people who insists on asking what you're reading, then without prompting tells you what he's reading, what he wants to read, what he regrets having read, what he tells people he's read but really hasn't read. So like those high school white girls who have after-school sex with the burly black athlete in the wood shop, and then cry rape when their fathers find out, maybe Rosa Parks, after the arrest, the endless church rallies, and all the press, had to cry racism, because what was she going to say: "I refused to move because the man asked me what I was reading"? Negroes would've lynched her. to I'd rather be called 'nigger' than 'giantess' any day of the week." Reviewers resolve this, in their neat way, by saying that Beatty is satirising "race in America". But that doesn't mean anything: Beatty is indiscriminate: mocking stereotyped black behaviour and police brutality, and pious diversity pushers, and white arrogance, and classic Civil Rights heroes, and radical black intellectuals, and assimilated Establishment black elites, and colorblind universalists. So, you can say "it satirises [more or less every position you can take on] race in America". But what's the point of doing that? I can think of three: 1) to say that there is no sensible position on this seething topic; or 2) to say that we haven't found it yet and must move past the existing positions, or 3) to use the nasty symmetry between the racist and the active anti-racist, to reflect well on Coatesian justice - maybe the thought is: 'colorblind egalitarianism is such a mad idea that even naked nineteenth-century racism is superior to it'.) I don't know which (if any) is Beatty's view. I know I don't agree. There's nothing actually wrong with MLK's principle, judge absolutely everyone on their own merits rather than treating them as a representative of their race or sex or anything, though it has usually been poorly realised. But I respect the chutzpah of pissing everyone off. If nothing else it's original and bullshit-free, two rare predicates around here.
or
Here's what I think is going on: It's hard to get through to people with the usual homilies and pieties, because they are deadened by cliché, bureaucratic muscle, tribalism, and historical ineffectualness. After hundreds of pages of troublingly hilarious japes (including ironic delight in old racist tv shows), Beatty has softened you up, left bare the old wound. That all may be healed, all must be shown. So, is the Sellout a charming pervert? A self-hating masochist? Or a nihilist with moral purpose? Spoiler! It's the first and third. Beatty has no answer and is again brave enough to say so; the book's last page admits no synthesis can win over that particular sceptic: Obama isn't enough, nothing is enough:
The protagonist segregates, and says things like this:
And yet he is not a separatist; he knows it's wrong when the minorities are shouted out of the public space:
Which is my laughter, but not my flight. The Sellout doesn't have an ism: they are all found wanting. I'm just glad it is still possible to explore this godforsaken crater without being screamed down. I'm glad Beatty didn't let it get to him, even if he leaves the Sellout hanging. | ||
| Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (2006) by Christopher M. Bishop | Timeless, towering. My yardstick: The first time I read it (looked at it) I was way out of my depth and understood little. Year by year I misunderstand less of it. | ||
| Cyteen (Cyteen, #1-3) (1988) by C.J. Cherryh | Magnificent. Cherryh is often deeply unclear (examples to follow), but she makes it work by using just enough unclarity to cover the gaps in her made-up mind engineering. I could call it allusion rather than unclarity. Very uncomfortable: large parts are about the internal motivations and human strengths of the leaders of a budding scientific dystopia with an immortal dictator. The humanists and abolitionists are the antagonists, and foiled at almost every turn. We follow the development of a charming little girl destined to Better even than Vinge at baroque skulduggery, chilling effects, the spiritual harm of surveillance, and decades-long cons. | ||
| Excession (1996) by Iain M. Banks | In one sentence: A psychologically realistic utopia (: a flawed one) nestled in a soft opera-of-space-operas. To be read when: you don't think we have anywhere to go. / On a train. (This is more of a review of the Culture series. Excession is my favourite of them - even just seeing that slightly bad 90s cover gets a reaction out of me - but none of the books is so great on its own. I just keep re-reading them. This essay gives a flavour of the intellectual thrill underneath Banks' hand-waving, hand-wringing, and gags. Start with Player of Games or Use of Weapons, and leave Phlebas to last, it's not great except thematically.) The two worst omissions from sci-fi are social development and software development. Banks covers the first so memorably, so thrillingly, that the series is a permanent touchstone for me. The Culture is actually different from us - even though underneath their society revs our great alien machine, liberalism unbound. Banks was always quite open about how didactic his sci-fi was; it is saved by his inventiveness and psychological realism amidst technological fantasy. This scene (from Use of Weapons) had a large effect on me as a child:
As did this, before I studied formal philosophy and received a resounding confirmation of it:
But this was also before I got into technical pursuits which lend us hope that the above grim realism can be defeated by self-awareness, quantification, and epistemic care. Sometimes.
| ||
| Science Fictions: The Epidemic of Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science (2020) by Stuart Ritchie | Wonderful introduction to meta-science. I've been obsessively tracking bad science since I was a teen, and I still learned loads of new examples. (Remember that time NASA falsely declared the discovery of an unprecedented lifeform? Remember that time the best university in Sweden completely cleared their murderously fraudulent surgeon?) Science has gotten a bit fucked up. But at least we know about it, and at least it's the one institution that has a means and a track record of unfucking itself. Ritchie is a master at handling controversy, at producing satisfying syntheses - he has the unusual ability to take the valid points from opposing factions. So he'll happily concede that "science is a social construct" - in the solid, trivial sense that we all should concede it is. He'll hear out someone's proposal to intentionally bring political bias into science, and simply note that, while it's well-intentioned, we have less counterproductive options. Don't get the audiobook: Ritchie is describing a complex system of interlocking failures. I need diagrams for that sort of thing. Ritchie is fair, funny, and actually understands the technical details. Supercedes my previous fave pop-meta-scientist, Ben Goldacre. | ||
| Intelligence: All That Matters (2015) by Stuart Ritchie | Calm empirical overview. Incredibly clearly written, stopping short of off-puttingly plain. Is the g theory of intelligence the most mature, replicated theory in psychology? 100 years old and ever-replicating; language- and culture-blind by now; at least somewhat predictive of some terminal values... What can compete? Operant conditioning, I guess. This book is part of the "All that Matters" series - a coincidental subtitle which has no doubt enraged many people and caused him no end of grief. I highly recommend his Twitter. | ||
| What is this thing called Knowledge? (2006) by Duncan Pritchard | None yet | ||
| Axiomatic (1990) by Greg Egan | (Probably 5 stars on re-read) Phenomenal. (Usually not nice phenomena, but always strong phenomena.) Every one of these produced an effect in me, from deep grimace to snort to total pathos. It took me a month to read 18 stories, because it is stressful to encounter characters this vivid in scenarios this brutal.* Every story has an actual logic - often a fantastical one, like the retrocausal literally-hypothetical boddhisatva posthumans of 'Eugene'. He has few peers in thinking this hard and making you feel the thought. What Black Mirror could have been: thought experiments like self-aware spears. Ranking:
The worst of these is still well above average for sci-fi - clever, satisfying plot, sympathetic characters, moment of awesome. (I tested this here; Egan's entry, weak for him, was still the best in the collection. It would be last, here.)
I could write something about each of these; sometimes hundreds of words. Next time. * It is probably best to treat this book as 2 or 3 small collections, for savouring and emotional rest. --- How does it do as serious science fiction? Social development: A great deal. Personal identity is twisted and torn a dozen times, and he sketches the social structures which would have to arise when there are two of you, none of you, half of you, chimeras. The Ndoli devices illustrate that social consensus replaces philosophy for most people. When perfect cloning and brain transplants are available - when medicine's grasp over injury is total - he still brings it back to hard economics, the small print. Better on this than Chiang, his great peer. Software development: Not a huge amount but enough. He knows that brain transplants couldn't work without software, and the Ndoli devices are an excellent picture of machine learning, even 25 years later, after the field became more than a toy. Actual Science: Half of these stem from an extrapolation of current science (transplants, brain editing, cloning, brain emulation, BioArt), rather than say the apriori thought experiments of Chiang. And not just science: combinatorics! Actual probability! But even his flights of fancy (like the programmable wormhole with bizarre physics of 'Into Darkness') are internally consistent, and display serious attempt to take physics or biology seriously. | ||
| Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 1872-1921 (1996) by Ray Monk | None yet | ||
| A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation (2000) by Peter Singer | None yet | ||
| Odds & Ends: Introducing Probability & Decision with a Visual Emphasis () by Jonathan Weisberg | A beautiful thing. Humorous, careful, with plenty of depth just under the surface. It gives only the classical view, only the point estimate bit, only normal utility theory. If you are comfortable with formalism it is too slow. But it connects logic and probability and decision in the appropriately deep way. I didn't get any decision theory in philosophy class. Even in my economics classes Rational Choice was presented as a done deal, not argued for on the bedrock of expected value and Bayes. And it was a theoretical curio, not really for personal consumption. This part of philosophy still gives me hope and awe - the hacker's end of formal/information-theoretic/Bayesian epistemology and 'science. The common thread is paying such close attention to maths and science that they begin to fade into it. Weisberg goes as far as some open questions, like probabilistic abduction and Bertrand's paradox. (It is important to show newbies more than just the finished part of the building.) I was looking for a better absolute introduction than Tomassi or Hacking, and found it. Insofar as understanding probability is critical to patching the most common human errors, and insofar as stats is one of the few general thinking tools that really does reliably transfer out of the classroom, this is a vital thing for anyone who wants to think. Insofar as you presently think only in words this is the best object I know. Minus a half for no solution book for the end-of-chapter exercises. (I know why, but still.) Free here | ||
| The Philosophy of The Social Sciences (1970) by Alan Ryan | None yet | ||
| Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007) by Walter Isaacson | Physics becomes in those years the greatest collective work of art of the twentieth century. - Jacob Bronowski What to say about the stereotypically great? Start by scrubbing off the accumulated century of journalism and appropriations. Einstein's scientific achievements:
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - Besides his own prize, confirmations of Einstein's theories have led to 4 Nobel Prizes (1922, 1923, 1997, 2001) so far, and first-order extensions several more (1927, 1929, 1933 at very least). We should expect a few more, for grav waves and not inconceivably for wormholes, some day. Isaacson, like most people, portrays Einstein's post-1935 work as a dogmatic waste - he spent about thirty years straining to produce a field theory that could get rid of the spookiness and probabilism of QM. If you compare the output of the first half of his life to the second, sure it looks bad. But he was giving classical physics (determinism, continuousness, simplicity, fierce parsimony, beauty-based reasoning) a well-deserved last shake. Imagine the strength of will needed to maintain full-time effort over thirty years of failures, with your whipsmart peers all tutting and ignoring you. His unified field efforts are methodologically sort of like string theory: a hubristic search over mathematical forms without contact with the actually physical to help limit the formal space. And he actually had a decent decision-theoretic argument for his doomed crusade: When a colleague asked him one day why he was spending — perhaps squandering — his time in this lonely endeavor, he replied that even if the chance of finding a unified theory was small, the attempt was worthy. He had already made his name, he noted. His position was secure, and he could afford to take the risk and expend the time. A younger theorist, however, could not take such a risk, for he might thus sacrifice a promising career. So, Einstein said, it was his duty to do it. People also try to attach shame to him for his wildly stubborn anti-Copenhagen crusade: years spent thinking up tricky counterexamples for the young mechanicians, like an angry philosopher. But I think he had a good effect on the discourse, constantly calling them to order, and leaving it clear, after all, that it is a consistent view of the evidence. The only unforgiveable bit in his later conservatism is that he ignored the other half of the fundamental forces, the strong and weak forces, and for decades. Two forces was hard enough to unify. I suppose another point against his long, long Advanced Studies is that he could have done even more if he had helped push QM along; as late as 1946, Wheeler tried to convince him to join in. As it is we have evidence against the unified field: "Einstein failed". Einstein is like Bertrand Russell, only much more so: even more brilliant, even more rebellious, even more politically active, even more aloof, even more relentless, even more neglectful of his family. (Russell, on hearing relativity for the first time: "To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.") Along with Ibn Rushd, Leonardo, Pascal, Leibniz, Darwin, Peirce, Russell, Turing, Chomsky, Mackay*, Einstein is one of our rare complete intellectuals: huge achievements in science, beautiful writing, good jokes, original philosophy, moral seriousness. To have warmth too, as Einstein does abundantly, doesn't have much of a precedent. However much Einstein is misattributed vaguely pleasant, vaguely droll, vaguely radical statements, the fact is he actually was brilliant, pleasant, funny, radical. Believe the hype. * The usual word is 'polymath', sure, but although we are mad keen on polymaths, their generalism is seen as a laudable extra, rather than the vital service I now think they alone can give: you want people who have proven they can discover truths to tackle your ancient ill-defined questions (beauty, justice, existence). And you can't do good unless you know a great deal about the targets of your morals; you want the vast imaginative search over philosophical possibilities to be aided by what we actually know. (As the noted writer against scientism, Ludwig Wittgenstein put it:
) Maxwell, Boltzmann, Schrödinger, and Feynman basically fit the above: they are as good at writing and philosophy as they are at physics, and very funny to boot. But they didn't push society forward much (...) Goethe tried admirably, but didn't achieve much science. Descartes should definitely be on there but eh. Hilary Putnam discovered important logical results and has all the other virtues, but I guess science is a stretch?. von Neumann covered perhaps the most intellectual ground of all of these people, but I'm not sure he had a moral or political life to speak of. Herbert Simon is deep and broad and fun. And Bohr is brilliant and moral but can't write. (There's others I'd include, but won't because I know I'm a fanboy** / it is too soon to say: Scott Aaronson, David Pearce, Nick Bostrom.) ** A new Moore's paradox: "I know I'm a fanboy, but my thinker is still better than your thinker." What was so moral about him? Well, he was ahead of his time (still is): - - - - - - Even his Zionism was enlightened (pro-migration, anti-state, anti-Begin): "Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs," he wrote [Chaim] Weizmann in 1929, "then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering." One particularly charming bit in this book covers Einstein's long friendship with the Queen Mother of Belgium. When Szilard warns him that nuclear fission has been achieved and could give the Nazis dominion over all, Einstein's first thought is to ask Elisabeth to sort it out, by grabbing all the Central African uranium and sending it far from the Nazis. (As it happens, the Uranverein got their uranium from Czechoslovakia.) Isaacson read all the letters, formed a view on all the academic controversies (Maric's contribution, baby Lieserl, what sort of deist or Zionist or pacifist he was), and covers most of the papers, recasting the classic thought experiments very lucidly. This was a huge pleasure. Read with Wikipedia open, though: C20th physics and its physicists are way too deep and broad for one book. | ||
| The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (1991) by Robert Kanigel | One of the best biographies I've ever read. (The subtitle says it is about Ramanujan, but it is equally about Hardy, that perfect British intellect: more crystalline than Russell, more lofty than Moore, more self-critical than Hare, more fun than anyone, loveable atop it all.) Ramanujan's story is of course maximally moving to anyone with a shred of curiosity or pity. The most moving part of all is an absence, one of the darker thoughts among all thoughts:
His research is patent throughout: he decodes South Indian religion and cuisine, British upper-class slang, and even something of the impressiveness of higher mathematics, while using mere natural language:
Ramanujan himself left a tiny dense literature that we are still decoding:
Many passages raise goosebumps: Kanigel unites the abstract and the bodily, the true and the human all-too-human.
A life-giving book. | ||
| White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo | The drug could be dangerous, after all. I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear. But I could not help thinking about that saucer-shaped tablet... Exhausting - but funny! - postmodern critique of postmodernism. Maybe David Foster Wallace did it better but this is still a thrill | ||
| Fear and Trembling (1843) by Søren Kierkegaard | None yet | ||
| The Gig Economy () by Zero HP Lovecraft | None yet | ||
| Seven Surrenders (Terra Ignota, #2) (2017) by Ada Palmer | It is so, so striking to see Palmer, who obviously lavishes enormous systematic attention on "worldbuilding", blow her own world up. | ||
| The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (2008) by Deirdre N. McCloskey | Not the earliest critic - that's Meehl or Freedman or Gosset himself - but the most readable. You don't necessarily need to read past page 100, it's recapitulation. Very short version here. | ||
| A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce | To use yourself for art you need a really interesting life, or sheer expressive skill - the ability to force anything to be interesting. Neither is easy: someone like Montaigne manages easily, but e.g. Rousseau doesn't (he just got there first, to the I Am Art game, so we have to talk about him). Joyce's life is only mildly interesting from the outside, so it falls to his evocation. I read this to find out whether to care about him, and I actually didn't until Part III, the rightly famous spiritual arc from apatheistic teenage kicks, to the ecstatic shame of submitting to the vast closed Catholic system, and through it to passionate agnosticism, anticlerical naturalism. Joyce's is the best portrait of the infinite terrorism of the Church: remember, my dear boys, that we have been sent into this world for one thing and for one thing alone: to do God's holy will and to save our immortal souls. All else is worthless. As he crossed the square, walking homeward, the light laughter of a girl reached his burning ear. The frail, gay sound smote his heart more strongly than a trumpet blast, and, not daring to lift his eyes, he turned aside and gazed, as he walked, into the shadow of the tangled shrubs. Shame rose from his smitten heart and flooded his whole being. The image of Emma appeared before him and under her eyes the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brute-like lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils. As a teen Stephen tries to mortify himself, to not look at women, to not eat well, to just look at the mud. But he's too bright, too worldly and too proud. I cheered at the end of Part IV, when he throws off the yoke. The prose is port wine: lovely if sipped. It is mostly monologue but the dialogue is the best bit. He is passionate about anything, e.g. algebra - The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock's; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley's fragment upon the moon wandering companionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space. The painful process of moving past family, nation, church, scholastic philosophy, to become yourself. Doing this in a country as maniacal about nation and church as eC20th Ireland was so much harder, and indeed he had to leave. He doesn't move past Art, and acquires a similarly monomanaical view of it - [To be an artist], a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life but if my prose was as good as Joyce's maybe I couldn't have moved past it either. Like Nietzsche if he wasn't an edgelord. That printers and governments treated Joyce and Lawrence the same is a laugh: Joyce has all of Lawrence's passion and none of the flat feet. Self-parody, odd humility, laughter at his own past dogmatism. His memory - or his notetaking? - is amazing: scholars have spent lifetimes checking and relating everything in this to recorded history, and he's usually spot on about details (though he changes names). I don't think I could write anything as accurate, even in my surveillance society. Fully half of my edition was taken up in footnotes and bibliophilia. (It also left Joyce's typos in, which is a bit much. In fact half the footnotes were as trivial as typos, e.g. pointing out where lines are reused from his draft Stephen Hero.) Portrait stops before the end of uni, before his odyssey, before his wife even. And much of the last section is a surprisingly flat, academic statement of Thomist aesthetics. But by then you've heard enough to love him anyway. | ||
| The Periodic Table (1975) by Primo Levi | None yet | ||
| The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (2018) by Bryan Caplan | A powerful book, remarkably light on ideology given its extreme conclusions. (Caplan is not mad: he is right behind universal numeracy and literacy. So the title should be "Case Against Higher Education" but oh well.) Here's a flavour: I have a long list of strange and extreme views, and I've been an arrogant hedgehog for as long as I can remember. As a rule, arrogant hedgehogs with lots of strange and extreme views are severely biased and grossly unreliable. Which raises two daunting questions. What might explain the universal appeal of education?
His conclusion is that about 80% of the personal economic gains from higher education are from (4): not improving your character, knowledge, or ability, but rather from certifying yourself as a good worker (smart, conscientious, conformist). Given the vast cost, time sink, and psychological toll of education, this implies a hugely wasteful, zero-sum arms race (grade inflation, degree inflation), since the income gain doesn't reflect productivity gain, and since we could be doing signalling in less indirect and foolish ways. I'll do a proper rundown of the (many) arguments he gives to end up at this separately. The mostly-signalling theory explains a huge number of confusing features (why do students and employers not value Ivy League MOOCs, even ten years on? Why are most of the income rewards concentrated in the instant of graduation? Why do students cheer when class is cancelled? If lectures are so economically powerful, why don't people just sit in on them without enrolling (and why doesn't the university put security on them to protect their livelihood)? How can human capital explain the income gains, when people forget almost everything about their major within 5 years and don't show very large soft skill increases? You often see people trumpeting the large (50-60%) income premium of higher education, as if that showed that added human capital was the reason for the premium (cough, correlation / causation). But even granting that uncritical leap, there's something strange about focussing on private income gains: the kind of people who believe in the centrality of education tend also to believe that pay is a poor indicator of social value. (For instance, our incredibly low opinion of investment bankers.) Caplan's disturbing point is that the private returns do not translate into social returns. This seeming paradox could happen a few ways: if credential inflation shifts jobs from nongraduates to graduates; or if there are minor human capital gains, but swamped out by the huge financial cost and time cost of uni. My philosophy department used to trumpet graduate income stats as evidence that critical thinking is valued in industry. (They don't anymore, possibly because philosophy is now associated with decreased earnings, at least in the UK.) This trump was an amusing triple failure of critical thinking: they confuse correlation and causation ("philosophy degree and income gain, therefore philosophy degree causes income gain"), fail to consider selection effects (philosophy students start out posher than the average student) and the Yes Minister fallacy:
The big concern with the sweeping cuts Caplan recommends is: how do you stop poor people losing their ability to signal their virtues, if the state withdraws the current subsidy? Remarkably, the book is in large part not based on economists' research: there is as much sociology, . This triangulation strikes me as the way to write lasting social science, social science with a chance of still being relevant in a decade. Who writes like this, aside from the GMU mob? Caplan is modest, thoughtful, an admirable empiricist. If you can't accept his argument you have a lot of work to do before you break even. | ||
| Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (1988) by Judea Pearl | probability is not really about numbers, it is about the structure of reasoning-Glen Shafer By no means an introductory book; even chapter 1 will mean little to you if you haven't tried to model situations with both formal logic and probabilities before. (Some set theory wouldn't go amiss either.) Parts of it treat nearly-irrelevant dead controversies, just because he was still fighting off the McCarthy / production systems programme in the late Eighties. (For instance, I learned Dempster-Shafer theory in class, and it is sorta interesting and neatly evades Cox's theorem, but I still expect never to have to use it. It gets more than 50 pages here.) Bayesian networks, ingenious and progressive as they were, have peaked in use, though their children are still cutting edge and invaluable for human and nonhuman reasoning. All that said: Pearl thinks very hard about ultimate matters. He didn't develop Bayesian networks (and causal models) as a hack, but instead as a consequence of showing probabilities to be better than the alternatives when tweaked for computation, subjective Bayesianism to be capable of handling causal inference, graphs as the natural data structure for both relevance and cause, and the causal/evidential decision theory distinction as primal. On the surface, there is really no compelling reason that beliefs, being mental dispositions about unrepeatable and often unobservable events, should combine by the laws of proportions that govern repeatable trials such as the outcomes of gambling devices. The primary appeal of probability theory is its ability to express useful qualitative relationships among beliefs and to process these relationships in a way that yields intuitively plausible conclusions… What we wish to stress here is that the fortunate match between human intuition and the laws of proportions is not a coincidence. It came about because beliefs are formed not in a vacuum but rather as a distillation of sensory experiences... Building AI as feedback for formal epistemology! My favourite philosophers are technical like David Lewis; my favourite technical people are philosophical like Pearl. He's also very good at taking us through a derivation and underlining the big implications (e.g. P(A) = \sum P(A|B_i) P(B_i) as a model for hypothetical reasoning: belief in event A is a weighted sum over belief in all the ways A can obtain). There's plenty of maths in here but I never struggled much, probably because of this qualitative care of his. PRIS beats the arse off his own 2018 effort, perhaps because at this point he was still working incredibly hard to understand and synthesise competing approaches. Hard to rate. But if you want to seriously think about AI, you'll want to read it at some point. ---------------------------------- Misc notes * McCarthy is to probabilities as Minsky is to neural nets. He sent us down a rabbit hole, chasing nonmonotonic logic solutions to a numerical problem. (See also Chomsky vs prob language models.) | ||
| Beggars in Spain (Sleepless, #1) (1993) by Nancy Kress | Big, moving dynasty novel about a future class war. Elitism vs racism, individualism vs collectivism, negative freedom vs positive freedom, UBI and/or dignity. Kress' stated goal is to bring together Rand's ideal and Le Guin's (ambiguous) ideal and see how they spark off each other, their repulsion dance. The first two books seem simple: a good basic dramatisation of the excellence vs equality problem. But stick with it, dialectic comes. Kress is much better at inhabiting other views than Rand, but not quite as good as Le Guin (who surprised me with how ambivalent, careful and detached her books can be, when her essays are so often blunt and denunciatory). Unlike them, Kress allows her ubermenschen to be irrational, as when the Sleepers fall into stupid binary demonisation of the majority outgroup. She climbs inside libertarianism, productivism, Objectivism, elitism - half of the protagonists are deeply, unreflectively into these ideologies for half the book. Leisha finds one fatal flaw with them - society is not a linear series of contracts but a chaotic informal web of micro-contracts and unthinking mutual structuration, with a thin layer of formal voluntary contracts on top. She remembered the day she had realized that [Objectivist] economics were not large enough. Their stress on individual excellence left out too many phenomena, too many people: those who had no excellence and never would. The beggars, who nonetheless had definite if obscure roles to play in the way the world ran. They were like parasites on a mammal that torment it to a scratching frenzy that draws blood, but whose eggs serve as food for other insects that feed yet others who fatten the birds that are prey for the rodents the tormented mammal eats. A bloody ecology of trade, replacing the linear Yagaiist contracts occurring in a vacuum. The ecology was large enough to take Sleepers and Sleepless, producers and beggars, the excellent and the mediocre and the seemingly worthless. And what kept the ecology functioning was the law. Miranda and the supers find another, which is that fortune can mock anyone regardless of momentary strength or weakness. Tony, Leisha said silently, there are no permanent beggars in Spain. Or anywhere else. The beggar you give a dollar to today might change the world tomorrow. Or become father to the man who will. Or grandfather, or great-grandfather. There is no stable ecology of trade, as I thought once, when I was very young. There is no stable anything, much less stagnant anything, given enough time. And no nonproductive anything, either. Beggars are only gene lines temporarily between communities. The hyper-precocious kids are about as off-putting as those in Ender's Game. I wish she had only given the Sleepless more time than the unmodified - not superintelligence and immortality to boot. This would still be enough to create the tension the plot needs, they'd just grow with a lower exponent, maybe taking 150 rather than 40 years. Everyone in this book, plus maybe Kress herself, are in serious need of the first lesson of first year economics, comparative advantage. This says, roughly, that it actually isn't a fatal problem if someone is better than you at every different economic task: they still have limited time, so they can still gain from trading with you (you each produce the thing you're best at making then swap some). This understates the problem with Kress portrays a couple of neglected ideologies. One, which determines just as much of world events as liberalism or socialism, has only the ugly name 'productivism' (or maybe also the misleading name 'workaholism'). Leisha is a classic example. On worrying that her elderly stepmother might be just farting around the house: Leisha had felt a palpable relief, like a small pop in her chest, when she saw the terminal and medical journals in Susan's office. On her relationship trouble: "We're fine, Susan. We work together really well. That's what really matters, after all." You can laugh at someone missing the point of life so much, but you should consider how much of what you value depends on people like this. And, when summarised into the long-term growth rate, how much of the vast potential of the future does. (Ada Palmer covers this exact dynamic, as the romantic "vocateurs", people of vocation.) And another ideology neglected in fiction: Leisha is a rare instance of "bleeding-heart libertarianism" (another ugly name). --- * Kress: Genetic engineering is becoming a reality, one that many people are not ready to acknowledge, let alone allow. But you cannot put the genie back in the bottle. We know how to manipulate the human genome and so, inevitably, we will. The two sequels to Beggars in Spain, Beggars and Choosers and Beggars Ride, explore that issue in as much detail as I could invent. Even so, I didn't come close to covering the excitement, the changes, the shock, and the controversy that genetic engineering will bring in the coming decades. I just wish that I could stick around for a hundred years or so to see it—and to write about it.Nah mate not a hundred years; try thirty. * There are eventually 4 classes: Livers (the idle cosseted underclass), Donkeys (the unmodified workers, the elite Sleepers), Norm Sleepless and the Super Sleepless. Ordered pair of ordered pairs. * One key to the conflicts is that people have grown used to certain ancient inequalities of degree, but new or qualitative ones should awake all of our envy and rage Beautiful or brainy children might encounter natural envy, but usually not virulent hatred. They were not viewed as a different race, one endlessly conspiring at power, endlessly controlling behind the scenes, endlessly feared and scorned. The Sleepless, * Most of the big interventions in the book fail. Yagai's gift to the US enables its slide into total indolence and short-termist hedonism. Hawke's nasty uprising for dignified labour morphs into shallow hedonistic Idiocracy, voting for more party money instead of doing things. * Sanctuary is grandly sick, a monarchy masquerading as half a democracy. (It is not quite as sick and complete as the totalitarianism in Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky.) This… child, this girl who had never been spat upon because she was Sleepless… never locked in a room by a mother who was putrid with jealousy of a beauty her daughter would never lose, even as the mother's beauty was inexorably fading… never locked in a cell away from her children… never betrayed by a husband who hated his own sleeplessness… this spoiled and pampered child who had been given everything was attempting to thwart her, Jennifer Sharifi, who had brought Sanctuary into its very being by the force of her own will. The children looked at their shoes. They were afraid of her, Jennifer saw. That was not bad; fear was only the ancient word for respect. She's a paranoid idiot, or rather mindkilled by fear and the dread ruthlessness of a survivor. Witness her adhoc patching of the edge cases of personhood on Sanctuary, her silly fixation on mere sleep and mere relative productivity, which is her downfall. And: What good outcome could there have been from her bioterrorist secession? She's an effective villain despite her inertness because she's so good at manipulating smart well-meaning people into vice. The horror of sophistry. She has a right to her life, whatever it is now!" * Libertarianism could be a lovely thing, for some other species. It builds a philosophy of life from a completely different direction than mine: top-down, from grand general ideas to morals and behaviour. (Has anyone teased them for having a top-down philosophy which demands the abolition of top-down forces?) The bottom-up approach, missing from this book, is to instead move from experiences, which motivate morals and nonmorals just by you understanding what it is like to experience them. Any subject of experience deserves good; the legal and political implications are distantly contingent on this, and vary massively from time to time as a result. Productivity is good when it leads to good lives: the enlightened definition of 'productive' is whatever does this. If pushpin or cartoons give you pleasure, they're productive. It just happens that there is generally currently millions of times more productive things to do. (The Livers are aesthetically repugnant to me, but eh their lives are better than most.) This isn't as vacuous as it sounds: consider the remarkable goodness of (most of) Jeremy Bentham's beliefs, in a time of universal bigotry. We got better, but we're still not optimising for good vibes. * "Community" is mostly malign here: the zero-sum nativism of We-Sleep, the incoherent defensive supremacism of Sanctuary. The idea does have a black heart: "us, not them", but there are better, nicer examples. (I suppose the Supers are the steelman.) The one grace of the instances here is separatism: they don't initially demand mutilation or submission, just space for their difference. We-Sleep is also a pretty weak exemplar for socialism. "Wake up, Jordan. No social movement has ever progressed without emphasizing division, and doing that means stirring up hate. The American revolution, abolitionism, unionization, civil rights—" * The depiction of the supers' thought process is good and novel - they build and collaborate on "strings", complicated visual argumentation models, replacing natural language. * What is Kress' view? It's not that good a question, given that she's trying to do dialectic between ideologies, and does it pretty well. But if we let Leisha's mature view stand in, there are some authorial-sounding notes And throughout it all, the United States: rich, prosperous, myopic, magnificent in aggregate and petty in specifics, unwilling — always, always — to accord mass respect to the mind. To good fortune, to luck, to rugged individualism, to faith in God, to patriotism, to beauty, to spunk or pluck or grit or git, but never to complex intelligence and complex thought. It wasn't sleeplessness that had caused all the rioting; it was thought and its twin consequences, change and challenge. Leisha settles on the idea that it is impossible to reconcile solidarity and high-variance freedom, that the attempt to reconcile them drove Jennifer and the US mad. When individuals are free to become anything at all, some will become geniuses and some will become resentful beggars. Some will benefit themselves and their communities, and others will benefit no one and just loot whatever they can. Equality disappears. You can't have both equality and the freedom to pursue individual excellence. The book's answer is to not take either horn, to just juggle the contradiction forever. I don't see the dilemma really; you just separate moral worth from ability, then automate the economy: boom, equality and freedom. --- Maybe five stars on re-read, though the prose might be a bit flat for that (aside from a couple of moving passages, all quoted above) and maybe the dialectic is too heavy-handed. --- How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: Strong. The various caste systems that spring up are believable - for instance the Liver/Donkey one, where the donkeys downplay their own work and set up society as a circus, to short-circuit the questions of employment, dignity, status, revolution. Her nativists are very plausible, though they speak less about "natural life" than I expect ours to (the Sleepers seem happy with any genetic modification besides sleeplessness). The elitism of the Sleepless is just a stronger form of the sort already held by certain merely slightly more productive conservatives. Much of the economics is questionable though, particularly the C21st self-sufficient space city of 80,000(?). Software development: Good, though high-level even by fiction's standards. The plot hangs on software (including patent databases), though these are mostly reduced to relative hacking ability. Only Vinge is better. Actual Science: Some very sketchy genetics at the heart of the plot but not much. It's not pure magic - she puts realistically heavy limits on the genetic engineering of adults - but the rest is just assumed. | ||
| A Companion to Ethics (1991) by Peter Singer | None yet | ||
| Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1) (2016) by Ada Palmer | SF with prose from the (radical) C18th, written IRL by a historian of that time. A big old bucket of ideas. I loved the many didactic discursions - e.g. de Sade's Christian name being a plot point, sections written in speculative future Latin - but I think most readers will not love them. I did choke a little at the constant coincidences, and at the enslaved protagonist meeting literally every elite in the world in the space of two days. Filled with what some have called out for, "competence porn" - i.e. the elites are manipulative, egotistical, and yet still acting in (what they think are) the best interests of the world. Will probably bump it up to a 5 on re-read. Get past the superficial quaintness, you'll be rewarded. | ||
| The People's Act of Love (2003) by James Meek | Found this very striking when I read it 13 years ago, but can't remember why. | ||
| Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration (2019) by Bryan Caplan |  Beautiful stuff, perhaps the clearest economic argument I've ever seen, and more moving than expected. I've seen people dismiss it as narrowly economic ("people value more than money ya know") but this is stupid: fully half the book is about morals and culture. There are dozens of lovely little easter eggs in Weinersmith's art too (e.g. "Conspicuone Pecansumption" icecream). The arguments: 1. Closed borders lead to incredible suffering - not just the obvious oppression of camps, raids, struggle and drownings, but also the unnecessary perpetuation of poverty. 2. He argues that it's a human rights issue: "If a foreigner wants to accept a job offer from a willing employer or rent an apartment from a willing landlord, what moral right does anyone have to stop them? These are contracts between consenting adults, not welfare programs." The regulation is an apartheid with comparatively little outcry and great popularity. 3. America had completely open borders until 1875 and comparatively-free undocumented immigration until 1924. It did pretty alright. 4. Immigrants on average have been fiscally net-positive. Doing our best to isolate the effects, moving to a rich country seems to multiply your productivity. (For a few reasons: more co-operation, a larger market for your work, no tropical disease, coastal trade, IQ gain if you're young.) This model predicts trillions of dollars of gain from open borders. If true, this massively reduces global poverty. 5. Immigrants are on average culturally positive, allowing the recipient country to select from the best of everything in the world. The first generation are quite a bit more law-abiding than average natives. (Nowrasteh estimates that just one in seven million immigrants turned out to be a terrorist.) Assimilation is high, usually complete within 2-3 generations. "Political externalities" (the idea that your good culture will be voted out by bad culture once you let immigrants vote) have not in fact been seen. Residual points:
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| The Age of Reason (1945) by Jean-Paul Sartre | So nasty, but some great lines. | ||
| The Replacing Guilt Series () by Nate Soares | pinch yourself, and remember what you are. What do you see? Consequentialism for humans. Important because it is rare for discussions of "demandingness" or "scrupulosity" to speak about specific behavioural patterns or phenomenology. (It also has the most important part of self-help, an awareness that positive advice is never universal: "remember the law of equal and opposite advice. For every piece of advice useful to one person, there is some other person who needs exactly the opposite advice.") (I put off reading this for a whole year, and felt bad about it. So.) He'd have you move from external motivation to intrinsic motivation because it's more sustainable, and so more effective. He's quite radical about this, ditching normal moral psychology: the way that most people use the word "should," most of the time, is harmful. People seem to use it to put themselves in direct and unnecessary conflict with themselves... imagine the person who wakes up feeling a bit sick. They say to themselves, "ugh, I should go to the pharmacy and pick up medication before work." Now picking up meds feels like an obligation: if they don't get meds, then that's a little bit of evidence that they're incompetent, or akrasiatic, or bad... this disconnects the reason from the task, it abolishes the "why". The person feeling sick now feels like they have an obligation to pick up medication, and so if they do it, they do it grudgingly, resenting the situation... Now imagine they say this, instead: "ugh, if I went to the pharmacy to pick up medication, I'd feel better at work today." Your true shoulds, if I could show them to you, would not look like a list of obligations. Your true shoulds would look like a recipe for building a utopia. Many treat their moral impulses as a burden. But I say, find all the parts that feel like a burden, and drop them. Keep only the things that fill you with resolve, the things you would risk life and limb to defend. I find it amusing that "we need lies because we can't bear the truth" is such a common refrain, given how much of my drive stems from my response to attempting to bear the truth. "Badness" is not a fundamental property that a person can have. At best, "they're bad" can be shorthand for either "I don't want their goals achieved" or "they are untrained in a number of skills which would be relevant to the present situation"; but in all cases, "they are bad" must be either shorthand or nonsense. Wouldn't Nietzsche in his better moods (or Laozi at any time) smile? --- The strategy is roughly: 1. Find something to care about. (Obstacles: hiding in bed, defensive relativism or nihilism, hiding in routine.) An important distinction: * Listless guilt: feeling bad because you feel you should do something with your life, but not really thinking about what. --- One startling bit: some people report that following his advice has "broken" them, in the sense that guilt was indeed propping up their lives. His response is, "good": Some people, when they stop forcing themselves to do things because they "should," will do a bit less to improve the world. They'll bow a bit less to social pressure, and insofar as the social pressure was pushing them to do what you think is good, you might count that as a loss. Some people don't care about things larger than themselves, and that's perfectly fine, and making them more resilient to social pressure might lose the world some charity. (This attitude is strongly reminiscent of the person Scott Alexander is incredulous about at the end of this great, great piece, though with instrumental harm.) I'd probably be more cautious, and advise you not to read this if you don't have lots of slack, support, and stomach for horrible facts. (Soares finds intrinsic motivation in attending to how awful the world is, how much it needs fixing.) --- It's short but dense with interesting ideas. (e.g. the nice concise rebuttal of naive internalist egoism.) Each post repeats its point at least three times, which I suppose is intentional pedagogy, but it made me skim a lot. Soares also often links forward to posts you haven't read yet, confusingly. I'm not particularly guilt-ridden or scrupulous, on the scale of things, but I still found this good. Not sure I buy everything in it, but the rough method (move from vague to specific guilt, and then view the specific guilt as an external and unhelpful force in the light of your specific goal) seems sensible. If the following worldview or prose doesn't appeal to you, it's not for you: you will not be measured by the number of moments in which you worked as hard as you could. You will not be judged by someone rooting around in your mind to see whether you were good or bad. You will not be evaluated according to how unassailable your explanations are, for why things you couldn't possibly have prevented were the things that went wrong. Why should we listen to self-help, unless the author has done something impressive? I don't know if you find these things impressive, but they serve. | ||
| Do You Think What You Think You Think? (2006) by Julian Baggini | Maybe the first philosophy (nominal philosophy? thing by a philosopher?) I read. Can't quite remember if it was amazing, but I ended up doing philosophy so it can't have been bad. | ||
| This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009) by David Foster Wallace | There's been a lot of DFW hate lately – here, here, here, here. But who else marries the syrupy plain with the thrilling theoretical arcane? Could anyone fail to understand the retrospectively obvious point of this little lecture? (Roughly just: It requires constant work to divert yourself from egotism and irritation; this work is the point of education and the essence of maturity.) The audience titters throughout the recording; this grates on me. It's the forced, knowing laughter you hear in theatres. I submit that it's this feature of DFW's audience that Ellis and TLP hate. I don't know if reading DFW makes me any less self-obsessed and disdainful, but actually it feels like it might. | ||
| How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (2007) by Pierre Bayard | In one sentence: Relax, it's a game. To be read when: teenaged; burdened by the thought of the millions of unread books; before going to a posh party. There are too many books; among those worth reading at all, most are best skimmed; others are best interpreted via interpreters; you only see part of the possible meaning of the books you've read; and you've forgotten almost anything about even those. So relax and talk about the 'virtual' book, the idea of it, the version of it that you and your interlocutor inadvertently generate between you. The title sounds like vacuous click-bait (indeed, a friend who later wrote his thesis on Bayard initially thought I was recommending something like this fluff). But it is instead all of the following: a thrilling act of virtuoso postmodern over-reading, a serious look at intellectual status and neurosis, a really interesting phenomenology of books, a glowing review of a dozen writers (including my beloved-but-low-status Greene and Lodge), and sheer backwards-land satire. I found it liberating, not because I go round pretending to have read things (a free-rider in literary conversations), but because by the end of my arts degree I had found out, to my surprise and dismay, that high culture is 90% bollocks. Or, maybe: that arts culture is shallow and irrational, a thick and grasping vine overgrowing the lovely lonely tower of great writing and painting. Bayard (or anyway his cheeky narrator) help unhook you from the blind devotion of the reading classes, and lets you face books on your own terms, sceptical and skimming and agentic. I was freed - and immediately started to get technical. And 'Bayard's' style - pointing out the inconvenient but undeniable things about a cherished phenomenon - now reminds me of the arch-rationalist Robin Hanson. Which is where I went next.
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| The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing (2012) by John R. Perry | structured procrastinator: a person who gets a lot done by [consciously] not doing other [important] things. This book didn't exactly change my life, but it made me feel better about what I was already doing. (Before, I'd been calling it slingshot akrasia.) Structured procrastination is that staple from stand-up comedy where the best way to get yourself to tidy your entire house is to sit down to do your taxes. : All of my reviews, all of my essays were written in the glow and shadow of other things I should've been doing. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, such as gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they find the time. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because accomplishing these tasks is a way of not doing something more important. -- Work and study pressurise my life. They give me a structure to defy, a gravity assist. I am happiest laden with obligations, when the set of tasks that is my life flies just out of control. I think the mechanism is this: 1. I require a steady stream of variety. SP is related to how great I feel when I don't have to go to a party, to my sadly efficient approach to grades, to how giving work to a busy person is a good way of getting it done quicker, i.e. an implausible linear increase of output with increasing things to do. I read more fiction when doing a stats degree and learn more stats when in work. --- Antecedents of Perry and me. Fernando Pessoa: I often wonder what kind of person I would be if I had been protected from the cold wind of fate by the screen of wealth... to reach the tawdry heights of being a good assistant book-keeper in a job that is about as demanding as an afternoon nap and offers a salary that gives me just enough to live on. Nietzsche: the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of Christianity... produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely-strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals... we have it still, all the distress of spirit and all the tension of its bow! And perhaps also the arrow, the duty, and, who knows? The goal to aim at... Geoff Dyer: The best circumstance for writing, I realized... were those in which the world was constantly knocking at your door; in such circumstances, the work you were engaged in generated a kind of pressure, a force to keep the world at bay. Whereas here, on Alonissos, there was nothing to keep at bay, there was no incentive to generate any pressure within the work, and so the surrounding emptiness invaded and dissipated, overwhelmed you with inertia. All you could do was look at the sea and the sky and after a couple of days you could scarcely be bothered to do that. Zach Weiner: [After months of working only on my main goal] I took on a job doing closed captioning because I found it [made for] an easier time writing. Just something about talking to people and watching weird media made the writing a lot easier. My new theory of self was that you can't write well unless you have a little strife in your life. I worked at the closed captioning job for 4-6 months and by then I was making enough money on the site to responsibly quit my job. --- Is this platitudinous? It is possible that the grand narration above is delusional, and that the only actual content here is "A lot of people work better under pressure". Don't think so though. YMMV. 5/5 if you don't do this already. | ||
| 80,000 Hours: Find a fulfilling career that does good () by Benjamin Todd | Collation of results from a very grand project: to channel young careerist thousands into better tasks in higher gear. If you have the will to do well, you should read the website, and think through the planning exercise here. Unlike everything else I've read about career development, since it talks about work and success without being nauseating. | ||
| Exhalation: Stories (2019) by Ted Chiang | Wonderful again, worth the wait - 9 stories (including 4 novellas) in 12 years. The defamiliarisation, the perceptual aid in these is the equal of great philosophical work. The best bit is his patience and magnanimity with folk psychology. He is much more empathetic with bad philosophy that I am; he builds people very different from himself or me (a worried father writing a moral-panic piece about perfect recall; a young-earth creationist tipped into despair by being god's practice shot), and then around page 10 he flips their philosophy, showing how it unravels in the face of reality, and so makes me look like an idiot zealot for being irritated by them. many people became convinced that [alt-timeline creation devices] nullified the moral weight of their actions. Few acted so rashly as to commit murder or other felonies, but... In "What's Expected of Us" he has "one-third" of people driven mad by an intuitive demonstration of their lack of 'libertarian' free will. I don't doubt that some would be, but there's no way that one-third of people are that abstract, that philosophically susceptible. The world would look so different if they were. (We have "paradox-absorbing crumple zones", as Futurama puts it.) And as for the ones who did go mad, I would be tutting at them for letting bad philosophy confuse them to death. The title story is just perfect, the story of a robot dissecting itself and thereby learning of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its emotional implications. Another distinctive thing: Half the stories have a pair of contrasting narrators, objective and subjective. One of these voices is merely expository, apparently styleless. But it just works. I was primed to dislike "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" from the title alone: despite popular usage, feelings are neither true or false, but instead grounded or ungrounded, helpful or unhelpful. (I was shocked to find this activist taxonomy very useful: valid / justified / effective.) But again it's larger than me: it links the great oral-to-literate transition to a near-future one from analogue-literate to digital-literate. God it's good, like Black Mirror if it wasn't relentlessly scaremongering and cheap. Ranked: Not as good as his first collection, but what is? (With Le Guin and Wolfe gone, he might be the reigning master.) | ||
| The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins | None yet | ||
| Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction (2015) by James V. Stone | rigour follows insight A pleasure to spend time with. Stone's arguments are complete without being bloated, and he has a keen eye for philosophical and intuitive implications ("Why does maximum information look like pure noise?", "What exactly does half a bit mean?", and much more). This completeness means that he sometimes repeats definitions or lemmas, but I defy you to find this unhelpful. The bibliography is also excellent, ranking a hundred books by their specialty and difficulty. (Quibble: at the end he suggests that Shannon's originality was so strong that he "single-handedly accelerated the rate of scientific progress, and it is entirely possible that, without his contribution, we would still be treating information as if it were some ill-defined vital fluid". But his work seems so natural and elementary that this would surprise me. Weak evidence: Konrad Zuse independently invented Shannon's boolean circuit theory...) | ||
| Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013) by Sendhil Mullainathan | Economics bills itself as 'the study of decisions under scarcity', though much of it is actually about excess: luxury substitution, savings rates, futures markets, conspicuous consumption, and so on. The psychological side - the panic, narrow focus, and sense of doom - was completely absent from my economics classes, but without it you can't really understand poverty, and thus can't value economic growth as the life-saving, mind-saving thing it has been. Reasons scarcity is bad: Economics only really handles costs (1) and (2). Psychology at its best handles (3-7). (9) is the author's new contribution, I think: this is cognitive economics. Without some spare resources it's impossible to be free, to be generous, to relax. That's obvious. Less obvious: Without slack you can't even think straight (there's a "bandwidth tax" on the poor, reducing their effective intelligence, willpower by perhaps an entire standard deviation). Most of the cited experiments are about money scarcity, but their ingenious move is to generalise to all of us, to all conditions where a person lacks some instinctively (evolutionarily) key resource: e.g. money, time, calories, friends. As well as a rare theoretical synthesis, this makes this book more evocative for its rich-world readers: We have used the psychology of scarcity to create an empathy bridge. We have used experience with one form of scarcity (say, time) to connect to another form (money). Having known what it's like to badly need a little more time, we might start to imagine what it's like to desperately need a little more money or even more friends. We used this bridge to draw a connection between a busy manager fretting about insufficient time before a deadline and a person short on cash fretting about insufficient funds to pay rent. Exciting! I've been reading development economics and behavioural science for years, and I still got a lot of new results and a whole gosh-darnit Practical Theory of Mind with moving parts from this. They compress all the complex constructs and determinants of their real theory into a lossy construct, "bandwidth". This is a shorthand for working memory & fluid intelligence & attention span & decision consistency & persistence & executive control & long-term planning inclination. They admit at the start it's a compression, so that's fine. With compromised bandwidth, we are more likely to give in to our impulses, more likely to cave in to temptations. With little slack, we have less room to fail. With compromised bandwidth, we are more likely to fail. Lesson: To actually optimise your life, you can't optimise too hard, in the sense of pushing right up against your budgets. This idea is not new; a different book would tie this to queuing theory and distributed systems, trying to find general theoretical truths about systems. (What's the maximum sustainable load for a server? For a life?) Excess capacity, 'slack', is short-run inefficiency and long-term shock-tolerance and thus true efficiency. The point seems to apply to servers, hospitals, and a single human life viewed from inside. This also adds to Taleb's critique of naive finance, encouraging 'risk-sensitive optimisation' (or, death-sensitive). Extends bounded rationality to limited attention, willpower, as well as computation and a search budget. The book's big philosophical question is the old Essence vs Context chestnut ("the poor are worse parents, drivers, borrowers" vs "given these constraints, people are worse parents, drivers, borrowers"). But it's a new twist on it: rather than (as well as) a developmental deficiency, poverty is an active, situational force: This shortfall is not of the standard physiological variety, having to do with a lack of nutrition or stress from early childhood hindering brain development. Nor is bandwidth permanently compromised by poverty. It is the present-day cognitive load of making ends meet: when income rises, so, too, does cognitive capacity. The bandwidth of the farmers was restored as soon as crop payments were received. Poverty at its very core taxes bandwidth and diminishes capacity. This surprises me: I generally accept that people are hard to change, that engineered context is relatively weak. But then all attempts at self-improvement are a denial of essentialism about something, and I'm well into those. To explain why the poor borrow excessively, we do not need to appeal to a lack of financial education, the avarice of predatory lenders, or an oversized tendency for self-indulgence. To explain why the busy put off things and fall behind, we do not need to appeal to weak self-control, deficient understanding, or a lack of time-management skills. Instead, borrowing is a simple consequence of tunneling. They don't sugarcoat it: they accept the massive body of evidence on how burdened the poor are, on dozens of axes. And they note that just giving them cash rarely solves the problem because this doesn't change the logic enough. The poor stay poor, the lonely stay lonely, the busy stay busy, and diets fail. One big gripe: They use the word "scarcity" for both a physical shortage (i.e. the normal economic sense) and for this special psychological burden. (Not having, and having your mind captured by not having.) This needs two words; it muddies their thesis. They've persuaded me that late fines are an extremely regressive tax. I'm open to the view that reducing poor people's options is sometimes best for them (e.g. if they are "hurt by the ability to borrow [at extortionate rates]" because it prevents them smoothing their income in a credit cycle). I agree that bandwidth is the deepest kind of human capital. Their treatment of the mental costs of education is important, given NGOs' blithe promotion of education over all else. (And it's a further argument for unconditional cash transfers.) To capitalize on a bonus payment for a child's medical checkup, a parent must set up the appointment, remember to keep it, find the time to get there and back, and coerce the child to go (no child likes the doctor!). Each of these steps requires some bandwidth. And this is just one behavior. Conditional cash transfer programs seek to encourage dozens, if not hundreds, of these good behaviors. Just understanding those incentives and making the necessary trade-offs—deciding which are worth it for you and which are not, and when—requires bandwidth. I'm a keen and cynical student of social research, and but I only recognised one spurious result in this whole book. (ego depletion, p.107 - and that only in a tangent explicitly phrased as hypothetical.) They did a pretty convincing within-subjects study on sugar farmers before and after harvest income which nails down the effect as far as I can see. --- Only not five stars because we can't give any social science book five stars until it is 20 years old and more severely scrutinised. | ||
| A Few Quick Ones (Jeeves, #11.5) (1959) by P.G. Wodehouse | What else can you read one line of and feel this happy?
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| Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014) by Nick Bostrom | Like a lot of great philosophy, Superintelligence acts as a space elevator: you make many small, reasonable, careful movements - and you suddenly find yourself in outer space, home comforts far below. It is more rigorous about a topic which doesn't exist than you would think possible. I didn't find it hard to read, but I have been marinating in tech rationalism for a few years and have absorbed much of Bostrom secondhand so YMMV. I loved this: Many of the points made in this book are probably wrong. It is also likely that there are considerations of critical importance that I fail to take into account, thereby invalidating some or all of my conclusions. I have gone to some length to indicate nuances and degrees of uncertainty throughout the text — encumbering it with an unsightly smudge of "possibly," "might," "may," "could well," "it seems," "probably," "very likely," "almost certainly." Each qualifier has been placed where it is carefully and deliberately. Yet these topical applications of epistemic modesty are not enough; they must be supplemented here by a systemic admission of uncertainty and fallibility. This is not false modesty: for while I believe that my book is likely to be seriously wrong and misleading, I think that the alternative views that have been presented in the literature are substantially worse - including the default view, according to which we can for the time being reasonably ignore the prospect of superintelligence. Bostrom introduces dozens of neologisms and many arguments. Here is the main scary apriori one though:
Of far broader interest than its title (and that argument) might suggest to you. In particular, it is the best introduction I've seen to the new, shining decision sciences - an undervalued reinterpretation of old, vague ideas which, until recently, you only got to see if you read statistics, and economics, and the crunchier side of psychology. It is also a history of humanity, a thoughtful treatment of psychometrics v genetics, and a rare objective estimate of the worth of large organisations, past and future. Superintelligence's main purpose is moral: he wants us to worry and act urgently about hypotheticals; given this rhetorical burden, his tone too is a triumph. For a child with an undetonated bomb in its hands, a sensible thing to do would be to put it down gently, quickly back out of the room, and contact the nearest adult. Yet what we have here is not one child but many, each with access to an independent trigger mechanism. The chances that we will all find the sense to put down the dangerous stuff seem almost negligible. Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens. Nor can we attain safety by running away, for the blast of an intelligence explosion would bring down the firmament. Nor is there a grown-up in sight... I don't donate to AI safety orgs, despite caring about the best way to improve the world and despite having no argument against it better than "that's not how software has worked so far" and despite the concern of smart experts. This sober, kindly book made me realise this was more to do with fear of sneering than noble scepticism or empathy. [EDIT 2019: Reader, I married this cause.] * People sometimes choke on this point, but note that the first intelligence to obtain half a billion dollars virtually, anonymously, purely via mastery of maths occurred... just now. Robin Hanson chokes eloquently here and for god's sake let's hope he's right. | ||
| Lost for Words (2014) by Edward St. Aubyn | Brutal Booker Prize satire.
The targets I recognised were 'Wolf Hall', 'how late it was, how late' - and, among the judges, Stella Rimington, Chris Mullin, Malcolm Rifkind / Jim Murphy(?) Sam certainly sounds like Patrick, too:
There's also an exquisite send-up of Deleuzian/Lacanian raving. | ||
| An Introduction to Statistical Learning: With Applications in R (2013) by Gareth James | Really good, heavy on intuition building, folk ML, and stuff which you'll actually use. I've brushed up against all of it before (: I've called all of it from the safe distance of a nice Python library before), but it took a second pass and doing all the exercises to click. To actually learn (grok) something, you need 1. To do it, not just read about it And 2&3 conflict. (Most books don't have a natural do-operator. How do you do a novel? I make do with these reviews; others do fanfiction and probably get the same benefit.) Kind of annoying that the figures are never next to their discussion. And I was hoping this would make me like R but I can't and I don't. But good. | ||
| The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, Rationality and the Race to Save the World () by Tom Chivers | To my surprise I recommend this for anyone. (The chapters are tiny and I did the whole thing in an hour.) For outsiders it's an honest and nontechnical portrait of a new, strange, and wonderful endeavour; and Chivers shows his path from ordinary sceptical thoughtfulness to taking the idea seriously. (However, there's almost no maths in it, and without maths you can only ever sort-of get the gist. For instance, one of the key premises of the whole programme is very easy to understand if you've ever seen the structure of a reinforcement learning algorithm - where the 'optimizer' and the 'reward function' are completely separate modules varying freely - and apparently quite difficult to accept if you haven't.) For insiders it's a reminder of just how strange the project seems from outside. The chasm of inferential distance. There's also fun new details: I had no idea that Bostrom is name-dropped in Donald Glover's new TV show, for instance. And this made me laugh: Buck Shlegeris, a young MIRI employee with excitingly coloured hair and an Australian accent, told me that 'A book on this topic could be good', and that 'if I could jump into your body I have high confidence I could write it'. However, his confidence that I could write it from within my own body seemed significantly lower, which is probably fair enough. If you've read much on the topic you can skip the whole middle third of the book, it's just Chivers paraphrasing bits of the first two Sequences. Chivers overemphasises Yudkowsky. Gwern, Grace, Sandberg, and Muehlhauser get one passing reference each, but their work (and Krakovna's) have each had a larger effect on me, and on others I know. Not to mention the tumblrs. Ach never mind: it's a huge illegible mess of a movement and he's done well. Some of the interviewees make patently poor arguments - Sabisky ("it's a sex cult"), Brooks ("no [AI safety proponents] have ever done any work in AI itself"), Gerard ("it's a money-spinning cult") but it's so patent that I think people will see their prejudices. The real shame is that better critics exist - I have in mind the anonymous prosaic-AI researchers Nostalgebraist ("alignment is equivalent to solving ethics and decision theory at once") and "Beth Zero". But I suppose anon randos are not the best subjects for a mass-market book. (Robnost: "Here is what this ends up looking like: a quest to solve, once and for all, some of the most basic problems of existing and acting among others who are doing the same... problems of this sort have been wrestled with for a long time using terms like "coordination problems" and "Goodhart's Law"; they constitute much of the subject matter of political philosophy, economics, and game theory, among other fields. It sounds misleadingly provincial to call such a quest "AI Alignment" ... ) Young Yudkowsky is adorable - and I hope others are able to see this past his hubris and proclamations. Chivers manages to show the power and emotional impact of the 'internal double crux' idea: I can picture a world in 50 or 100 that my children live in, which has different coastlines and higher risk of storms and, if I'm brually honest about it, famines in parts of the world I don't go. I could imagine my Western children in their Western world living lives not vastly different to mine, in which most of the suffering of the world is hidden away, and the lives of well-off Westerners continue and my kids have jobs... Whereas if the AI stuff really does happen, that's not the future they have... I can understand Bostrom's arguments that an intelligence explosion would completely transform the world; it's pointless speculating what a superintelligence would do, in the same way it would be stupid for a gorilla to wonder how humanity would change the world. (Amateur psychoanalysis is fine - if you're doing it to yourself, and if you don't take it too seriously.) I'm pretty sure I know who this is (that mix of iron scrupulousness and radical honesty) and before I read it I thought the same: I met a senior Rationalist briefly in California, and he was extremely wary of me; he refused to go on the record. He has a reputation for being one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, but I found him a bit stand-offish, at least at first. And I think that was because he knew I was writing this book. He said he was worried that if too many people hear about AI risk, then it'll end up like IQ, the subject of endless angry political arguments that have little to do with the science, and that a gaggle of nerdy Californian white guys probably weren't the best advocates for it then. Journalistic harm I feared, that didn't come to pass: he never comments on anyone's appearance ("It would be extremely easy for me to write a book mocking them. But I don't want to do that."); he mentions Dylan Matthews' irritating amateur psychoanalysis only once - roughly, "of course Silicon Valley people think that good software will save the world"; he gives exactly no time to that one proudly cruel subreddit devoted entirely to ad hominem idiocy about the Rats. He brings up polyamory a lot but not malignantly. The "Chinese robber fallacy" is that you can make any large group seem evil by selecting from bad actors among them, even if they have exactly the same rate of the selected bad behaviour. If there are ~1m views on LessWrong per month, say 100,000 unique visitors. If sociopathy is found in 1% of the general population then the site will have 1000 sociopathic visitors. If 99% of visitors are lurkers, never commenting then you should expect 10 sociopathic commenters a month. This is enough to satisfy me that the 'dark side' (i.e. the odd far-rightist, and two gendered tragedies) Chivers covers is the selfsame dark side as our dumb world at large. I hate Chivers capitalising "Rationalist" all the time. I double hate it when he pairs this with capitalised 'Effective Altruist', like "the Rationalist Effective Altruist Buck Shlegeris". At no point does Chivers use the full (and only appropriate) name for the identity: "aspiring rationalist". (No human is that rational.) But to be fair nor do most people online. Couple of harmless errors (Helen Toner wasn't 'doing' ML in China, for instance). But the big one is that, after talking to all these people for and against, Chivers ends with the deferential prior: 80% of technical researchers think it's 90% likely we'll have AGI within a century, and if (as Chivers thinks) 17% think it will be highly negative, then our best guess is a 14% chance of catastrophic AGI. (With very large error bars - but that's even worse when you think about it.) Now, since he began at extreme scepticism (<1%) this is a large update - and we were lucky that a journalist came this far out on the limb. But the arguments presented here for and against the Risk are not equally convincing. He is presumably just too modest to multiply them out, as an amateur, in the face of big expert surveys. But, see what you think. | ||
| Joy in the Morning (Jeeves, #8) (1947) by P.G. Wodehouse | An irony: Florence is noted for her urge to improve Wooster by forcing philosophy textbooks and boring modernist literature on him. This fails utterly and inspires revolt. she was one of those intellectual girls... who are unable to see a male soul without wanting to get behind it and shove. We had scarcely arranged the preliminaries before she was checking up on my reading... substituting a thing called 'Types of Ethical THeory'. Nor did she attempt to conceal the fact that this was a mere pipe opener and that there was worse to come. Jeeves, on the other hand, has no programme, he just slips allusions and lyricism into conversation, with at least passable results on Wooster. 'I shall miss you, Jeeves.' 'Propose, forsooth! She'll just notify me that the engagement is on again, like a governess telling a young charge to eat his spinach. And if you think I've got the force of character to come back with a nolle prosequi-' Indeed, since all the stories but one are told by Wooster, the title of this is down to this strategy. (This is only remarkable because I was not expecting ironies.) --- * Wooster's taboo: Sindbad fancy dress costume; fake ginger beard. | ||
| The Divine Comedy (1320) by Dante Alighieri | James claims Cultural Amnesia took him 40 years to write and that this translation took 50. Lucky he saw the two keystones to the end! I was surprised by how much of Dante's audacious fleshing out of vague Scripture is revenge verse; standing in judgment over his historical (Alexander, Attila) and contemporary enemies (his Latin teacher). He was probably echoing Church proclamations, but still: the author as towering demigod. After Book One you'd be forgiven for thinking that most people in hell are Italian. It's impossible to ignore Dante's medieval sneer in places (even though he was a big liberal by the going standard): he parades the Church's varied idiot retributions, some of which persist, e.g. promising suicidal folk that they are going to get fucked up, or having sweet modest Epicurus roasted alive forever for holding the soul to be mortal. The final, most irredeemable circle of hell is reserved for, well, me: childless anti-nationalist atheists. Didn't quite have the stamina, but I'll be back. | ||
| Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell | None yet | ||
| Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1) (2002) by Richard K. Morgan | Class act: cyberpunk without cheap gothic neon and lolspeak; noir without cartoonish conventions. A meditation on identity and consent via sex and violence. Genuinely. The Scene: Consciousness can be up- and downloaded. In this world, if you are rich enough, you do not die. If you're richer than that, you get uploaded into a young clone of yourself - otherwise you take whatever marginalised corpse is going and adjust your sense of self to fit. He picks out implications brilliantly (e.g. what happens to celebrity culture?). The inevitable neologisms are excellent, intensely suggestive of the new culture's inner life: death is just "storage"; bodies are just "sleeves" and to be reincarnated is to be "sleeved"; a plasma gun is a "sunjet". Murder is just "organic damage". Catholics are (once again) the world's underclass - unable to travel interstellar because it involves casual storage (suicide) and resleeving (heresy), and killed with near-impunity because they alone cannot testify at their own murder trials. Cartoonish moments: our anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs is attacked or apprehended 7 times in the first 150 pages.) People transition gender with regularity. Morgan makes a bold essentialist statement, which is somewhat backed-up: To be a woman was a sensory experience beyond the male... To a man, skin was a barrier. To a woman it was an organ of contact. That had its disadvantages</span>.(Kovacs is tortured, horrifically, as a woman.) Advertising can be beamed obtrusively into your mind. The UN has become a Shady Galactic Empire. It is strongly suggested - not least by our trained-psychopath protagonist - that this transhuman society is more psychopathic, owing to the lower stakes of violence, injury, and taboo-breaking. Gritty but not just gratuitous. Better than Gibson. | ||
| At Last (2011) by Edward St. Aubyn | None yet | ||
| ワンパンマン 1 [Wanpanman 1] (Onepunch-Man, #1) (2012) by ONE | Note that you will only be recognised as a super hero if you are registered in the National Super Hero Registry. If you are not registered, you will always be seen as a delusional weirdo and looked down upon, regardless of how many times you save the world. What's the name of the thing where you don't like a genre, but you do like deconstructions of it? I have it with horror (Cabin in the Woods and Tucker and Dale vs Evil!) and now, to my surprise, with shonen anime (Evangelion, Mob Psycho and this). Despite appearances OPM is a serious comment on credentialism, mob psychology, existentialism. The heroes and monsters are all ranked, but the ranking has little relation to their power. The unboundedly powerful protagonist is quite depressed because nothing in life is a challenge to him any more, no foe ever lasts. (Disappointed by the second series of the TV show, so turned to this.) The art is surprisingly bad (though the creator improved massively over a couple of years). Unlike most manga it looks like what it is: a five day rush job. The show plays with this by using art crudeness to represent Saitama's emotional state: when he's actually focussing he's drawn in great detail. The other 99% percent of the time he's round-faced, blank, and unshaded to represent how little effort he is giving whatever perilous situation the world is in. Still, hilarious. | ||
| Collected Poems (1981) by Sylvia Plath | The first raw confessional poet? Which is to say the first very-modern-poet, mother of 100,000 epigones, confessing when we've done nothing in particular worth admitting or renouncing. Actually, have any metal bands covered Plath? | ||
| Nua-Bhardachd Gaidhlig / Modern Scottish Gaelic Poems: A Bilingual Anthology (1976) by Donald MacAulay | None yet | ||
| Museum Without Walls (2012) by Jonathan Meades | The best bellowing contrarian in the land. This is mostly just TV scripts I've already seen, and though this means that we can at last catch up with his rapid-fire aesthetic barbs, they still suffer without their inspired, bizarre visual production. A sense of loneliness comes through on paper (anger and historical command is the dominant note in the programmes). You can see almost all his work at this Youtube channel. It is a fine use of a week. | ||
| A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science (1998) by Noretta Koertge | None yet | ||
| Gateway (Heechee Saga, #1) (1977) by Frederik Pohl |  Hits hard, leaves marks. The ignoble, epistemically pinched, economic-realist sci-fi as written by the Strugatskys or Stross. I love it so much that even the Rogerian psychotherapy at its core doesn't annoy me; that even its 90% focus on one spoiled and abusive bastard is a merit of it. Spoilers everywhere. Physics and sin. No shortage of things left to do. In one sentence: Dreadful human being reflects on his dreadful actions while dead aliens look on. To be read when: overconfident; always.
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| The Earthsea Quartet (Earthsea Cycle, #1-4) (1984) by Ursula K. Le Guin | If fantasy tends to strike you as pompous or tasteless - if you can't get through 'Lord of the Rings', 'Game of Thrones' or whatnot, you should try this. Anthropological fantasies. The first three books are about: mortality, deconversion and addiction. But the fourth, about two women in two farmhouses, is actually the most ambitious. 'Tales of Earthsea' is my favourite, but you can't just skip to it, since it gets its power from reprise and reprisal. The cycle is relentlessly pro-death though; Ged does not become a man until he faces and integrates a manifestation of his own death; Cob's terror of, and resistance to death enslaves and drains the entire continent; an ancient attempt to create an afterlife is actually an act of betrayal, colonialism, and Frankensteinian hubris. The cycle ends with the circle of life and death restored, and everyone right pleased and relieved at this, not least the undead who get to not exist. Now, you can counter that le Guin is more pro-stoicism, pro-serenity, pro-enlightened-adaption-to-the-inevitable than she is pro-death. But deathists always are; they are harmful because of their apriori ban on potentially wonderful undertakings, not because they are goth as fuck. As always, she is a wonderful read even when I disagree with her very strongly. To be read by 10 year olds and 27 year olds, presumably by 50 year olds and definitely by 75 year olds. | ||
| Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (1993) by Leonard Cohen | I don't think he's depressing! Does that make me in some way broken? Anyway: Cohen the Jewish Buddhist leverages literary power from a faith he does not own: his poems are thus as erotic and grotesque as the best Christian writing. Much funnier and more concrete than his songs, too. Sure, everything is ominous in his work, but it's also banal, and these often admit they're ridiculous. To my surprise he is never obscure; to my relief he is never fatally wounded by the vicious retribution his many flaws invite. Gnarled urban spirituality. A strong, unlikely comparison: Bukowski. They both fixate on: plain poems about poems, bitter desire, nakedness, grandiose self-loathing, losers in love, and the significance of everyday things.(Look at this: "The art of longing's over and it's never coming back.") Speaking of Bukowski: is Cohen sexist? Arguable. For every slap in the face like 'Diamonds in the Mine', there are several tendernesses ('Portrait of a Lady') and self-aware apologies for lust. I would say: shocking and honest about patriarchal shapes, generally not unfeminist. ("You took my fingerprints away / So I would love you for your mind.") Moments of chastity inamongst the randy fury - for instance he never says 'God', always 'G-d'. Lots about the Holocaust too, mostly its banal consequences. Kiss me with your teeth The newer stuff is generally weak, because less wry, profane and specific. | ||
| I Think You'll Find it's a Bit More Complicated Than That (2014) by Ben Goldacre | A hundred clear, witty, and literate attacks on the agreeable nonempiricism that most worldviews and most conversations are based in, even in the modernised, developed world. (It covers such anti-scientific fields as alternative medicine, journalism, politics, and policy. You may regard anti-vaxxers, face cream 'science', homeopathy, and AIDS denialism as too obviously false to be worth your time deriding. But these hopeful, manipulative falsehoods are where many if not most live: someone has to defend people.) This makes it a collection of a hundred enjoyable tutorials in statistics, experimental method, and epistemology: Alternative therapists don't kill many people, but they do make a great teaching tool for the basics of evidence-based medicine, because their efforts to distort science are so extreme. When they pervert the activities of people who should know better – medicines regulators, or universities – it throws sharp relief onto the role of science and evidence in culture... Goldacre is a gifted populariser: by focussing on particular abuses, he is able to animate very hard and theoretical topics by leveraging our anger, or our humour. (In a similar way to Nassim Taleb's snark. Of course, as strict empiricists, the two men share many targets: the powerful and overconfident, the famed and hollow, the predatory and avaricious). Since British libel law opens him to constant financial hazard, even when he is entirely careful and correct, he calls his writing "pop science with a gun to your head". (Actually it is mostly pop metascience; even better. There are shout-outs to the great critics of C20th science: Celia Mulrow, John Ioannidis, Uri Simonsohn, who are too-rarely praised; for they turned on the people who might otherwise have lionised them.) He shows policy analysis to be lagging a century behind the standard set by medical trials, and not mostly for the good reasons (which are: that they have a more causally dense subject than medicine has; and because they face absolute ethical restrictions on their experiments: it is politically impossible to experiment with welfare systems). e.g.: Policy people set no required evidence threshold before administering their treatments en masse, have no controls, no randomisation, no calibration, no statements of formal uncertainty, no malpractice system to punish their recklessness, nor often any honest fucking posthoc evaluation of their treatment. [Andrew Lansley's] pretence at data-driven neutrality is not just irritating, it's also hard to admire. There's no need to hide behind a cloak of scientific authority, murmuring the word "evidence" into microphones. If your reforms are a matter of ideology, legacy, whim and faith, then, like many of your predecessors, you could simply say so, and leave "evidence" to people who mean it. Journalists come across as badly as the quacks - even BBC, Panorama, C4 News. This may be being ameliorated at last by the rise of the specialised blogospheres and by the Nate Silver / Rich Harris / Keith Frey school of data journalism. But not generally yet and not for sure. I love his rationalist war-cry, against the public and dinner-party proponents of the never-supported MMR -autism link: Many of these people were hardline extremists - humanities graduates - who treated my arguments about evidence as if I were some kind of religious zealot, a purveyor of scientism, a fool to be pitied. The time had clearly come to mount a massive counter-attack. His website is a bit ugly but has most of this content for free; the extras in this volume are oddities for fans (an undergraduate paper of his, BMJ editorials and notes from his heartening rise into British policy establishment (he is a public health researcher at the NHS). This was my second pass at his columns; I was again refreshed and uplifted and enraged. We might despair at how persistent insensitivity to evidence has been, and at how unnatural empiricism remains, in a society totally transformed by it. But I don't despair, because it has never been easier for us to check and rebut liars and fools. I sincerely aspire to become a "research parasite" (an independent checker of analyses, a rogue forensic statistician) and to write as clearly and well as him. Goldacre is that rare thing, someone doing the best work they possibly could be. (If he could be persuaded to migrate to the global south...) | ||
| Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990) by Ray Monk | None yet | ||
| Math with Bad Drawings (2018) by Ben Orlin | Fables and math have a lot in common. Both come from dusty, moth-eaten books. Both are inflicted upon children. And both seek to explain the world through radical acts of simplification. If you want to reckon with the full idiosyncrasy and complexity of life, look elsewhere... math makers are more like cartoonists.
So wise. You'd think a high-school maths teacher who draws intentionally badly wouldn't have much to say about the nature of reason, the ecstasy and despair of learning and abstraction, the beauty of inevitability. But here we are - this only looks like a children's book. For better or worse there's a pun or goofy self-deprecating joke every couple sentences. (The greatest of these: " CHAPTER 21: THE TIME HAS COME, LEON WALRAS SAID, TO TALK OF MANY THINGS") Everything in it is elementary, but using these simple examples Orlin covers a dozen of the most important intellectual developments: constraint theory of beauty, "unreasonable effectiveness", probability theory (via fascinating government lotteries with positive expected value!), the Great Recession from the quants' perspective, the replication crisis, the marginalist revolution... And he disses school mathematics often enough to charm anyone. I learned plenty (about bridges, polar animals, sabermetrics, about the inevitability and brilliance of ISO 216, and so on). Dissing folks for their probabilistic failures is a bit like calling them bad at flying, or subpar at swallowing oceans, or insufficiently fireproof. No big deal, right? I mean, does probability ever come up in the real world? It's not like we spend our lives clawing for intellectual tools that might offer the slightest stability in the swirling miasma of uncertainty that surrounds us every waking moment... He goes a bit wrong in his probability / lottery chapter - he spreads the rational choice theory (the idea that lotteries are good because it buys you nice daydreams) without reflecting that human attention and gumption are finite, and that the daydream thus robs people of a mildly but actually better future. Surprisingly, he also disses expected value (first-order users of which are "educated fools") with the trivial fact that infinities are strange: "Perhaps the ultimate repudiation of expected value is the abstract possibility of tickets [promising infinite payoff but only asymptotically]". Luckily decision theory is larger than one rule, and nowhere says that you must ignore your budget (+ leverage) and blindly obey the result of one multiplication... He also uses the false positive / false negative framework, which is usually misleading for squishy things like medicine and social science. (He also thinks Han Solo is valid.) While I am bitter that my own early maths education was so mindless, I'm amazed and glad that a few kids out there get to learn from someone like this. | ||
| The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence (1964) by D.H. Lawrence | Far better than his far more famous novels. Bitter and randy but often sensational, bringing flowersReach me a gentian, give me a torch! There's about 6 duds for every one of those - as always, a Collected is never judged by its hit rate but by its best. His philosophy is rank nonsense ("Sexless people transmit nothing."; "The machine shall be abolished from the earth again; / it is a mistake that mankind has made;") - as always, this has no bearing on the poems. What do I care that he is the most unsound voice in the great unsound choir of English literature? See here, here, here, here, here. The dirt-cheap holly-green Wordsworth paperbacks are where I got my first education. (I think this is what older generations got via Dover Thrifts or Pelicans.) | ||
| Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: A Reader's Guide (2006) by Roger M. White | None yet | ||
| The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011) by James Gleick | Ah! I am a sucker for this form in pop science: "primary research into some unjustly obscure thing, pulling together the historical and scientific strands, revealing the excitement and transcendence in the unsexy, un-Arts thing, and making the reader feel smarter and more solidly located in the modern world". Here it's information technology very broadly construed – so African talking drums, Morse, bioinformatics, memetics, Hawking radiation, Wiki, and so on. Unbelievably, I'd never heard of the hero of the tale, Claude Shannon, because he was quiet and didn't make any metaphysical claims for his profound work. Loads and loads of tasty gobbets to boot "I do not believe that my father was such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst (& Metaphysician)…" - Lovelace Shot through with the joy of discovery, and all of it unbleached by the drudgery, familiarity, and commercialism evoked in "I.T.". | ||
| The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age (1965) by Stanisław Lem | Superlatively brainy and silly fairytales, with wizards replaced by AI engineers. Think Carroll, Smullyan, Juster, Egan, heavier than heaven. Quantitative slapstick: And the mathematical models of King Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors' pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King's polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann's Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values Despite appearances, it's not light fiction. It covers the impossibility of making people happy, the absurd birth and death of a robot without senses, the arbitrariness of power. The shadow of the Soviets falls on the stories quite hard. Trurl notarizes, issues directives, the typewriter chatters, and little by little an entire office takes shape, rubber stamps and rubber bands, paper clips and paper wads, portfolios and pigeonholes, foolscap and scrip, teaspoons, signs that say "No Admittance," inkwells, forms on file, writing all the while, the typewriter chattering, and everywhere you look you see coffee stains, wastepaper, and bits of gum eraser. The Steelypips are worried, they don't understand a thing, meanwhile Trurl uses special delivery registered C.O.D., certified with return receipt, or, best of all, remittance due and payable in full- he sends out no end of dunning letters, bills of lading, notices, injunctions, and there are already special accounts set up, no entries at the moment but he says that's only temporary. After a while, you can see that that is not quite so hideous, especially in profile - it's actually gotten smaller!-yes, yes, it is smaller! The Steelypips ask Trurl, what now? how do you [humans] build your progeny?" asked the [robot] princess. Kandel's translation (from the Polish) is maybe the greatest I've ever seen: hundreds of puns, neologisms, fake academese, and absurd alliterative names, all rendered into English without slips or missed opportunities. I read this over a month, savouring. Probably 5/5 on re-read. | ||
| Writings on an Ethical Life (2000) by Peter Singer | If a critical mass of people with new priorities were to emerge, and if these people were seen to do well, in every sense of the term -- if their cooperation with each other brings reciprocal benefits, if they find joy and fulfillment in their lives -- then the ethical attitude will spread, and the conflict between ethics and self-interest will have been shown to be overcome, not by abstract reasoning alone, but by adopting the ethical life as a practical way of living and showing that it works, psychologically, socially, and ecologically... [here] I've read a lot of Singer, mostly papers and columns and distilled arguments, not books. I can't remember not wanting to life an altruistic life, so I don't know exactly how much influence he had on me - but I'm a tithing vegan with a lot of respect for evolutionary arguments, who bites many utilitarian bullets, so it's probably plenty. Clear, unflinching, inspiring. Reading this, it's easy to see why the heroes of a fantasy novel could be called Singers. --- PS: Can anyone explain why, alone amongst philosophers, his face is so often on his book covers? Just fame? Just his strong brand? | ||
| Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1) (2009) by Hilary Mantel | Engrossing, a great charitable reconstruction of a terrible age. Besides the subtle portrayal of the latent Reformation revolution, there's also a far more important upheaval: the rise of brilliant laymen and potent commoners (e.g. More and Cromwell), that is, the beginning of the end of feudalism. Never been very interested in the Tudors. Henry is fickle and narcissistic even compared to other early Modern monarchs, and Anne is a boring climber. He appeared to set off a revolution for no better reason than he was too sexist to accept a female heir. Mantel shows how Henry, Anne and Katherine are a microcosm of their time - Mother Church vs the nationalism-Protestantism complex, and England slowly tearing itself away from former to latter. The first Brexit. It's an imperfect model - Henry still burns un-Catholic books and men, and Luther and Tyndale don't support the shady divorce (against their own interests). A mixture of lust, opportunism, influence from competent rebels (Cromwell, Cranmer)? Most characters are portrayed as pragmatic and modern, prayer aside. They know most relics are bogus, that the "medicine" of the day is hazardous, that the Church's decisions are deeply contingent and political, and they mock the superstitious lord who believes in ghosts. This is probably going too far, but it makes for great fiction. The treatment of More vs Cromwell is the reverse of that in A Man for All Seasons: here Cromwell is a rational, catholic, and empathetic gent, while More is a scary authoritarian fundamentalist, closer to a Daesh jihadi than Rowan Williams. [Cromwell] can't imagine himself reading [the Bible] to his household; he is not, like Thomas More, some sort of failed priest, a frustrated preacher. He never sees More, a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod - without wanting to ask him, what's wrong with you? Or what's wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you have learnt, confirm you in what you have believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away, a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Mantel has a funny way of letting her grammar show that Cromwell is The Man - she'll use "he" to mark him, even when this breaks the normal "pronouns refer to the most recent subject of that gender" convention. This is disorienting, but I appreciate the effect. I was recently baffled by this sentence, from a contemporary American evangelical: "I was baptised Catholic before I became a Christian." The violence of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation is the nastiest evidence of the power and horror of the narcissism of small differences. I liked the book recommendations, the 16th Century equivalents of discussions on here. It is so hard to know, from 500 years away, what's worth reading. Though I suppose the real C16th dross is dead, all out of print, unarchived, unextant. For instance: Castiglione says that everything that can be understood by men can be understood by women, that their apprehension is the same, their faculties, no doubt their loves and hates. This bit was funny: When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He feels a moment of jealousy towards the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; now a days the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month. | ||
| Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help (2015) by Larissa MacFarquhar | I don't know whether there are any moral saints. But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them... The moral virtues, present... to an extreme degree, are apt to crowd out the non-moral virtues, as well as many of the interests and personal characteristics that we generally think contribute to a healthy, ...the moral narcissist's extreme humility masked a dreadful pride. Ordinary people could accept that they had faults; the moral narcissist could not. To [André] Green this moral straining was sinister, for the moral narcissist would do anything to preserve his purity, even when doing so carried a terrible price... new qualifiers appeared: there was "pseudo-altruism", a defensive cloak for sadomasochism; and there was "psychotic altruism", bizarre care-taking behaviour based in delusion... the analyst surmised that the masking of their own hostility and greed from themselves might be one of altruism's functions for people of this type. ...we cannot and should not become impartial, [Bernard Williams] argued, because doing so would mean abandoning what gives human life meaning. Without selfish partiality—to people you are deeply attached to, your wife and your children, your friends, to work that you love and that is particularly yours, to beauty, to place — we are nothing. We are creatures of intimacy and kinship and loyalty, not blind servants of the world. Twelve profiles of recent radical altruists, and the backlash they receive from the rest of us. (^) Besides, MacFarquhar has some deep reflections on the good life and human nature to work through. So: There are people who shape their lives around the need of the world – in particular around strangers who are constantly, in some sense, drowning. This category of person does more than just work a caring job and be dead nice to those around them: instead, their entire lives are dominated by the attempt to do the most good.
- - - - - - - - - (I've compiled data on their nature here.*) MacFarquhar appears suspicious about these people, whose lives are taken over by their morals. She calls them "do-gooders" while admitting the term is dismissive.** Even the most humble and quiet do-gooder is, she thinks, making an extremely arrogant claim: that the moral intuitions of the whole species - i.e. family favouritism, supererogation, the right to ignore the suffering of strangers - are totally wrong. She leaves no-one unsuspected. an extreme morality as Singer's or Godwin's can seem not just oppressively demanding but actually evil, because it violates your duty to yourself. To require a person to think of himself as a tool for the general good could be seen as equivalent of kidnapping a person off the street and harvesting his organs to save three or four lives... even to ask this of yourself seems wrong, even perverted. Impartial, universal love seems the antithesis of what we value about deep human attachment. But these lives are victory laps: the victory of broad reason over narrow animality. MacFarquhar is more nuanced, less willing to dismiss particularism, nepotism and speciesism – which are together known as common sense. (Though I have only a mild case of the radicals: for instance, I am mostly immune to misery about the state of the world, and I help my loved ones without much guilt. I'm giving 10% now and 50% eventually, but I am such a bookish scruff that the absence of luxuries does not really cramp my life at all.) One part of Williams' humanist case against radical altruism has dissolved in the last decade: the idea that single-minded ethical focus must erode your connection to your community. Well, the effective altruists are growing in number and maturity; they offer a deep, global community of at least partially serious people to support and be supported by: and all with the stamp of moral consistency. MacFarquhar doesn't much like utilitarianism, but she is too moved and impressed with her subjects to take the standard, safe, quietist line (which her reviewers have tended to). Throughout, she presents contradictory philosophical propositions, and makes it difficult to know which she believes; she constantly uses indirect speech and deictic discussion, blurring her voice with the debate at hand. This is, I think, an impressive rhetorical strategy – an "esoteric" one. The book is addressed to common sense readers, but also to our uncertainty and faint guilt; it's dedicated to her parents, but explicitly constructed to bring us closer to the altruists: I took out all the physical descriptions because if you're looking at someone's physical appearance, you're on the outside. Similarly quotations, which seem as though they should be the most intimate form, because they come directly from the person's mouth. Again, in fact, the only way you hear someone speaking is if you're outside them. So if you translate quotation into interior thought, which simply means taking away the quotation marks and saying 'he thought' rather than 'he said' – that's a more intimate way of encountering someone.*** So Strangers Drowning covertly brings us closer to radical altruism. Her task is not to establish their ethical premises, nor to win over new obsessives: instead, she simply shows us their sincerity and incredible effects on the world – and, better, shows the lack of evidence and interpretive charity behind their opponents' aspersions. (This goes for the Freudians, the Objectivists, and the anti "codependency" crowd.) It humanises the threatening side of ultimate goodness. She mostly avoids editorialising about the radicals. But one of her clear conclusions is that these people are not deficient, instead having something most people lack: What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence. They lack that happy blindness that allows most people, most of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes (though not always) their joy is purchased with other people's joy. And, remembering that, they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility... while also noting that, in general If there is a struggle between morality and life, life will win... Not always, not in every case, but life will win in the end. Sometimes a person will die for a cause; sometimes a person will give up for duty's sake the things that are to him most precious. But most of the time, the urge to live, to give to your family, to seek beauty, to act spontaneously... or to do any number of things other than helping people, is too strong to be overridden... It may be true that not everyone should be a do-gooder. But it is also true that these strange, hopeful, tough, idealistic, demanding, life-threatening, and relentless people, by their extravagant example, help keep those life-sustaining qualities alive. An amazing book, anyway: charged, critical, structurally ingenious, and filled with humanity – or, with this other, better thing.
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| Why I Am Not a Christian (1957) by Bertrand Russell | Read my great-grandfather's copy, which felt good in a way I haven't often felt. This is what traditionalists like about tradition, I suppose: long continuity making you feel large. | ||
| The Claw of the Conciliator (The Book of the New Sun, #2) (1981) by Gene Wolfe | Again excellent - a better Dune, a much better Narnia, a peer to Ulysses. Throws you off balance right from page one - there's about 50 pages of plot missing between the first and second volumes, never really recounted. Since the Book is a chronicle written much later by Severian, this is maybe to show how old the book is when the in-universe reader finds it. One of the great things about Severian is that he's various - he has many conflicting goals, none of which is really the master quest. He swears I think four absolute oaths to different authorities. Jonas teases him about this: "You want to serve Vodalus, and to go to Thrax and begin a new life in exile, and to wipe out the stain you say you have made on the honor of your guild — though I confess I don't understand how such a thing can be stained — and to find the woman called Dorcas, and to make peace with the woman called Agia while returning something we both know of to the women called Pelerines... I trust you realize that it is possible that one or two of them may get in the way of four or five of the others." As the retrospective journal of a victor (and as a work of nasty, feudal science fiction) it has the same feel as Dune, only less clumsy: we know that Severian or Paul have prevailed or will, but this somehow doesn't unstring the plot. There is a lot of plot, a lot of one-off scenes and people. It's all earned though, through symbolism or callback or prose. Hundreds of pungent sentences ("praise the Autarch, whose urine is wine to his subjects..."). Probably 5/5 on re-read. | ||
| The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006) by Deirdre N. McCloskey | I've been most things in my life: a positivist social engineer, a Joan Baez socialist, a man. Now I'm a free-market feminist, a quantitative postmodernist, a woman. I'm not ashamed of these changes of mind. It is good to be a contrarian teen. Decorous even. I was straight-edge, socialist, feminist, a poetaster, an inverse snob, and a shunner of TV.* Call this sort of thing one level up, one contrarian step past received opinion (which defaults to boozing, family-level rather than species-level communitarianism, gendering, ignoring poetry, passively respecting fine art, and watching 4 hours a day). However, at some point the observant contrarian will disagree with someone and find themselves unable to write them off - as they usually do - as prejudiced, anti-intellectual, or ignorant. Worst-case, they will meet a deadly meta-contrarian, someone who once held their view but stepped past it on considering some missing crucial consideration. (For instance: it is common sense, or at least common practice, that it's fine to not give any money to charity. One step beyond is altruism: 'we have a duty to help the wretched of the earth'. But then consider that one of the first things people who rise out of poverty do is increase their meat intake, and so to industrialise - that is, torture - their animals. If, as the scientists strongly agree we should, we take this seriously, then poverty alleviation might not be good at all! But then, consider that wild animals also suffer, millions of times more of them than even factory farmed animals, and that human industrialisation plausibly decreases this by removing habitat (...) ) Meta-contrarianism is vital is because philosophy, politics and economics are littered with crucial consideration landmines like these, single premises that can fully transform our conception of good action. Our problem is not socialism or theism or atheism or conservativism: the problem is irrational, reflexive views with no connection to the balance of evidence: i.e. ideologies and not philosophies. Anyway: I was pretty good-hearted, but neither clear nor honest. An ideologue. McCloskey, a Christian libertarian(!) and much else besides, got to even me via our shared contempt for neoclassical macroeconomics and null-hypothesis significance testing, two things she critiqued twenty years before the Great Recession and the replication crisis. Then she shocked me with the meta-contrary title of this, the first volume in her epic economic history of moral development: a reclamation of a slur on the creators of this good modern world we all increasingly enjoy. I don't know how many iterations of contrarianism ("dialectic") I'm on; it's not important, as long as I hold my views lightly enough to do one more when the evidence demands it. Besides long meditations on the pagan and Christian virtues, she holds a serious discussion on Groundhog Day, Thomas Mann, and much other art, and is the best telling of the maligned, vital Great Transformation story. Triumphant and funny and trembling with erudition. * At the time I thought being an atheist was really contrarian, but in Britain it really isn't. (Outside an RME classroom.) The formal stats are only now showing a majority for stated nonbelief, but church attendance has been a minority practice since the early C20th.
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| Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (2003) by Philip Ball | "Being an Enquiry into the Interplay of Chance and Necessity in the Way That Human Culture, Customs, Institutions, Cooperation and Conflict Arise" (2004) by Philip Ball. An elegant pop treatment of the once-burgeoning physics of mass human behaviour. (Which physics follows hundreds of years of stupid and/or inhumane theories claiming the name "social physics"). A love letter to statistical mechanics: Most people who have encountered thermodynamics blanch at its mention, because it is an awesomely tedious discipline both to learn theoretically and to investigate experimentally. This is a shame, because it is also one of the most astonishing theories in science. Think of it: here is a field of study initiated to help nineteenth-century engineers make better engines, and it turns out to produce some of the grandest and most fundamental statements about the way the entire universe works. Thermodynamics is the science of change, and without change there is nothing to be said... Introduces a hundred topics from thermodynamics, economics, econophysics, game theory, and fields which don't have a name yet, including intuitive explanations of fearsome concepts like:
Unlike shiny TED-style nonfiction, he refers directly to the original scientific papers and includes small interviews with the original researchers. No equations, but beautiful diagrams relating micro with macro, too: snowflakes to traffic and bacterial colonies to cities. The book's reception, in the main by middlebrow, mathematically illiterate reviewers shocked me a bit: their banner conclusions were "boo! people aren't particles!!", a truism which Ball spends much of the book thinking about, and "aaar horrible people have said they've found the laws of society before!!", a truism the first fifth of the book is a history of. In their haste to protect ordinary human difference from averages, and the notion of free will from technical explanations, they flee to safe refuges like "complexity" and "reflexivity", i.e. out of science. Ball can speak for himself though: The notion that we could ever construct a scientific "utopia theory" [e.g. classical Marxism] is, then, doomed to absurdity. Certainly, a "physics of society" can provide nothing of the sort. One does not build an ideal world from scientifically based traffic planning, market analysis, criminology, network design, game theory, and the gamut of other ideas discussed in this book. Concepts and models drawn from physics are almost certainly going to find their way into other areas of social science, but they are not going to provide a comprehensive theory of society, nor are they going to make traditional sociology, economics, or political science redundant. The skill lies in deciding where a mechanistic, quantitative model is appropriate for describing human behavior, and where it is likely to produce nothing but a grotesque caricature. This is a skill that is still being acquired, and it is likely that there will be embarrassments along the way. There is a real question about how deep into human behaviour the statistical approach can go. Econophysics, as a term and as a living, funded academic subfield, fizzled out shortly after this book was published. Apparently the SOC results have come in for a lot of criticism, though mostly of their overreach than the method being humanistically inapplicable or whatevs. Even so, I wish I had read this 5 years ago: it would have saved me lots of contortions. it taught me a huge amount anyway. (e.g. the huge moral panic, following the invention of descriptive statistics, about ever using means to describe any human characteristics, since the remarkable stability of e.g. the C17th London crime rate across decades seemed to speak of divine or diabolical insurance.) One of my top 5 books on economics, one of my top 5 books on physics. In one sentence: Social physics had at last begun to make exciting progress on understanding mass human behaviour. | ||
| Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983) by Andrew Hodges | in the early days of computing, a number of terms for the practitioners of the field of computing were suggested in the Communications of the ACM — turingineer, turologist, flow-charts-man, applied meta-mathematician, and applied epistemologist.</blockquote> | ||
| Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything (2017) by Kelly Weinersmith | Excellent, sceptical look at near-future tech, their enormous potential and risk. The technologies are: new ways of getting to space, asteroid mining, fusion power, programmable matter, robotic construction, brain-computer interfaces, synthetic biology, and bioprinting. They tend to be bearish about these technologies, because their default (i.e. unregulated) effects could be really dreadful. (Excepting robo-construction and organ printing because these are much less dangerous and dodgy than the existing hacks.) My favourite bit is the paean to Alvin Roth's organ-swap algorithm, which is a magnificent way of circumventing human squeamishness. Lots of direct quotation from the unprepossessing scientists doing all this, <3. There are also lots of addenda of the following sort:
Suitable for all ages, knob jokes aside. (There's a segue joke at the end of every block, and they are uniformly a bit forced.) The illustrations actually don't add anything, even though I love SMBC. | ||
| A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought, #2) (1999) by Vernor Vinge | A beautiful portrait of pragmatism vs idealism, colonialism and collaboration, surveillance culture vs everything, the possibility of deep translation, the beauty and gaucheness of trade, and the ultimate fate of civilisations.Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle… There were programs here written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it — the horror of it… down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely… the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems… Vinge's great skill is in drawing out sick tragic tension for hundreds of pages, driving the reader on to ever more complex injustices, until... The smooth-talking fascist antagonists are a bit too simple, a bit Harkonnen; their mind-raping slavery, their inversion of justice by lying perfectly, their flat-toned planning of atrocities: "At which time, we'll feed them the story of our noble effort to limit the genocide." Ritser smiled, intrigued by the challenge. "I like it." You are made to wait 500 pages for a comeuppance. The "Focused", the mindwiped slaves are extremely creepy; weaponised savants (see Ada Palmer's set-sets for a less straightforward treatment of human computers). Pham Nuwen, the great programmer-statesman, is far more interesting here than in the first book. He stands out in a large cast of interesting characters, all laying down schemes and intrigues with at minimum 20 years until payoff (at maximum 2000 years). Not ordinary, but not unrealistic; there have been dozens like him, possessed of or by the force that drives Napoleon off his island, Washington over the river, Alexander everywhere. He is a psychopath: The [armed fascists] might try to chase him around in here. That would be fun; Nau's goons would find just how dangerous their tunnels had become... The evolutionary role of such people - both the fearless hero, Nuwen, and the bloodthirsty predator, Nau - is not handled explicitly, but Pham is held up as a paragon. The arachnid aliens are much better than the hivehounds of the last book: Vinge and his translator characters' anthropomorphisations (or, rather, personalisations) are successful. Though maybe I'm just biased because the Spiders are shown going through their Information Revolution rather than their Pre-Renaissance period. It shows the deep connection between lack of economic growth, lack of intellectual growth and lack of social progress. The great scientist Sherkaner is also the one to challenge his society's sexual oppression. ("Either way, the cycles were shattered forever") The "counterlurk" is the Enlightenment. It's an exquisite portrait of the great promise and risk of a technological society; you get the end of hunger and disease, you get spaceflight, but you also get nuclear standoffs. There are wonderful symmetries between the Spiders and humans: they each have odd, distended sleep cycles (the humans going into cryogenic suspension most of the time, the Spiders hibernating centuries until the sun reignites). There's also the Sura/Pham, Qiwi / Ezr, and Victory/Sherkaner pairings, the actual beauty of complementing another, of power couples with aims beyond their own power. The title looks clumsy but isn't: it refers to a very large thought, that decentralising a system is the only way to make it last; that space is not only a cold and hostile place, it is also the way to break the terrible forces that might work against mere interplanetary civilisations: Pham would get their localizers in return for decent medical science. Both sides would benefit enormously. Magnate Larson would live a few extra centuries. If he was lucky, the current cycle of his civilization would outlive him. But a thousand years from now, when Larson was dust, when his civilization had fallen as the planetbound inevitably did—a thousand years from now, Pham and the Qeng Ho would still be flying between the stars. And they would still have the Larson localizers... One unintentional detail: the "huds" that all the human characters depend are I think just Google Glass. Stayed up late to finish it. Maybe 5/5, will re-read in a while and see. --- How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: all three societies depicted are very distinct and have believable economies, genderings, . The Qeng Ho - the empire without a capital, the force without an army - are a lovely depiction of the humanistic and progressive side of trade. The Emergents are maybe a little too simple, too feudal and dastardly. Software development: Fantastic. Central to the plot (titanic cruft as feature), with a subtle twist on the horror of legacy systems: an entire multi-planet civilisation is shown collapsing because its software is too fucking crufty to live. (That might sound ridiculous, but I promise you I see this story in miniature everywhere at my work.) No one does it better. Actual Science: Lots, with a breathless romp through all of C20th physics and engineering - though there's also a magic antigrav ore. | ||
| The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) by Erving Goffman | Queering the fake/authentic binary | ||
| The Lord of the Rings (1955) by J.R.R. Tolkien | Anti-modern, stilted, and it inspired millions of pages of awful work, but hey it's grand. A glorious mess (or, a glorious mess draped over an impressive classical edifice, the linguistics.) : a devout Catholic tries to write a mythic prehistory of Earth... with its own pagan pantheon, where a cool man with a shiny gem on his face is also a giant ball of carbon dioxide. People don't seem to realise that it's a mess. Maybe all fiction is, when you know it intimately enough. Is this hate-reading? I don't think so, I wouldn't get goosebumps at this if it was: There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. | ||
| Infidel (2006) by Ayaan Hirsi Ali | I told him, "I'm not coming to the [wedding he arranged for her], and all he said was, "You're not required." Legally, this was true. I went to Sister Aziza and said, "The [Christian] girls will not become Muslims. Their parents have taught them other religions. It isn't their fault, and I don't think it's fair that they'll burn in Hell." Sister Aziza told me I was wrong. Through me, Allah had given them a choice. If these girls rejected the true religion, then it was right that they should burn. Vivid and horrific. She is sewn shut as a child. Her Sunday school teacher beats her into the hospital. She is forced into marriage. She flees civil war and her family. She becomes an apostate. She makes an edgy film. The latter three are held to be crimes, the last worthy of death. But somehow the book is not a misery memoir. --- She is hard to agree with and impossible to ignore; some people solve this tension with absurd insults. Her work against sexism is thought to be negated (and then some) by her succour to racism. What are the arguments against her views? * "Her critique only applies to Somalia." (e.g.) * "Her critique was only valid in the 70s." * "Her critique only applies to Wahhabism." * "Her writing is self-serving: she built a political career on denigrating Islam." * "She has no scholarly credentials to speak authoritatively about Islam". * "She is an inauthentic ethnic voice." / "Her portrayals are neo-Orientalist." / "Her portrayals are an enactment of the colonial civilizing mission discourse." * "Their accounts confirm dangerous stereotypes and reinforce the old-new dichotomy of the 'civilized us' versus the 'barbaric them'. In addition, they increase the pressure on Muslim and Arabs in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere." (source) * "Her policy prescriptions are extreme and counterproductive." * "Hirsi Ali feels she cannot be a feminist and a Muslim... [but] numerous women who espouse feminist, intellectual, Muslim and African identity [exist]." (e.g. here) * "(Only) white men like her" / "Her fans are awful.". Here's one of mine: To understand Ayn Rand - the cartoonish egotism, the false social theory, the needless extremity - you need to remember what she went through: the equally cartoonish, false and extreme Stalinism. (This point would outrage Rand, since it makes a victim of her, and makes her vaunted individualism just a mechanical inversion.) Maybe you could argue Hirsi Ali is like this. Even if you do, it doesn't reduce our obligation to actually argue with Rand or Hirsi Ali at all, though. --- Here's the crux of the whole thing, her discussing religion with her dad:
: Did you notice it? She yields the entire ground to the fundamentalists. She's a literalist! She notes, correctly, that the Quran forbids interpretation, forbids reformation, and gives up. Never mind that almost all religious people live extremely flexibly with the demands of their religion, "failing" at this and adapting that. Never mind that, contrary to the Word, there's loads of Islams, that some majority-Muslim countries have been electing women for ages, that some Muslim governments have been trying to stop FGM for a while now. We're messy, nevertheless, thank god. (It looks like her more recent books focus on exactly this point, though.) | ||
| Surface Detail (Culture #9) (2010) by Iain M. Banks | Meditation on consequentialism and moral progress, only more fun than that sounds. ("Consequences are everything.") Spends 300 pages setting up its thirteen protagonists into like seven plot threads. As a result, he has to repeat a lot of exposition to keep us - including, in one instance, a full page of quoted dialogue which we'd heard 50 pages back. Oddly simplistic despite its fifth-order intentionality, then. Surface Detail fills out some of the mechanisms and organisation of the Culture; throws his usual bucket of ideas at the plot (graphic descriptions of Hell, a first-person account of an aquatic, hair-thick species, an extended section in a Medieval convent) and keeps a good amount of tension and mental strain going. Good, full of simple dramatised philosophy. | ||
| Seveneves (2015) by Neal Stephenson | Amazing hard worldbuilding from a lunatic seed: 'what would happen if the moon just blew up?' You will stomach pages of physical exposition before scenes can occur, but it isn't superfluous. First two-thirds are psychologically convincing: you will ball your fists at the politics. (By which I mean treachery and irrationality.) He does railroad a couple of plot points - e.g. it is taken for granted that a psychopathic war criminal has every right to an equal share of the genetic future. And the last third's extrapolation of 5000 years of cultural creep is less formally ambitious than e.g. Cloud Atlas. First two-thirds 4*/5, last third 3/5. [Theory #1, Theory #2, Theory #4, Values #2]</li> *** How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: Lots, though the races that develop are primary-coloured and fantastical, including a fantastical war. Software development: A little bit, particularly Dinah's cool claytronics. Actual Science: Plenty, with the lone exception of the initial moonburst. | ||
| Money for Nothing (1928) by P.G. Wodehouse | Gorgeous as ever. Was snorting on the Tube over it. ---- This was surprising, for 1928: You're a confirmed settler-down, the sort of chap that likes to roll the garden lawn and then put on his slippers and light a pipe and sit side by side with the little woman, sharing a twin set of head phones. But Wiki tells me this was indeed possible, for a posh progressive couple. Not sure why they'd do this instead of a gramophone - maybe it was for the radio. | ||
| The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Eliot | What a pain to understand this must've been, before the internet. (But only if you need to feel in control all the time while reading.) | ||
| Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck (2017) by Eliezer Yudkowsky | None yet | ||
| Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions (2008) by Gayle Laakmann McDowell | This has zero relevance for almost everyone; and about 3 quarters of the book can be skipped by almost all of the remaining people (specifics about the big tech companies and particular language warts). Even so, it's good that it exists; it's an impressive distillation of Computer Science lore and heuristics, which thus lets smart outsiders in. I was dismayed to open it and find 100 pages of fluff (the curse of the ebook: book proportions not being completely obvious), but the algorithm challenges start after, don't stop, and are very good. (Don't panic: doing half of them way over-prepared me for my interview.) The non-coding 'brain teasers' are helpful if, like me, you weren't a puzzle geek in youth. Essential for a tiny number of people. | ||
| Sex by Numbers: What Statistics Can Tell Us About Sexual Behaviour (Wellcome) (2015) by David Spiegelhalter | Fun with a serious scientific mission. The expected titillating facts are present (how many people have tried anal? How many people are gay? What's typical?) but there's also an intro to the many difficulties of social science and a history of sexology in here. You learn why you should admire (but not trust) Ellis, Hirschfeld, Kinsey, Masters & Johnson, Hite... Something for everyone. | ||
| The Pale King (2011) by David Foster Wallace | What to say? Fifty fragments: unintegrated, contradicting, only sometimes amazing. Themes you'd expect: self-consciousness, freedom, duty, routine - the awful effect of unconstrained self-consciousness, freedom, duty and routine - the death of American civics - 'the horror of personal smallness and transience' - the repugnance we feel for pure virtue - the extraordinary fires alight beneath some people. But where in Jest these were expressed through (burdened with) drug slang, pharmacology, advertising dreck, and calculus, here we get accountancy minutiae surely intended to repulse us. Yet the style is far less mannered than his finished work, which style we might call Postdoc Valleyspeak. The reason for this public ignorance is not secrecy. The real reason why US citizens were/are not aware of these conflicts, changes and stakes is that the whole subject of tax policy and administration is dull. Massively, spectacularly dull. Institutional tedium – the default state for developed-world adults – is profoundly important to address, a topic it will take an unusual mind to illuminate for us. But Pale King is actually not a Kafkan tale of the ever-growing horror of bureaucracy; actually he is deeply impressed and convinced of the value of the people and the work of the IRS, in large part because of its inhumane strictures, lack of glory, and unpopularity. "Big Q is whether IRS is to be essentially a corporate entity or a moral one." (Though if 'corporate' is there read merely as meaning 'maximising', the distinction can be misleading.) To me, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' and 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way… I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down. I tried to read them as short stories rather than chapters. This half-works. Actually the entire book was intentionally fruitless – the major agonists all off-stage, everyone else just enduring. A couple of intentionally unconvincing first-person authorial inserts – "I, David Wallace, social security no…" – affirm the reality of the garish IRS underbelly he fabricates, put him in the scene. Fragment #8 is a horrifying Cormac McCarthy lyric, childhood psychosis. One (#22) is a hundred-page monologue, the character repetitive, rambling and conceited, but also the most developed and affecting. Of this wreckage we are given to read. | ||
| The Plato Cult: And Other Philosophical Follies (1991) by David Stove | Funny, unfair, rabid dismissal of most philosophy ever. Uses ad hominem Bulwerism openly - despite that going against his own ideal of reason - because he views a great range of people as being too mad to engage with. His other move is to use the positivist's wood-chipper principle a lot: 'your position is literally meaningless; you're too stupid to see this', occasionally correctly. Attacks idealists mostly, including whole chapters making fun of Goodman, Nozick, and Popper(!) - but does not spare Mill ("here doing his usual service of making mistakes very clearly") and Russell, who you'd think were his kind of men. The last chapter is scary and hilarious and suggests the man's basic pain, underneath his roaring pessimism. Read it at least. 4/5. (keep it away from freshers though) | ||
| Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1975) by Raymond Williams | A list of definitions (and etymologies) of the vague, overloaded, and pompous language used in the humanities. Reading this early in my degree made me able to talk: it relaxed the paralysis that is the natural (and perhaps intended) response to their famous walls of jargon. If you've ever felt there was something to area studies and critical theory, but that the inferential distance was too costly to justify the effort, this is the book for you. (Or, it was thirty years ago. They'll have invented thousands more ill-defined words since then.) I imagine it would also be good for very ambitious adult English learners. Williams is a sarcastic, clever and friendly guide: I can't remember which top-rank word he describes as "better for it never to have been", but here's a good entry:
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| Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1) (1965) by Frank Herbert | The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better [to] rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes– Frank Herbert 'Didn't you learn the difference between Harkonnen and Atreides so that you could smell a Harkonnen trick by the stink they left on it. Didn't you learn that Atreides loyalty is bought with love, while the Harkonnen coin is hate?– also Frank Herbert Dune shouldn't work: there's a lot of the worst of fantasy fiction in it. The spurious black and white morality, above; cod-medieval dialogue; noble-savagery and bizarro Orientalism; its spoilers for itself (through its constant first-person precognition); and the po-faced chapter epigrams about how great the main character is... * But it does work. It works because of the loveable setting and its thrilling ecosystem; the sharp, rapid dialogue; its sheer, smushy pastiche of human history (American environmentalism, medieval feudalism, Arabic sheikism, and Zen martial hokum ("he is a Zensunni prophet", "to use the family atomics"); its mystical anti-Star Trek historical materialism; excellent setpieces; and because the book contains a realist reading of its own magical-heroic events. (Here's a start: Everything takes place on a world made of shroom heroin! You can't trust a thing these people say!) This hidden realism is clearest in the (heavy) appendices to the book - these aren't the ordinary conceited footnotes of fantasy, which assume you care about its little world as much as the author does. They're instead a rationalist palate cleanser after 600 pages of woo. A scientific, academic register erupts, mocking the internally real mysticism of the foregoing. I was even a little disappointed to find a huge glossary at the end, containing all the words I had been puzzling over. Mystery and gnosis and not-quite-getting-it suits the plot. The appendices say the book is more than its plot, and the world more than its books. (The big realist moment within the book is when you see that the great prophecy is just a scam, planted to manipulate people.) The baddies, the Harkonnens, are a bit much though: nothing they do is not repulsive. Herbert has the protagonists use mysticism and authoritarianism, while having most of the best characters resist and despise these things. There's no such tension with the main antagonists, no nominally redeeming feature. So you can feel Herbert hissing and booing the Harkonnens. Here is the first scene with the evil Baron:
Herbert gets away with this because Harkonnen is supposed to be over-the-top, and, more, because his world has a black and grey morality. (Do you want the genocidal decadent rapist Machiavels or the square-chinned aristocratic Machiavels?) The greyness of the Atreides leads to the biggest plot problem. (It's not exactly a plot hole, but it takes interpretive labour to make it make sense.): Paul's Jihad is unmotivated. Nobody wants it, including the Messiah it is carried out for. Paul even compares himself to Mega Hitler:
and it's implied that the previous tyrant, Padishah, did not do such things. This completely undermines the exciting and righteous revolution that we spent a book and a half cheering on. If unprecedented death and misery is the payoff, what is the gain of having a noble ruler? OK, Paul frequently speaks of not being able to stop the jihad - scrying that, if he does try and stop it, he just gets usurped and then it carries on worse. But then he shouldn't have come to power at all, and the book tacitly tells us that things would have been better if the Harkonnens succeeded and none of the last three-quarters happened. The way to make sense of this is to take Herbert's anti-hero line above seriously. Paul made a terrible situation worse. We're not supposed to root for him. But, Herbert knows, we can't help it, because Paul is the Underdog and Loyal and Smart and Competent and (obvs) dead handsome. Notes:
The quality dropped sharply between books: Dune is amazing, Messiah is slow but satisfying, Children of Dune is ok. Believe the hype. ********************************* How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: Done pretty well, despite appearances. Dune is a wild repudiation of Whig history, that our technology and our society must progress, and progress together. "Feudalism with energy weapons" as Heath says, half in contempt. Software development: No. Actual Science: No. | ||
| A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (1998) by Bill Bryson | I don't rate him – his matey adjectival register and cutesy knowledge get on my nerves – but this is great. Dead funny throughout, free of bluster, and passionate about marginal researches (the fate of the hemlock tree in Northeast America, the punctuated history of very long US roads). I read this aloud and it worked very well. Even my townie girlfriend wants to go hiking now. | ||
| Does Foreign Aid Really Work? (2007) by Roger C. Riddell | At least when I was writing about aid, this was the best book on the balance of evidence. Bottom line is that almost all non-health C20th aid was wasted (and the food aid portion often harmful, since it distorted the local economy), but things have been getting a lot better since 2005. Only not five stars because it doesn't integrate the evidence into a full quantitative model or meta-analysis. | ||
| A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (2003) by Richard Dawkins | Essay collection from his long heyday. His letter to his 10yo daughter is maybe the clearest statement of sceptical empiricism ever, though it also displays the blithe wonkishness that alienates most people:Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and you'd probably say, 'Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?' Now suppose I answered: 'I don't actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have this funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead.' You'd be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you'd know that an inside 'feeling' on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, and sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don't. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead. Aaag he used to be so wise and grand, giving out words to live by. (He remains brave and clear, but you don't necessarily want to look through this windows anymore.) | ||
| Selected Poems, 1954-1992 (1996) by George Mackay Brown | Distrust and death but never self-pity; drowning and drama but wise. Of one place's Vikings, fish, and pain – like Under Milk Wood without the japery and authorial distance. Seal Market is amazing; the Hamnavoe poems are so good I feel I've been there (which means I don't have to go). Brown seems stuck writing about the Middle Ages – "what are these red things like tatties? (apples)"– but then, the Middle Ages lasted right through to the 1960s, on Orkney. And since "a circle has no beginning or end. The symbol holds: people in AD 2000 are essentially the same as the stone-breakers of 3000 BC." | ||
| Writing Home (1994) by Alan Bennett | None yet | ||
| Dril Official "Mr. Ten Years" Anniversary Collection (2018) by Dril | It's difficult to explain ok. What looks like tasteless idiocy - or, not much better, tastelessly ironic tasteless idiocy - is actually a new, hilarious literary style. I hate Twitter, but use it for this. 'dril' is a self-aware idiot, a boastful masochist, a fanboy, a shill, a disgusting but hapless man. He graduated high school in 2005 but also has grandchildren. He can't spell very well but he breaks out ten-dollar words quite often. That is: he is Everyman, online. He thinks he's a social critic but he's also an open shill (and this is not unheard of). His mix of self-regard and incompetence is done better than Ignatius in Confederacy of Dunces. You can get a sense of what people see in him through all the surprisingly apt applications: the prolific tagging of completely different philosophers, US presidents, Romans, Christian denominations. Missing from this book is the nastier strand of the project, where he resurrects ten-year-old tweets by real accounts with impressively stupid names which accidentally share the aesthetic. (He mostly targets inactive accounts, though.) It's weird to pay for a book which is both free and dreadful (and lacks some good roughhousing). But everything here is weird. | ||
| Little Wolf's Book Of Badness (Book & Tape) (1995) by Ian Whybrow | None yet | ||
| In the Beginning...Was the Command Line (1999) by Neal Stephenson | The basic tenet of multiculturalism is that people need to stop judging each other—to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful… The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macramé. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. Classic, cynical cultural history of popular computing. A noob-friendly guide to breaking free: a love letter to GNU: "Linux… are making tanks… Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free… It is the fate of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old and have to compete against more modern products. But it is the fate of operating systems to become free." If you're like me (human?), you need metaphors and binary distinctions to get abstract stuff, and Stephenson has them coming out of his ears, which sometimes leads to a stone-tablet patronising tone*. Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces.") An amazing writer, though: he finds program comments "like the terse mutterings of pilots wrestling with the controls of damaged airplanes." In tech, 15 years is a full geological era and a half*, so some of his insights have taken on a sepia hue (e.g. "is [Microsoft] addicted to OS sales in the same way as Apple is to selling hardware? Keep in mind that Apple's ability to monopolize its own hardware supply was once cited, by learned observers, as a great advantage over Microsoft. At the time, it seemed to place them in a much stronger position. In the end, it nearly killed them, and may kill them yet... When things started to go south for Apple, they should have ported their OS to cheap PC hardware. But they didn't. Instead, they tried to make the most of their brilliant hardware, adding new features and expanding the product line. But this only had the effect of making their OS more dependent on these special hardware features, which made it worse for them in the end. "). But astonishingly, most have not – and how many other tech articles from the 90s are still worth a single minute of your time? Free! here * He uses this very metaphor in this short essay. | ||
| CLOSURE (2013) by Why The Lucky Stiff | [Downloadable here and only here.] This is a wilfully glitchy, difficult, intense bundle of handwritten sketches about unspecifiable loss, faltering ambition, unchecked and uncaught exceptions. Why he doesn't program any more. It is autobiographical but most of it is probably not literally true. The 95 stories, each brutally truncated:
Along with Gwern and Perlis, _why is one of our developer-artists. Art about code. So this is conceptualism that I don't immediately despise. (A closure is a neat piece of code that can remember what has happened, knows what's going on outside, beyond what the code explicitly mentions.) We get dead-format nostalgia, memery, a handwritten stretch of Ruby, and reflections on feeling inferior to Franz Kafka, of all people. _why has a unique voice. That is a banal thing to say, but it is true here as I suspect it is not elsewhere. There are only two technical passages, one litany of relief from enterprise development, and one entire module in handwriting. There is torment. Keep up the names: he is the Simon Weil, the Tristram Shandy of web development, the DFW of running out of ritalin. Unquiet introversion.
Here are his self-hating notes in the margin of his beautiful, kind comment on Shymalan's The Happening:
Wilfully awkward, marginal, analogue. He calls himself the Professor, as an insult. The PDF is of images, not text: you cannot copy anything without putting in the effort. Old misaligned book scans, dumb Gorey cartoon jokes, an itemized grocery bill, astute literary notes on Kafka, Ishiguro, Gaiman. He lives now with extreme thrift and extreme technophobia, slamming down his friend's phone when she browses it during conversation. He makes seawater bread instead of web apps. The harsh jump-cut absurdism between the sketches is not genuine - they are all linked. Not sure what by, but I say so.
(I did resist, but it was actually hard to.) I usually don't rate merely formal experiment, intentional awkwardness. But the warmth of his great first book and the constant self-deprecation and plaintive concrete detail make it easy.
Someone is squatting his old site. I wonder if it's _why; if the banal entrepreneurial positivity on it is him continuing CLOSURE. Since the book refuses to end; this is the last page: 4/5 but only if you care already. | ||
| Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing (1987) by David Harel | A thing of beauty: an attempt at a work of computer science that doesn't date. It's general abstract introductory matter. The field is hugely consequential: different algorithms for the same task can differ in performance by a factor of trillions. Bible quotations book-end each chapter and give this a frisson of something other. | ||
| Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (2015) by Laboria Cuboniks | None yet | ||
| The Mating Season (Jeeves, #9) (1949) by P.G. Wodehouse | "Still," I said, feeling that it was worth trying, "it's part of the great web, what?" --- Classification: Wooster's taboo: None; using a port decanter as a conductor's baton while standing on a chair bellowing hunting doggerel. * It is vital to have an odd number of people in the love 'triangle', so that they can all be paired off at the end, sparing Wooster. | ||
| Ethel and Ernest (1999) by Raymond Briggs | None yet | ||
| The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001) by William Easterly | Extremely important and readable empirical summary of the (C20th) failure of directed "development" aid (that is, capital aimed at a self-sustaining anti-poverty outcome). | ||
| Against Method (1975) by Paul Karl Feyerabend | A common misconception is that this book disses scientists. It doesn't; it tells philosophers of science that they've failed and should go home. Has an "Analytical Index", a table of contents which contains the principal argument. This should be mandatory in nonfiction. | ||
| Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (Faber Library) (1970) by Ted Hughes | Metal af. Good after a breakup. | ||
| Master of Reality (2008) by John Darnielle | Crushing, beautiful portrait of teenage alienation, institutionalisation, and 'Sabbath, from an author uniquely placed to deal with these things (as an ex-desperate-teen, ex-psychiatric-nurse, metal fan, America's greatest lyricist of neurosis). Heavy. It doesn't matter if you've never heard or never liked Sabbath. This explains it regardless, and might unlock it. His best prose (though his lyrics 1995-2004 are his best words). (From dear James) | ||
| At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) by Flann O'Brien | Postmodernism is completely fine if it's as fun as this. | ||
| Studies in the Way of Words (1989) by Paul Grice | None yet | ||
| The Habit of Art (2009) by Alan Bennett | None yet | ||
| Previous Convictions: Assignments From Here and There (2006) by A.A. Gill | What an excuse of a man he can be, but what a writer he always is. The piece on golf is characteristic - hilarious, fluid, razor-bladed. The basic problem with him: his horror of golf would be better spent on actually horrific things (e.g. his own aestheticised violence). To be fair the second half's travel pieces spend exactly that: from being right inamidst hallucinatory police brutality in Haiti, to the Africa pieces which buck stereotypes and complacency. He has vast sensitivity or sensibility, but he pairs it with a kind of generalisation (e.g. "begging is a consequence of opportunity, not poverty") and off-piste counter-PC phrasemaking, as if to shock us out of respecting him. He uses his friend Jeremy Clarkson brilliantly – as stooge, dim counterpoint to Gill's own professed post-masculine, pro-gay, pro-grey, pro-oppressed enlightenment. But then Gill reports all these uber-macho exploits and self-conscious leering at women. What compels him to be so indirect about being progressive? It's that he wants to be both LAD and liberal intellectual, and but needs the approval of neither side. | ||
| How I Escaped My Certain Fate (2010) by Stewart Lee | A comedian and an artist - with some of the bloat and near-repulsive belligerence that entails If you've not seen me before, right, a lot of what I do, er, it's not jokes as such, it can just be funny kind of ideas or little, er, weird turns of phrase like that, yeah? So, 'owner-operator of an enchanted beanstalk', yeah? And that's a giant, isn't it, a giant... So all I'm saying, if you've not seen me before, yeah, is the jokes are there, they're there, but some of you, you might have to raise your game. Book has tons of general merit: it's about trying to be artful in a genre where populism is a condition of being recognised as a practitioner at all. And Lee just has his shit worked out, is by turns harshly enlightening and plaintively endearing. Basically there's a whole generation of people who've confused political correctness with health and safety regulation. 'It's gone mad. They saying I can't have an electric fire in the bath any more, Stew, in case queers see it.' I even love his intellectual flab: the Wire mag chat, ignoble snarking, and attempt at epic free verse. I trust him – but you can't trust him. (Recent shows are founded on outrageous lies, satirising spin/smear cultures in our media and government and employers and friends.) Hard to know who the joke-explaining footnotes are for – since his fans already get it, and no-one else's going to read this. That said, if you don't like him or don't know about him, please read this. For instance, he explains that onstage he 'portrays a smug wanker'. | ||
| How to Do Things with Words (1955) by J.L. Austin | None yet | ||
| The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) by Thorstein Veblen | None yet | ||
| Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) by Isaiah Berlin | None yet | ||
| North (1975) by Seamus Heaney | None yet | ||
| Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (2011) by David Bellos | Good strident stuff, wrestling against the prevailing pessimistic dogmas of English lit and ling. (e.g. "We can never fully understand each other as individuals or cultures." "Truth is just power.") This is a poppy treatment of his own work, but still manages to pack in a lot of brilliant (original?) theory, a refutation of Sapir-Whorf in four pages, and lots of charming stats about the state of world languages today. I imagine he's a great teacher. (From dear James) | ||
| Two Dogmas of Empiricism () by Willard Van Orman Quine | None yet | ||
| A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works (1994) by Baruch Spinoza | Hard to imagine now how shocking this was in 1664 ("God is not a person; there is no free will; tolerance is the only rational politics"). Trying to understand Spinoza without Curley's notes (which are about twice as long as the primary material) is a decade's work. | ||
| Twilight of the Idols (1888) by Friedrich Nietzsche | In one sentence: the cleverest troll in history tries to say 400 things at once. The easiest way into him. He is among the most misunderstood people ever, and his prose, so contradictory and esoteric, sarcastic and pompous, is a large reason for this, though second to his C20th mistreatment. Hollingdale's translation is best, though I plan to crawl through the original at some point.
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| On Denoting () by Bertrand Russell | None yet | ||
| The Problems of Philosophy (1912) by Bertrand Russell | None yet | ||
| The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth about Morality and What to Do About it (2002) by Joshua D. Greene | The first PhD I ever read: a witty and authoritative piece of meta-ethics. He surveys every large approach to morals using strong naturalism as a criterion, and concludes that anti-realist utilitarianism is the least unsatisfying option. I suppose this is only worth reading if you are both very convinced of naturalism and radically unsure about what constitutes goodness; otherwise you should just study practical ethics already. [Here] | ||
| Philosophy of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction (1998) by John Heil | None yet | ||
| The Complete Maus (1980) by Art Spiegelman | None yet | ||
| The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg | None yet | ||
| Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) by David Simon | Character study of twenty vengeful people and the awful, indispensable institution they serve and constitute. The detectives are intelligent and hilarious, but have to navigate two extreme and depressing environments: the streets and City Hall, violence and politics. Simon was embedded with them, and completely effaces himself, makes this novelistic. We get a glorious outsider view, see things the detectives don't: [The detective] glides past the lockup without looking inside, and so doesn't see the final, unmistakable expression on Robert Frazier's face. Pure murderous hate. He gives a complete chapter to most of the detectives, tracking them through a couple of sordid weeks. They are all distinctive, sharp in different ways, but this approach means it stretches on. Also a study of the incredibly poor incentives the bureaucracy gives the detectives: they're rewarded for arrests, not convictions, and individually penalised for open homicides. I don't want to think about what this did to their false arrest rate. A case in which the pathologist's finding is being pended is not, to the police department, a murder. And if it isn't a murder, it doesn't go up on the board. And if it isn't up on the board, it doesn't really exist. No weight was given to the difficulty of the case - whether witnesses remained at the scene, whether physical evidence existed, whether the weapon was found. All this killed inter-squad cooperation, and led to infighting over dumb luck of the draw. In human terms, the scene at 3002 McElderry Street was a massacre; in the statistical terms of urban homicide work, it was the stuff from which a detective fashions dreams. (No other crime counted in the stats, despite Homicide also covering accidental deaths and suicides. This was an incentive to frame things as e.g. suicide if at all possible.) the chance of actually being convicted of a crime after being identified by authorities is about 60 percent. And if you factor in those unsolved homicides, the chance of being cuaght and convicted for taking a life in Baltimore is just over 40 percent [in 1988]. You might conclude - falsely - that internal stats are worse than nothing - but only stats as bad as these are. A classic of informal institutional economics. The nationwide murder 'clearance rate' (arrest rate) was 70%. Amazing that it was this high, in that comparatively low-surveillance, low-social-trust place. The [squad's] clearance rate - murders closed by arrest - is now 36 percent and falling, a... threat to [Lieutenant] Gary D'Addario's tenure. The board that gave His Eminence reason for concern six weeks ago has continued to fill with open murders, and it is on D'Addario's side of the wall that the names are writ in red. Of the twenty-five homicides handled by Dee's three squads, only five are down; whereas Stanton's shift has cleared ten of sixteen... More incentive analysis, on police shootings and the shameful closing of ranks: In the United States, only a cop has the right to kill as an act of personal deliberation and action. To that end, Scotty McCown and three thousand other men and women were sent out on the streets of Baltimore with .38-caliber Smith&Wessons, for which they received several weeks of academy firearms training augmented by one trip to the police firing range every year. Coupled with an individual officer's judgement, that is deemed expertise enough to make the right decision every time. There's so much careful and sympathetic detail about the job (and no deep portrait of any suspects), that Simon risks partisanship - writing "copaganda", as internet radicals call it. Anyone who's seen The Wire knows this isn't a problem. (He has solidarity with the rank and file, and contempt for the suits.) for the black, inner-city neighborhoods of Baltimore, the city's finest were for generations merely another plague to endure: poverty, ignorance, despair, police. Speaking of which: This is not at all made redundant by The Wire - the show has an entire pathos-pathetic angle (the anti-authority cop) missing here, and this is more focussed on the law side. Their humour is fantastically sick. the application of criteria such as comfort and amusement to the autopsy room is ample proof of a homicide man's peculiar and sustaining psychology. But for the detectives, the most appalling visions have always demanded the greatest detachment... Someone on Hacker News was up on their high horse about the black humour of medics recently. This strikes me as perfectly backwards. I would much prefer a doctor (or a detective) with a nasty sense of humour: it suggests emotional detachment, so they're more likely to think clearly; and it certainly has a cathartic and bonding role, improving their health and teamwork. This idiotically literal, first-order model of psychology (as if people were so easy to program!) is everywhere, for instance all discourse about fake news, porn, and violent computer games. The section about the idiocy and arbitrariness of juries is sickening and I recommend that you don't read it if you want to continue thinking well of your society. The operant logic of a Baltimore city jury is as fantastical a process as any other of our universe's mysteries. This one is innocent because he seemed so polite and well spoken on the stand, that one because there were no fingerprints on the weapon to corroborate the testimony of four witnesses. And this one over here is telling the truth when he says he was beaten into a confession; we know that, of course, because why else would anyone willingly confess to a crime if he wasn't beaten? The other eight jurors offered little opinion except to say they would vote for whatever was agreed upon... It was the Memorial Day weekend. They wanted to go home... The book has aged badly in one way: Simon completely falls for two entrenched bits of pseudoscience, the polygraph and profiling. But many people still believe in these things, and anyway it's a rare lapse of scepticism, for him. I think this is the first 'true crime' book I've read. Don't know if this is the pinnacle of the genre, then, or if the genre's better than literary people think. | ||
| Collected Poems (1985) by Norman MacCaig | None yet | ||
| Collected Poems I, 1909-1939 (1951) by William Carlos Williams | None yet | ||
| The Information (1995) by Martin Amis | Scalding and fantastical send-up of novelists and readers. About a nasty little man made insane by being low status - or, rather, by his friend becoming high status. He's completely destroyed by valuing position so much, by his crab mind:Richard, who would not mind being poor if no one was rich, who would not mind looking rough if no one looked smooth, who would not mind being old if no one was young. This is all the worse because he has taste and good ideas, between his maudlin self-pity and terrible ideas: It would be a book accounting for the decline of the status and virtue of literary protagonists. First gods, then demigods, then kings, then great warriors, great lovers,then burghers and merchants and vicars and doctors and lawyers. Then social realism: you. Then irony: me. Then maniacs and murderers, tramps, mobs, rabble, flotsam, vermin. Richard's complete, painful self-absorption shows that literary envy, male rivalry, and the fear of death are similar if not the same: childish rage when you can't get what you want. Amis keeps interrupting Richard (himself) to talk about outer space, the fate of stars, the rounding error that we are: Amis undercuts pathetic irony with ultimate meaning, which is the reverse of the usual trick. I think this author insertion is why people call it 'postmodern', though of course it's an ancient trick and Amis doesn't share their mean ideology. There's also self-reference: What was Richard? He was a revenger, in what was probably intended to be a comedy. Or maybe it's because Richard is a bland modernist (which here means: no fun) and Amis is taken not to be. Richard has violent thoughts and a violent worldview but is not violent, he fails to be violent; and Amis contains that container. There are unannounced focal shifts every couple pages, three of which focalisations sound very similar to each other (whether psycho Steve, revenger Richard, misanthrope Martin).
It's not just about books; the underworld of 90s Britain also gets it:
You have to go a very long way - through tell of murdered children, celebrated suicides, denied misogyny, embraced misandry, deep duplicity - to get the merest possibility of redemption and getting over yourself. (And even that subverted: The season of comedy... Decorum will be observed.) The middle drags terribly. It's worth it. --- * The titular Information is hard truths, avoided thoughts, intimations of inadequacy and mortality.
* Richard's friend is called Gwyn (Welsh for blessed). It often seemed to him, moving in the circles he moved in and reading what he read, that everyone in England was Labour except the government. even though the book was written in 1994, before New Labour. A joke which survives inversion! * Presented without comment. | ||
| A Question of Attribution () by Alan Bennett | None yet | ||
| An Englishman Abroad (2001) by Alan Bennett | None yet | ||
| Untold Stories (2001) by Alan Bennett | None yet | ||
| The History Boys (2004) by Alan Bennett | None yet | ||
| Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000 (2000) by Douglas Wolk | I was trying to get a handle on all of pop music - pop, that is, in the broad sense that anything that couldn't get played in a fancy concert hall is pop, that anything newer than Gershwin is pop. I spent years on this endeavour, eventually reaching the Scaruffian fringes: everything at least heard of, every landmark clung to by fingertips. I'm not sure why I did it. Or, I know but it isn't pretty: The people who know most about music are the ones who need it most: need it as a pretext to wear headphones and not talk to people, need it as vicarious catharsis for things felt but never said, need it as a gigantic arena for countercultural status, where if you only put in a thousand hours of skronk and dischord, then you're a thousand hours ahead of someone. Reading Lester Bangs on the Comedian Harmonists (!), included here, remains one of the most powerful moments in my entire reading life. The unsurpassing joy of discovery, of crossing cultures, of fandom. | ||
| Get in the Van: On the Road With Black Flag (1994) by Henry Rollins | Chronicle of violence, censorship via nightstick, nervous breakdowns, mental illness, ridiculously hard work, and poverty - most of it welcomed in. Rollins was a literally Romantic introvert in an unbelievably macho environment. (You might find this hard to believe if you watch the above videos but it's true.) He got better: he's now a strange sort of public intellectual, Iggy Pop with more pretensions, political snark, and appetite for extremity. Get in the Van is overwrought and self-absorbed and self-defeating. It is great. Bukowski with a 100W amp, Palahniuk if Palahniuk was in any sense real, a Russian Soul in California. (Read Punk Planet's oral history of Black Flag for counterclaims to half of this book. For once I don't mind what's true.) | ||
| Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 (2001) by Michael Azerrad | Unsurpassed writing about a tiny but hyperinfluential moment in unpopular music. One of the few writers I've seen give the Minutemen their due as the greatest flowering of global punk. | ||
| The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (1995) by Bill Watterson | Elevates its medium. | ||
| The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun, #1) (1980) by Gene Wolfe | Wonderful. Rivals Earthsea as the wisest and subtlest Fantasy, for people who don't like Fantasy. Fast-moving, full of ironies, antimonies, and ambivalent symbolism - the kind which doesn't hit you over the head (I'm thinking of Gandalf changing colour hmmmmmm). There's a dozen memorable characters in 300pp (Gurloes, Thecla, Agilus, Agia, Talos, Ultan, Inire, Eata, Baldanders, the man himself), even though many appear for just one scene. And there's a very unobtrusive frame narrative which deepens and undermines things. And under all that: the beautiful post-post-apocalyptic layer: New Sun is actually science fiction, about what happens when the great project, Progress, collapses; what happens after thousands of years of decay. It is Clarkean: The book is unconcerned whether strange events are due to obscure high technology, psychological trickery, or bonafide supernatural force. Because Wolfe is a bit difficult, it's not too incongruous to bring up Grand Narrative now: sure, the French theorists were wrong to suggest that such ideas are dead in our time (or bad, if alive) but they certainly could die, and Wolfe explores what that'd be like. Nessus has no master idea - not even god, not even family, not even order. (Or maybe it's class again.) "Severian. Name for me the seven principles of governance." (Dune occupies the same SFF feudalist netherland as this, but is much clumsier, occasionally contemptible.) How do you write a truly immoral sympathetic character? (In this case, the most immoral: who does the worst thing you can do.) I think the answer is simple: detail. Make it first-person and simply show the ordinary range of interests, foibles, enculturation, passions. The reader does the rest. (Compare Lolita, Private Memoirs of a Justified Sinner, Wasp Factory, Crime and Punishment...) Gurloes was one of the most complex men I have known, because he was a complex man trying to be simple. Not a simple, but a complex man's idea of simplicity. Just as a courtier forms himself into something brilliant and involved, midway between a dancing master and a diplomacist, with a touch of assassin if needed, so Master Gurloes had shaped himself to be the dull creature a pursuivant or bailiff expected to see when he summoned the head of our guild, and that is the only thing a real torturer cannot be. The strain showed; though every part of Gurloes was as it should have been, none of the parts fit... He ate too much and too seldom, read when he thought no one knew of it, and visited certain of our clients, including one on the third level, to talk of things none of us eaves-dropping in the corridor outside could understand. His eyes were refulgent, brighter than any woman's. Severian is completely cold-blooded about violence while still being notably heroic and sentimental. By the use of the language of sorrow I had for the time being obliterated my sorrow - so powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy... The heroism is natural and plausible, because he dooms himself in the middle of the book, so everything that happens is a bonus to him, so he takes bandits and duels and unlikely undertakings in his stride, which is an enviable attitude. One of many lovely details: all the Latin is subtly wrong: 'terminus est' taken to be 'this is the line of division' rather than 'this is the end'; 'felicibus brevis, miseris hora longa', 'Men wait long for happiness'. But most of the rest of the jargon is historically accurate: 'hydrargyrum' for mercury, 'hipparch' for cavalier, 'archon' for lord, 'carnifex' for butcher, 'matross' for junior soldier, etc. The second half, the quest with Agia and Dorcas, reminds me of 'Before Sunrise', of all things: glittering words exchanged by the young and instantly intimate. The writing is so fine and uncliched that it pulls off unreconstructed romance in the midst of post-apocalyptic feudalism. In general, the feudal trappings justify Wolfe's ornate prose well. Severian often says things that are wise to us, and the things which aren't make sense in brutal context: the pattern of our guild is repeated mindlessly (like the repetitions of Father Inire's mirrors in the House Absolute) in the societies of every trade, so that they are all of them torturers, just as we. His quarry stands to the hunter as our clients to us; those who buy to the tradesman; the enemies of the Commonwealth to the soldier; the governed to the governors; men to women. All love that which they destroy. Nietzsche on the wheel: Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it. Probably 5/5 on re-read. PS: I can't decide if this or Fall of Hyperion has the lower quality-of-book : awfulness-of-cover ratio.</td> </tr> | ||
| 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (2010) by Ha-Joon Chang | Chatty, thoughtful introduction to some hard truths of economic development. Not actually anti-capitalist, except in the mild sense that we all should be (that is, critical of market failure, cronyism, corporate welfare and socialised risk, regulatory capture, negative-sum nationalism, casino capital, ...). The soundest and most important of the 23 points is the surprising fact that no currently-developed economy ever managed to industrialise without initially using trade barriers. (This is covered better in Chang's Kicking Away the Ladder, with its extensive details of postwar South Korea's shocking illiberalism: for instance, importing hi-tech goods was a serious crime for decades.) This wasn't well-known even in the Development circles I was moving in. The other propositions, I can't remember well enough to endorse or deny, but it left a vague good impression. | ||
| The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993 (2007) by Charles Bukowski | An anti-social phallocrat waves his pen in the wee small hours – yet often achieves beauty. This is a Best-of, but actually not his best. Still a very good way in. Bukowski is Springsteen after Rosalita, Mary, Janey, Sandy, Trudy and the rest either moved town forever to get away from him or died. | ||
| The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4) (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin | None yet | ||
| Never Mind (1992) by Edward St. Aubyn | Tense, effortless, funny, devastating. A single day among the melting upper-class, building up to a dinner party - but eliding the contempt we might feel with pathos and pain and humour. The dialogue is consistently impressive. Victor is the most convincing philosopher character I've seen - neurotic, analytic, too in his head to be harmful. Patrick's model of the world is slightly too sophisticated model for a five-year-old, but the scene in which he's introduced is the most convincing childlike prose: Patrick walked towards the well. In his hand he carried a grey plastic sword with a gold handle, and swished it at the pink flowers of the valerian plants that grew out of the terrace wall. When there was a snail on one of the fennel stems, he sliced his sword down the stalk and made it fall off. If he killed a snail he had to stamp on it quickly and then run away, because it went all squishy like blowing your nose. Then he would go back and have a look at the broken brown shell stuck in the soft grey flesh, and would wish he hadn't done it. It wasn't fair to squash the snails after it rained because they came out to play, bathing in the pools under the dripping leaves and stretching out their horns. When he touched their horns they darted back and his hand darted back as well. For snails he was like a grown-up. And the venomous, purely perverse relationship of his parents produces gasping lines like At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded. I stumble over David, the charming psychopath rampant. It is too hard to understand intentional evil, even when snobbery, tough love parenting and simple rage are proffered as explanations. I had a petite mort at the end. Really fantastic. In one sitting. | ||
| Hogfather (Discworld, #20; Death, #4) (1996) by Terry Pratchett | None yet | ||
| The Last Continent (Discworld, #22; Rincewind #6) (1998) by Terry Pratchett | None yet | ||
| My Man Jeeves (Jeeves, #1) (1919) by P.G. Wodehouse | The first Jeeves collection, including several stories told by a proto-Wooster called "Reggie Pepper". PG's prose is slightly less glowing and divine at this early juncture, but it still makes me smile on every fourth page. | ||
| The Nice and the Good (1968) by Iris Murdoch | A joy, a dirge, and so sincere I cried. Both a tame London murder mystery and a sliding-doors comedy of manners in Dorset, the two plots dreaming each other, running laminar. These mere genres are electrified by Murdoch's ethics and filled up with her wit. Like Greene, she is the apotheosis of trash conventions. I feel I am a better person afterward, or at least a better fool. The following derives its power from 200 pages of buildup suddenly letting loose, but it might give you an idea:
An essay on the benefits and limits of polyamory; on the trials of self-conscious virtue; an extended gag about virtue's unlikeability. I love the appalling drawling fops Octavian and Kate, I love the notably indistinct Fivey, and I clutch Ducane to myself like a home-knitted scarf against strong winter wind. So pure! | ||
| Thief of Time (Discworld, #26; Death, #5) (2001) by Terry Pratchett | None yet | ||
| The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka | Hard to believe, but I missed the obvious metaphor when I read it first, as a teenager. The selection I have also contains the lovely sanguine piece 'The Aeroplanes at Brescia', the first in a series of travel vignettes he planned to write and sell. I don't suppose it would be as interesting without the tragic backdrop of Kafka, without it representing such a different route through history, that fucking scumbag, history. | ||
| Interesting Times (Discworld, #17; Rincewind #5) (1994) by Terry Pratchett | None yet | ||
| Men at Arms (Discworld, #15; City Watch #2) (1993) by Terry Pratchett | S'ok. Identity politics and gun control – so, a very American British fantasy. Works: my audience squealed in horror at the right places, the deaths of fond characters. (Read aloud) | ||
| Thud! (Discworld, #34; City Watch #7) (2005) by Terry Pratchett | See here for my theory of Discworld international development. | ||
| The Fifth Elephant (Discworld, #24; City Watch, #5) (1999) by Terry Pratchett | About oil, conservatism, the Inscrutable Balkans. The most literary of his excellent police books: telecomms as model and amplifier of emotional and cultural ties; contact with otherness as cause and defining feature of modernity. Less grandiosely, he trots out his satisfying werewolf point again: in actual fact, the creature inbetween human and wolf is not a terrifying lunatic chimera but a dog. | ||
| Mother's Milk (2005) by Edward St. Aubyn | None yet | ||
| The Twits (1980) by Roald Dahl | None yet | ||
| Matter (Culture, #8) (2008) by Iain M. Banks | This entry's mostly set on a C17th world, the rest given over to barely interesting galactic politics. The Culture novels feel free to wave away technological plot devices with talk of "energy grid!" or "nanotech!", but Banks shows off hard-scifi cred here, giving a few lovely, moving images based on meteorology and astrophysics. On the current-affairs blogosphere: A rapidly expanding but almost entirely vapid cloud of comment, analysis, speculation and exploitation...Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying the wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths,our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness. Ending is good and brutal, made me stop and infer for ten mins afterward. So, yeah, Banks has been playing the same "ooh, neo-colonialism", "ooh, consequences", "ooh, angst in utopia" note for a while. But hey it's a good note. | ||
| Esio Trot (1990) by Roald Dahl | None yet | ||
| Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away (2014) by Rebecca Goldstein | It is very hard to say anything new about Plato. Except, of course it isn't, because he spoke in the most general possible terms, and the world continues to do unprecedented things and so allow for new commentary and new applications of Plato. It will always be possible to say something new about Plato because, until the heat death draws near, it will be possible to say something new about the world, and criticism should relate the old but general with the new and unanalysed. This was really deep fun: Goldstein debunks a great deal about him via close-reading (e.g.: that Plato's book, Πολιτεία, has no etymological or structural relation to modern republics). Some very moving chapters, too, particularly the neuroscientist dialogue: she renders this man we know almost nothing personal about as polite, curious and modest, willing to suspend judgment on e.g. our popular democracy. The titular chapter is best, involving the philosopher wrestling with one imperfect implementation of his epistemocracy, the data-mining Silicon Valley engineer: "You're telling me that the purpose of all of this knowledge is merely to make money? Greed is driving the great search engine for knowledge? This bewilders me... How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include the knowledge of the life most worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money?"Goldstein's move for each chapter is to draw out an inconsistency in Plato that later became a persistent philosophical dichotomy; the chapters are all classical dialogues, actually trialogues at least. Also she makes us note how little explanation of modern culture Plato would actually need to be able to deploy his existing arguments. Witty and persuasive. (You'd think I'd need no persuading of the eternal value of philosophy, and nor do I, but I'd no intention of studying Plato properly before this.) In one sentence: Plato wanders contemporary America, Chromebook tucked under his arm, looking to understand the few ways we are radically different. | ||
| Carry On, Jeeves (Jeeves, #3) (1925) by P.G. Wodehouse | None yet | ||
| Witches Abroad (Discworld, #12; Witches #3) (1991) by Terry Pratchett | None yet | ||
| The Crow Road (1992) by Iain Banks | Had an enormous impact on me the first time (I was 16), but very little the 2nd (I was 23). | ||
| Witch Wood (1927) by John Buchan | Ornate and surprisingly subtle picture of the Scots Borders during the Reformation. Mystery novel without a detective. Went into this with unfair scepticism but was impressed by his making boring theological debates dramatic, and by his unsentimental nature prose. I also learned lots of words. | ||
| Lanark (1981) by Alasdair Gray | None yet | ||
| The Squashed Philosophers (2005) by Glyn Lloyd-Hughes | Excellent way in for a teenager. Almost primary sources; someone else simulating you if you had the attention span to find the highlights. | ||
| Cujo (1981) by Stephen King | None yet | ||
| The Truth (Discworld, #25; Industrial Revolution, #2) (2000) by Terry Pratchett | The Disc grew modern, gaining a media (The Truth), sanitation (also The Truth), soft-power politics (Jingo!, Thud!), and institutionalised sport (Unseen Academicals), to add to its latter-day civilian police (Men at Arms), telecoms (Fifth Elephant, and steam power (Raising Steam). The most literary thing about the Discworld books is this modernisation, from magic to steampunk. This happens comically rapidly – Colour of Magic, the first book, is standard non-chronistic High Fantasy, so, set circa circa 1200CE. Snuff takes place not twenty-five discursive years later – yet the central city is clearly Victorian. And that's not including the burgeoning intercontinental fax network. Technology is given its due, but not to the neglect of the institutional side. Disc modernity began with the despot Vetinari's marketisation of crime, moves through ethnic diversity reforms and open-door immigration, and marches on and on. UA, the sport one, is solid, poignant. He doesn't often let his wizards get earnest and truly develop – by this stage, magic is comic relief, no longer the determining power or symbol of the Disc. Snuff is dark and politically worthy, but not his best. He's been reusing jokes in recent books, and I refuse to speculate on the cause. | ||
| The Power and the Glory (1940) by Graham Greene | Funny I don't find Greene's themes obnoxious, compared to say Waugh. | ||
| Changing Places (1975) by David Lodge | None yet | ||
| Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (Charlie Bucket, #2) (1972) by Roald Dahl | None yet | ||
| The Other Wind (Earthsea Cycle, #6) (2001) by Ursula K. Le Guin | None yet | ||
| Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (Jeeves, #11) (1954) by P.G. Wodehouse | Taboo: Moustache. Triangle: Cheesewright - Florence Craye - Gorringe - Wooster Subplot: Selling 'Milady's Boudoir' Aunt: Dahlia Antagonist: Cheesewright Expedient: Accidental balcony romance, accidental theft, several Jeeves specials. | ||
| Lords and Ladies (Discworld, #14; Witches #4) (1992) by Terry Pratchett | None yet | ||
| Roadside Picnic (1972) by Arkady Strugatsky | Good stuff! Earthy, economic sci-fi; aliens visit, ignore us entirely, and soon leave, leaving behind only transcendent junk and horror-film phenomena from their little picnic. Prose is lovely and plain, translated brilliantly by the mathematician Olena Bormashenko (we get "scabby", "sham", "mange"). The ordinary, crude protagonist Red is scrabbling illegally to provide for his mutant family (the Strugatskys use cash and cash pressure amazingly, grounding the whole cosmic fantasy in commerce, crime, exploitation). Every time Red gets cash, he throws it away – in someone's face as an insult, in someone's face as a distraction to evade capture, or just away. No explanations except bureaucratic filler; no salvation, just dumb defiance. A really nice original touch is that Red interprets the body language of his friends in extreme detail – a scratched nose means, to him, "Whoah, Red, be careful how rough you play with the new kid". Also notable for being a Soviet novel set in mid-west America, evoked very, very well. And the Russian Soul under their dismal economics rings out without catching in the barrel: | ||
| The BFG (1982) by Roald Dahl | None yet | ||
| Some Hope (1994) by Edward St. Aubyn | None yet | ||
| A Fire Upon the Deep (Zones of Thought, #1) (1992) by Vernor Vinge | Deeply satisfying space opera. I thought of The Fifth Element and the Culture throughout, it is as stylish as these while being more serious. Software permeates the book in a way it unforgiveably doesn't in most scifi. Vinge is a master of dramatic irony - the reader wriggles with knowledge of treachery for hundreds of pages. His cool, medieval dog aliens are less interesting to me than the space opera bit, but you have to admire the craft involved in them. The big bad is genuinely unnerving. An elevation of plotfests. | ||
| Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison | Scathing about all social strata | ||
| Farewell, My Lovely (1940) by Raymond Chandler | Relentlessly idiomatic. Hollow like a bell. Marlowe is not presented as feeling anything except incessant fatigue and occasional lust. The prose is fast and somehow innocent though surrounded by darkness:
Sure, Noir is cliche now, but we should try to stop Seinfeld effects from undermining original work. And I think he really was original. You could get to like that face a lot. Glamoured up blondes were a dime a dozen, but that was a face that would wear. I smiled at it.
"You lied to me." Learned a lot of words, had a lot of fun. Power in simplicity.
| ||
| Permutation City (Subjective Cosmology #2) (1994) by Greg Egan | The best-written info-dump ever. Egan's predictions for the near-future are looking really good 25 years on: the dominance of cloud computing, the digital-nomad life, spam filters, molecular-chem composer VR ... Still some amusing bits of course, e.g. "He was using more computing power than Fujitsu." Reading about the legal expert-system she has free access to, I itched for the future to arrive. There are a few logical holes in the plot which Egan helpfully erratas here. | ||
| Nice Work (1988) by David Lodge | None yet | ||
| The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath | None yet | ||
| Medea. Stimmen (1996) by Christa Wolf | None yet | ||
| The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) by Philip K. Dick | None yet | ||
| Use of Weapons (Culture, #3) (1990) by Iain M. Banks | The protagonist is cartoonish, full of piratical energy, but saved from a boring super-soldier effect by pathos of the Bad Lieutenant variety. Banks was always quite open about how didactic the sci-fi novels were; they are saved by his sheer inventiveness and the grand psychological realism amidst the technological fantasy. : What do humans have to offer, after the singularity? What skills are scarce? Banks' answer is: "a lack of scruples; excessive force; the ability to not care." We should be so lucky. This scene had a large effect on me as a child: 'Of course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. "But look; this table's clean.' As did this, before I studied formal philosophy and received a resounding confirmation of it: "Aw, come on; argue, dammit." But this was also before I got into technical pursuits which lend us hope that the above grim realism can be defeated by self-awareness, quantification, and epistemic care. Sometimes. | ||
| The Player of Games (Culture, #2) (1988) by Iain M. Banks | None yet | ||
| Wyrd Sisters (Discworld, #6; Witches #2) (1988) by Terry Pratchett | None yet | ||
| A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1) (1968) by Ursula K. Le Guin | None yet | ||
| The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1) (1995) by Philip Pullman | None yet | ||
| The Hobbit or There and Back Again (1937) by J.R.R. Tolkien | None yet | ||
| The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2) (1997) by Philip Pullman | None yet | ||
| Tehanu (Earthsea Cycle, #4) (1990) by Ursula K. Le Guin | None yet | ||
| Small World (1984) by David Lodge | None yet | ||
| A Widow for One Year (1998) by John Irving | None yet | ||
| Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | None yet | ||
| Feet of Clay (Discworld, #19; City Watch, #3) (1996) by Terry Pratchett | Another monarchist plot, another wonderful slice of Vimes. This instalment, one of his increasingly cinematic plots, pivots on the enduringly poignant trope of the Golem, the put-upon automata given life by holy words. Their persecution doesn't quite map to any one political issue, a point in favour really– they echo slavery, class struggle, and A.I. Pratchett also stretches to get a big bad pun into every scene, with mixed but gladdening results. (Read aloud) | ||
| Monstrous Regiment (Discworld, #31; Industrial Revolution, #3) (2003) by Terry Pratchett | He really could pluck anything out of the superficially cliched, superficially zany world he built. Here, Balkanization, first wave feminism and two dozen good characters summoned up and put down. | ||
| Night Watch (Discworld, #29; City Watch, #6) (2002) by Terry Pratchett | Perhaps his darkest book (though he never was just about puns and japes – consider the extent of extinction and futility in Strata). All about the Night, as in inherent human brutality and in being metaphysically lost. Remarkable for being about being the police in a police state. Cried my eyes out at the climax the first time, a decade ago. | ||
| Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970) by Roald Dahl | None yet | ||
| The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus | None yet | ||
| Sourcery (Discworld, #5; Rincewind #3) (1988) by Terry Pratchett | Rincewind starts to become an actual character rather than a reaction shot. | ||
| The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Norton Juster | In one sentence: An invitation to reason by way of reified puns and embodied binaries.
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| The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1) (1954) by J.R.R. Tolkien | None yet | ||
| The Campus Trilogy (1993) by David Lodge |
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| Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell | Features befitting a great book: stunning detail, well-historicised prose, engaging characters, intricate narrative structure, embrace of multiple genres. But it's too clean, somehow. Though it depicts predation by the worst of us; though its dystopia is one Pop-Hegel extrapolation from our current world-system, it's not as challenging as it thinks it is. It consists of ten sudden narrative shifts, moving back and fore four or five centuries. These sections are connected by each having a 'reader' (the opening sea journal is read by the second narrator, the Romantic composer, whose letters are obsessed over by the journalist, whose memoir is seen by the hack editor, whose tale is seen in an ancient film by the saintly clone, who is remembered as a god in the post-apocalypse story that is as far forward as we see. (They are also connected by a reincarnation overlay - but, apart from giving brutal history more chances to be brutal to the same people, I don't really get it.) The bit with the composer, Frobisher, is my favourite: he transcends his cheeky bohemian archetype and becomes horribly tragic despite his pig-headedness and camp pretension. The last line, returning to the original Victorian narrator, is a good summary of the book's wounded, pessimistic collectivism: He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!' So: Enjoyable and ambitious, unsatisfying. | ||
| Mort (Discworld, #4; Death, #1) (1987) by Terry Pratchett | None yet | ||
| All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1) (1992) by Cormac McCarthy | Wonderful. About two boys who are not boys, mostly because they don't want to be. They are only 16 but already have the skill and stoicism which actually constitute adulthood, rather than mere age. It is also about law and morals and power and the chasms between these things. Also suddenly, bizarrely, about pre- and post-revolutionary Mexico. They were zacateros headed into the mountains to gather chino grass. If they were surprised to see Americans horseback in that country they gave no sign... They themselves were a rough lot, dressed half in rags, their hats marbled with grease and sweat, their boots mended with raw cowhide... They looked out over the terrain as if it were a problem to them. Something they'd not quite decided about. They pulled the wet saddles off the horses and hobbled them and walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before... something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool. The country rolled away to the west through broken light and shadow and the distant summer storms a hundred miles downcountry to where the cordilleras rose and sank in the haze in a frail last shimmering restraint alike of the earth and the eye beholding it. Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion. I remain amazed by McCarthy's ability to use the most hollow and worn-out tropes - horse whispering, the stableboy and heredera, cowboys and varmints, injustice and redemption, the climactic shootout - and make them new, blasting through your cynicism with sheer force of prose. It's a dark book, but I laughed a lot, mostly at the boys' philosophising, which natural creasing I recognise from most boys I have known, educated or not. My daddy run off from home when he was fifteen. Otherwise I'd of been born in Alabama. You are disoriented when John goes home, to 1950s Texas; the rest of the novel operates with early nineteenth century logic and props. You wake up from a long nightmare into the modern dreamtime. | ||
| Cosmopolis (2003) by Don DeLillo | None yet | ||
| The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (1981) by Douglas R. Hofstadter | Wonderful: giant concepts conveyed through excerpts of great fiction. | ||
| Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Eminent Lives) (2005) by Christopher Hitchens | Short critical portrait of a grand hypocrite. where Locke had spoken of "life, liberty, and property" as natural rights, Jefferson famously wrote "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"... given the advantageous social position occupied by the delegates at Philadelphia, it is very striking indeed that [this] should have taken precedence over property. I was worried that Hitchens might have gone soft over his adopted land but it's full of this kind of thing: A bad conscience, evidenced by slovenly and contradictory argument, is apparent in almost every paragraph of his discourse on [slavery]. as well as his humourlessness, adultery, self-service, self-pity, horrendous partisanship, and, surprisingly, bloody ruthlessness. Jefferson:
(He was pro-Jacobin for a terribly long time.) --- Try and judge him fairly. How did his actions (not his words lol) compare to the prevailing spirit?: * Democracy: Well above average, even revolutionary US average. Jefferson: The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. His fear of a freedmen uprising apparently paralysed him. The conventional wisdom around 1800 was that you couldn't just free the slaves, you'd also have to deport them (to e.g. Sierra Leone like the British) to prevent them taking their rightful vengeance on the planters. His turning on the Haitians for similar reasons is one of the saddest and dumbest moments in a life of compromise. --- Whatever view one takes of Burke's deepening pessimism and dogmatic adherence to the virtues of Church and King, the fact is that after the summer of 1791 the Jacobins did their best to prove him right. Deleted scene from the Declaration of Independence: [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And Hitchen's final exceptionalist thought: The French Revolution destroyed itself in Jefferson's own lifetime. More modern revolutions have destroyed themselves and others. If the American Revolution, with its... gradual enfranchisement of those excluded or worse at its founding, has often betrayed itself at home and abroad, it nevertheless remains the only revolution that still retains any power to inspire." | ||
| A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form (2009) by Paul Lockhart | if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child's natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn't possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn't have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education. [Excerpt free here] | ||
| The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (2007) by Paul Collier | None yet | ||
| A Season in Hell (1873) by Arthur Rimbaud | Trembling / thrashing. | ||
| Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science (2003) by Steve Fuller | None yet | ||
| Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce | None yet | ||
| Step Aside, Pops (Hark! A Vagrant, #2) (2015) by Kate Beaton | So silly but also so sensible. | ||
| Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose (1993) by Adrienne Rich | Poems are better than the prose, early better than late, but all are pretty good.Be proud, when you have set She has a bad habit, common in critical theory, of confusing possible nasty interpretations of texts with the author's intention or with reality, and so dismissing the work. But, along with Greer, Dworkin, Young, and Sontag I don't think I'll stop reading her, no matter how much I disagree. | ||
| Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Charlie Bucket, #1) (1964) by Roald Dahl | None yet | ||
| The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe | None yet | ||
| Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (2005) by Simon Reynolds |  Playlist here. An exhaustive essay on art and/versus pop, politics and/versus aesthetics, intellect and/versus passion, and on how seriously music should, in general, be taken. He reads post-punk as far wider than the sombre anti-rock art-school thing people usually take it to be - so he includes Human League and ABC as post-punks with emphasis on the post:
His scope is total: everything's here (except for oi, hardcore, Ramonescore - i.e. the people who failed to make it past punk). Reynolds divides the genre/period in three broad camps:
* * * He gives chapters to the Other Places of lC20th popular music: whether Akron (Devo, Pere Ubu), Leeds (Gang of Four, Mekons), Sheffield (Cabaret Voltaire, Human League), Edinburgh (Fire Engines, Josef K, Associates). There is a covert critique of punk (that is, the messianic punks) throughout the book:
Instead, his favourites are the gorgeous misfits-among-misfits, who managed to be neither modernist nor entryist nor shill: Talking Heads, Meat Puppets, Associates, Japan. Crucially, he is charitable to all the tributaries: chart-hungry post-pop, politically-rabid modernism and the interminable ugliness of Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse and No Wave: this makes Rip It Up real history rather than hagiography, and so much more than I or anyone has managed. He has more critical acumen than any of the mooks in the brainy bands; more love than the fey melodists. I have lived in the post-punk woods - too jaded and too hopeful to be a punk - for getting on a decade, and I thought myself a connoisseur: until now I was not. | ||
| Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character (1985) by Richard P. Feynman | None yet | ||
| Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (2010) by Simon Reynolds | Omnivorous, unifying, funny. | ||
| Monogamy (1996) by Adam Phillips | In one sentence: Harsh, circuitous, critical aphorisms on the greatest secular religion. To be read : At the start of every new relationship; when your contempt of psychotherapy boils over and needs correction. I guess he's a bit overfond of knowing paradox ("Seduction, the happy invention of need"; "The problem of a marriage is that it can never be called an affair") – and of course aphorisms have to compress away the qualifications that would make them fairer, and so easier to take in large doses. Infidelity is such a problem because we take monogamy for granted; we treat it as the norm. Perhaps we should take infidelity for granted, assume it with unharassed ease. Then we would be able to think about monogamy. But it's non-partisan (not anti-monogamy, not anti-polyamory) and original and funny and wise and I still haven't absorbed the finer points.
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| Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology (1995) by Jane Dowson | Raising up great obscure things is one of the main points of having academics around. However, half the poets in this actually refused to be segregated in their lifetime (that is, refused to be anthologised as women, or at all). Dowson is candid about this, and half the book is just suggestive little biographies as a result. She is shackled to the humanities' chaste, hyper-qualified prose ("I have tried to illustrate that through their interrogations of national and international affairs, their preoccupations with cultural politics and their experiments with language and form... rejects the language of centrality and dominance...") and their fear of judgment / love of equivocation ("If consensus over a 'good poem' is neither desirable nor possible, then value is largely determined by context..."), it's not exactly hateful. Whether through Dowson's bias or the necessities of the time, these poets are even more independent than their male counterparts. Of those selected, Stevie Smith and Edith Sitwell are already fully reclaimed as the canonical boss ladies they are. Two big oversights of mine: Naomi Mitchison and Sylvia Townshend Warner. Mitchison is amazing - wise when wounded, droll and passionate, politicised but never journalistic: check out "To Some Young Communists", "Woman Alone", "Old Love and New Love". Warner is both blunt and metaphysical. (Others are just passable. Vita Sackville-West's are surprisingly poor, in fact. Highlights: "Beauty the Lover's Gift?" (bitter objectification); "Pastoral" (Manly Hopkins after empire). "A Woman Knitting" (the infinite in the finite); "Song of the Virtuous Female Spider" (satirising pious motherhood clichés); "The Sick Assailant" (rare for the time: male violence focus); "On August the Thirteenth" (on abruptness, gentle impotence of human pretensions). Multiplicative. | ||
| The Rorty Reader (2010) by Christopher J. Voparil | Encompassing and uplifting. I've been in love with the idea of Rorty for years. (He is: the renegade Analytic, the outrageous unifier, the literary soul, the pessimistic utopian, the great puncturer, and the bravest postmodernist by far - because he just comes out and says it, bites the bizarre bullets.) Here he is illuminating about philosophy of mind, poetry, foundationalism, the public/private divide, feminism, America, MacKinnon, Derrida, Davidson, and Dewey (obvs), among lots of other things. One can usually taste meanness in postmodern writing - stemming, I suppose, from our sense of being undermined by it - but never in Rorty. He is utterly clear, original and sometimes funny, and yet the realest postmodernist of all. Not sure what I'd think of it these days. | ||
| Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media (2008) by Nick Davies | Calm hatchet job on what I will call mainstream media - but don't thereby imagine me in a tin hat. I was on a news diet anyway (though this doesn't mean disengaged), so this told me what I'd already nastily assumed: commercial ownership of outlets means vast staff cuts and over-milked productivity; which mean no time to research or check facts; which means "churnalism", the frantic-lazy reproduction of PR and State material, and worse, their interpretations. (88% of all His model of the origin of hysteric snowball stories like the Millennium Bug or Diana's death is brilliant and convincing, disparaging conspiracy-theory suspicions 1. Uncertainty exists. Economise, kowtow, slink, hegemonise, neutralise, service, decontextualise, validate, exaggerate and conform: the rules of production. Was balling my fists through most of this. Essential for people in Britain. | ||
| The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World (2008) by Tim Harford | Celebration of the universality / imperialism of economics (the application of the field's hard-nosed acquisitory rational choice theory to more and more human phenomena - crime, romance, addiction, corporate pay, and The Ascent of Man). Harford is better than Levitt - to whom the books owes its format, cheek and some of the original research - because he's less amused about the unflattering and anti-humanist results people have uncovered. Some of the research is astonishing – and contentious (I have in mind the 2005 paper that purported to show significant shifts in [expressed] sexuality as the AIDS epidemic peaked, in proportion to how well people personally knew sufferers, "cost of AIDS".) In any case, Harford writes extremely clearly about technical things, and the research can't be ignored, because it suggests routes for generalised policy (rather than cynical rules to apply to all individual cases). Extra point for his lovely immanent-performative ontology of maths: he claims cricket players and economic actors are doing maths unconsciously when they catch a ball or opt for an optimum (third-order differentials). This implies that sunflowers are mathematicians - that all the world is not merely describable with maths, but acts as maths, is maths. I don't believe this, but isn't it lovely? | ||
| Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009) by John N. Gray | Hard to read - not for his prose, which is luminous and droll, but because he disagrees with almost everything almost everyone holds dear (whether reason, science, or organised social movements are your tool for improving the world). Tory anti-speciesism, anti-Enlightenment anti-cruelty(??) These span his career, satirising Marxists and Neocons, eulogising Santayana and explaining why communism sucks and doesn't work, and why liberalism is cute but doesn't work. (I paraphrase somewhat.) This leaves only Stoicism and resistance to dangerous meddlers as the 'good' life. Lucid, unclassifiable, horrific. | ||
| The Meaning of Recognition (2005) by Clive James | Funny polticial and cultural digs (his series on the 2005 His long essay on Isaiah Berlin is fantastic and contentious, and his retorts to the professional philosophers who come at him about it devastating, inspiring. | ||
| Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009) by Barbara Demick |  Horrible portrait of a deluded and brutalised country. You've probably already imagined the political religion, the incompetence and manipulation of the cadres: here are some of the only first-person accounts. The dozen defectors she interviews agree on enough to lend some confidence. She repeats entire sentences verbatim at various parts of the book, and runs out of ways to reflect somberly on collective madness and individual caprice (fair enough). It's hard to see a country in which 10% of the population die of state-caused starvation ever rising up. No | ||
| A Chinese Anthology: A Collection Of Chinese Folktales And Fables (1973) by Raymond van Over | Bunch of parables and fairytales taken from three millenia. Fun, and Other to me. Van Over has a thing for Pu Songling, the vernacular master of the form shunned by the mandarin system because of his colloquial and ornamental style. I'm not sure I learned much, but it beats Aesop. | ||
| The Social Construction of What? (1999) by Ian Hacking | Balanced analysis of this usually partisan matter. Hacking is the first scientific constructionist to not irritate me. He concludes that, at least in science, social construction happens and can't just be dismissed by appeal to the Context of Justification. This is more plausible because (where, with e.g. Bruno Latour it isn't clear) he has clearly properly studied the science he covers. The section where he tries to navigate the trade-off between realism's history of oppression, and relativism's potential for totalitarian abuse is touching. (He concludes that he just is "of the wrong generation" to get behind radical constructionisms!) The first section - just a huge long disambiguation of all the different things people mean when they say something is socially constructed - is 5/5 please read it. Required reading for anyone who wants to use, or dismiss, the concept. | ||
| Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (2008) by Gary F. Marcus | Funny and humane work of evolutionary psychology. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow but he tries to explain the many cognitive biases in terms of evolutionary adaptations. Relies on classic (old) behavioural experiments. So, not sure if this holds up better than Kahneman under the replication crisis assault. | ||
| We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews (2001) by Daniel Sinker | My teenage heroes, some of them teenaged at the time. Uniquely in punk, PP showed the muddiness of the ideology in things; the genuinely thoughtful people here interviewed share a tendency to blur party lines. There are radicals talking radically in the usual manner (Chomsky, Biafra) but also practitioners of social good (the Central Ohio Abortion Access Fund and the remarkable Voices in the Wilderness), iconoclasts of iconoclasm (Hanna, Mackaye) and even a few apolitical ethical-egoist libertines (Albini, Frank Kozik) who are common in punk, but rare in its commentary. Sinker's super-earnest intro text inserts all the right misgivings about Chumbawumba's entryism or Kozik's blithe first-generation patriotism; he somehow retains his beautiful faith in 'Punk' (as empowering civil-disobedient grass-roots social justice) in the face of vast variation in actual punks. My own attempt at the social meaning of punk gave up on seeing it as one thing (or even as generally good things) entirely. What are we to judge a social phenomenon by? Its majority expression? Its noblest exemplars? Its effects? (Which in punk's case, let's not flatter ourselves, were aesthetic rather than straightforwardly political: there is now slight freedom in clothing and hair colour in the workplaces of the land; there is now a standard pretence to deviance in all youth movements (e.g. pop music)...) Sinker's judgment is strong (cf. writing the oral history of Black Flag, with each member contradicting each other!), but his prose is wearing. This is the real thing though: one type of inspirational, anti-inspirational person, in their own words. | ||
| American Supernatural Tales (2007) by S.T. Joshi | I usually find horror fiction sort of pathetic, but this cherry-picking of two centuries is varied, trend-setting, often golden. Hawthorne, Poe, Bloch, Matheson, Oates. I have no patience for Lovecraft and his legion. The phases: High Gothic to Pulp to magic realism to splatterpunk, blessedly omitting the most recent and hypersuccessful form, urban fantasy / paranormal romance. Henry James' prose is every bit as clotted and unpronounceable as reputed. High point (apart from Poe's 'House of Usher' – a hellhound in a fluffy corset) is probs Theodore Klein's 'The Events at Poroth Farm', a queer sleepy beast with its own internal supernatural anthology and unnerving sidelong glances. (Read aloud) | ||
| Moranthology (2012) by Caitlin Moran | Gleeful and rarely zany. I don't laugh at books much, but snorted all the way through this on a long megabus. The middle section on class and gender is light and uncliched and makes her fall from grace among pious people all the sadder. We need people who can talk about these things without sounding like an appalling prig. | ||
| What the Hell Are You Doing?: The Essential David Shrigley (2010) by David Shrigley | Hilarious, abject, shoddy. Magical realism if magic were shit and made you look an idiot. Voices from the last bus and the dawn of time, from dank cells and strip-lit service stations. Against institutional art and other pretences, and against indifference, and against no fun. | ||
| So You've Been Publicly Shamed (2015) by Jon Ronson | Investigation of what angry people are doing to jokers and liars and fools, generally on the internet, generally on political grounds. We send them death threats, we photoshop them into animal porn, we doxx them, we get them fired. If Ronson's shock and remorse at being part of this could spread, the most distinctive depressing part of modern life would evaporate. There is only one representative of the online shamers here (besides Ronson, who is reformed). You realise quickly that she is not especially hateful: she's just dim – she still thinks shaming is great, even after suffering it horribly and losing her job as a result of her own aggressive humourlessness and insensitivity. In her interview with Ronson, she shows no signs of empathy or learning. It is a tragic example of how addling identity can be. One essential passage - the payload inamongst Ronson's ordinariness and self-deprecation: a human-rights lawyer points out the emotional power of noncriminal acts: "Let me ask you three questions," he said. "And then you'll see it my way. Question One: What's the worst thing that you have ever done to someone? It's okay. You don't have to confess it out loud. Question Two: What's the worst criminal act that has ever been committed against you? Question Three: Which of the two was the most damaging for the victim?" (It has been claimed that this phase of internet social justice is on its way out - that the tactic is now to "call in"- that is, to correct an offender, but also to appeal to the offender's humanity, to try to bridge the gap. We can hope this will gain traction (3 years and counting...). In the meantime a roaring subculture has been founded upon the glorification of bad behaviour and utterly unpersuasive flames.) Ronson's possible solutions to finding yourself shamed: you can 1) refuse to feel bad (or at least refuse to show them you're bleeding), own the thing they're trying to shame you for, like Max Mosley. This only works sometimes. 2) You can hide from the internet, try to SEO the affair down to Google page 3, where no-one goes, like someone it would be counterproductive to name. 3) You can start over, asking for forgiveness like Jonah Lehrer. (There is none; the internet is not interested in you improving your behaviour.) [Theory #3, Values #1]</li> | ||
| American Hippopotamus (2013) by Jon Mooallem | American Hippopotamus</i></b>. Blasted through this nonfiction novella with great delight; so much astonishing Victorian detail, so much damn fun. The story of two hardcore spies, American and Boer, who ranged over the eC20th, blowing things up and meeting presidents and dissing Churchill's fitness level and mining by hand as an anti-fascist action and striking oil and maybe killing lords – who campaigned together to bring an invasive species in to eat another invasive species and introduce a new meat animal to America. Duquesne to Burnham: To my friendly enemy, the greatest scout in the world, whose So damn fun, and, in the last instance, also deep. Mooallem reproaches us for having clicked on American Hippopotamus to make fun of the men. But: Rather than diversify and expand our stock of animals, we developed ways to raise more of the same animals in more places. Gradually, that process led to the factory farms and mass-confinement operations we have today—a mammoth industry whose everyday practices and waste products are linked to all kinds of dystopian mayhem, from the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, to a spate of spontaneous abortions in Indiana, to something called blue baby syndrome, in which infants actually turn blue after drinking formula mixed with tap water that's been polluted by runoff from nearby feedlots. That same runoff also sloshes down the Mississippi River to its mouth, pooling into one of the world's biggest aquatic dead zones, seven or eight thousand square miles large at times... Simple, thoughtful, astonishingly well-written. | ||
| The Inimitable Jeeves (Jeeves, #2) (1923) by P.G. Wodehouse | Musical, uplifting, and still so, so funny. Each story draws on a very small pool of the exact same jokes (Jeeves hates a new piece of Wooster's wardrobe; little old lady Aunt Agatha is completely inexorable; shit gambling on unconventional sports, headgear is misappropriated, monsters are slain) and only four supporting characters (Pals, Uncles/Fathers-in-law, Aunts/Fiancees, Trade). But they only gain from the repetition somehow. Even here, in Wodehouse's smiling, sun-dappled imperial nest, there are echoes from reality: for instance The War as well as the spiky and still-reigning art it set alight: I suppose every chappie in the world has black periods in his life to which he can't look back without the smouldering eye and the silent shudder. Some coves, if you can judge by the novels you read nowadays, have them practically all the time... So frivolous it loops back round to profound. --- Wooster's taboo: | ||
| Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients (2012) by Ben Goldacre | Or - his preferred book title - The Information Architecture of Medicine has Several Interesting Flaws, Many of Which Inflict Avoidable Harm on Patients, But All of Which are Amenable to Cost-Effective Change, Were There to be Adequate Public and Political Will. An empirically rigorous angry manifesto! Here are all of the book's theses in one paragraph, which is another thing I love nonfiction writers doing: Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don't like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug's life, and even then they don't give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. Exactly as fair to pharma as it deserves and no more ("there is no medicine without medicines"). Business gimps sometimes use the term "thought leader", meaning powerful, original thinker (they usually use it spuriously). Goldacre actually is one. Please at least join AllTrials. | ||
| Chuck Klosterman on Media and Culture: A Collection of Previously Published Essays (2010) by Chuck Klosterman | Exciting raids on petty tyrannies. Of: contemporary sexuality, cereal adverts, the implications of the 00s pirate craze, questions in general, the Unabomber's good point. Klosterman's not going to get away without comparison to DFW – but he's really good in his own way too. He's a more relaxed, atheoretical Wallace, with pop music (rather than Art writing) at his core, and technology (rather than general Irony) as the source of his worries about us all. This slices through the reflexivity that causes modern confusions, while being mischievously reflexive himself (at one point he tells us that he once lied to an interviewer who had correctly identified Klosterman's mouthpiece in one of his novels; Klosterman denied that he shared the character's view in order to preserve a cheap narrative uncertainty for readers of the interview – but, of course, admitting that here undoes that cheap save for we third-order readers). Applied instance: "We assume that commercials are not just informing us about purchasable products, because that would be crude and ineffective. We're smarter than that. But that understanding makes us more vulnerable. We've become the ideal audience for advertising—consumers who intellectually magnify commercials in order to make them more trenchant and clever than they actually are. Our fluency with the language and motives of the advertiser induces us to create new, better meanings for whatever they show us. We do most of the work for them." Two quibbles: there is (what I take to be) a lack of ideological care you'd expect of pieces written for Esquire magazine. He doesn't resolve (as I think DFW mostly does) the tension between a) affirming low culture's power and unique charms against bullshit classist disparagement, and b) despising its crudest, most conservative common denominators. Went through it in an hour. | ||
| The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins | None yet | ||
| The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001) by Christopher Hitchens | No indictment: an indictment on all of us. | ||
| The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (2004) by Richard Dawkins | Loads of lovely examples and vivid analogies. The sidebar on races is surprisingly careful and illuminating - that portion of the phenomenon that's genetic is more straightforward than I'd thought, in my Arts student way. (Though his placid definitiveness about the social interpretation is obvs controversial as hell. He's a strict philosophical eliminativist, implying that the harm resulting from reifying race totally outweighs all gains from positive discrimination. This is unclear to say the least.) I hadn't heard of the 'two-fold cost' of sex before, super-interesting. Not as snarky as you'd expect, and full of alternative perspectives so long as they're other evolutionists' perspectives. | ||
| Mao's Great Famine: The History Of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (2010) by Frank Dikötter | Deadpan documentation of the most awe-inspiring and culpable misrule ever. (I don't mean to weigh Mao's 40 million counts of negligent manslaughter and 5m conspiracies-to-murder against e.g. the 12 millions of more intentional monsters; the exercise seems childish, past some asymptote of human suffering.) The Party took their land and animals, melted their pans and hoes, killed billions of birds and 40% of the trees in China, starved them until they sold their children, and them starved them some more. At the same time they exported 30 million tons of grain, mostly for guns. Historians are impressive for their readiness to sift through so much irrelevant tonnage – and so much that is boring even when relevant – just so as to be careful and good. Mao comes across as a self-deceiving sociopath; Zhou as a decent man nevertheless permitting atrocities. Heavier than The Black Book, than Primo Levi. | ||
| Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001) by Lydia Davis | We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn't read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn't read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn't read it now. Went on my guard when I heard that the title story was one sentence long – speaking, as such conceits do, of holy-urinal superstitious art – but this is actually a standout, a series of droll, exacting capsules and nutshells. A typical piece is one page long and part gag, part compulsive meditation, part confession of petty vice. Once you get over her diffident, terse non-being, it is fun stuff. The long piece on jury duty is best, its length and repetitious babble a symmetry of the trial. | ||
| Why Moral Theory is Boring and Corrupt () by Anonymous | by the Unknown Anti-ethicist. to say that love is what motivates most of us who are neither complete bastards nor distracted by secondary concerns such as "what other people will think" – to say this is not to say anything very neat or tidy. But that too is as it should be. Full review here | ||
| Even As We Speak: New Essays 1993-2001 (2001) by Clive James | The last twenty years see James taking a turn from light entertainment to the history of totalitarianism. He then brings it into everything, everything else, dragging Hitler and Stalin around like the stations of the cross. His long excoriation of Daniel Goldhagen is angry, entertaining, and an education in itself. (The question the two men are at odds over is, "How could civilised, literate, assimilative Germany Do Such Things?" Goldhagen says: 'because they – all Germans – were eliminationists just itching for an excuse'. James' answer instead puts due weight on the simplest explanation: 'they did it because a single word of dissent meant death, for any of them'.) James is a bit obsessed by his chosen field – Hitler references turn up in his sunny, giddy Sydney Olympics pieces! Then there's an ornately maudlin account of his acquaintance with Diana Spenser. (I spent a little while trying to pigeonhole his politics recently – this non-republican, anti-Marxist, pro-American-culture hobnobber – and decided it is wrong to call him right-wing. "Democracy is really valuable only for what it prevents…") Funny, profound in places, but his late themes had solidified already and are covered better in A Point of View and Cultural Amnesia.
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| An Encyclopaedia of Myself (2014) by Jonathan Meades | Abuser, Sexual The best documentarian and architecture critic in Britain - also "the best amateur chef in the world" (cf. Marco Pierre-White) - writes about his childhood in a brutal panoptic manner. His unsentimentality about himself, his mother, his horrible uncles, is startling, even speaking as a fan of his sarky and acid programmes. It's not exactly linear: there are several odd repetitions and filling-ins, mimicking the meandering of memory. Still, Meades' prose makes them worthwhile twice over:
Some fleshpot, Southampton: the Port Said of the Solent. A poor whore has only to sit in a window in Derby Road, and a major police operation will be launched. All the coppers who've been on Cottage Patrol squeeze out from beneath the rafter to race a mile east from the Common. Their route takes them past Great Aunt Doll's chaotic bungalow where there were peals of dirty laughter and sweet sherry and sweet Marsala, and a room heated to eighty degrees and fish and chips for a dozen in an enamel bowl, and gossip and ribbing and silly stories, and gaspers, and will someone let the dog out else he's going to wee on the couch, and Jonathan you better go with him if you want a widdle cos Eric's been and done a big one...
The whole book is anomalous - it is sustained emotional recollection by a professed enemy of nostalgia: Nostalgia is not simply a yearning for a lost home, a yearning which can never be satisfied by revisiting that home, which could only be satisfied by becoming once more the child who inhabited that home, at that time. It is also primitive, pre-rational, pre-learning. It quashes developed taste, aesthetic preference, learnt refinements. It insists that the chance associations of infancy are more obstinately enduring than the chosen positions of our subsequent sentience. It tells us that we are lifers in a mnemonic prison from which there is no reprieve. But then the man's an anomaly: a razorish rationalist, a scathing positivist about the arts, who has devoted his life to them. (They were accompanied by their arty and - it follows - entirely artless friends.) His childhood was not like other children's in Fifties Britain. (I'm comparing his to Bennett, Hitchens, wrongly also Clive James.) His parents quietly rewarded his not conforming, and he ate Afghan curry throughout (his father was stationed in Iraq and brought back a tonne of spices). He grew up surrounded by clergy and the weapons scientists of the Downs:
(He really likes the biological warfare men, in maybe the biggest piece of contrarianism in this large contrary book.) The book stops when he's only 17 - but there are so, so many deaths in it. Maybe 70, counting the drowned calf; my total by that age was 3. Let's say he delights in the contrast with today, not in the deaths themselves.
It is very easy to put him in a bad light; he makes it easy for you, because he is always absolutely emphatic, usually vitriolic, and often wrong. (The things he's wrong about include vegetarians, anti-racism overall*, arguably human rights.**) Where would we be without monotheism, fasts, judicial impartiality, the eucharist, sincerity, pork's proscription, Allah's ninety-nine names and seventy-two virgins, weather forecasts, life plans, political visions, conjugated magpies, circumcision, sacred cows, the power of prayer, insurance policies, gurus' prescriptions, the common good, astrology? Where indeed? But those are the big lies. Picturing the equine Princess Royal is a sure way of inhibiting orgasm and prolonging enjoyment, so long as one doesn't picture her for too long and so risk flaccidity. stoical meiosis was normal in a generation which denied itself deep immersion in feeling, had not learned to wallow in empathy, understood an outpouring to be the discharge of cloacal sewage. The lexicon of demonstrative care had yet to be coined; the people's absurd princess had yet to be born; the mistakenly unaborted Blair had yet to perfect the catch of tremulous sincerity in his voice. my mother had assured me that the old testament was risible tosh. And so it is. So, of course, are all 'holy' books. But risible tosh can be persuasive. The desert landscape [in Iraq] is relentlessly grim. There was indigenous hostility to contend with. The Arab world was broadly sympathetic to the Axis powers. (The Nazis' successors are not the lost causists of the BNP, NPD and Vlaams Belang but the totalitarian Islamist post-Khomeini terror states... The Arab armies included Bosnian Muslim veterans of the Handzar SS brigades... The entire sentimental Arabist package, the tradition of the fawning British buggerocracy - Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence, St John Philby, Glubb Pasha, Wilfred Thesiger and countless other aristocratic eccentrics - had become la pensee unique of the army's higher strata. It was also (not that its adherents acknowledged it) effete, misogynistic, irrational, anti-urban, Luddite and gullible. Antiquarian pillage is hardly scholarly and far from scientific, but its perpetrators were not culpable of the misanthropic relativism which grants rights to ancient amphorae and entitlements to yokes' remnants. Nor did they conceive of history in terms of movements, big ideas and sweeping theses. Their empiricism militated against generalisation. The tyranny of minorities had caused the atomisation of England. The damage is repairable - by state terror or mob rule. But since the state's treasonable clerks are the very cause of the embuggerance we can be sure that it will do nothing. And a mob needs a leader to bring its hatred to the boil, foment its venom, drive it on. It needs the Duke of Edinburgh. Much as he might wish it he won't be around. Consider that last one: it is natural to read in it a fascist glee - but it isn't that at all. It is rather the dread of inevitable deadlock and looming contradictions. There's no relish, only misplaced fear. But you need to have read his contempt of fascists (and of Philip) and his fear of totalitarianism before, for it to sound like that. Why isn't the cannibal internet calling him out? Because he is in the grey zone of non-celebrity? Because he is too old to shame? Because he isn't on Twitter? Anyway: He is neither a bigot (offensive because hateful and ignorant), nor a clickbait troll (intentionally, insincerely offensive), nor an aged victim of social drift (obliviously offensive): he has not defaulted to these opinions; he was never much tied to his time's prevailing prejudices, whether it's Fifties' conformism and class obsession or Noughties PC and pomo. His antipathies are reasoned and he refuses to pander. Compare this passage to e.g. what Yiannopoulos was finally banished for: The formula states that adults are wicked predators, children are innocent prey. In the hierarchy of abuse, paedophilia (which may be literally that, liking children) is demonised, fetishised. It has giddily attained equal status with race crime... Homo faber. Isn't he just? Man has devised multitudinous forms of child abuse which are not sexual. Their immeasurable consequences may, however, be just as grave as those of sexual abuse. The book is highly abridged (only up to cram school) and still a bit too long. Before reading this you should first watch any 10 of these films. * If you insist on challenging the worst e.g. woke, trivial internet activism, you have to say that's what you're against: Meades is being uncharacteristically imprecise, and decimating sympathy as a result. "Against (actually-existing) anti-racism" is not the same as "pro-racism", but people will read you that way unless you give them explicit reason not to. (And even then.) ** Rights are only good if they produce good outcomes; lots of people all over the world think in terms of imperatives and absolutes and it is almost futile to argue about it; thus rights can be a useful fiction. Meades again spits on "rights" in general without laying out this or any other philosophical objection, without showing us what he's for and so allowing people to not think the worst. | ||
| New Year Letter (1941) by W.H. Auden | 800 heroic couplets written off the cuff for a friend. Pompous, showy, and forced: I love his idiocies, I love his verse footnotes, which are as long as the original poem again and arraying all his beetling, piecemeal research into his age at least: cell biology, crank psychoanalysis, early sociology, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, all the arts and sciences nominally in his pocket. Anyway half of the idiocy is forced on him by the genre, epic verse, which always sounds damn silly to me (not that I mind silliness in my high art, but I do mind people being silly and not admitting it):
One critic, screwing up all his strength, called Auden's bad style, which NYL is supposed to be an instance of, "snide bright jargon", which is a perfect compliment! (if you don't view limpid repetition of what every other sensitive outsider has said before you as poetry's point.) I've not read it alone on New Year's Eve like you ought to, but I will. | ||
| For the Motherboard: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám () by Vanessa Hodgkinson | Gaudy and hectic word-associations, with only tenuous formal or thematic links to the actual Rubáiyát, presenting itself as a translation but fizzing with verve of its own. A nerd culture devotional. (Vine was a video fragment website; Wine is an excellent Windows emulator.) Teeming with clumsy nerdy ephemera, but I think it will be worth reading in 10 years. Let's see. Works much better aloud. Free! here: 'The' '"Rubaiyyat'" of 'Omar Khayyam'</b></i> | ||
| Collected Poems (1962) by Federico García Lorca | 2007: I used to love people for getting shot. | ||
| Occasional Poets () by Richard Adams | Poems from people not known as poets, yielding a equal mix of dedicatories, doggerel, and diamond. Their styles are mostly preserved, epitomised: the big grim novelists (Lessing, Coetzee, Fowles, Murdoch, Golding) write enormous grit-tooth verse; Heads bowed down or thrown Raymond Briggs, a quiet, brutal elegy; David Lodge, some good meta jokes; animal bits from Jan Morris and Stella Gibbons; Wodehouse, two wonderful gossipy hyperboles. Adams manages to pick out the only Naomi Mitchison poems I don't like. A lot of unbridled sentiment, e.g. Arnold Wesker depressing his children, Francis King's lies spiralling down, Enoch Powell lying awake listening to his wife's asthma; the writers aren't expecting the irony-making pressures of publication, or the obsessive polishing of any work that will be identified with them. So it's free indeed. Until Adams. | ||
| The Black Halo: The Complete English Stories 1977-98 (2001) by Iain Crichton Smith | Best Scottish poet writes good Scottish stories about, mostly, terrible Scottish pragmatists. Steady observational tragedy, and quiet outcast statures. Recurring structure: a staid, professional male narrator tells us his profession on page 1 and admits a whole puckle of flaws. Recurring people: the censorious, crabbit islander who was not always so; the passionate and creative woman slowly eroded by island gossip, monotony, stasis; her husband, who knows this happened because of him. Most striking are 'The Scream', 'What to do About Ralph?', 'The Spy', and 'The Exorcism' – but particularly the latter, because I recognised the worst of myself in both the little bastard obsessed with Kierkegaard and the small-souled lecturer who saves him: I looked at him for a long time knowing that the agony was over… [But] how could I be sure that my own harmonious jealous biography had not been superimposed upon his life, as one writing upon another, in that wood where the birds sang with such sweetness defending their territory? Much more than clever. | ||
| The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975) by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | How big teams make things. How awesome tech feels on the inside: Too many interests, too many exciting opportunities for learning, research, and thought. What a marvellous predicament! Not only is the end not in sight, the pace is not slackening. We have many future joys. The oldest thing by far on my computing syllabus and nearly the most stylish.* This anniversary edition has a chapter which is just the whole book boiled down to its propositions and whether or not they stood up twenty years later, which is a thing that other non-fiction could gravely benefit from. (You sometimes see the like of this in honest philosophy books, included as 'analytical index' or 'prolegomenon' or 'exordium'.) Brooks is not merely exoteric, not just an IBM mook; suitably acerbic and suitably enthusiastic. The open secret of programming is that it is actually a whole barrel of fun, just one that baffles, bores or scares outsiders: The craft of programming gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men, providing five kinds of joys: (NB: The Christian God rears up at unexpected intervals – and at one point Brooks recommends openly patriarchal programming teams - on the model of "God's plan for marriage". But this lone wacko note doesn't get in the way.) * (I set myself Shannon, Wang, Knuth.) | ||
| The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (2002) by Hilary Putnam | Remarkable meta-ethics, which establishes itself in large part by undermining neoclassical economics. Important quibble: The title evokes sexy French relativism – e.g. there is no fact of the matter, il n'y a pas de hors-texte – whereas his actual thesis is that only the strictest, stupidest partition between facts and values collapsed. (A distinction is the mild statement that A is not the same thing as B – whereas a dichotomy is the strict logical exclusion of two things: 'if something is A, it is a priori not B'.) A pedantic quibble: god he is fond of italics. Anyway. It collapsed, but still lives on in other fields, decades after the fall of the positivism that was the only thing motivating it. Book is: a scathing modern history of the distinction, a Pragmatic reconstruction, a love letter to Amartya Sen. Putnam blames the philosophical dichotomy for the failures of economics, and from there for real suffering.
Some claims: Factual and evaluative statements are necessarily entangled, since; Facts are ascertained as such only by the application of epistemic values: "coherence, plausibility, reasonableness, simplicity, and elegance... if these epistemic values do enable us to correctly describe the world... that is something we see through the lenses of those very values."; i.e. facts are thick too; i.e. he has been made to "rethinking the whole dogma (the last dogma of empiricism?) that facts are objective and values are subjective". Of course, coupled to his ditching foundationalism, this leads him a long way down the Rortyan road - 'science is just another social practice' yada yada - but he tries to salvage a sort of pragmatic objectivity for science. Dunno if he's winning, but I loved the race. | ||
| Human Chain (2010) by Seamus Heaney | As ever, it's of hands, eels, parents, wakes, digging, kennings, regret, the RUC, Cuchulain, and Caesar. Fully half are in memoriams. You have to be brave or famous to write this plainly. Plainness can be mistaken for absence of technique – 'here, I could do that' – but here it is very, very obvious that I could not. Feel your tongue:It's winter at the seaside where they've gone Best are 'A Herbal', 'Chanson d'Aventure', 'Miracle', 'Loughanure', and 'Route 110', an odyssey about buying a second-hand copy of the Aeneid and then trying to go home. | ||
| A Mathematician's Apology (1940) by G.H. Hardy | None yet | ||
| Non-Materialist Physicalism: An experimentally testable conjecture () by David Pearce | None yet | ||
| Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking (2013) by Daniel C. Dennett | A self-help book! in the form of a set of tricks and tools for good non-routine cognition. But it's utterly personable and scientifically charged, and a defence of naturalist semantics, mind, 'free' will, and philosophy itself, to boot. He's so much more subtle than he's given credit for; for instance, a large theme here is the central role of imagination in science and the other potent sorts of thought. I confess that I simply can't conceive of some of his positions (e.g. 'qualia' being illusions); but one of the book's burning points is that this may be a failing of my person and not his philosophy. Also a meta-philosophy: By working with scientists I get a rich diet of fascinating and problematic facts to think about, but by staying a philosopher without a lab or a research grant, I get to think about all the theories and experiments and never have to do the dishes.
Every book of his I read increases my respect. (Though note Galen Strawson's rebuke to Dennett's narrativist theory of identity, 4* here.) | ||
| Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism (2009) by Joseph Heath | None yet | ||
| The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg (2008) by Robert P. Crease | Droll, scientifically proficient, philosophically superconductive. The cast is standard – 'Pythagoras', Newton, Euler, Boltzmann, Maxwell, Einstein, Heisenberg – but his treatment's lucid and alive to the art and philosophy of the things. (Get this: "special use of language, often over the heads of untrained readers, that seeks to express truths concisely & with precision, that allows us to understand otherwise inaccessible things, changing our experience in the process" – equations, or poems?) Thermodynamics is best, casting physicists as Shakespearean (there were four suicides in the twelve of them). Crease wants science to have cultural presence, since at the moment it has authority, cultural reputation without real presence. He suggests that "science criticism" is the way to get this - not in the sense of know-nothing postmodernists attacking instrumentalist hegemony (Holmes on Cochrane), but as in the work of engaged human bridges between practitioners and audience. Every art has a surfeit of such critics. Pop-science comes close, but it's more often cheerleading and radical simplification than artful play on precedents, implications and meaning. Well, here's at least one example. (See also the Edge and 3QuarksDaily people.) | ||
| Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China (1987) by Colin Thubron | A stunning travel book in the best aristocratic tradition of wandering about talking to people and expecting monasteries to put you up unannounced. But it's as much moral as geographic or historical. China had only just opened up to foreigners, again; the Cultural Revolution, just 15 years past, looms large. A lost generation. In fact the book is obsessed with the difficult question, "How could they do that to themselves?", a focus which makes it excellent, informal long-form journalism as much as gentleman's what-ho travel narrative. The man went on: 'We found a porter who had been reading novels with a love interest. I don't mean porn. Just a personal story. This was decadent. We beat him unconscious, and burnt the books. Then he died.' The question isn't as simply answered as it is for Hitler's Germany (answer: "Because the merest dissent by any German meant death") nor even as it is for Stalinist Russia (since the unbelievable violence of the Holodomor and gulags was meted out by a comparatively small number of people). Millions of educated Red Guards brutalised millions of untrendy people without much central control at all (indeed, they often revolted against and scared the shit out of the PLA and the apparatchiks). Thubron's important points include: that the Party cadres are nothing more than the latest garb of the long, long line of elite mandarins. So the poor Laobaixing got all the downside of an absolutist bureaucracy plus all the incompetence and terror caused by people who think that violent unending revolution is desirable. Another large theme is the appalling state of women: The patriarchy there was without even the paltry sweetener of chivalry - married off at 14 if not murdered as infants; old women sitting in the aisles of busses while young men lounge, etc, etc. Many of the people he meets (mostly lower-middle-class) were (are?) unbelievably obsessed with class, even after forty years of 'communist' rule; the brief, cursory glorification of the nongmin bounced back as soon as the big sticks went away. He calculates the cost of things - TVs, train tickets, hotel whiskies - in that most decent of measures, fractions of an average worker's monthly wage. There is, already in 1987, an ambitious, irreverent, apolitical youth which any graduate of a Western university will now recognise readily.** The modern Modern China - Deng's China - is visible here, just. Thubron watches the future radiating out from the city: Under the enormous vault of the station hall there resounds the tramp of a newly mobilised peasantry. I have seen them before all over the city: families arrived to buy or trade, sleeping under bridges or in shop porches with cap over their eyes. Now they step on to the escalators as gingerly as Western eight-year-olds, laden with rope-trussed boxes, newly bought televisions, chickens in hampers, radios, bags spilling out fruit and biscuits - bearing El Dorado back to the village. They overflow the waiting-rooms and camp against every wall behind their baggage palisades, snoring open-mouthed through the din with the detachment of Brueghel swineherds, their children in their arms. His wit, compassionate anger, gravitas, and grasp of the detail of how messily old collides with new: all recall my favourite critic, Jonathan Meades. (Though Meades is a bit too refined to be easily imagined sleeping fifth-class amidst spit and melon rind, or buying a barn owl in a meat market just to set it free.) He reports much local bullshit, sarcastically (e.g. Northerners' notion that 'moral integrity' decreases as you go south). This makes it sometimes difficult to know which reportage he endorses: thus, a couple of outlandish claims are possibly deadpan jokes (e.g. only '100' cars on mainland China in 1987?? Human flesh on sale in Canton? Unsurprisingly, the book received a dab of cursory post-colonial critique.* This is unsurprising because he is interested in testing stereotypes out - in particular, finding out if innate cruelty enabled the Cultural Revolution; it is thus not unfair to imagine the book as a Eurocentric hatchet job. But this dismissive cynicism is only possible before you've heard his frank encounters with a hundred vivid, intelligent, and mournful locals, seen his solid grasp of the history of the dynasties and of 'pedantic and kindly' Confucianism. (Which is the best description of it I've ever seen.) Those interviews are novelistic - impossibly sincere, compressed, tragic, poetic - and far beyond anything I could elicit as a foreigner, in my summer there. But you believe him even so. Anyway he doesn't pretend to have answered his burning question: 'This sort of thing isn't peculiar to my country,' the priest said: he might have been thought-reading. 'Look at Germany, Russia. Of course, those countries are not old civilisations like ours, but still...' I oughtn't skimp on the book's adventure-story side just because it happens to be a beautiful and humane psychological portrait; the prose is persistently gorgeous, the sights are dryly and comprehensively evoked, and Thubron presents himself as a very fine comic character to boot. My favourite China book.
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| Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (1995) by Richard Webster | What a fucking book! Title is apt and cleverer than it looks: this is not just a comprehensive catalogue of the errors and lies Freud told throughout his career - some of them criminally negligent and emotionally abusive - but also a psychological explanation of why he made them. (Roughly: Lust for fame, cocaine, and a misplaced fervour in a particular numerological sort of neurology.) Full discussion forthcoming, after re-read. | ||
| Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018) by Sabine Hossenfelder | A look at high-energy particle physics* in its present nightmare (of deep inconsistency and vastly expensive new data). Her thesis is that the problem is sociological and aesthetic: in the absence of new data sources, we form cliques and regroup around incompatible, unempirical beauty intuitions. it leads me to conjecture that the laws of nature are beautiful because physicists constantly tell each other those laws are beautiful. experimentalists working with a detector developed to catch neutrinos reported on the first "interesting bounds on galactic cold dark matter and on light bosons emitted from the sun." In plain English, "interesting bounds" means they didn't find anything. Various other neutrino experiments at the time also obtained interesting bounds. Her prescription is that we should stop limiting the field so heavily with naturalness or geometric naturalness or symmetry or unification or anti-fine-tuning intuitions, which collectively she (following her field) calls "beauty". Since Physical beauty is quite distinct from natural-language "beauty", I think it'd be better if we left those five components under a different name. Filled with interviews with some of the cleverest, deepest physicists of our time (Arkani-Harked, Wilczek, Weinberg, Lisi, Polchinski) and the several bandwagons they lead, blind, in different directions. Hossenfelder herself is funny, self-critical, scrupulously clear: the kind of curmudgeonly, unbiddable empiricist we always need. "You ask, why do people still work on it?" Nima [Arkani-Harked] continues. "It's in fact very funny. As I said, the best people had a pretty good idea what was going on—they were not sitting on their hands waiting for gluinos to pour out of the LHC. They also had a pretty level reaction to the data." That sweet bitterness is telling; Hossenfelder is the broke-down hard-boiled P.I. of particle physics.
I remember reading biographies of last century's heroes, picturing theoretical physicists as people puffing pipes in leather armchairs while thinking big thoughts.</i> The heavies are in general very open and undogmatic about the state of things (they can afford to be, what with tenure). Weinberg: I don't know how much elementary particle physics can improve over what we have now. I just don't know. I think it's important to try and continue to do experiments, to continue to build large facilities… But where it will end up I don't know. I hope it doesn't just stop where it is now. Because I don't find this entirely satisfying… (There's a nice bit where Weinberg hears a new philosophical/historical theory of physics - that the revolutions always involve overthrowing an old aesthetic principle - and is immediately nerd-sniped and charmed by it. Also Wilczek: According to McAllister, scientists don't throw out everything during a revolution; they only throw out their conception of beauty. So whenever there is a revolution in science, they have to come up with a new idea of beauty. He lists some examples for this: the steady state universe, quantum mechanics, et cetera.) She even seeks out the ugliest theories, like Xiao-Gang Wen's string-net condensation, trying to find her own aesthetic limits: I am skeptical, but I tell myself to be more open-minded. Isn't this what I was looking for, something off the well-trodden path? Is it really any weirder to believe everything is made of qubits than of strings or loops or some 248-dimensional representation of a giant Lie algebra? This bit understates a real problem (it implies we don't use Solomonoff induction out of pique rather than incomputability): A way to objectively quantify simplicity is by computational complexity, which is measured by the length of a computer program that executes a calculation. Computational complexity is in principle quantifiable for any theory that can be converted into computer code, which includes the type of theories we currently use in physics. We are not computers, however, and computational complexity is therefore not a measure we actually use. The human idea of simplicity is instead very much based on ease of applicability, which is closely tied to our ability to grasp an idea, hold it in mind, and push it around until a paper falls out. Better than The Trouble with Physics which I also liked (though he was narrower and less balanced about string theory). Maybe 5/5 if I reread it. Her blog is extremely worthwhile and more technical and thus less untrue. * OK, "high-energy particle physicists and also Grand Unified Theorists of whatever stripe including some cosmologists". But it is wrong to say that "physics" tout court has a crisis, nor indeed does Hossenfelder say this. (She didn't choose her own subtitle.)</td> </tr> | ||
| Awakenings (1973) by Oliver Sacks | An oppressive book or a book about the maximal oppression. It is a dozen case studies of profoundly frozen people: contorted, whispering, impassive for decades - at best. It describes one of the most poignant real events I think I've ever heard of: the medical reversal of effective, affective death - and but only a temporary reversal. Sacks really hadn't developed his style by this point: I quite liked the technical medical report feel, but it both highly technical and highly melodramatic: there is much of infinitudes of the soul, titratabilities, and perseveratably festinative resipiscences in it. Also a nice subtle stylistic note: he breaks apart dead metaphors to revive them (e.g. "wild life", "death bed"). Also lacking is his later grand balancing of romance with reason.* For instance, he falls right off the edge on pp.97, seeing numbers as enemies of people:
It's a repetitive book for a maximally repetitive disease. The wonder and personalising detail he lavishes on each case aren't enough to get me past the surprising uniformity of the bizarre symptoms and the hell of it all. Just as well I'm not a doctor.
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| Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words (2015) by Randall Munroe | So wonderful; technical diagrams big and small, annotated with only the 1000 ("ten hundred") most common words. (This is as often poetic as it is clumsy; Munroe renders a nuclear bomb a "machine for burning cities".) | ||
| Rain (2009) by Don Paterson | Wonderful: sincere, grotesque, solemn and shrugging; both elemental and goofy. Rhymes are delivered straight. Going by the ambient temperature and the coverage of light, Paterson lives very near to outer space.
A unique, dry view of family life here; sneaking downstairs so as not to disturb them with your inexplicable angst.
Which is best read as a scherzo. Half of it's written for a dead friend or in homage to lesser-known world poets; I rarely get poems like that. I don't know why I'm cavilling; this is the best collection I've read since... the last Don Paterson. Sentimental by his standards but bruising by poetry in general's. Teetering upright. | ||
| Selected Poems (2011) by Jaan Kaplinski | A very broad swathe from Estonia's most stately rustic. He keeps a high eyrie but has a fatherly musk as well. It's a chilly nest though - occasionally anti-human:It gets cold in the evening. The sky clears. He gets called a particularly European (a particularly Unionised) poet, and this is true enough: Kant's rationalist cool and Smith's pragmatism really are pedal notes in him. But there are snippets of nine languages in this mid-sized selection, including Sanskrit and Japanese (the ukiyo-e/mono-no-aware rhythms of which he owes a great deal to) and a poke of originals in pragmatic, wriggling English. That is, he's really a globalist. His own Estonian ("serious, greyish") is of course not remotely Indo-European, instead fluting and crashing, riverine, out of the Urals. (It would be silly to say that his work's bleak because some people he is descended from came from Siberia, but if I were a marketer rather than a gadfly it would be a good hook.) Let's complicate matters with two other sides, the paternal domestic and the wide-eyed enquirer: Lines do not perhaps exist; there are only points. This wonderful latter aside (and anti-poetry though he is) I do not like him constantly bringing up poetry; the poems where he does are often po-faced and contentless. But he is a master and it's his business what he chooses to cool by just gazing at it. | ||
| Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
The most ambitious and messy book in his idiosyncratic four-volume work of evolutionary epistemology, the 'Incerto'. (It is Fooled By Randomness, Black Swan, Bed of Procrustes, and yonder.) The former three books are largely critical, hacking away at theory-blindness, model error, and the many kinds of people he sees as possessing unearned status (economists, journalists, consultants, business-book writers): this is the upswing, a chaotic attempt to give general positive advice in a world that dooms general positive advice. Every other page has something worth hearing, for its iconoclasm, or a Latin gobbet, or catty anecdote, if not something globally and evidently true. I think he is right about 30% of the time, which is among the highest credences I have for anyone. I only think I am 35% right, for instance.* But a core point of his system is that his approach should work even given our huge and partially intractable ignorance. The core point, repeated a hundred times for various domains:
This observation leads to his grand theory of everything: every system is either fragile (damaged by volatility), robust (resistant to damage from volatility), or antifragile. This isn't a trivial distinction, because each has formal properties that allow us to change arrangements to, firstly, prevent explosions, and then to gain from chance volatility. Biology is definitely one of these antifragile systems***; his case that, absent gross financialisation, the global economy would be one is convincing too; and the idea's at least plausible when applied to the cultivation of virtue or existential strength in a single person. The danger with this - an indissoluble danger because there can be no general strategy to avoid it - is that in welcoming constructive stress we'll miss the point at which the welcomed dose turns destructive (where fasting starts to atrophy, where training becomes masochism, where critique becomes pogrom, where sink-or-swim encouragement turns abuse).
************************************************************* Some pigeonholes you might think to put all this in:
* * * * * * * * His work fits the x-risk paradigm very well, but he developed his edifice in complete isolation from them, and has an uncompromising scepticism about expected value that might not make cross-overs all that fruitful. ************************************************************* How original is the core point, really? Well, who cares? His claim is that he had to invent the word 'antifragile', not the idea. He says, idiosyncratically, that Seneca and Nietzsche had the nub of the idea, and Jensen the formal essence; Darwin certainly did too. "Resilience engineering" and in computing, 'defensive programming' (b. 1998) and 'self-healing systems' (b. 2001) are at least on the same track, though not getting beyond a lively sort of robustness. But I doubt that most systems can become antifragile - e.g. it's hard to imagine an antifragile jet engine (one that harvests bird strikes for fuel, or soot cleaning)? So maybe it's only the grand generalisation to all design that's new. ************************************************************* Gripes: His footnotes are collected by theme rather than linked to his claims directly, which makes it so difficult to follow up his sources that his credibility suffers. He namedrops, which is not the same as showing his working. I would really like to see his backing for his cool claims (about e.g. an irregular sleep pattern as a good thing, or things like 'I suspect that thermal comfort ages people'), but it's hidden away and often one-study. (Again: apparently one-study, since his working is not easily on show.) He has a surprisingly high opinion of Steve Jobs – who I view as a grand example of an empty suit: there are 9 references to Jobs' hokey shark-wisdom, (where Gigerenzer and Mandelbrot get 8, Jensen gets 7, Marx 7). Does Jobs really count as a 'practitioner' with 'skin in the game'? Eh. His homebrew jargon starts to drag – some sentences are wholly composed of his neologisms plus a barrel of articles and prepositions. (I used the glossary early and often.) Repetitive: tells what he'll tell you, tells you he's told you. Some passages really suffer from his wholesale hostility to copy-editing; there are some flatly bad sentences here. And he namedrops a lot, more than fair attribution of ideas – there are several passages that are just lists of people he likes (e.g. p.257-8). I don't see that it's worthwhile to criticise his arrogant style; it's what animates his points, and he never uses it on weak targets. Lastly, he sometimes makes of a system's persistence the highest good. (Where its persistence is to be contrasted with mere stability.) This is in tension with his wonderful emphasis on artistic and quasi-sacred values elsewhere in the book. But it talks about everything, is historically wide-eyed, relentlessly rational, and often funny. And the method-worldview-style it suggests might stop life crushing us utterly. | ||
| The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (1964) by Anthony Thwaite | I feel able to say it at last: haiku is pathological, a genre absolutely limited to the engraving of flat single images. And single (or paired) verbal images of nature do nothing for me; it is relation and juxtaposition and story and reductios and original presentation that give images life. The haiku leaves almost no room for these. (This is not about length; the senryu retains wonderful possibilities, because they are animated by satire rather than po-faced nature-worship. Jokes can stand alone.) This book cannot be blamed for being half haiku, because that mechanical law ruled Japanese poetry for thousands of years and this is first of all a historical selection. Lots more to see. Currently I am only fond of the ancient gnostic hermits and the droll postwar internationalists (no multi-culturalists here). Many of the others emote at us too directly - the likes of "Oh how // I miss my wife // out here // on the border wall" - which brittle superficiality fails Wei Tai's test and mine. In general their ancients have dated much better than ours, perhaps because they grokked ironic minimalism a thousand years before us. The emperors and shoguns all write poetry, are still all required to profess about the land that they perch upon. Meiji: In newspapers, all seethe doings of the world,which lead nowhere.Better never written! Amen. I liked Yamanoue Okura, Yakamochi, the Kokinshū, Ki Tsurayuki, Tsuboi Shigeji, Kaneko Mitsuhara, Takahashi Mutsuo. I absolutely do not have sufficient knowledge to stop there. Skip Bownas' enormous Preface too, you don't need it. In one sentence: 無. | ||
| Herzog on Herzog (2003) by Paul Cronin | Luminary. Herzog is a contrived and dour and absurd man, and yet charming and sincere. Here is him describing one 6 month block of his youth:
His whole life is lived with this undemonstrative fervour. The interviewer is completely uninspired: he just works his way stolidly through Herzog's back catalogue, with no insight into anything much ("Precautions Against Fanatics was your first colour film, a bizarre comedy set at a racetrack where various individuals feel it necessary to protect the animals from local 'fanatics'. Any comments?"); we are fortunate that Herzog is self-stimulating and full of himself. I'll just let him show you how good he is: I am someone who takes everything very literally... I am like a Bavarian bullfrog just squatting there, brooding. I have never been capable of discussing art with people. I just cannot cope with irony. The French love to play with their words and to master French is to be a master of irony. Technically, I am able to speak the language - I know the words and verbs - but will do so only when I am really forced to. I was forbidden to use fireworks. I told the army major that it was essential for the film. 'You'll be arrested,' he said. 'Then arrest me,' I said, 'but know that I will not be unarmed tomorrow. And the first man who touches me will drop down dead with me.' The next day there were fifty policemen and soldiers standing watching me work, plus a few thousand people from the town who wanted to see the fireworks. Of course, I was not armed, but how were they to know? Nobody complained or said anything. So through all these incidents I learned very quickly that this was the very nature of filmmaking.</i> | ||
| The State of the Art (Culture, #4) (1991) by Iain M. Banks | None yet | ||
| The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle, #6) (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin | Pompous. Lots of tragic ellipsis. A rare misstep of style, even though the world and its issues are still great, and the progress of a great mind burgeoning amongst strict collectivism is done well. It reads like a debut novel or a draft - good but rough. I suppose I will hail her versatility anyway. Her characteristic ambiguity and fairness are still here though. The sexist, rankist, capitalist ("propertarian") Urrasites are still inventive, tasteful, and ambitious; the anarchist, egalitarian, promiscuous Odonians are still given to egotism, tribalism and petty brutality. They can be relied on, like all of us to tolerate anything except the outgroup:
I don't think her Anarres economy would work even as well as it is depicted as doing, but she has at least thought about it (admits that there would need to be a centralised computer, admits all kinds of shortages). This is not polemic, then; it just doesn't manage her usual grace when dealing with huge dilemmas. A great book by anyone else. | ||
| The Compass Rose (1982) by Ursula K. Le Guin | None yet | ||
| The View from the Ground (1988) by Martha Gellhorn | My favourite reporter; a great, compulsive, austere, compassionate writer. Better than Fermor when happy, better than Orwell when irate. I am always interested in what she has to say about literally anything: this edition covers her peacetime reporting, which is to say her poverty-and-rubble-reconstruction reporting: Great Depression Deep South; the arts in Communist Poland; the difficult path to democracy in Spain; Thatcher and the miners (...) She ranges over the whole sad half-century, bringing her maternal, judgmental, sardonic history to bear on what could otherwise have been ordinary journalism. Chastises communists and capitalists, liars, mercenaries and torturers of whatever justification. Never mentions her gender; she never let anyone stop her for any reason, let alone that. Her natural, common-sense compassion and fairness only cracks when it comes to Palestine; she contorts herself terribly in the face of shocking Nasserian anti-Semitism. It's not a whitewash; she talks to dozens of Palestinians in Jordan and Gaza, covers the Irgun and the bulldozers. But she is totally defensive about the Balfour Declaration and the Six Day War; is unusually eager to show up the many fibs of the Palestinian refugees (: confirmation bias); and excludes their self-determination alone among the nations of the earth: Arafat has had enough protection money from the oil Arabs to finance the education of two generations of young Palestinians, a chance to rise beyond the poverty of the camps into a good self-reliant life. Instead he has recruited two generations for training only in the use of guns and plastique, and insisted on a futile goal: Palestine for the Palestinians... How many deep inconsistencies are we allowed, before we stop being great? I don't know exactly, but more than one. | ||
| Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978) by Mary Midgley | I have a bad habit when reading philosophy; I sometimes get deeply impressed by a book, so that it changes my view, but then forget that I ever thought otherwise. Midgley is so good I am prevented from this: I know I couldn't have come up with that. This is her engaging with evolutionary biology and ethology, as they speak to the old ancient questions. Enormous thoughts, all expressed with perfect wryness and tact. I get the same feeling of mental grinding from Midgley as I do from Wittgenstein or Anscombe - too dense with thought to skim - but Midgley is actually readable. Full review, anatomising the arguments, forthcoming. | ||
| Keeping On Keeping On (2016) by Alan Bennett | Diaries in the lee of becoming actually famous. I love him dearly and bolted all 700pp in a couple of days. General sense of him reaping decades of quiet acclaim: he bumps into well-wishers and heavy-hitters (Stoppard, Dench, MacKellen) every week or so. One of the reasons I love him is that I had a very similar adolescence to his. He remains reserved, kind though grumpy: Being in love unhappily singled you out, I thought, it drafted you into an aristocracy. It was more than just a badge of being gay but rather an ordeal you were called upon to undergo if only to transcend it and reach a sublimity denied to other mortals. He still feels outside of things, for all his reminiscences of dinner with Harold Wilson or Liz Taylor perching on his knee. On winning a Tony for Best Play aged 72: I am thrust blinking on to a stage facing a battery of lights while questions come out of the darkness, the best of which is: 'Do you think this award will kick-start your career?' Talks so much about 50s Yorkshire. (People in general seem to think about their childhoods more than I do. (or just writers?)) I suppose he is taken to be a twee writer for this nostalgia, along with his cuddly speaking voice. But he simply isn't twee - he is the author of several of the finest nihilist soliloquoys in English literature. You may know the ignorance of people by their use of this stereotype. He is touchingly agitated by British politics, in the exact way I used to be. His protests are unprogrammatic, based simply on the meanness or indignity or cowardice of the policy at hand, whether it's a Labour or Tory hand;
With the fading of the old loud left, and the abject failure of the sneering theoretical sort, unpretentious justice of this sort might motivate people, even/especially opportunist Brexiters. So to the defence of public libraries, the unprecedented conviction of policemen who murder, the provision of good to all. [Data #1, Values #3, Thinking #3] | ||
| The Science of Discworld (The Science of Discworld, #1) (1999) by Terry Pratchett | None yet | ||
| Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (2013) by Shaun Usher | Wonderful | ||
| Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence (1997) by Geoff Dyer | A book about an unwritten book about a writer I don't like much. And it's amazing! Not a study of Lawrence, a study of trying to write when you lack an iron will. So also a study of all work, so a study of the hard generation of value, and so, despite appearances, a study of what matters. The prose is circuitous, cantatory, shaggy-dog, but never dull: Oxford! Now if there is one place on earth where you cannot, where it is physically impossible to write a book about Lawrence it is here, in Oxford. You could write a book about plenty of writers in Oxford: Hardy, or Joyce even — people are probably doing just that, even now, dozens of them — but not Lawrence. If there is one person you cannot write a book about here, in Oxford, it is Lawrence. So I have made doubly sure that there is no chance of my finishing my study of Lawrence: he is the one person you cannot write about here, in Oxford; and Oxford is the one place where you cannot write about Lawrence. For a while I amused myself by seeing how many consecutive sentences used the same phrase, in a running stitch motif. He is playing a character, but like Rob Brydon does: only slightly heightened. One long stream of scenes, unthemed, unbracketed. He is the critic I would have hoped to be: sceptical of the novel, sceptical of the spiritual pretensions of artists, sceptical of children, sceptical of travel and sceptical of home, sceptical of self. He is free to admit his boredom and his joy, unlike the academic critics he often erupts against. Here is the key passage (not that you can trust him to cleave to it twenty years or minutes on): Hearing that I was 'working on Lawrence', an acquaintance lent me a book he thought I might find interesting: A Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence, edited by Peter Widdowson. I glanced at the contents page: old Eagleton was there, of course, together with some other state-of-the-fart theorists: Lydia Blanchard on 'Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality' (in the section on 'Gender, Sexuality, Feminism'), Daniel J. Schneider on 'Alternatives to Logocentrism in D. H. Lawrence' (in the section featuring 'Post-Structuralist Turns'). I could feel myself getting angry and then I flicked through the introductory essay on 'Radical Indeterminacy: a post-modern Lawrence' and became angrier still. How could it have happened? How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it? I should have stopped there, should have avoided looking at any more, but I didn't because telling myself to stop always has the effect of urging me on. Instead, I kept looking at this group of wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off. Oh, it was too much, it was too stupid. I threw the book across the room and then I tried to tear it up but it was too resilient. By now I was blazing mad... The final passage hits you over the head with what you have certainly already worked out, but it is still very powerful. Dyer is inspiring, pure nevertheless: One way or another we all have to write our studies of D. H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D. H. Lawrence. The world over, from Taos to Taormina, from the places we have visited to countries we will never set foot in, the best we can do is to try to make some progress with our studies of D. H. Lawrence. | ||
| Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin: An Anthology (2014) by Alan Bennett | Hardy, Housman, Auden, Betjeman, Larkin, MacNeice: all men who tended to emphasise the tragic. (You think Betjeman didn't, but you might be confusing his writing, full of loss and pettiness, with his foppy, daffy TV persona.) Wonderful, this - parallel poems and commentaries - covering the famous gobbets dutifully, but also picking excerpts which rarely come to light. The commentary is more clipped and sardonic than you might expect from Bennett, if you know him only by reputation / caricature. The cover shown above is much more beautiful than the cover I had. | ||
| Making Malcolm: The Myth And Meaning Of Malcolm X (1995) by Michael Eric Dyson | Because we have gotten better, old radicals often seem less radical over time. The pragmatic hedonism and secular calm of Epicurus was once fanatically detested, but is now a standard worldview (it's roughly that of the happy scientist); at one time Spinoza's Ethics (determinism, Nature as deity, religious and political tolerance) was the wildest thing ever said in the history of the Christian world; Montesquieu's disgust at aristocratic brutality, gross luxury and torture are commonplaces; Paine's raging insistence on human rights and total secularism are very successful (in Europe at least); and anyone who disagrees with duBois' or MLK's aims is foolish or virulent. Malcolm X has not yet been incorporated in this way - but, reading his less ranty stuff (not the early "TOO BLACK, TOO STRONG" variety) you wonder why. Might have been his influential homophobia, but that's hardly stopped other thinkers. (This suggests it's because we have a false, caricature of him in mind, one that believes in whites-as-devils and Fanonian purifying violence.) Dyson does not skimp on his downsides, and tackles the thorniest idea in identity politics: that experience is absolute, and so understanding a group's ideas and values requires group membership – that ideas have colour as people do. | ||
| The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (1996) by Joseph E. LeDoux | Maybe a bit dated, but thoughtful and historical enough to pull through. His big contention's that conscious feelings are red herrings: most emotional activity is demonstrably unconscious (though not in a Freudian way). So we should see emotions as products of several separate bodily-response systems: "the word 'emotion' does not refer to any thing the mind or brain really has or does". Getting there takes a lot of careful conceptual work, debunking old artefacts ("the limbic system"), probing the line between cognition and emotion, evolved emotional setups and enculturated expressions of them. Rather than reporting his theories as settled, he lets us in to the history, experimental setups, and argue for his theory choices. He's well-versed in the philosophy (he cites Rorty!), is a master of fear (research), and I feel smarter coming out of it. | ||
| Both Flesh and Not: Essays (2012) by David Foster Wallace | Bravura essays from all over the cultural instant he encompassed and abruptly let go (1988-2007). They are I suppose dregs, but DFW's dregs are better than the decade-projects of others. You can't help seeing foreshadows of Infinite Jest: he touches on 1) the obsessive, commercial, and religious aspects of pro tennis, 2) the obstacles to good prose about or involving maths, 3) self-conscious engagement with pop (for how else can we understand a world constituted by and obsessed with pop?), 4) 'interpretation-directing' books (like Jest), and above all 5) on the need to build after waves of high-entropy postmodernism, to work past its crucial (but bewildering) negativities. It was 'obvious' to him that ordinary late-capitalist life is 'at best empty and at worst evil'. But he was extraordinary; panoptic, judicious and sensationally beautiful, and that wasn't enough either. | ||
| Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005) by David Foster Wallace | Ah, ah. Postmodern and prescriptivist, enthusiastically wise, Wallace was the one, as loveable as intellectual, as iconoclastic as judicious. He's a model of finding meaning in places beyond sanctioned loci (like Dostoevsky and 9/11, which he also finds meaning in): in for example an old sincere conservative, in tennis, and arthropods. Not that he 'found' meaning: he generated it, erupting bittersweet priority over parts of the world held to be artless or empty. Theoretically rococo and colloquially concentrated. Our loss is marked. It's disappointing that 'Consider the Lobster', his more or less honest analysis of vegetarianism, founders and shrinks from responsibility. (In short, the piece says "they feel: so why do we do this?". But he asks: "Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental?" without actually discounting the latter weaselly ad hominem aspersion.) Tensions: he insisted on 'democratic' clarity and yet wrote wilfully distracting pieces. But he's one of the ones. | ||
| Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2001) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | I had skipped this, assuming I received the full contrarian worldview from Black Swan and Bed of Procrustes. But it's a different beast, more playful and modest, with less of his latter-day overstatement and invalid ad hominems. As anti-disciplinary provocateur and writer of empirical art he is unbeaten (I rank him with Nietzsche for delightful arrogance and hard-ass enculturation.) Still, these ideas (from cognitive science and applied statistics) are hard: one needs several runs at them. Taleb is a great introduction, then Kahneman and Gigerenzer for the calm conservative estimate. | ||
| A Point of View (2011) by Clive James | In one sentence: Sometimes age actually does allow for wisdom to accumulate. To be read when: whenever. I came to liberalism late, after radical teens. By the time I found James, I was withering sick from years of people and books attacking the modern world, spending all their time reducing absolutely everything in life to its politics. (Larkin is a great poet and was a terrible man, easy as that – but this tension is unbearable to some, who throw out his great work and try to shame those who don't.) Clive James is the consummate droll liberal railing against both wings of partisans: he's against celebrity culture, Ostalgie, and anti-American critical-theoretical cuteness, but also 'clash of civilisation' nonsense, socially destructive austerity and conservatism in the arts. What others get out of Wodehouse or Rowling, I get from this grumpy old Australian's stoic nonfiction. I had my notebook handy the whole way through, sieving out gold gobbets of late style. His essays are a space beyond the culture war, where the personal is not usually political. He is one of the greatest living stylists, would deserve study for that alone. His long essay on Isaiah Berlin is fantastic and contentious, and his retorts to the professional philosophers who come at him about it are devastating, inspiring. Unlike say Geoff Dyer, to whom he is similar, James doesn't have academic standing. So his work is at risk of fading away, without their dull but chronic oxygen. | ||
| Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (1947) by George Orwell | So lucid. 'Killing an Elephant' is, surprisingly, the most powerful animal rights essay I've read in years. I think he'd struggle to get his essay on Dali published these days, maybe not even in the Spectator: we aren't able to think of art in these moral terms any more:
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| Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) by James Gleick | Engrossing and detailed. Feynman is different from other first-rank minds: he values clarity and humour above all. He's a slightly hazardous role model though: his sheer speed, creativity, and high standards, which justify his arrogance and deviance, cannot be emulated by ordinary people; his mantra - "disregard [what other people are doing]" - is similarly high-risk; and his pickup-artistry after Arline died is at least icky. But the big accessible hazard is his thrilling science-supremacism. Gleick:
Feynman:
His cheeky scientism will make unread teenagers insufferable at parties. More seriously, it could return our scientists to unreflective, uninspired positivism. But his anti-authoritarianism, his anti-pretension, his honest and sweeping scepticism, his existential peace, more than compensate. Filtering out the above, his life is an enormously fruitful applied epistemology. It is shocking, to anyone who knows the modern salami-slicing academic world, to hear how many breakthroughs he didn't publish, just out of high standards:
And how he resisted emeritus disease to the end. Hawking: "We may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature,". Feynman:
Feynman's ideas are still completely modern. He'll be modern for a long time to come, too: as the main theorist of the path integral formulation of QM, the first theorist of nanotechnology and quantum computing, as storyteller, as a complete master of applied epistemology for humans. | ||
| The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin | I read the Illustrated Edition (2008) put together by David Quammen, which is very beautiful. Filled with sketches, portraits, maps and suggestive remarks from the diaries. Particularly good if, like me, you've struggled with the plaintext. Keys:
(That last sentence had "by the Creator" tacked on in the second edition.) You would never guess the prose was written in a rush: possibly because the arguments were formed at the slowest possible rate. | ||
| The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007) by Alex Ross | None yet | ||
| McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope (2000) by David Foster Wallace | None yet | ||
| A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997) by David Foster Wallace | None yet | ||
| The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (2008) by Daniel M. Haybron | None yet | ||
| The Marxists (1962) by C. Wright Mills | None yet | ||
| The Way Things Are (-55) by Lucretius | None yet | ||
| Fooled By Randomness & The Black Swan: Two Books In One (2008) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | None yet | ||
| Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method (2004) by Paul Humphreys | None yet |
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3/5: Net likeable. 50th percentile.
</blockquote>| The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995) by Neal Stephenson | Amazed that this is from 1995; its concerns feel very current - too current. The nations of the world collapse from cryptocurrency destroying the tax base; they are replaced with voluntary ideological associations, including trads ("neo-Victorians" and techno-Confucians) who are shown thriving where others suffer civil war, state failure, and ordinary poverty and abuse. Everyone has fancy nanotechnology, which solves absolute poverty and allows massive structures to be built of solid diamond. That's all in the background, where the foreground is a theory of education and rebellion, of social degeneration and regeneration. The leader of the Victorians designs the best educational game ever, a 12-year-long adventure game with live narration. He does this because there's a shortage of subversion and rebellion in his society, and he wants to train his granddaughter to be independent. (He also says the neo-Vickys have an associated shortage of great artists, but to put it mildly this is not something the originals suffered.) In particular, Stephenson was a bit obsessed with moral relativism in the 90s; he harps on the superiority of realism, or communitarianism, or status regulation, or sincerity, or something, in most of his books. Superficially, his concern matches one annoying strain of internet writing of the last few years - the clickbait strawmaneering of the Petersons and the Lindsays. But French Theory fell in the meantime, outside of a few academic subcultures with little influence, so Stephenson can be right while these guys are wrong. An excess of scepticism and irony - a deficit of shaming and judgment - does not strike me as the first problem with the mores of 2020. Stephenson saves most of the nice bits of the book for the Vickys, and his attempt to recover what was good about the original Victorians (their energy, inventiveness, duty, taste) ignores a lot of what was bad about them. (Though he actively endorses their hypocrisy about sex, he would have to think again about their betraying their Christian universalism with retributive justice and imperialism.)
Having "Victorian" characters means he gets to have fun with his dialogue; there are dozens of words I've never seen before in this, and several children crafting exquisitely balanced subordinate clauses. About a third too long, and that's with him completely truncating the excellent Judge Fang plotline. As always, he is incapable of writing a good ending. Maybe 4 stars on re-read. |
| Uzumaki: Deluxe Edition (2000) by Junji Ito | I'm not into horror or surrealism, and I'm only just learning the visual vocabulary of manga, but this is well-executed. Placenta fungi, pregnant zombies, horny hurricanes, gangs using tornados for vandalism, humans becoming fair game, all that. But these garish wonders are secondary to the grossness and power of Ito's atmosphere. The protagonist Mikie is frustratingly passive and ineffectual - she waits for 10 distinct monstrous things to happen before running away - but this is a classic shortcoming / genre requirement and I don't know how I'd write a powerful horror protagonist myself. The boyfriend, Shuichi, understands everything right from the start, unlike her, and yet he is no better. There's a few beautiful colour pages, all in pastels, but it makes the rest look incomplete. The price of a weekly medium. So, a masterpiece in an alien language. |
| Hearts in the Hard Ground (2020) by G.V. Anderson | Managed to unnerve me despite the extreme domesticity. The big problem with stories about haunted houses is why anyone would ever stay in them after the first bad night. The stories require a stupefied lack of agency to get through their second acts. So too here, but it isn't very irksome. The other big problem is the lack of empirical spirit from the protagonists - can we finish philosophy of mind by enlisting the ghosts? There's a little bit of that here, but mostly just the old emotional haunting. |
| How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar (2020) by Rich Larson | None yet |
| Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs () by Peter Andreas | None yet |
| The Prefect (Prefect Dreyfus Emergency, #1) (2007) by Alastair Reynolds | Great fun! Reynolds describes an Archipelago epistocracy - that is, a loose collection of thousands of city-states with their own weird constitutions (voluntary fascisms, upload city, voluntary coma land, luxury Running Man land), with federal votes weighted by your past performance at predicting / causing good changes. The only federal crimes are voting related: messing with the central vote, denying their citizens the vote. (They don't seem to enforce the other thing you'd need to make this minimally acceptable: iron exit rights.) Reynolds is clearly also having fun here, where I found Revelation Space exhaustingly grim and sepia. I particularly loved his entire society of professional superforecasters / high-quality futarchist voting bloc, who make their living off lobbyists and being bellwethers and spend most of their time buggering about with hobbies. (You are ejected if your calibration drops below 50% better than normal people.) He husbands his twists, and keeps almost all characters in the dark (including the antagonists) all the time. It also takes the horror of exponentials seriously; machine intelligence's scalability is the worst thing about it, and here we get two great scary instances. One downside is that it feels like book #3 in a series; maybe one infodump too few or something. |
| The Magos (Eisenhorn #4) (2018) by Dan Abnett | None yet |
| Ravenor: The Omnibus (Ravenor #1-3) (2009) by Dan Abnett | Abnett is so much better than he has to be. Poverty and corruption before gibbering legions and building-sized guns. (Though he also does the latter.) |
| Analyzing the Analyzers: An Introspective Survey of Data Scientists and Their Work (2013) by Harlan Harris | I never expect these fluffy little business pamphlets to contain anything worthwhile, but I've referred to this one a few times. Imagine getting some data before you pontificate about data! The list of the skills involved is the best I've ever seen, if misleadingly intimidating. |
| The Rebel Sell (2004) by Joseph Heath | None yet |
| A Man Without a Country (2005) by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | None yet |
| Bring Up the Bodies (2012) by Hilary Mantel | More of the same witty early moderns: modern speech atop medieval action. (Anachronistically witty, sceptical?) Mantel manages to make all the tiresome court manoeuvring interesting just by having it pass through Cromwell, her sensitive, competent monster. Halfway through, Cromwell turns from rational underdog to corrupt totalitarian. Or, halfway through you realise that this turn has happened, that this aspect was there. He kills his enemies based on hearsay and jokes, zero physical and eyewitness evidence. Mantel manages this fall in a smooth and inevitable way. I complain about current legal systems a lot, but at least their errors are not this unjust and merely political. When Gregory says, 'Are they guilty?' he means, 'Did they do it?' But when [Thomas] says, 'Are they guilty?' he means, 'Did the court find them so?' The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away. It was a triumph, in a small way, to unknot the entanglement of thighs and tongues, to take that mass of heaving flesh and smooth it on to white paper: as the body, after the climax, lies back on white linen. He has seen beautiful indictments, not a word wasted. "Nothing makes you falter," Wyatt says. He says it with a reluctant admiration that is close to dread. But he, Cromwell, thinks, I did falter but no one knows it, reports have not gone abroad. Wyatt did not see me walk away from Weston's interrogation. Wyatt did not see me when Anne asked me what I believed in my heart. Lots of artistic licence, to patch over the huge gaps in the historical record (as Mantel admits in the postscript). Cromwell is sympathetic here, even with all the blood and lies - you notice his evil only after effort. But this is just the same treatment that Thomas More has enjoyed for a hundred years, in several beautiful retcons. And the worst of the blood and the torture came after both of them. Maybe 4 stars later |
| The Design and Implementation of Probabilistic Programming Languages () by Noah D. Goodman | An executable mini-textbook in the modern mould. Not the introduction I was after, but really really clever and general. |
| The Children of the Sky (Zones of Thought, #3) (2011) by Vernor Vinge | Vinge is without peer at two things: * Producing childlike rage at unfairness, stringing out one piece of treachery for 400 pages and keeping the heat going. Even where it is obvious that a betrayal will take place, he still manages to make me tense and outraged over it. The book feels very incomplete, even setting aside the cliffhanger; we see Timor's burgeoning hacking skills, but are shown none of their fruit. We see |
| Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader (1998) by Richard G. Parker | Can't remember anything about it except John d'Emilio's "Capitalism and Gay Identity", which blew my mind. He argues that capitalism was a necessary condition for the emancipation of gay people, since its associated urbanisation, weakening of family ties, mass anonymity, and the autonomy of wages(!) let gay people explore, gather, and build a movement, the first time since antiquity. Maybe this doesn't sound so wild to you, but as a 20yo Marxist this lifted the top right off my head. |
| Less Is More Please (1992) by Barry Humphries | Good mix of innocence and retrospective meanness. Like me, his childhood appears to him as a series of fixations (licking the cake mixer, staring at a cement mixer, hushed discussion of lead poisoning from a pencil stab). Would probably be 4* in full. |
| Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution (2000) by Steven Poole | None yet |
| Rumpole and the younger generation (1978) by John Mortimer | None yet |
| The Innocents Abroad (1869) by Mark Twain | None yet |
| The Break Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (1977) by Tom Nairn | Took 40 years but give this man a cigar |
| Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism (1975) by Peter K. Unger | Extremely well-written, and full of big giant thoughts and grand flourishes. But the whole thing feels like a joke at my expense. (Did he write it as a reductio of this sort of philosophy? I wouldn't put it past him.) |
| On Religion (Thinking in Action) (2001) by John D. Caputo | A central example of the zaniness and arbitrariness of a certain kind of Theory. But it's not as easy as it looks - I tried to imitate the irreverent, intertextual style in my Levinas course and got the biggest rebuke of my academic life. Caputo had to work for 30 years and put up with some truly awful people, to write like this. Fun, unserious, deadly serious. |
| Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example (1994) by Peter Flach | Quite deep - the other, overgrown and overshadowed half of AI. Part II is a very nice introduction to classical search, though in Prolog, which will be enough to scare away most readers. Computational logic is the result of say half a dozen geniuses seizing a field from the philosophers and shaking remarkable things out of it.* It is also not very relevant for 90% of AI researchers today, though the extremely prolific and lively Programming Language Theory and theorem-provers people have inherited some of it and shake out remarkable things. As such, maybe most of this is unlikely to help you. The site they built around this book makes Prolog as easy as as it's going to get. Free and fully executable here. * Putnam and Robinson were philosophers, and the point stands. |
| Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900) by Henri Bergson | None yet |
| 永遠を旅する者 ロストオデッセイ 千年の夢 (2007) by Kiyoshi Shigematsu | The clunky videogame 'Lost Odyssey' contains 33 incredibly good short stories, which you just optionally bump into in the course of your standard 50-hour murder-looting spree. They are understated, sentimental, and literary where the main plot is cliched, badly written (translated?) and garish. I don't know whether reading them alone would have the same effect as this contrast, but they are free in English here. |
| Perfect Rigour: A Genius And The Mathematical Breakthrough Of The Century (2009) by Masha Gessen | Not so much a biography: instead a study of recent Russian anti-Semitism, the viciousness of Soviet academia, and but also the wonderful alternative subculture that lived uneasily within it. This subculture hid inside the superhuman apolitical dreamland, mathematics.* It could only exist because of the sacrifices of famous and decent men, Kolmogorov and Aleksandrov. Their selective maths schools seem to have been the only nice places to be in the entire empire, for any intellectual with a taste for actual discourse, or for the truth. (Reasons it can't be so much a biography: the subject refused to talk to her, does things that are very hard to explain, and doesn't go out much.) The teacher Ryzhik's story about the evil entrance exam he sat is so, so sad: "Coffins" were questions specially designed for the Jewish applicants... rejection was administered in a peculiarly sadistic way... if [Jews] succeeded in answering correctly the two or three questions on the ticket, then, alone in the room with the examiners, they would be casually issued an extra question... a problem not merely complex but unsolvable. The examiners would then nail the cover of the coffin shut: the Jewish applicant had failed the exam... Gessen is well-placed to write this - she was a maths nerd in Soviet Russia around the same time. As far as I can tell (which isn't very far) her grasp of the maths (one chapter for the crown jewel) is fit for purpose. But Gessen is out to bust Perelman's reputation for hyper-individualism; so she focusses on the devoted teachers and functionaries that pulled strings to get an abrasive Jew into the heart of Soviet academia, and his incredible luck in starting graduate study just as Glasnost happened. She wants to highlight the poverty of his character - his antisocial withdrawal, his complete and intentional ignorance of politics, his naivete, his savantism. It doesn't work. Yes, he's rigid; maybe he is composed of a curiosity, a competitiveness, an ethics, and nothing else (no vanity, humour, romance, charisma, empathy, theory of mind, tolerance, compromise, doubt). So what? Why does everyone need to be rounded? Does she sneer at athletes, the other people with lives this seemingly contorted and simple? David Foster Wallace managed to get over himself, on this note:
Gessen is, to be frank, quite cruel: she never passes up an opportunity to mention appearances - that that athletic boy of 1970 is "now an overweight and balding computer scientist", that the house of a man caring for his wife with late-stage dementia is "a messy place, lived in awkwardly" and he himself "similarly unkempt"; that Perelman didn't change his underwear or clip his nails as a teen. This is the shallow side of the New Yorker style on show - or else the malign side of Russian honesty. Either way fuck it. (Though Perelman would probably approve.)
The great mystery, which Gessen understandably can't touch, is why after 36 years of focus he suddenly stopped doing the only thing he'd ever done. How could he? How can that much momentum be shed? What does such a man do next? Subtract a star if you don't care about maths or if you can't abide people being mean to nerds (as both the old apparatchiks and Gessen were). --- * One of the oddest things about Perelman, because it maybe explains him turning down a million quid and the highest honours the world can bestow, is that he'd disagree with that sentence: maths, the least animal and least irrational thing we have, is too political for him. There was a little bit of nasty jostling at the time of the announcement - but nothing compared to any other science, let alone any government. Maybe the bubble everyone set up for him was bad for him, because it robbed him of perspective and so made the mild case of fuckery seem like a complete invalidation of mathematical culture. But maybe a rigorous rule-based mind would always explode eventually even given a scale to measure instances of bias. |
| Man Who Loved Only Numbers: Erdos (1998) by Paul Hoffman | "What would you say to Jesus if you saw him on the street?" A life of a saint. Not in the sense of a moral paragon - though he was very kind when he wasn't being stubborn - but in the sense of a man devoted to, possessed by one thing, a high and rare thing that sets him some way beyond society. No money, no fixed abode, no lovers, no children, no religion. 80% of his family eaten by Nazi Germany. And yet a glorious, constructive, hilarious life. A champion moocher, eternal couchsurfer, generous and ascetic, witty and worldly. We are lucky to have had him. I [Hoffman] slept where he slept and stayed up nineteen hours a day, watching him prove and conjecture. I felt silly not being able, at the age of thirty, to keep up with a sickly looking seventy-three-year-old man. I suppose I could have shared his pills, but the only stimulant I took was caffeine. He abhorred discussions of sex as much as he disliked the act itself... In the late 1940s, during the Chinese civil war, Erdős took part in a food drive for the Communist Chinese. "I remember walking into a big room in Los Angeles, at UCLA, I think," said Vazsonyi, "and there was Erdős and all these people making packages of food. Some mischief-makers who knew of his disgust at naked women offered to make a $100 donation if he'd go with them to a burlesque show." To their astonishment, he immediately took them up on the offer. Afterwards, when they forked over the $100, he revealed the secret of his victory: "See! I tricked you, you trivial beings! I took off my glasses and did not see a thing!"</i> Unlike Perelman, the other late-C20th-century mathematical saint, Erdős had a wicked sense of fun and style. Like him, Erdős let himself be completely dependent on others for housing and logistics, and demanded much of them. he expected his hosts to lodge him, feed him, and do his laundry, along with anything else he needed, as well as arrange for him to get to his next destination. Erdos started developing his private language... referring to Communists as people "on the long wave-length," because in the electromagnetic spectrum the red waves were long. He said that Horthy supporters and other Fascist sympathizers were "on the short wavelength." That's also when he started calling children and other small things "epsilons," grandchildren "epsilons squared," alcohol "poison," music "noise," and women "bosses," an inversion of what Hungarian women often called their husbands. "Give me an epsilon of poison," Erdos would say when he wanted a sip of wine. "Wine, women, and song" became "Poison, bosses, and noise." He then had a huge argument with the surgeon about why, since only one eye was being deadened [during his cornea transplant], he couldn't read a mathematics journal with the other, good eye. The surgeon made a series of frantic calls to the Memphis math department. "Can you send a mathematician over here at once so that Erdos can talk math during surgery?" The department obliged, and the operation went smoothly. Unfortunately only half of this is anecdotes about Erdős, the rest being the usual potted-history of quirky mathematicians (Archimedes the oblivious, Fermat the executioner, Gauss the crabbed, Hardy the dry eccentric, Ramanujan the sublime, Wiles the Stakhanovite) with the usual stories. I skimmed these bits to get more of the good stuff.</td> </tr> |
| Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything (2012) by Philip Ball |
Another history of the origins of science: our long trek to GWAS, livermorium, and CERN via astrology, natural magic, alchemy, Neoplatonism, herbalism, occultism, and philosophy. So, superficially, the book is just about an especially fruity context of discovery. But this period holds two of the most important lessons in history: 1) science grew out of work by people who diverge wildly from the modern idea and practice of science, whose variously false frameworks led to the Royal Society and e.g. the Newtonian triumph. (And from there to contemporary, professional, university science.) So wrong people can still make progress if their errors are uncorrelated with the prevailing errors. And, 2) a small number of the most powerful people in Britain - the Lord Chancellor, the king's physicians, the chaplain of the young Elector Palatine and bishop of Chester, London's great architect, Privy Councillors * - successfully pushed a massive philosophical change, and thereby contributed to most of our greatest achievements: smallpox eradication, Sputnik and Voyager, the Green Revolution, and the unmanageably broad boons of computing are partly theirs. The received view of all this is one-dimensional: you have superstitious, pompous cretins at one end and rational, experimental moderns at the other. But really you need five axes before you get a basic understanding of the great, great revolution that began in the C16th - before you can see how science differs from every other community:
**** So I'm modelling science as naturalist, fallibilist, quantitative empiricism with pretensions to openness. I've categorised the early scientists mentioned in Curiosity according to this: you can see the data with additional justifications here. (Ball doesn't state this model, but it floats around in his debunkings and "well actually"s.) All of the pieces of science are very ancient - we had mathematics and data collection well before the Ten Commandments, naturalism before Buddha and Confucius, reductionism before the Peloponnesian War at least one controlled trial centuries before Christ, fallibilism likewise. Everything was ready BCE; we can see indirect evidence of this in the astonishing works of Ancient Greek engineers, mostly unmatched for 1000 years until y'know. So the question is not "was Bacon the most original blah blah?": he wasn't, particularly when you remember Alhazen's Baconian method, developed in the C11th. But we need an explanation for how we messed it up so badly. The received view, which is all I have at the moment, is that the fall of Rome, Christian anti-intellectualism and, later, the enshrining of Aristotelian mistakes was enough to destroy and suppress the ideas. I want deeper explanations though. (For instance, what did we do to the economy?) A fun regression on this data would be to see how my scienciness measure correlates with the importance of the person's work. It would not be that highly proportional, in this time period. *************************************************************** Back to the book eh! Book structure is lots of little chapters on fairly disjointed topics: early modern ideas of space travel, universal language, pumps, etc. Chapter on "cabinets of curiosity" is great though: suddenly their dull zany blare makes sense and I want to build one:
Ball doesn't like us calling the Scientific Revolution a revolution, and I agree: the revolution didn't consist in the theories of Bacon or Newton: it consists in the diffusion of the worldview into all subjects and all inquiry. It transformed society and gave us marvels, but it hasn't finished happening. The general will, or default state, is still strongly unscientific. (The largest and most grievous holdout, larger even than the enduring hold of fideist religion, is our tribal politics and our largely nonempirical government policy.) Ball expends a lot of time on a history of wonder vs curiosity vs dispassionate robot inquiry. People hated all of these things for various reasons, up until the Renaissance when curiosity became acceptable on what are now classic economic grounds, or in line with the Italian cult of the virtuoso - someone who's so bloody brilliant that you have to just let him get on with it. I always like Ball's drawling prose and catty editorialising. (For instance, Margaret Cavendish - the darling of arts academics who latch on to the only woman in sight in this period - gets a round dissing by Ball, as an anti-experiment idiot, a vitalist, and a misogynist.) Stimulating as always. * Bacon has some claim to being the most influential philosopher ever, in terms of counterfactual effect on history. (Rather than number of bloody citations!) No-one with his social standing was resisting the Aristotelian consensus in 1620; his prototype scientific method is a century ahead of its time. (Yes, ibn al-Haytham's was 7 centuries ahead of its time, but to limited avail.)⏎ ** This one is hard to refer to, because we now find it incredibly easy to understand why "go and look" works as a general route to knowledge; Medieval thought rejected this on the basis of things like the problem of induction. The cliched way to refer to the split between those who want to start with the apriori and those who want to start with data is "Rationalism" vs "Empiricism". But these words confuse people: the two of them are also used in a C17th debate about psychology, to do with the nature of mental content. More: it can't be a dichotomy, since many of the greatest rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz) were experimentalists too, doing what we now call empirical work. Three meanings of rationalism, and three words for them:
I use Alberto Vanzo's criteria for deciding if someone was enough of an experimentalist: let us consider four typical features of early modern experimental philosophers: |
| The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (1997) by John Henry | Incredibly brief tour of the main issues raised by the Scientific Revolution. IIRC he walks the line well between the first inklings of the context of justification and the sheer STS-friendly weirdness of the context of discovery. The unexpected decoupling of the scientific revolution from the industrial revolution (two centuries apart!) is one of the most important facts I have ever learned. [maybe 4 stars, I can't remember] |
| The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) by Jonathan Haidt | Descriptively true (moral psychology is indeed more diverse than most philosophy or art recognises, and it is difficult to understand most of the world without recognising this). But not normatively. |
| The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (2004) by John M. Barry | Rousing history of one of the worst things that has ever happened: the 1918 outbreak of H1N1 flu. It focusses particularly on the great scientists who tried to fight it, none of whom I'd ever heard of. Also a meditation on epistemology, the modern mind, & the redemptive meaning of science for beasts like us. Barry senses that the headline result - one-third of the entire world infected, with 25-100 million dead - doesn't get enough of a rise from us. The numbers are numbing. So he couches it in modern shocking terms: It killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. Or ten thousand 9/11s. It's worth belabouring this, because we have a weird habit of paying far more attention to human threats than natural ones, even when natural ones are far worse. (Witness our terrorism prevention budgets compared to our infectious disease control budgets, when the latter is a thousand times more lethal.) So: The 1918 flu was worse than the entire First World War: 40+ million died of flu compared with 17 million dead from war; 500 million lives damaged by flu vs 41 million lives by war. 3% of everyone alive died of flu, including about 8% of young adults(!). Except it's hard to separate the War and the pandemic. The virus was spread everywhere by unprecedented numbers of troops, and by the massive supply convoys it induced, and by the War's other human displacements. We don't know how many of the pneumonia deaths only occurred because of the logistical degradation, poverty and pestilence of wartime. There are terrible nonlinearities involved in overcrowding and global movement of troops. But add millions at least to the overall death toll caused by WWI. The book is in the epic mode, all the way through. (That's not a straightforward compliment.) I liked it, but I understand if it's a bit American for you:
There's a long prelude describing how terrible medicine was up to the 20th Century. Medicine was "the withered arm of science". Therapeutic nihilism (that is, "we can't really do anything") was the only rational view, replacing millenia of Galenic woo.
Problem is, this rational scepticism created a powerful vacuum: humans need to believe something can heal, and the gap was filled with worse. Some confabulated gremlins from this time haunt us still: homeopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, Christian Science, and (though Barry doesn't include them) the organic farming movement and psychoanalysis. Few people come off well. Even among the scientists, we get a horrible example of perverse priors and premature updating: an enormous proportion of all scientific resources were devoted to fighting the wrong pathogen, due to a bad guess by an extremely eminent researcher. Because so much of the state was occupied in war, in places there was wholesale social collapse: In Philadelphia meanwhile fear came and stayed. Death could come from anyone, anytime. People moved away from others on the sidewalk, avoided conversation; if they did speak, they turned their faces away to avoid the other person's breathing. Everyone can read the collapse of official power in Philadelphia as supporting their politics. Anarchists can point to the benevolent spontaneous order that arose after the corrupt local government failed to act; libertarians can point out that this spontaneous order was all funded by the richest Philadelphians; statists can point out that, without actually-authoritative co-ordination, the effort eventually failed, because people defected against each other, in fear. The corpses had backed up at undertakers', filling every area of these establishments and pressing up into living quarters; in hospital morgues overflowing into corridors; in the city morgue overflowing into the street. And they had backed up in homes. They lay on porches, in closets, in corners of the floor, on beds. Children would sneak away from adults to stare at them, to touch them; a wife would lie next to a dead husband, unwilling to move him or leave him. The corpses, reminders of death and bringers of terror or grief, lay under ice at Indian-summer temperatures. Their presence was constant, a horror demoralizing the city; a horror that could not be escaped. Finally the city tried to catch up to them. "There is, therefore, but one response possible from us: Force! force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which shall make right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust. "- Woodrow Wilson addressing one of his money-lending mobs. Wilson tends to be viewed pretty positively, just because he won. ("at last the world knows America as the savior of the world!") But he perverted an entire state and nation to do so, ignored the terrible suffering of his own damn population for years, and refused a conditional peace with Austria in August and with the Kaiser's new parliament in September. (This meant 30-70 extra days of war, which, if this period was as lethal as the rest of the war, means up to 800,000 completely unnecessary deaths, not to mention the continuing waste of resources during the worst epidemic ever). Wilson did great evil, was not much different from the Kaiser, the election aside. the military suctioned more and more nurses and physicians into cantonments, aboard ships, into France, until it had extracted nearly all the best young physicians. Medical care for civilians deteriorated rapidly. The doctors who remained in civilian life were largely either incompetent young ones or those over forty-five years of age, the vast majority of whom had been trained in the old ways of medicine. Barry's middle chapters are a frightening portrait of how rabidly un-American the US was in 1918. The laws were bad enough - for instance the ban on criticising the government. But then there's the unofficial "patriotic duties", punishable by beatings. State-sponsored atavism. By the summer of 1918, however, Wilson had injected the government into every facet of national life and had created great bureaucratic engines to focus all the nation's attention and intent on the war. Because the disease was everywhere, ravaging the entire species (and beyond), the book can't cover everything. Very little is said about non-Americans, i.e about 98% of the death and chaos. This is partly because there just isn't a lot of evidence about them, despite their influenza immunity and medical care being even worse. (This is why the top estimates reach 100m deaths, three times the median estimate.) Here is a passage about just a tiny number of them, in the north: In Alaska, whites protected themselves. Sentries guarded all trails, and every person entering the city was quarantined for five days. Eskimos had no such luck. A senior Red Cross official warned that without "immediate medical assistance the race" could become "extinct."... --- In research and education especially, American medicine lagged far behind [European medicine]... At least one hundred US medical schools would accept any man willing to pay tuition... and only a single medical school required its student to have a college degree... the Johns Hopkins itself, not student fees, paid [its] faculty salaries, and it required medical students to have not only a college degree but fluency in French and German and a background of science courses. But his enthusiasm for Johns Hopkins introducing the college degree requirement is misplaced. Contemporary US doctors (who all have 3 years of pre-med, or even more college, before they start medical training) are probably no better clinicians than undergraduate doctors in other countries, and are far further in debt. This requirement is probably one reason the American system is so fucked. I suppose Barry is just confusing the open admissions situation with the schools' appallingly low graduation standards, which is certainly one reason eC20th medicine sucked. (Many doctors had never looked down a microscope, never used a stethoscope on a patient, never seen a dissection.) PS: Mostly unimportant corrections by a virologist here. Reply to these from Barry here. |
| Zeitgeber (2019) by Greg Egan | Sweet and straightforward by his standards. |
| Criticism and Truth (1966) by Roland Barthes | Oh, a French literary figure writing against clarity? Do tell. (This is unfair, it's a good faith argument which I cannot remember any single premise of, 10 years on. Bet you it includes "Whose clarity? Whence it's classification?" though.) |
| Single-Bit Error () by Ken Liu | Cute stuff, fan fiction for Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God". The programmer spending his evenings reading poems at open mics, really living, is a cliche I haven't seen before (if you see what I mean).Programmers are not really numbers people," Tyler said. "We are words people. The numbers people work in hardware." Very earnest, slightly flat. |
| Ultimate Rock-Paper-Scissors () by Inukorosuke | Great fun, like a Rube Goldberg machine. (Inevitability and surprise.) The clairvoyant vs the telepath in particular is a near epistemic logic puzzle. |
| Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays (2019) by Peter Watts | Eleven years after the birth of the most neurologically remarkable, philosophically mind-blowing, transhumanistically-relevant being on the planet, we have nothing but pop-sci puff pieces and squishy documentaries to show for it. Are we really supposed to believe that in over a decade no one has done the studies, collected the data, gained any insights about literal brain-to-brain communication, beyond these fuzzy generalities? I for one don't buy that for a second. These neuroscientists smiling at us from the screen—Douglas Cochrane, Juliette Hukin—they know what they've got. Maybe they've discovered something so horrific about the nature of Humanity that they're afraid to reveal it, for fear of outrage and widespread panic. That would be cool. Blogposts from a thoughtful doomer. Name a hot button, anything, and he will elevate it to the scariest thing in the world: internet surveillance, zoonotic viruses, climate change, Trump, the security detail around the G8. Bloody-minded sympathy, Left nihilism, boundless sensawunda, viscera instead of prose - and but deep unreliability when he gets on a subject besides marine biology. He is vulnerable to anything cool or fucked up. I like him a lot, but I'm worried if I find myself agreeing with him, since he so often misleads himself. If I am indeed fated to sink into this pit of surveillance capitalism with the rest of you, I'd just as soon limit my fantasies about eating the rich to a venue that doesn't shut you down the moment some community-standards algo thinks it sees an exposed nipple in a jpeg. Everything he does is excessive. Of course, this makes for good aesthetics and bad epistemics. Like Charlie Stross, Watts reads horrifying things into the news, informed by the toxic half of history but also by a nebulous paranoia which leads them astray. (Representative sample from Stross: "[media incentive] has been weaponized, in conjunction with data mining of the piles of personal information social networks try to get us to disclose (in the pursuit of advertising bucks), to deliver toxic propaganda straight into the eyeballs of the most vulnerable — with consequences that are threaten to undermine the legitimacy of democratic governmance on a global scale.". Watts: Bureaucratic and political organisms are like any other kind; they exist primarily to perpetuate themselves at the expense of other systems. You cannot convince such an organism to act against its own short-term interests... It's not really news, but we seem to be living in a soft dictatorship. The only choices we're allowed to make are those which make no real difference... On a purely selfish level I'm happier than I've ever been in my life, happier than I deserve. Of course it won't last. I do not expect to die peacefully, and I do not expect to die in any jurisdiction with a stable infrastructure. At least I don't have to worry about the world I'm leaving behind for my children; I got sterilized in 1991.) The two biggest fumbles here are his posts on Daryl Bem and high-functioning hydrocephalic people. It is no shame to fall for either: these are highly respectable academic hoaxes, and Bem's methods were exactly as valid as the average psychology paper of the early C21st. Watts' mistake isn't to insist that ESP is real, but to leap to the defence of the weird just because it is weird, to the point where he rejects Hume's maxim ("Laplace's principle"), a basic incontrovertible theorem of Bayesian inference. these results, whatever you thought of them, were at least as solid as those used to justify the release of new drugs to the consumer market. I liked that. It set things in perspective, although in hindsight, it probably said more about the abysmal state of Pharma regulation... I'm perfectly copacetic with the premise that psychology is broken. But if the field is really in such disrepair, why is it that none of those myriad less-rigorous papers acted as a wake-up call? Why snooze through so many decades of hack analysis only to pick on a paper which, by your own admission, is better than most? Another big miss is his emphasis on adaptive sociopathy as the cause of our problems, rather than say global coordination problems. He is also completely off the deep end on climate change as existential risk, sneering at anyone who disagrees, no matter how well-informed. there's no denying that pretty much every problem in the biosphere hails from a common cause. Climate change, pollution, habitat loss, the emptying of biodiversity from land sea and air, an extinction rate unparalleled since the last asteroid and the transformation of our homeworld into a planet of weeds—all our fault, of course. There are simply too many of us. Over seven billion already, and we still can't keep it in our pants. Notice the pattern: faced with an apparent dilemma, he happily chucks the strongest, most basic principles to maintain his paranoia (the principles "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" or here "it is good for people to have children if they want, good lives have worth"). This bias would be entirely fine if he only admitted error later, about his predicted Trump race riots for instance. The real danger isn't so much Trump himself, but the fact that his victory has unleashed and empowered an army of bigoted assholes down at street level. That's what's gonna do the most brutal damage. Most posts are entertaining but betray one-way critical thinking: for some reason he can barely see the other half of the world, that we are winning in all kinds of ways. Lots of learned and fun film reviews here: I relax, since criticism need have no truth-value. He likes 'Arrival' more than 'Story of Your Life', which fits: the film is bombastic, paranoid, politicised, unsubtle. When you can buy the whole damn store and the street it sits on with pocket change; when you can buy the home of the asshole who just disrespected you and have it bulldozed; when you can use your influence to get that person fired in the blink of an eye and turn her social media life into a living hell—the fact that you don't do any of those things does not mean that you've been oppressed. It means you've been merciful to someone you could just as easily squash like a bug... Marvel's mutants are something like that. We're dealing, after all, with people who can summon storm systems with their minds and melt steel with their eyes. Xavier can not only read any mind on the planet, he can freeze time, for fucksake. These have got to be the worst case-studies in oppression you could imagine. it still seems a bit knee-jerky to complain about depictions of objectification in a movie explicitly designed to explore the ramifications of objectification. (You could always fall back on Foz Meadows' rejoinder that "Depiction isn't endorsement, but it is perpetuation", so long as you're the kind of person who's willing to believe that Schindler's List perpetuates anti-Semitism and The Handmaid's Tale perpetuates misogyny.) Watts reacts with caution and indignation to any police presence, even a compassionate visit to the homeless man sleeping in his garden. It would crude to explain away Watts' style and worldview by reference to his unusually bad luck: his flesh-eating disease, his inexplicable beatdown and prosecution by border cops, his publishing travails, his scientific and romantic flops. Disclaimer: I'm probably only so down on him because I got so excited by Blindsight and its promise of actual science fiction by an actual scientist. He is certainly well above-average rigour for a political blogger, and well above-average imagination for anyone. Plus a star if you're in it for the ride, the anecdotes, and not for reliable info. |
| Painless (2019) by Rich Larson | Violent, weird, great. |
| Introduction to Natural Language Processing () by Jacob Eisenstein | Extremely mixed. First chapter is great, a nice high-level summary of the difficult history of getting computers to understand us, and the many fields and field factions involved. (Linguistics is a deep science that in large part taught CS how to do theory, but certain of its dogmas - against probabilities, against machine learning - ended up holding it back for decades.) But chapters 2-5 are bad: weird notation, and almost no diagrams for lots of natively geometric ideas. That said, fig 3.3. is a great essence of backprop. I switched to Jurafsky afterward. [Free here] |
| Titanicus (Sabbat Worlds) (2008) by Dan Abnett | Top shelf mind candy. There are several sides to 40k: the original indie English lulz, the corporate grimdark edginess which misses the irony, and then what the few real writers make of it. (Ian Watson and Abnett are two I know about.) The first 150 pages here have no giant robots, only the quiet apprehensive horror of a war economy, war emotions. Lovers parted by conscription, blocks of lives traded for nothing, the belligerent joy of a public which hasn't lost its first battle yet. Then you get plenty of omnipotent bots, a conspiracy, and two parties in desperate retreat. I like the Mechanicus because, unlike the rest of their society they are half-rational, occasionally have to confront the pervasive superstition and noble lies. Several times you get a unique twist on PTSD, from old men who spent decades inhabiting a war machine: Zink hobbled over to his hut at the best full stride his old legs could manage. He took out the worn step ladder that he used for pruning the boughs of the ploin trees, and carried it back to the west wall. This execution took the best part of half an hour, and Zink had to stop and catch his breath twice. More than twice, he forgot what he was about and began to carry the ladder back to the hut. When he reached the wall, he came about, two points, low stride, west rotation, and dragged the ladder into the wet flowerbeds. I struggle a bit with the psychology of the wicked Satanic enemy. Even in thoughtful authors like Abnett their motivations and strategies are too predictably vicious, too unsustainable - they've invaded this planet, fine, but then they blow up half the cities in it. So what's the point of invading? The archenemy, in his long experience, often ignored An enemy who was so haphazard, divided, unstrategic would struggle to threaten a whole organised empire. They could just be terrorists, or value suffering itself, or just be damaging infrastructure for the wider conflict. But this is a flat worldview, one you can't do anything with except backdrop the nobility of your own characters. Which is one reason there's not a lot of literature in this canon. Abnett compensates well as usual, with flawed and distinctive protagonists, rigorous fantasy logistics and tactics, nice setpieces, plenty of humanising nonmilitary detail, and good satisfying betrayals. |
| turn push | turn pull (2012) by Kit Fryatt | every grain atom & drop in its entirety is protected by copyright [poems about poems] need to be about something else too Cryptic but eh come on, search engines exist now. |
| The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts (1953) by Arthur Miller | None yet |
| Back-green Odyssey () by Alastair Mackie | We spoke o girds, scuds, quines, bleedy doctors… A sincere internationalist in an indecipherable local dialect, like many Scots poets. Allusions to Mallarmé and Valéry, Pushkin and Eurydice, in a voice they'd only stare at. |
| Double Eagle (Sabbat Worlds #1) (2004) by Dan Abnett | None yet |
| Machine Learning: The Art and Science of Algorithms That Make Sense of Data (2012) by Peter Flach | Short, friendly, smooth, repetitive. First ML book where I didn't feel dumb. |
| The Bed of Procrustes (2010) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb | None yet |
| The Inquisition War (The Inquisition War #1-3) (2004) by Ian Watson | The most interesting piece in Games Workshop's vast, clanking archives. It isn't canon: Watson does too much in this, messes with the profitable stasis of the last years of the 41st millennium too much. The nearest thing to Illuminatus! or Snow Crash. |
| The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics (2010) by Roderick Hill | Useful counterweight to the many lies-to-children told in proper undergraduate textbooks. And it is often useful to be reminded of the ideological nonsense that surrounds even mathematised fields. But, read on its own, this won't tell you the power and generality of some economic results and risks confirmation bias. (In my teenage case it licenced my not bothering to do the maths, not allowing my own ideological nonsense to be shaken - but I don't expect you to be so vicious.) |
| The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon - The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (2001) by Steven L. Kent | None yet |
| Spark: The Definitive Guide: Big Data Processing Made Simple () by Bill Chambers | It's fine, covers everything shallowly. The API changes so frequently that you probably need this book: 95% of the Google hits for a given Spark feature are now either wrong or suboptimal. |
| How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems (2019) by Randall Munroe | Oddly unaffecting - I loved What If?, and this follows a very similar formula, but it's flatter somehow, the understatement less funny, the maths less astonishing. The few chapters where he starts with a ridiculous naive approach (e.g. ski by dragging a train of liquid nitrogen which you spray in your path) and then iterates until he gets to the existing technology (roller skates) are satisfying. Chris Hadfield's nerd-chic understatement is funny, but that's probably just because of who he is. Still a vector for mathematical modelling, but eh. |
| Against a Dark Background (1993) by Iain M. Banks | One of his darkest; darker than the one with a real hell. Stuffed full of plot, rammed full of details - a dozen cities on three planets, each with their own economic or cultural or religious setup. There's: a huge war over economic policy; a primitivist misotheist theocracy; a bunch of murderous millenarians; a group of solipsist mercenaries who each think they're the only person in the world; a World Tree ecology; a giant raft city; a talking deus ex machina; two world conspiracies; a man raised from birth to be the perfect revolutionary leader; the fall of a trillionaire dynasty; terrible, maximally vicious sibling rivalry; a beautiful android city full of likeable people being competent and deep. The protagonists pull off about a dozen missions in varied landscapes with various goals. But it's all just sketched, since the 12 worlds he builds are vying for the same 700 pages. We are a race prone to monsters, and when we produce one we worship it. What kind of world, what translation of good could come from all that's happened here? And I didn't like any of the protagonists; they're all a glib kind of hedonist. The leader, Sharrow, is tacitly remorseful about the many terrible things she does, but at no point does she stop doing them. People were always sorry... The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped. * The Huhsz, the millenarians, are actually quite marginal, despite the first 200 pages setting them up to be central. The blood pumped and coursed within her, and with each beat the whole edifice seemed to quake and pulse and shiver, as though for all its mountainous solidity the Sea House was merely a projection, something held in the power of her blood-quickened eyes. * The Lazy Guns sound exactly like Culture tech, quasi-sentient to boot. But their presence in this remote "orphan" system is odd, and it doesn't fit to have the Culture either dump or lose such weapons. Banks is less subtle than I thought he was, as a teen. Good if you prefer worlds to characters. |
| The Wish List (2000) by Eoin Colfer | None yet |
| Delta-V (2019) by Daniel Suarez | Hopeful and precise. Surprisingly moving, in the second half anyway. The prose is flat, economical, and repetitive (for instance, every time the characters do pre-emptive oxygen saturation before a spacewalk, Suarez tells you so), but if you like space or engineering detail you'll be fine. It's billed as (very) hard scifi, but there was actually less physics and more economics in it than I was expecting (and still too much kinematic exposition for most readers, I guess). It's "hard" in the sense that every technology in this already exists in some form, if only prototype or protoprototype, that every celestial body mentioned exists in that location, that the energy budget of the crew is taken seriously - "gravity wells are for suckers" - that their (even safety-critical) software has many terrible bugs. The flight suits were meant only for short, emergency EVAs, but without access to the ship's network, the clam suits' high-tech helmets were inert.) Why not completely local processing? Why not use the lo-tech visor instead? The most moving part was Why is space so moving? Well there's the stated reason, via Hawking:
But does this argument from reduction of existential risk go through? Probably not - most x-risk is due to us, not volcanoes or asteroids or gamma bursts, and we should expect this kind of risk to reduce only modestly in a multiplanetary setting, since the act of colonisation carries the risk source, us, with it; and there are much cheaper and more developed ways of preventing extinction, like arms control and AI research. And we're (even) more likely to have large conflicts when the cultural distances, between planetary civilisations, are so much larger. So what? Is it our genes, new-pastures wanderlust? The sheer scale? There's a lot of ostentation in the book, unnecessary mentions of Zegna suits and fancy watches and whatnot (perhaps intended to make us suspicious of the investors and lawyers who wear them - but we already have them admitting that they are motivated by egomania and envy). The billionaire at the heart of the plot is a suitable mix of inspirational, reckless, authoritarian, noble, ignoble. Props to Suarez for using SpaceEngine and Kerbal to model the precise trajectory of his crew, though many extra points would have accrued had he open-sourced the run, for the purposes of scientific hermeneutics. Also for his bibliography and dissing Mars colonisation. Suarez' claim that a single asteroid trip could make a trillion dollars is contradicted in the Weinersmith's pop book, where they emphasise the legal headaches, and that the profits are conditional on a huge increase in human space activity (otherwise not much demand for your LEO wares). This is all I know, and it's not very strong evidence either way. ********************************* How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: None. One thing which doesn't happen much IRL is the Software development: Yes! The mission is almost lost several times due to software problems, and Ade is the most critical crewmember because of his top monkeypatching and hacking skills (hacking in both senses). Actual science: Yes. The gravity ship is actually basic physics, just incredibly hard and expensive engineering (Joyce drops something like $45bn on the project, which sounds about right). The economic argument about moving and constructing everything outside of gravity wells seems incontrovertible to me. |
| What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) by Raymond Carver | I'm surprised to find Carver relying on punchlines - last-line narrative puns - in most of these stories. There is: a lot of rambling, a lot of meanness (breakups, fights, conversations that would be much healthier if they were honest fights), and then a transcendent or transcendently degraded last line. It would almost be not worth reading if you lost all the last lines. Here's what I mean by a pun - from 'The Calm':But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.I expected him to care for his wretches. The one from the wife's perspective, 'So Much Water So Close To Home' is the only standout. Completely menacing with almost no action, no flash. Good portraits of the oafish, as opposed to the rapey, as opposed to the long-suffering. I can't decide if the last line is acquiescence or perversity. The title story is surprisingly slight, a 16-page Symposium with oddly inarticulate, repetitive drinkers. (One has ~10 years of college education, and but he's the most primitive.) You could put this down to naturalism and forget it entirely, but for its two great lines. (The story is, then, a fine thing for the protagonist of Birdman to stage - self-defeating, opaque, not as deep as it wants.) Stories like these live or die on dialogue, and there's neither enough heft or polish in their chat for me. I always get Chandler and Carver mixed up (yeah, I know) - but if I didn't, I'd go for Chandler every time. The lowness of Chandler is Gothic, stylised, and somehow less general. Plus one star for SMWSCTH. |
| For the Emperor (Ciaphas Cain #1) (2003) by Sandy Mitchell | None yet |
| Learning Spark (2013) by Mark Hamstra | None yet |
| Eisenhorn (Eisenhorn #1-3) (2004) by Dan Abnett | Abnett is extremely good at what he does. This has less action than his best though. |
| Dawn of the Dumb: Dispatches from the Idiotic Frontline (2007) by Charlie Brooker | None yet |
| Screen Burn (2004) by Charlie Brooker | None yet |
| Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman | A surprising victim of the replication crisis. Only about 10% of the claims have been struck down, but that's a bad attrition rate for just 5 years. Effects strongly promoted in this that have so far been strongly questioned by failed replication: - The Florida effect (words connotating old age make you walk slower) (I don't know what the general attrition rate of claims in nonfiction is, though. Another reason to disfavour books from immature sciences.) It is a great book, wise and practical. It is just hard to tell what parts of it will not decay. |
| Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) by Richard M. Rorty | Couldn't judge, will try again. |
| Supernova in the East I- (Hardcore History, #62-) (2018) by Dan Carlin | None yet |
| Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers (1997) by Jan Gullberg | Disarming, unpretentious, funny, deep. |
| On the Pleasure of Hating (1826) by William Hazlitt | Toty brace of magazine pieces in which he philosophises bare-knuckle fights, juggling, and yes petty hatred. He's cute, what with his italicised phrases that are now clichés ("blue ruin"), his enthusiasm for enthusiasm, his mid-sentence verse quotations, his Latinate insults ("O procul, este profani"), and enthusiastic woe. is reaction to seeing someone juggle four balls at once: It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is I can do as well as this? Nothing. What have I been doing all my life? … What abortions are these Essays! How little is made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do. The essay that's from is about juggling and the concept Greatness and the character of a dear dead sportsman friend – and all this in 20 pages. Big man, only sometimes clotted in the seven-clause sentences of his age. |
| Governing the World: The Rise and Fall of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (2012) by Mark Mazower | Casually brilliant and oddly fond history of the UN et al. Practical cosmopolitanism - the promotion of any supranational structure at all - was for a long long time a view held only by strange people indeed - visionaries and ranters and scifi writers - until it was suddenly in the works, laboured over by full secretariats with big bucks. Mazower puzzles over why the US and Britain put so much into these structures, when the previous world order suited them fine. Answer? "Camouflage." |
| The Adoption Papers (1991) by Jackie Kay | Strong, po-faced verse portrait of her own birth and adoption, in three voices. Really lovely details throughout – her mother hiding all her Communist décor for first meeting the birth mother; Kay kissing her poster of Angela Davis goodnight, a traumatic, funny dismissal of the idea that your real mother has to be your birth mother ("After mammy telt me she wisna my real mammy I wis scared to death she wis gonna melt…"). Meeting her bio-mum much later, Kay's disillusionment is subtly and truly done: "the blood does not bind confusion" (mop it up, like carbon dioxide). It becomes apparent that Kay has just created the birth mother character – her mouth filled with vivid Plathian violence and articulate confusion not born out by the real woman. If so, more the better. See also 'I try my absolute best', a perfect snapshot of misguided C20th hippy despair at agrichemicals. |
| Inventing the Enemy: Essays (2011) by Umberto Eco | Calm, panoptic and ennobling. (Funniest clause all month: "thus Lenin was a neo-Thomist – without of course realising it.") There's good sad Realism under his playful semiotic historicism: only lazy academic cliques prevent people seeing that the critical realist & the pomo skylark can coexist. So it's a surprise but not a shock to see him use basically Johnson's defence against relativism. Eco chides the Church with its own history! The title essay is composed of quotations from virulent historical racists / misogynists / puritans: it's hard to read. He walks the difficult line between being maximally clear & slightly banal (thus he says things like "Fire is a metaphor for many impulses…", but also: Trying to understand other people means destroying the stereotype without denying or ignoring the otherness.). Whose side is he on? The text's! |
| Computational Logic and Human Thinking (2011) by Robert Kowalski | Nice mission: to teach computer logic to humans to help them think. (Returning logic to its normative roots.) But Kowalski immediately strays from this to also try to build "a comprehensive, logic-based theory of human intelligence". By aiming at both pragmatic self-help and grand, metaphysical, qualitative psychology, it's too ambitious - or rather, appropriately ambitious but using the wrong tools. (The right tools are unknown but probably include decision theory, statistics, distributed representations, the Bayesian or predictive brain - none of which Kowalski foregrounds. He talks about inferring causes - without using Causal Inference; about doing abduction - without probabilities; about production systems - without the more mature Predictive Processing calculus.) Kowalski praises a few bad theories, like Fodor's version of language of thought, and Gardner's multiple intelligences. (And Cyc isn't marked as a failure.) But also good theories: dual-process psychology, Sperber's relevance theory. The best bit is where he links cognitive biases to naive logical rules The computational interpretation [of dual process theory] is that, when an agent is deliberative, its behaviour is controlled by a high-level program, which manipulates symbols that have meaningful interpretations in the environment. But when the agent is intuitive, its behaviour is generated by a low-level program or physical device... It's also a friendly introduction to more recent logics. Perhaps too friendly - if you think that formal symbols always make things harder to think about, I recommend comparing learning logic from this vs a good semiformal text like Tomassi. The bloat of English compared to symbols is about 20x, and the overheads are impossible to miss. It is at least what I hoped it would be: a very clear introduction to good old "GOFAI" in all its rigour, grandiosity and narrowness. (There are maybe 600 definitions in this.) I wanted a logician's (or logic programmer's) view on AI, and I got it (from the technical appendices). CL is impressive and authoritative on a small number of tasks, but it's just not generally promising, and hasn't been for a long time. This 2011 book read like a time capsule from the 1970s, before Prolog and Cyc had soured, before the Winter. (I should clarify that inductive logic programming is a live research programme - I'm going to work on it myself - but only in combination with the ruling statistical methods.) I actually don't understand how he can think that this approach is the answer - is it unkind to put it down to decades of sunk cost? I also thought it might be a more rigorous version of Algorithms to Live By, and I suppose it is, but at the cost of its practicality. |
| Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson | Fun, highly dated in ways that I find charming rather than vitiating (e.g. he has to explain to us what a hard disk is). His depiction of software, that ineliminable agent of our present and our future, is still better than 95% of scifi and 99.9% of lit-fic. The plot is so clunky and over-the-top that Stephenson needs to actually embody all the necessary exposition in the form of a scholar personal assistant (which I would give bags of cash to have). I fail to see what's satirical about it; certainly I know Stephenson doesn't believe that Sumerian is a neurolinguistic virus - but author disbelief is not sufficient for satire. Is he satirising Julian Jaynes? Cyberpunk? Hacker supremacism? If so, he failed because Snow Crash is a vivid and sympathetic instance of these things. |
| Information: The New Language of Science (2003) by Hans Christian Von Baeyer | Elementary philosophy of science focussing on Wheeler's "Really Big Questions" about the foundations of physics, in particular the 'digital physics'. (The Questions are 'How come existence?', 'Why the quantum?', 'It from bit?', 'What makes meaning?') Which wasn't what I was expecting from an out-of-print hardback tome by a serious physicist - particularly with that grand title - but still: nice. In fact it's hard to imagine anyone writing out these first steps any friendlier (ok, maybe Ben Orlin). Its technical work feels effortless; think Schroedinger's What is Life? (which von Baeyer actually corrects, in passing). I needed a book on the method / meta-field surrounding mathematical "information", because it has surrounded me: it threatens to encompass science. Just as "energy" eventually became a unifying pillar of all the natural sciences, information has infiltrated that same salient: Energy <-> Entropy <-> Information. And then into other sciences: vB hints that we should see bits as money as ML-performance as Fisher information as VNM utility, which would seize about half of theoretical science. Info theory is a core part of a mathematico-philosophical witch's brew: computability, decision theory, computational complexity, Bayesian statistics, digital physics, quantum computing. Which together take big steps towards the naturalisation of logic - or, more, of maths - or more, of thought. (And is information larger than thought?) And/or the dematerialisation of physics? von Baeyer builds it all up, so we get Clausius (1852) for thermodynamics, Boltzmann (1877) for entropy (inverse info) as a proper physical object, Shannon (1930) for classical info theory, Solomonoff (1960) for algorithmic complexity, Landauer for the shocking physics of computation (1961), Bekenstein (1971) and Hawking for black hole theory (crucial experiments for it-from-bit), Deutsch (1985) for how quantum computing could work. And Wheeler setting the whole new agenda. (I call it new because it hasn't made it into undergraduate philosophy, or physics, or statistics, or ordinary computer science, yet.) The philosophy is very well done. I really liked his physicist's optimism about reflective equilibrium between science and folk physics: Information, too, has been defined operationally. Unfortunately, this technical, bottom-up definition is very restricted, and hitherto bears little resemblence to any of the common, top-down definitions. Eventually the two definitions should converge, but that hasn't happened yet. When it does, we will finally know what information is. It impresses me to find a pop science book that has aged this well, over 16 years. It's sad that that's impressive - obviously I'm not reading enough physics and maths. Von Baeyer maybe leans too hard on the physics-is-solid heuristic; he ends up being uncritical about some extremely late-breaking and radical work: the heterodox classical theory of Kahre (2002) and Zeilinger's (1999) grand quietist explanation for QM's weirdness (neither of which I've heard much about since). Zeilinger's principle... furnishes an answer to Wheeler's famous question "Why the quantum?" Why does nature seems granular, discontinuous, quantized into discrete chunks like sand..? The answer is that while we have no idea how the world is really arranged, and shouldn't even ask, we do know that knowledge of the world is information: and since information is naturally quantized into bits, the world also appears quantized. If it didn't, we wouldn't be able to understand it. It's both as simple and as profound as that. Each chapter takes an idea ("heat and entropy", "logarithms and message space", "qubits", "Morse and optimality") and builds it up with little informal proofs and thought experiments. This is nice, but because it has to do everything from scratch it's more of a grab-bag than an argument, and certainly not a "language of science" by the end. For instance, he stops short of one key philosophical outcome of all this technical talk, which is that there are two types of explanations, even though he covers all the ideas you'd need: 1) information compressions (e.g. General relativity explains the force on all of the infinite points in spacetime in one unbelievably terse tensor equation. We can often count the bits used by theories like this, and so solve theory selection!) 2) simplified algorithms, faster ways to reason about the world (e.g. much of computer science) As you can tell from the number of question marks in this review, I found this stimulating but not conclusive. But it would be foolish to expect a pop book to answer the Really Big Questions, and von Baeyer's reminds us frequently that the current answers he presents are unfinished. So this is step one of a currently unbounded algorithm. Minus a half for not quite taking things as far as they can go. --- Misc notes * This would be a pretty good primer for Map and Territory or Quantum Computing Since Democritus, if those assume too much for you. * Lots of literary illustrations of scientific ideas - Calvino, Wittgenstein, Borges - but it didn't feel forced to me. I suppose it might actually reduce the friendliness, for some readers. * Is this true?: The most important role of noise, however, is as the preserver of our sanity. Without noise, the measurement or observation of a single quantity would requite an infinite memory and an infinite amount of time - it would overload all our circuits. Neither science nor consciousness could exist... noise is a thick blanket of snow which softens the contours into large, rounded mounds we can perceive and sort out without being overwhelmed. We evolved lots of ways to ignore information. Why would this not happen again? A photosensitive patch arises in that noiseless world; since it is an analogue processor it simply trims off the infinite information by default when it runs out of molecules or reactions(?) * He calls the Bayesian interpretation of probability "the rational approach" which suits me but let's imagine that's a mistranslation of his meaning "the mental approach", "the personalist approach". * Gleick handles the social history and applications with unsurpassed skill, but I wanted the mind-bending crunchy side, natural information, digital physics, information as everything. * "Information is flow of form" * Solomonoff induction is intractable, another word for practically useless. Does this change the philosophical significance of the above brew? I don't think so - "Here is a way to work everything out; you can almost never use it" is a pretty plausible way for philosophy to end tbf. Does it change its scientific significance? Yes, absolutely - we have to seek approximations of the forbidden ideal or else it has none. * What's fundamental, thermodynamics or information? Neither? * Yet another way that info theory eats the life of the mind is the deeply practical "value of information", a way of deciding whether to bother with an experiment (q.v. the master, Gwern). |
| Cryptonomicon (1999) by Neal Stephenson | An enormous collection of novels - a spy thriller, and a military farce, and a comparative history (of Showa Japan, Churchill Britain, Roosevelt America, the pre- and post-Marcos Philippines), and an oral history of computing, and a modern legal psychodrama, and a family saga of three large dynasties. And a divisive book: 1) It is extremely focussed on men and masculine mindset - guts and brutality, mathematical facility, mind-numbing horniness, how shit works, emotional impermeability, pride in being a stereotype. (Scroll down to see reviews reacting in highly exaggerated ways to this fact, with either horror or delight.) Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time... there might be a third category... [Waterhouse] speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he's already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you'll join in. Which no one ever does. On the wonder and absurdity of social etiquette: The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of those bodies makes a single sound during the sultan's speech. Half of this is an accurate portrayal of 40s gender politics, half a defensive reaction to contemporary blank-slateism. I don't think it's a malign kind of masculinity, though there are only a couple of female characters who don't have at least peripheral or inverted sexiness - if you can't handle that I'd avoid it. A good point to bail out would be the bit where Waterhouse models the effect of masturbation vs sex on his cognition as a periodic timeseries. I'm very hard to offend, but the constant use of "females" got to me, by page 400. Randy stares directly into the eyes of the female customs official and says, "The Internet." Totally factitious understanding dawns on the woman's face, and her eyes ping bosswards. The boss, still deeply absorbed in an article about the next generation of high-speed routers, shoves out his lower lip and nods, like every other nineties American male who senses that knowing this stuff is now as intrinsic to maleness as changing flat tires was to Dad. "I hear that's really exciting now," the woman says in a completely different tone of voice, and begins scooping Randy's stuff together into a big pile so that he can repack it. Suddenly the spell is broken, Randy is a member in good standing of American society again, having cheerfully endured this process of being ritually goosed by the Government. 2) It is also a partisan in the Arts vs STEM "culture war". (In fact Stephenson is often dismissive of all academia - "grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research".) One of the most important scenes in the book shows a lone techie clashing with a self-appointed jury of stereotypically appalling critical theorists: they speak nonsense about an objective matter, he correctly calls them on it, they cover him in ad hominem bulverism until he gives in. It's not without nuance: his champion in the fight Randy is later shown sulking and reliving it and admitting his own pettiness: "I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat," Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person's language maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them but more likely (he thinks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an uncontrollable urge to be a prick. 3) There are a lot of coincidences, much more than the novelistic baseline. Characters meet Atanasoff and Turing and Reagan and MacArthur. (A Nazi submarine captain makes a sneering reference to a bureaucratic nightmare being something out of "that Jew Kafka". I thought this was an absurd anachronism, but looking into it, the Nazi could easily have read him, but could not have made the reference to a Brit and expected it to stick. English translation of Das Schloss in 1930 but it didn't take off until after the war.) This is cute/trite on its own, but I find it helpful to imagine Stephenson looking down at history, selecting a particularly interesting sub-graph from the population 4) There are lots of info-dumps. Large sections of this are indistiguishable from nonfiction. ("This pause is called the horizontal retrace interval. Another one will occur...") People seem to hate this, but it is fine since it's done through aspie characters who absolutely do talk like that. 5) It has a lot of pulpy Feats, fuck-yeah setpieces which fiction this good usually foregoes. Tropical headhunters; escape from a collapsing mineshaft; cryptocurrency in the 90s; tactical blackface; drinking and lolling with your Nazi captors; etc. It would be an idyllic tropical paradise of not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and deat each other and use human heads for decoration. --- It's easy to miss the uniting theme, and thus call it "not a novel" or whatever, because it only unmasks on p.791. It is Ares v Athena, rage v cunning, politics v engineering, normies v geeks, law v ethics, conflict v mistake, local maxima v the search for the global. This overloaded binary is embodied in Andrew v Randy, the Dentist v Avi, Rudy v Göring, All of Japan v Dengo. Now, it suits me to have litigious bastards and culture-warriors be the inheritors of Ares, of mindless destruction. But it would be silly to think that the stakes are comparable between the plot strands: it's WWII vs the Struggles of Some Cool Crypto Entrepreneurs. But Stephenson is obviously not equating them, and might be pointing out that stakes are now in general lower, even when you're up against contemporary gangsters. Another giant theme is the emergence of one new masculinity, beyond the taciturn physical hero: the geek. This is the "third category" above. (Is this really that new? Isn't it just the Scholar?) --- Misc notes * Waterhouse seems to be taking Bill Tutte's space in history and seizing it for America but ok. * Bobby Shaftoe is the noblest junkie character I've ever seen - ingenious in his pursuit of morphine, but slightly more keen on Marine honour than on it. * I was not expecting Stephenson to use converting to Christianity as the symbol for Dengo leaving sick ultranationalism behind. Compassion and liberalism are far larger and better than the Christian launchpad they happened to use, after all. * Relatedly there's his preference for cute family-values Christianity over postmodern critical theory: To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. * Some surprisingly deft notes on kink and the exogenous/preconscious nature of sexuality, in the bit where they're spying on Tom Howard. * This line accurately portrays the mindset of certain wizard types like Turing: It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. though it is discreditable and nongeneralisable to hold. * I learned a lot of words. * There are dozens and dozens of depictions of Japanese war crimes before we get any note paid to the horrendous suffering of the Japanese troops. But after that it is suitably even-handed in its tragedy. One of the saddest sentences I've ever read: "They are strafing the survivors". * Root is a tech determinist about the war - the Allies won because their tech was better, end-of. I seriously doubt historians would go with this. * --- There's a lot wrong with it - it's about twice as long as it needs to be, the gender stuff is overdone, it is intentionally annoying to its outgroup, succumbing to 'conflict theory', and none of its antagonists (Loeb, the Dentist, Wing, Crocodile) are fleshed out despite him having 900 pages of opportunities for fleshing them - but it's grand, clever, full of ideas, funny, full of great setpieces, and foresaw a couple of things about our decade. |
| From Subsistence to Exchange and Other Essays (New Forum Books) (2000) by P.T. Bauer | Conservative critique of foreign aid, but without contempt or narrow particularism. Emphasised cultural barriers and institutional weakness as a lone voice during the hegemony of Rostow's capital-only fairytale. |
| SCP: Foundation Tomes () by Various | Good example of the most distinctive literary trend of the day: web serial fiction / wiki fiction. Also of the shortcomings of same: the committee fragmentariness and unmanageable hugeness. (I cut this short at page 1000. And this is only one of three giant ebooks of the whole wiki. Phew.) That's the medium. Its genre is post-pulp post-Lovecraft urban fantasy-horror - the most popular genre? (Aside from old stalwarts, trash romance and MFA lit.) And style's the uncommon pseudoacademic register of Lovecraft's original pulp. Its achievement is to dispense with characterisation and rely entirely on atmosphere and startling concepts. There's no protagonist and only hints of antagonists (besides the thousands of SCP objects themselves). The Foundation is ludicrously powerful - they've global jurisdiction over law enforcement, run hundreds of fatal human experiments, retain a vast staff and holdings. In order for this to work as horror, they need equally elevated foes - and so they do: they're always being infiltrated, manipulated, stolen from, exsanguinated or bombed. The Foundation commits many atrocities (contrast Delta Green, Dresden Files, Agents of Shield, the X-Files, which are much more anti-authority). It has all the ordinary kinds of horror - monsters, disease, body horror, mind-rape, invisible forces, alien geometries - but also the greater, rare horror of exponentiation, of facing a foe with the potential to suddenly explode beyond all containment and never stop growing. Another distinctive bit is its meta horror: objects which know the rules of the story and about other objects. I recommend reading this with the images disabled. They're a labour of love, I know, but the imagination is easier to scare than the eye. Good queasy fun. |
| The Foundations of Arithmetic: A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number (1884) by Gottlob Frege | Bloody weird to slap a star rating on this, but there you go, welcome to where nothing is not rateable. |
| Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity (2007) by William J. Baumol | Thoughtful and lucid nontechnical essays on the very different structures hiding behind the vague anticoncept 'capitalism'. The title alone beats most leftists and rightists, who tend to tacitly deny the existence of good or bad capitalisms, respectively. (Where by good we mean "good for growth and eliminating poverty".) The authors go further of course, with four ideal types: * state-guided capitalism (China, 60s Japan, Singapore) They tie these to specific policies, often lacking in these kinds of books. They also accept that what's "good" economic policy depends on your existing base (cf. Ha-Joon Chang's argument for trade barriers for pre-industrial countries). Most of the book is about the conditions and effects of entrepreneurship, but they also find big firms actually necessary ("the best form of capitalism is a blend of entrepreneurial and big-firm"), well before Tyler Cowen. Decent paean to the moral importance of growth too: slow growth, especially when coupled with widening inequality, can provide an environment that breeds distrust and often hate. It is not an accident that some of the worst periods of intolerance to African Americans and immigrants in United States history (the late 1800s, the 1930s, 1970s) occurred during periods of slow or negative growth. The worst-case example of this was, of course, the rise of Nazism... Good book for anyone who thinks they hate economics, or economists, or neoclassical economics, or growth itself. Certainly much more readable and fair than Piketty's mega-bestseller. (For very adversarial people, better to start with Filthy Lucre, which analyses good and bad forms of competition.)</td> </tr> |
| Learn Python the Hard Way (2010) by Zed A. Shaw | None yet |
| What is the Last Question? () by John Brockman | List of 284 questions - some of them kind of daffy or parochial ("will we ever be able to predict earthquakes?", "What would comprise the most precise sonic representation of the history of life?"), some of them profound, about half of them interminably nerdsniped by this thing called consciousness, exactly 12 of them about what I'd answer. ("Will AI make the Luddites right?", "Is it possible to control a system capable of evolving?", "What can humanity do right now that will make the biggest difference over the next billion years?", "Can an increasingly powerful species survive the actions of it's most extreme individuals?") A few of them are answered already (to my satisfaction), e.g. "Why are people seldom persuaded by clear evidence and rational argument?", "Is love really all you need?", "Are feelings computable?", "Why do even the most educated people today feel that their grip on what they can truly know is weaker than ever before?", "Was agriculture a wrong turn?". But then the list is an accurate picture of how compartmentalised and undiffused much of the greatest knowledge is among intellectuals. (But the prompt is not "what's the most important question?" nor "what question do we most need answered?" so ignore my judging.) Too broad for PhDs, often too broad for entire careers, but inspiring and sharpening anyway. |
| The Unreality of Time (1908) by J.M.E. McTaggart | None yet |
| Unknown Armies (1999) by Greg Stolze | Something witty and shocking and literary, in the urban fantasy genre? Yes: this RPG does the same secretly-magical subculture-glorifying thing as the rest of the 90s, but does it better. The genre might be better described as political horror - the same kind of logical extrapolation of conspiracy theories and occult 'wisdom' as Unsong.Everybody hears things on the street. Some of them might even be true. Like these: The core mechanic is that there's always a catch: you have to sacrifice to gain magic. In particular, social deviance brings power. Each character has an obsession - the booze mage gets charges from drinking rare liquors, the wealth mage from squandering money, the skater mage from risky stunts, the porn mage from..., the self-harm mage from... This isn't trivial: to get the serious charges you have to permanently change your character. The spells in the book are just suggestions, the characters mostly have to make them up. And this is reflected in the fluff: being edgy isn't a pose, it directly drives your alienation from society and mere reality. You go mad even if you win. The back story is huge and silly (moves from control of the Street, to the World, to the Cosmos) but also excellent for long campaigns. This thread on a random dead forum is a key part of the book. Totally perfect for teens. haven't read it since but I will. |
| Milkman (2018) by Anna Burns | Unlikeable, admirable portrait of a diseased society, the disease signified by unbearable harassment of one of its young members. The book's unlikeable because it's realistic. In Burns' telling, 70s Ulster feels like ISIS in miniature, a taste of Maoist China: the complete infection of private life by horrible politics, slander, cruelty, and doom. The disease radiates out from the death squads and Gestapo fuckery of the "traditionalists" and the delusional gangster sociopathy, the kangaroo courts - the lash for women, and six-packs for men - of the "renouncers". Decades of fear and vengeance bring out our worst, give psychopaths a foothold: To the [IRA] groupies too, it wasn't so much these men should be fighters for the cause as that they should be the particular individuals wielding substantial power and influence in the areas, They didn't have to be paramilitaries, didn't even have to be illegal, could have been anyone. It so happened though, that in the set-up of the time, in each of those totalitarian enclaves, it was the male paramilitaries who, more than anyone, ruled over the areas with final say... The sickest part of the book is the way that gossip feeds on itself, floats free of reality - her ordinary stalker accuses Maybe-girlfriend of "aggravated harassment"; she's seen "with" [being harrassed by] a Big Man, so she becomes tainted/anointed with his aweing disrespectability; later, after he threatens to kill her boyfriend, the grapevine instead has it that she'd "tried to evade retribution for cheating on him with a car mechanic". A rape of social standing, of identity. Burns gives out great lines, poetic heft, to everyone, even vicious people like Ma and Milkman. Why can't you take on board you're not wanted, that your advances are not to be accepted, that it's thanks but no thanks? You mean nothing to us, we don't even think of you and another thing, you can't just act with impunity, carrying on as if it didn'thappen, as if you didn't start this, as if you didn't stir things up. You're a cat – that's right, you heard us, a cat – a double cat! We don't think you're up to the level of even being a cat. But don't you push us so far because this is aggravated harassment Maybe-girlfriend's own register is a little tiring, bright and arch and digressive (but not enough to keep the the pall of her surroundings lifted). It might be an attempt to balance out the setting with comically out-of-place lyricism, but if so it works strangely: 'But understand, daughter,' went on ma, 'I'm not saying my rear cannot now fit in the chair because the chair's become too tight for it. It can still fit in. It's just that now it encompasses a certain amount of extra inches or fractions of inches to which it has never acclimatised and which in the old days didn't used to be.' The Community hates the depressed and the upbeat ("shiny"), the chaste and the promiscuous, the deviation: And that was the trouble with the shiny people. Take a whole group of individuals who weren't shiny, maybe a whole community, a whole nation, or maybe just a statelet immersed long-term on the physical and energetic planes in the dark mental energies; conditioned too, through years of personal and communal suffering, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger – well, these people could not, not at the drop of a hat, be open to any bright shining button of a person stepping into their environment and shining upon them just like that... I quite liked the purely-functional names - "maybe-boyfriend", "third-brother-in-law", "longest friend from primary school", "Somebody McSomebody", though I see it's not a popular methodology on here. I think "Milkman" is the only proper name in it. She belabours a good metaphor (the sunset from the front cover): even the colour of a beautiful sunset is an ideological matter, for these locals. They've a particular cached thought - "the sky is blue" - and refuse to let a fancy intellectual (a spirited French teacher) make them notice that the sky is currently anything but blue. Blatant wilful error in the face of decisive evidence, maintained to express one's identity: welcome to the species. Reviewers call it funny, which it isn't really until Chapter Seven, until Milkman is gone and the Carry On-Tarantino part can kick off. There's this: Before Milkman, they had shot a binman, twobusdrivers, a road sweeper, a real milkman who was our milkman, then another person whodidn't have any blue-collar or service-industry connections – all in mistake for Milkman. Thenthey shot Milkman. Then they played down the mistaken shootings while playing up theintended shooting, as if it had been Milkman and only Milkman they had shot all along. and "You're a female. He's a male. You're my sister-in-law and I don't care how many of his family got murdered, he's a bastard and would've been a bastard even if they hadn't got murdered." They hadn't got murdered. Only four had got murdered. The other two had been a suicide and an accidental death. Very tiring but worthy overall. |
| Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Going Solo (Roald Dahl's Autobiography, #2) (1986) by Roald Dahl | None yet |
| Learn Python 3 The Hard Way () by Zed A. Shaw | Much, much more my style - opinionated, joined-up, irreverent - though not my speed ("this book gives you the mental tools and attitude you need to go through most Python books and actually learn something"). Shaw is a beautiful mind in a slightly unhinged shell:Which programming language you learn and use doesn't matter. Do not get sucked into the religion surrounding programming languages as that will only blind you to their true purpose of being your tool for doing interesting things. A good way to spend an hour after a year away. [Free!] |
| Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) by Edwin A. Abbott | Likeable but not readable. I prefer the Dot and the Line or GEB |
| The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman | None yet |
| The Sandman: Endless Nights (The Sandman) (2003) by Neil Gaiman | None yet |
| Reaper Man (Discworld, #11; Death, #2) (1991) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Complicity (1993) by Iain Banks | None yet |
| Bad News (Patrick Melrose, #2) (1992) by Edward St. Aubyn | None yet |
| Notes from a Small Island (1995) by Bill Bryson | None yet |
| Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2006) by David Benatar | Intense, original, contrarian - doing exactly what philosophy should do - but unpersuasive. |
| The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space (Ribbonfarm Roughs) (2013) by Venkatesh G. Rao | A fun, nasty, bitchy taxonomy of social class / psychological theory of the firm; a mishmash of economics, psychoanalysis and literary criticism; a series of massive blogposts apologising for being a book. It splits employed people into three classes with terrible names - Leaders ("Sociopaths"), Loyalists ("Clueless"), Workers ("Losers") - and throws a massive amount of fictional evidence at each. That's obviously a formal hierarchy, Leaders > Loyalists > Workers, but Rao's first big left turn is to impose a second contradictory ordering on the 3 classes in developmental psychology terms: Clueless < Losers < Sociopaths. I like his subdivision of Losers into: Minimum-effort rationally-disengaged; Overperformers; future Sociopaths. It looks nasty, and Rao is uninterested in making it seem moral or immoral, but if this is how the leaders actually think, Rao is doing us (the 99%) a service. Is this system justified and true? No. Rao writes the best clickbait in the world, what he calls "insight porn". It is the verbal equivalent of the noise an F1 engine makes on a 200m straight. The class theory in this would make for a great literary theory, a blueprint for future Office Spaces. Myers-Briggs is marginally better than the dumb view of people as more or less defective versions of one character. So too is this better than "bosses/workers" cod Marxism. (He could have massively increased his audience and reduced unwanted connotations by renaming "Losers" to "Workers" the Loser — really not a loser at all if you think about it — pays his dues, does not ask for much, and finds meaning in his life elsewhere) He has a weird relationship with the amoral elites - he often says things like
putting destiny and ultimate value in their hands. And he clearly thinks of himself as a post-reality-shock enlightened figure. And yet he rags on the inauthenticity, nihilism, cruelty, hollowness of his 'Sociopaths'. There are dozens of acute, contentious, boggling passages like
I can imagine a teenager reading this and becoming absolutely insufferable. But much great writing can lend spurious superiority to fools - for instance Nietzsche. [Free! here] |
| Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (2003) by David Kushner | Kinda amateurish prose, everything "classic" and "legendary" in the same sentence. It's saved by the singular, remarkable character Carmack. Neuroatypical, ascetic, principled, focussed to the point of dissociation. He slept on the floor for months, despite being rich, because he didn't see the need for comfort. An excellent example of what someone profoundly creative can do, if they also love work. (: All the glories of the species.) Romero is less interesting, because he is a fairly ordinary tech startup founder (with a sicker sense of humour and less self-suppression), mendacious and loud. "To the outside world, Romero was id." He may have invented gaming smack talk, by screaming at people in LAN tournaments. If you've never been on Xbox Live, you probably haven't had a 9 year-old child scream that you're a faggot and a noob. The child is channeling Romero. I concede that there would have been no Doom Moment without Romero's hyping it - that together these two men form one functioning human being. Kushner occasionally adds value, e.g. when he notes that id were to gaming what technical metal was to music: the marriage of virtuosity with extreme content, "high technology and gruesome gameplay". To see how important skill is in selling a dark aesthetic, compare the Learjet-level success of fancy metal with the parochial subsistence of hardcore punk. He also sees an entire type very clearly: the alpha nerd, with all his lofty contempt, Ferraris, workaholism, disloyalty, pranks, energy. This is much more common in life than in media. Repetitive though; skim. |
| More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics: Physics as Nature's Economics (1989) by Philip Mirowski | I struggled with this a lot (probably equally due to his prose as my lack of maths) but Mirowski is always very exciting. (Whether excitingness is the best virtue for an historian or social theorist, if it's at the expense of other virtues, is another question.) |
| Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion (2014) by Sam Harris | Most people who believe they are meditating are just thinking with their eyes closed. Forces of digestion and metabolism are at work within me that are utterly beyond my perception or control. Most of my internal organs may as well not exist for all I know of them directly, and yet I can be reasonably certain that I have them, arranged much as any medical textbook would suggest. The taste of the coffee, my satisfaction at its flavor, the feeling of the warm cup in my hand—while these are immediate facts with which I am acquainted, they reach back into a dark wilderness of facts that I will never come to know. Surprisingly humble and sincere. Some readers feel tricked - feel that Harris is smuggling in science under soft, false pretences. This isn't fair; he has done this stuff for decades, visited lamas in Tibet, put in the work. It's implausible that he would do so much insincerely; whatever his other failings, he is actually trying to bridge the two kinds of seekers.* (That said, this book design is a masterpiece of camouflage. Look at the soft colours, the sunny logo, the sans-serif purity, the unthreatening subtitle. Compare his other books!) However: consider all the things people mean by "spirituality": With so much popular support - with so much baggage - it's not possible to throw out the word or concept; instead we have to try and reform it. This is Harris' mission - though in fact he focusses almost exclusively on (5) -> (8), the standard Buddhist therapy of not being hurt by distraction, bad luck, frustrated desires. He rejects (1) straightforwardly, in favour of psychologising the whole practice. Paraphrased: 'Instead of making you experience Reality, meditation lets you experience your mind; instead of strengthening your insubstantial soul, you're strengthening your mind.' This is a healthy kind of reconstruction in my view, but it certainly leads him to make controversial claims like "The deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self". Metaphysically profligate readers will have no fun here. (But they knew that already.) How can a scientist (or at least a pro-science talking head) boost a practice with the aim of rejecting thought? The trick is to distinguish thinking / experiencing (which are after all the locus of all value, and of decisions and creativity) from identifying with the stream of your thoughts, from being carried away, from being endlessly distracted. --- Does this stuff work? It probably does for stress reduction - at least like taking a nap does, or a valium, or sitting still and breathing deeply for a bit. And on the other end, it is definitely not the source of supernatural brain-juice-drinking power. So the truth is somewhere between these two limits, and we drift, deciding whether to spend time on it. I'm an unpromising practitioner. For instance, this is kind of my jam. It's not the indescribability that bothers me - after all, any knowledge-how is indescribable (or rather describable only with millions of parameters). You can accept e.g. Hume or Parfit's reasoning - you can have the propositional knowledge, can know that "there is no self beyond my bundle of experiences". Meditation is supposed to be the know-how of nonessentialism, the skill of actually paying attention to the implications of this System-2 judgment. But being 'nonconceptual' means no language, no premises, no reason, no jokes, no connection, no comparison, using none of my strengths, leaving none of my spoor. This is a great loss to me. I don't know that I do suffer as a result of identifying with my thoughts; I don't think that dissatisfaction lurks in every sensation I ever experience or also my whole life in retrospect. But the old claim, similar to Marxist or feminist 'false consciousness', is that I am too owned to realise I'm being owned:
Freedom from desire sounds much like death to me, for all that Harris and others argue that it can somehow coexist with passion against the suffering of others, with striving to be a better person, with chipping in to the Great Project of discovery, compassion, optimisation. Luckily the two projects - really feeling that you are not your thoughts, not a homunculus behind your eyes having them; vs not wanting things because wanting leads to disappointment - seem to be separable. A consolation: there's a sense in which meditation, introspection and phenomenology are highly, maximally empirical - they involve very close attention and analysis of the raw data. It just happens that the raw data (the sense-data) are irreplicable, private, closed, and so not directly a matter for science. Empiricism before science, consciousness without self. And I like this. Mindfulness is billed as not just cool and true but useful - No doubt many distinct mechanisms are involved - the regulation of attention and behaviour, increased body awareness, inhibition of negative emotions, reframing of experience, changes in your view of the 'self', and so forth - and each of these will have their own neurophysiological basis." Well, I do love self-regulation! The following argument isn't explicitly stated by Harris, but I find it helpful as an existence-proof for the usefulness of nonessentialism: Also 1. We do not directly apprehend the external world; we know it through sense-data plus massive computational modelling tricks in the brain. While I don't have a very clear philosophy of mind, I know I'm not a direct realist or substance dualist or identity essentialist, so I've no simple philosophical objections to breaking down the Self, either. Allons-y. --- Even if I accept that mindfulness is a source of value, there's presumably still a tradeoff against clearer, quicker, more public sources: doing science or kindnesses or pleasures. 10 days spent in myself is 10 days not learning, not exercising, not enjoying, not helping, not meeting, in solitary. (And even on the contemplative axis it competes with Stoicism, with yoga, with writing, with psychedelics.) How much work will it be? Some contemplatives freely admit that the cost is very high: some contemplatives are not just salesmen. I met someone who claimed to be capital-e-enlightened. (He was otherwise articulate and modest.) He said it took 6 years' work, at many hours a week. I asked him if he could say how valuable it is in other terms - 'What else has been as good?' He said: a decade of intense psychotherapy, or two philosophy degrees. (One ancient text teases us by setting 'seven years' as the required period, but in true troll-Buddhist style it then slowly walks back this helpful definite statement.) --- On that note: I was looking forward to writing a gotcha paradox here, but Harris (and thousands of years of arhats and yogis) pre-empted me:
I'm not actually worried by this, because I suspect the full-Buddhist anti-striving thing is unnecessary and... undesirable. --- Why should an evolved creature have the power to inspect its own sense-data? If we are constantly distracting ourselves with reified thoughts, what evolutionary role did this play? At the top of this review is Harris' droll diss about people deluding themselves into thinking they are meditating - but how can we know that we, or anyone, is not deluded? (Brain scans of inhibited medial PFCs are interesting but merely suggestive.) --- Most of the above isn't directly from Harris, I'm riffing off better rationalist reconstructions of this ancient one-weird-trick. (I actually don't know if this is any good, cos I don't know the area. Seems fine.) * Much of their anger is about his chapter warning of the history of abuse by gurus and yogis and so on. But like it or not this is a public service. |
| Moab is My Washpot (1997) by Stephen Fry | There are worse teen idols to have, than Fry, Dawkins, Graffin, Rollins, Goldacre, Bangs, Gould, Earls, Pratchett, Banks. |
| The Ode Less Travelled: A guide to writing poetry (2005) by Stephen Fry | Better for learning to read poetry than write it. I think I read this three times, obsessed as I was with an art that would let me talk, talk clearly and obscurely, give me weight or the semblance of weight. |
| How to Get a PhD: A Handbook for Students and Their Supervisors (1987) by Estelle M. Phillips | some social science students who have read Kuhn's work on 'paradigm shifts' in the history of natural science (science students have normally not heard of him) say rather indignantly: 'Oh, do you mean a PhD has to be just doing normal science?' And indeed we do mean that... It is the basic useful activity of scientists and scholars, and PhD students should be pleased to make a contribution to it. You can leave the paradigm shifts for after your PhD... Liked it - it has a quiet rigour and schoolmistressy focus I wasn't expecting - but my god you have to skim. Many sentences could lose two-thirds of the words without losing any meaning; probably no-one exists for whom every chapter is relevant. But they make skimming easy by listing recommended actions in a box at the start of each chapter. There's a thoughtful chapter on psychological mechanisms to watch out for. They confess that any general book on the matter is necessarily incomplete, since each field has its own defining skills, styles, and norms, often unwritten or badly written. Call the reigning institutionalised, credentialist way of allocating epistemic value schoolism. This book is a particularly blithe example It is only by understanding the need for precision and having the ability to apply yourself in a disciplined way that you will eventually get to the point where you have the right to follow up interesting leads and explore a series of ideas that arise out of the work in hand. We suggest that, for the moment, this should be after your doctorate. (To be fair they also instruct you to think for yourself, to manage your supervisor, etc.) The "non-traditional students" chapter is interesting, if only for the separate sections for male and female students which have almost the same advice. ("1. Join or establish a [gender]' peer support group. 2. Discuss with your supervisors any problems in the male/female aspect of the student–supervisor relationship...") Neat but kind of disingenuous. Questions and answers I (loosely) got from this: * What needs to be done? -> It's your first job to find out |
| Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation (2010) by Stuart Kelly | Good fun. Scott has suffered one of the sharpest declines in literary reputation ever, from being the toast of Europe and Goethe's idol to being a joke (and a nice railway station). Besides concocting the tartan myth for a royal pageant and anthologising Scots folk heroes, he was himself quite a novelistic man, for instance that time he worked himself to death to pay off his debts. |
| The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013) by Brad Stone | Less critical than I was expecting, still good. The trouble with evaluating leaders (this goes for modern scientists as much as corporate founders) is that they are able to take so much credit for the work of those they hire / train. Even so, Bezos had a lot of ideas - we know this because some failures are attributed to him, putting an upper bound at least on the file-drawer problem of Amazon's creativity. (Stone seems pretty good at tracking down the real inventors. And he literally dug through Bezos' garbage in search of details.) And he is a hyperactive micromanager, pulling conference call screens off the walls, ramming through his pet projects over any amount of opposition:Almost alone, Bezos believed fervently in Prime, closely tracking sign-ups each day and intervening every timr the retail group dropped its promotions from the home page. The management style is/was macho, with an uneasy mix of flat objectivity (if you show the maths of your idea works, you are likely to get serious consideration) and imperial whim (like making everyone write meeting notes in full prose - which is based on no science in particular). Bezos treats workers like expendable resources without taking into account their contributions to the company. That in turn allows him to coldly allocate capital and manpower and make hyperrational business decisions where another executive might let personal relationships intrude. But they also acknowledge that Bezos is primarily consumed with improving the company's performance and customer service... Some of Stone's anecdotes about this or that mid-level exec are neither funny nor illustrative, and make this feel like a reference text. I suppose there should be one. With them so dominant now, it's easy to forget the stock crashing to $10, or Amazon being seriously threatened by a single Lehman analyst, or all the many failures like Auctions or zShops or A9.com. And that they really were another garage operation that took over the world. Stone does push back a bit - the "two-pizza team" idea gets uncritically celebrated in business, but Stone says that the actual teams hate it. I'm fascinated by Bezos making each team come up with their own objective function - but apparently this is also hated, on "digging our own grave" grounds. (Isn't any quantified performance metric hated?) Then there's the context switch that makes the billions seem small: since he was a child, Bezos seems to honestly see himself as shepherding humanity into space, with Amazon a means to that end. Not enough coverage of just how weird Amazon is, in terms of shareholder quiescence, the astonishing amount of cheap capital it hoovers up, its terrible reputation among 90s and 00s analyst as a "nonprofit scam". It was almost never profitable for 20 straight years, but people kept throwing money into the bubble... which has stopped being a bubble (because of AWS, not really retail). The tiny tax burden that people decry should start growing, and antitrust attention too. No attention to what we should expect of Amazon's effect on literature and ideas, given the mass die-off of local bookshops and the weakening of gatekeeper publishers. (I don't know what the effect is either, but if I wrote a book about them I hope I would have a go.) Skimmed a bit, e.g. 2004, the Zappos chapter, |
| Extremes () by Duncan Needham | Good, oddly poppy proceedings from an academic conference. A BBC war correspondent and a cross-ocean rower, and Nassim Taleb. Some of them are extremely mathsy, some of them cite Stephen Covey and Carl Jung as authorities on the human condition. The Taleb talk is a peach, the first big idea I've seen from him in years, "the tableau of fat tails": all distributions can be split qualitatively by their potential for extremes using a couple of parameters (fig 4). This unifies . (He attributes some of it to a risk academic called Embrechts, idk.) An expensive diverse magazine, then. |
| Economic Philosophy (1962) by Joan Robinson | The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all. (That looks glib, but in context - a Keynesian socialist critique - it's not. It's an inconvenient fact in that framework, and as such it's a clue to the grand trajectory we are all unequally traversing under this doubly-maligned mixed system.) A relative insider being pessimistic about economics' prospects of ever becoming a Science. This coupling of economy to metaphysical matters suited me at the time. But there has been an empirical turn in economics (though decades after this), and I no longer look for a binary Science/Nonscience judgment. (After all, even particle physics is ridden with cognitive bias.) Instead there are only differing concentrations of objectivity / naturalism / quantification / successful prediction / insensitivity to speaker prestige / empiricism. |
| Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929) by Ivor A. Richards | One of the only pieces of literary theory I made it through, in two years of university English. Good solid helpful stuff, not capital-t-Theory. |
| Why Most Things Fail (2005) by Paul Ormerod | Clever stuff from one of the Great Recession predictors. Think I'll reread it eventually. |
| The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (2001) by Mark Lilla | Jaspers: "How can such an uncultivated man like Adolf Hitler govern Germany?" Denunciation of the terrible politics of some academic darlings (Heidegger, Foucault, Benjamin, Carl Schmitt). The common theme is that their philosophies so radically distorted their perception, that their interventions in politics were inevitably harmful. Lilla tries to make the edginess and procrustean attitudes of these men reflect badly on all philosophy, or philosophers in civil society. This doesn't work - think of Smith's influence, or Mill's, or Russell's, or Bentham's - though it might be true of a certain kind of Continental, the kind incentivised to say novel things regardless of their truth or consequences, I don't know. Possibly I reacted so strongly because this was the first dissent against these great nasty obscurantists I'd seen; other writing by Lilla hasn't impressed me, and though the targets of this book are bipartisan, his agenda is too plain. Good old Jaspers comes out very well from all this, anyway, an Obi-wan figure: I beseech you! if ever we shared philosophical impulses, take responsibility for your gifts! Place it in the service of reason, or of the reality of human worth & possibilities, instead of in the service of magic! |
| Escalator (2006) by Michael Gardiner | Racism, the specific overwhelming of the modern city ("hyper-reality"), economic and family pressure, handled subtly and desperately. |
| Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming (2010) by Marijn Haverbeke | Verbose, thoughtful and extremely well-implemented. On the "normal" side of a growing tradition of artful tech textbooks – Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, Learn You a Haskell, Land of Lisp. Hides the specific things you need to know about JS – its mad liberal syntax, semicolon insertion, functors, – among a My First Programming. But no harm in seeing what one knows already. Fantastic for noobs. [Here] |
| On Being a Data Skeptic (2013) by Cathy O'Neil | Extremely sane and salutary; along with MacAskill and Gates, this was one of the books I felt worth schematising, to hold its insights close; bullet list forthcoming. She appears to have taken a (book-selling?) pessimistic turn in the years since (but I haven't read that one yet). |
| The Ig Nobel Prizes (2002) by Marc Abrahams | Sublimely silly: my favourite piece of modern art. The joke is the same each time – informality in formal contexts – but like modern art it's the framing makes them. The titles alone: Williams & Newell (1993) 'Salmonella Excretion in Joy-riding Pigs'; Along with RetractionWatch and LessWrong and Andrew Gelman, this was one of my ways into actual science from pop science. |
| The Wasp Factory (1984) by Iain Banks | None yet |
| Wolf in White Van (2014) by John Darnielle | None yet |
| Maskerade (Discworld, #18; Witches #5) (1995) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Fortress Besieged (1947) by Qian Zhongshu | "I talked to Bertie about his marriages and divorces once," Shenming said. "He said that there's a saying in English that marriage is like a gilded birdcage. The birds outside want to get in, and the birds inside want to get out, he said, so divorce leads to marriage and marriage leads to divorce and there's never any end to it." Two books: one farce (A Confederacy of Dunces meets the Campus Trilogy - which would be the highest praise, if those books didn't have contradictory goals and tones), one soft Bovary tragedy. Internationalist (most characters speak another language), if only for comic effect. The main character, Fang Hongjian ("Grand Drippy Square" or maybe "Local Big Soak"), is a pompous fraud who slowly realises that all of his fellow intellectuals are the same. Forced to adlib a speech on what he learned about the West during his long (bogus) studies there, he comes up with: there are only two items from the West which have been lasting in Chinese society. One is opium, and the other is syphilis. These are what the Ming dynasty assimilated of Western civilization. The Japanese invade midway through but are just a nuisance to Fang, who is much more vexed by his parents messing with his marriage. People complain about the translation, but they've done that with three different translations, so maybe the stodginess is in the original too, and its air of cosmopolitan, Wodehousian lightness is just air. |
| Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier (2011) by Edward L. Glaeser | Engrossing optimistic catalogue of the counter-intuitions that urban economics provides us: "poverty can mean a city's doing well, since the poor wouldn't stay, otherwise", "cities are greener and more democratic (smaller houses, less travel, scale utilities)", "zoning laws ensure prices are too high, apartments too small, congestion, sprawl, slums and corruption", "people are less unhappy and less suicidal in cities". Glaeser's aims are larger than simple Gladwellian gee-whizzing: he's out to get a prevailing anti-city mood (e.g. Blake, Rousseau, Thoreau, hippies). Explains why art is urban, why we didn't have good ideas before settlements, the origins of the restaurant (in a crap Parisian health-food place), the skyscraper, and the global bank Chase Manhattan (in a scam defrauding money meant for NY's first public water supply). Valuing the devalued, staying within evidential warrant, and honest about the achievements of public agencies. |
| Going Postal (Discworld, #33; Moist von Lipwig, #1) (2004) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy (2017) by Tim Harford | Harford is among the best pop science writers. There are shout-outs to Nick Bostrom and other luminaries in this. Harford has a slightly tragic consciousness of backlash and double-effect of some of these (e.g. tetra-ethyl lead). So easy to read I forgot I had. |
| Darwin's Watch (The Science of Discworld, #3) (2005) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Wings (Bromeliad Trilogy, #3) (1990) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| The Little Prince (1943) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | None yet |
| Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (1992) by Stephen E. Ambrose | Was obsessed with this when I was small, probably because of the swears and gore. |
| The Rough Guide to Classical Music (1998) by Rough Guides | Rough it til you make it |
| An Introduction to Mathematical Economics: Methods and Applications () by G.C. Archibald, Richard G. Lipsey | None yet |
| Epistemic Analysis: A Coherence Theory of Knowledge (1984) by Paul Ziff | I know that there is no [demiurge], but what if I were wrong? I am not, but I could be, but I am not, though I may be. I no longer find coherentism even the kind of thing that would constitute an answer to the question "what is knowledge? / what is justification?". But this is so beautiful. |
| Island (1962) by Aldous Huxley | His last book: a half-rational vehicle for his late contrarian mystical worldview; in fact it reads as his making amends for the vivid bioconservative paranoia of Brave New World. It certainly handles the same themes, simply inverted in their consequences: we see drugs as enablers of enlightenment; a much healthier view of suffering, as a pointless trap; a surprisingly pragmatic view of genetic engineering; and a very balanced view of civilisation and economic development. So: he constructs a Taoist-Hindu-Buddhist utopia which mostly avoids primitivism and annoying mysticism for a sustainable East plus West non-industrial modernity. It's not my idea of paradise, but other people's utopias usually aren't. Moreover, it is a doomed utopia nestled in nasty 1950s international political economy. The animating enemy of Island is not the authoritarian consequences of technology, but what Scott Alexander calls Moloch: the forces of self-fulfilling inevitability and destructive competition. Protagonist is a mirror of John the Savage: an open-minded liar and shill, a fallen outsider who manages to undermine the utopia he infiltrates. Huxley himself is the model for him: in fact we can see Will's journey from cynical aestheticism to materialist spirituality as autobiography in allegory. The mystic character, Rani, is amazing: an enraging theosophical flake. This reflects well on Huxley's own weirdness: the Rani is as far from traditional organised religion as Huxley is from her. Given the times and his project, lots of Huxley's worldview have become clichés: e.g. "you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now ". The prose is arch and syrupy but I like it. (BNW is saddled by the air of a smug jeremiad. Island is every bit as didactic but nowhere near as smug.) It's chock-full of bad poetry though. I love his use of reported speech to denote characters he disrespects: this saves him the bother of writing it and us the bother of reading and makes a conspiracy of us and Huxley:
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| The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins | I'm a fourth-generation nonbeliever, in wishy-washy-secular Britain; really not sure why I got so caught up in New Atheism. Felt dead good to rebel against a weakened enemy with no recourse, I guess. I can't remember much false in this, though these days I'd quibble with his argument against agnosticism ("we can't get conclusive evidence against the existence of gods, but the probability is low enough that in any other domain we'd have warrant for full disbelief; and 'atheism' is just this very-low-probability-assignment"). This is an argument against the word 'agnosticism' and is pointless except in PR terms. |
| The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't (2012) by Nate Silver | None yet |
| Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction (1996) by Luciano Floridi | Whistle-stop hyperbole in the way of Continentals, but grounded by technical knowledge and uncliched. (Owing to its techno-optimism: it is uncliched to be a philosopher optimistic about tech.)The history of modern thought has been characterised by an increasing gap between mind and reality. It is a process of epistemic detachment which has been irresistible ever since it began, and quite inevitably so. Knowledge develops as mind's answer to the presence of the non-mental. It is the means whereby the subject establishes a minimal distance, and emancipates itself, from the object. The rise of dualism and the escalating interaction between traditional knowledge, as an object, and innovative knowledge, as a further reaction to it, has led to the emergence of a new world. Notice the skilled and non-fatuous use of phenomenological blah! Chapter 2, his fast and very formal discussion of Boole, Gödel and Turing, took me about half a week. The tiny concluding chapter – in which he locates computers in the history of human freedom, as Hephaestean handmaids – makes me giddy. Slightly dated where it talks PC specs, and he loves a goofy neologism ("egology", "corporeal membranes"), but grand, sceptical, grand, supervenient. (His 'Informational Nature of Personal Identity' and 'Turing's Three Lessons' are better.) |
| Children of Time (Children of Time, #1) (2015) by Adrian Tchaikovsky | Initially, this looked like a Brin rip-off, or a Vinge rip-off, or even a Pratchett rip-off. And the prose is just serviceable. Title sucks too. But it blooms: the long evolutionary pathway it follows - from a spider jeeust 'thinking' that pack hunting might be a good idea, to a full manned space program - is excellent. The alternative technological route is the great bit - what would industry look like without fossil fuel, a mechanised society without metal? - and the protagonist spiders who find the route are easy to empathise with. Ants are used as robots, factories, laboratories, and eventually as CPUs: There are hundreds of tamed ant colonies within Great Nest, not counting those in the surrounds that undertake the day-to-day business of producing food, clearing ground or fending off incursions of wild species. Each colony has been carefully trained, by subtle manipulation of punishment, reward and chemical stimulus, to perform a specific service, giving the great minds access to a curious kind of difference engine. {over-literal bull-shit} (Their bioengineering stuff is actually more realistic than Vinge's spiders' breakneck 50-year sprint through the C20th and C21st centuries, even if you include the Uplifting virus. This is because Vinge's telling is deterministic - they discover all the same stuff as us, in mostly the same order - and their culture a cartoon of ours.) His other successful theme is incomprehension: females not understanding male liberation, spiders not understanding how a depressed solitary human could be sentient, Kern not understanding anything. (Mostly the spider gender politics are boring, just bizarro patriarchy with a cannibal twist.) The main antagonist, the mad hubristic scientist starts off dull and strawish (why did it take 300 years for her to ask what rough genus the spiders were?) but the moment she stops that stuff and reaches across the species barrier is quite beautiful. Also, Tchaikovsky often drops out of the Spiders' worldview mid-sentence to telegraph what you, a human, should be thinking of all this (an example is the use of "curious" in the passage above). The humans are less interesting, fairly stock generation-shippers. There is this inversion, that the scholar of dead languages is Key Crew, plot-critical all the time: To study and laud those antique psychopaths during the Earth's last toxic days had seemed bad taste. Nobody liked a classicist. Anyway worthwhile, momentarily dazzling. *** How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: Lots. The spiders' matriarchal anarchism is shown with realistic downsides. The ark ship humans go through several revolutions and regressions. Software development: Some, but all pretty high-level. Thousands of years of uptime for some systems, with only hints at how to keep it going. Some nice linguistic archaeology. Actual Science: Mostly evo bio, little bit of computer science and crypto maybe. |
| Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future (2014) by Peter Thiel | What we hate about business books is their clichés, their fawning, their Panglossian grin, their being completely invalid because they don't consider survivorship bias, and their prose. This one avoids all these things and is radical in an unconventional way.* It's hard to know what to think of Thiel. He's easy to demonise - much easier than his loudmouth peer Musk. For instance, he's anti-college, anti-affirmative-action, anti-Clinton - and even openly anti-competition! (And a vampire!) But I've been impressed with his clarity and sense of proportion in interviews, and nowhere here did I find the Girardian anti-humanist conservatism that Gawker, Vulture, Vox, (...) made me expect. For instance, this spiel moves me every time I hear it - the billions of hours we steal from children every year: We teach every young person the same subjects in the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don't learn best by sitting at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality. and similarly plaintive and humane bits: Why work with a group of people who don't even like each other? Many seem to think it's a sacrifice necessary for making money. But taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: it's not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset, it's odd to spend it working with people who don't envision any long-term future together. If you can't count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven't invested your time well—even in purely financial terms. He is simply not simple. There are four positive references to Marx, four to Zuckerberg; two to Shakespeare, two to Bezos. He is a revisionist, then, intolerable to one side and oddly scathing about the other. (The chapter which translates Google's public rhetoric is not complimentary, for instance.) His niche seems to be the repugnant but true. So, like Taleb without the bluster and boasting. Which feels bizarre, like I'm in a different timeline where Taleb is actually aiming to not alienate a mass audience. He says true things about things I know about: the history of economic thought (Walras did indeed lift the formalism of general equilibrium from physics) and the deadened air of contemporary Political Philosophy. His contribution to Trump's campaign was risible and maybe a defection against the world - but notice that even this lapse speaks to his ability to find unexpected truths - FiveThirtyEight gave an 80% chance of a Clinton win at that point. So maybe his analysis and helpful checklist for startups are true too. It's a shame few critics of capitalism will read this - for he is one, in his way: Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: If you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business. (Of actually-existing capitalism I mean.) How on earth can you argue that monopolies give more social utility than high competition? First, distinguish three kinds: 1) criminal saboteurs and antitrustees (Apple); 2) government-licenced pets (US car dealers, the East India Companies); and 3) "creative monopolies" who gain their massive market share by doing something much, much better than everyone else. Obviously only the latter is good for society. I was recently rushing to the airport, and pulled the quickest route (via underground via train via foot) from Google Maps. On the way, I noticed a sign in the Tube and realised that actually a different line was a much shorter route. So I walked 10 mins to that line, to find, of course, that it was suspended all weekend and, consequently, that Google is better at my life than I am. This is what he means. He goes further and says that the spare resources and vision of a creative monopoly is the source of innovation and so
The model is structurally the same as the old one about the Agrarian revolution: farms meant that for the first time, not everyone had to work full-time on food production, which let them specialise in other roles (war, gods, justice, lore) and eventually - slowly - invent new things. Even so, I thought of an alternative road to dynamism, given perfect competition and so no profits: competition leads to low prices, which leads to savings, which are pooled into investment funds, which give entrepreneurs the same kind of space (and potentially the long view) that profits do. Other people would not use the word "monopoly", trying to manage the connotations, trying to persuade us by smoothing things over. This is not Thiel's strategy. One chapter argues that "Success is not just luck", mostly on the back of the existence of serially successful entrepreneurs (it is plausible that once could be luck, and plausible that one success brings massive funding, deserved or not. It isn't plausible that someone could dumbly blunder into 3 billion-dollar executions, even given the easy ride for the second and third). It pains me slightly to admit the latter, because it tints my otherwise complete loathing of Steve Jobs. --- Misc notes * He notes that the term "developed nations" is a sign of our lack of ambition, of a premature, smug, quasi-willed halt. * The dot-com boom was even crazier than you thought: A South Korean firm wired us $5 million without first negotiating a deal or signing any documents. When I tried to return the money, they wouldn't tell me where to send it. * It is not yet clear whether killing Gawker was good or bad. Either way, like his Trump donation, you must acknowledge the sheer gall and direction. * One should do a Straussian (between-the-lines) reading of anyone smart, conservative and public, because there will be a lot that's unsayable. I don't care to. The few who knew what could be learned, * Actually hold on. The man's a transhumanist, an anti-school radical, a funder of one of our only large-scale experiments in urban planning or libertarianism, a rationalist. Why do we call him a conservative? --- Short, original, modest, and he credits his ghostwriter on the cover. Minus one point because it makes 200 large claims in 200 pages and has no citations for anything. * Thinking about it, it's not so much that he avoids cliche, as that the erudite context defangs them. |
| Statistics: A Very Short Introduction (2008) by David J. Hand | Was looking for a qualitative introduction to convey something of the excitement and philosophical importance - the art of discovering anything which isn't bleedin' obvious! nor knowable apriori! This has bits of that ("Statistics is applied philosophy of science"; "it is the technology for handling uncertainty") but is still too dry to recommend as a first exposure. He diagnoses the worst parts of university teaching: hand calculations, canned inference, and the (exhausting, interminable) bag-of-tools approach, rather than computers and The Framework. But the latter have steep learning curves. I think the biggest thing missing is simple tailoring of datasets: let them pick something they care about to study, to learn how to study on. Lots of ML methods covered, without a single mention of the phrase "machine learning". This is fair enough if you consider how much of (enterprise) ML hype is just rebranded 40 year old stats. Hand notes the origins of the field - as State-istics, i.e. as the beginning of bureaucracy and surveillance. But he doesn't feel the tension of this fact: that it helped to transform us, for good and ill, into legible people. One dodgy idea: he claims that numbers offer a more direct apprehension of reality than words, that they're realer. But this isn't why they're better: they're better because they're more sensitive - it's at least possible for them to track any size change in the world, while words are mostly stuck to medium-sized dry goods - and because they are easier to spot errors in. |
| Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner (2003) by Michael Dawson | Gifted this when I was a teen. Wish I'd paid more attention, would've saved me about 5 years. |
| Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny: My Autobiography () by Limmy | Auto theft, fanny fright, incompetent but dogged self-harm, raving and tripping as self-medication, dole stupor, bail skipping, the death drive, pretend machismo, pretend homosexuality, alcoholism, Flash animation, BBC showrunner. Not very funny but very entertaining. (His shows are funny.) I could have guessed that he'd had a life like this from his characters; so much authentic idiocy, lunacy, awkwardness, pretension, and pettiness. Surprised that Dee-Dee is based on his own trippy blankness; Limmy's so sharp these days. He crosses into the middle class through IT, anxious about looking like the 'wee ned guy' in the office. And then into Design (a colony of the Art world, where a rough background's a bonus), and then to TV comedy, and then to streaming, where rawness and obliquity and patter means dollas. It's a nice story. It's about being strange in a normal, subclinical* way: intrusive thoughts, groundless anxiety, reduced affect display, auditory hallucination, mild paranoia, misanthropy, hysteroid dysphoria. I must sound like a fuckin robot tae you. But it's just the way I'm wired. I never felt sad about my mum dying. The deep function of laughter is apparently that it allows play / boundary learning / questioning social norms. So to be a comedian, you have be a step past your society. (I doubt funniness is linear in weirdness though.) And Limmy is obviously out there. He regularly tweets about how much he misses drinking (which I've never seen an alcoholic do), and satirises the now-daily flamewars of the shouting classes by taking absurd and alternating stances on every issue (...) . I know several people with the same mix of terrible impulses and good intentions, charisma and anti-social solitude: folk whose adolescence lasted twenty years. They're the funniest people I know, by far. I don't know how class comes into it, but they're all working-class. Maybe middle-class people as strange as them direct it inward, rather than outward as comedy or violence. (They're also all Scots but that's a selection effect, I hope.) Audiobook's worth it - the prose is very plain and his accent's strong but clear. Fans only, but you should be a fan. --- * There are also dozens of suicidal episodes though. |
| All Flesh Must Be Eaten (2003) by Al Bruno | None yet |
| What A Mess (1977) by Frank Muir | None yet |
| Economic Development (1993) by Michael P. Todaro | The first piece of economics I remember actually understanding, probably because it got under my guard by being undeniably, obviously about matters of life and death, hope and justice, and what's around the corner, and how maths can help. (Specifically Todaro's own model of urban migration.) |
| A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole | '...I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me.' "Have you read widely in Boethius?" Funny, loving portrait of Arts grad pretension / wilful ineffectuality, and of New Orleans. (Ignatius is a dogmatic Boethian, but the pattern repeats in neo-Aristotelians, neo-Thomists, ecocriticism, technocriticism, Heideggerians...) Ignatius is a perfect tragicomic figure, managing to be both physically and intellectually parochial (he never leaves Norleans) and but eloquent and ridiculously overconfident. But it's about twice as long as it should be. |
| Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1) (1985) by Orson Scott Card | Bit with Demosthenes and Locke was memorable (two children pulling the strings of the world media, less implausible than the aliens in this). |
| What's Left? (2007) by Nick Cohen | This hurt. |
| Science Made Stupid: How to Discomprehend the World Around Us (1985) by Tom Weller |  Once... the comman man had no hope of mastering the arcane complexities of the secrets of science. Years of study in musty classrooms were prerequisite to obtaining even a dim, incoherent knowledge of science.
Couple of solid jokes and lots of great drawings. Some of its shtick was later redone by Brass Eye and Look Around You, but that is no real objection. |
| Evolving Ourselves (2015) by Juan Enriquez | Broad-minded venture capitalists seek to update Darwinism in the light of new human capabilities. 100 tiny chapters on some facet of modern genetics and modern genomes and epigenomes and microbiomes... They're infectiously excited, but it's a bit light, sugary. |
| The Eternity Code (Artemis Fowl, #3) (2003) by Eoin Colfer | None yet |
| Artemis Fowl (Artemis Fowl, #1) (2001) by Eoin Colfer | None yet |
| Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding | None yet |
| Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson | "Don't try." |
| Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine (2013) by Paul A. Offit | Heinous illusions leech £200bn off the world's vulnerables, annually. The problems of CAM have been covered with more originality and verve by Goldacre / Singh & Ernst, but Offit covers its history, as well as some newer meta-analyses (2005: n=136,000 finds increased mortality from dosing vitamin E. 2008: Cochrane (n=230,000) concludes multivits correlate weakly with increase in cancer and heart disease risk, further confirmed in 2011). But you can't hear these ideas too often: there's no such thing as conventional or alternative medicine (only stuff that works and stuff that doesn't); everything is chemicals; origin is irrelevant to chemistry; too much of a good thing is lethal; the natural is not always or generally good. Offit is too quick to jump from the conclusive weak-magnitude evidence against multivitamins (particularly overdosing vitamins A, C, and E) to his attack on all supplementation. For instance: some two-thirds of the world is deficient in vitamin D; few people get enough magnesium through their food; and it's uncontroversial that vegans should supplement B12. But we're not really in conflict, because he'd change his mind if he looked at the evidence, and we each accept that (publically-funded) science will out the truth. Prose 2/5, ideas 4/5. (I read this under an edition called Killing Us Softly.) |
| Niubi!: The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School (2009) by Eveline Chao | Actually I was - but only because my lăoshī was a saucy linguistics grad who warned me not to practice the tricky phoneme 日 or 入 on the street, or ever to shout "3-8!". Anyway this is funny and valuable for understanding the place's (otherwise inaccessible) working-class or web or queer registers – and for generally not seeming like a prig. So: language is fossilised sociology; Chao excavates what would take us decades. She begins with slurs of all sorts, but doesn't list any homophobia – claiming it isn't a well-rooted hatred there (…). There's loads and loads of ableism, though. Gets more serious as it goes, with whole chapters on gay culture and web 'activism' (恶搞 is 'evildoings', lulz). This turns up details like the infallibly hilarious "potato queen". I also loved her decoding the ancient innuendoes: 云雨 (clouds and rain), 鱼水之欢 (the fish and the water, happy together), 余桃 (sharing peaches), or "playing the bamboo flute" or "bamboo harmonica". (BTW, the title term is 牛屄 – 'Cow-cunt' – and means "Awesome!". It is generally not included in mainstream Hanzi keyboard programs.) |
| Pro Git (2009) by Scott Chacon | Neal Stephenson once hyperbolised the situation in OS choice as follows:
This is overstated; Debian and Ubuntu, the chief consumer descendents, are as buggy as any other. But the very same people built Git, and it is a battle-tank. Fast, unbreakable and life-saving. Why hasn't it taken over the world, outside of tech industry? 1) most people don't need non-linear incremental backups; 2) the learning curve is bloody steep even for techies. Entities that you need to know about to use Git without absurdity: the files, the working tree, the index, many local repositories, many remote repositories, 'remotes' (pointers to remote repositories), commits, treeishes (pointers to commits), branches, a stash This book covers so much of the internal detail, the gotchas, the customisability, and comparisons with other source-control systems that it was adopted as canonical docs by the official working group. Skip sections at will, but do have a go. [Free here] |
| The Data Science Handbook () by Field Cady | Was looking for an intro text for my academic mates who aren't techie mates: this turned out to be it. Covers all the important boring stuff (file formats, coding practices) and a bit of the flashy stuff (CNNs, Keras) and was written specifically to drag maths PhDs into basic competence. Not to be confused with this puffery. |
| The Elements of Data Analytic Style (2015) by Jeff Leek | Pleasant, readable, sensible. This bit's good, tells you exactly how most social science is limited (it stops at inferential, and sometimes manages to mess even that up): |
| Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969) by Ronald Blythe | None yet |
| The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) by Mark Haddon | Likeable! |
| Wankers () by Christian Robshaw | Fun, thoughtful, especially for music nerds."Look, bollocks! Pixies seem to be an act that, while little appreciated within their own lifetime, have retrospectively come to be seen as one of the greats, and while, in that respect, they can be compared to The Velvet Underground or even Joy Division, where they differ from the latter two acts is that, in spite of all that obfuscating acclaim, they never actually produced a full LP of unskippable tracks." – good going Sooty actually, you can be so eloquent! – [much more] There is some masturbation but it's a minor theme. Nor is the title writing off the characters as actively unpleasant - they're at worst a little pretentious. I think it's as in onanism, narcissism, not thinking of your effect on others. Pleasing yourself. There's no explicit moral though: it neither condemns pleasing yourself nor reclaims it as a real ethics. You get the reflection that sneaking away from your hookup is a bad way to ensure seeing them again. High Fidelity is the obvious comparator, but Sooty is less dysfunctional, more optimistic, much less dependent on true love to save him. St Aubyn is the preferred comparator - of the inability to really control oneself, of moral luck and lack of luck.
Lots of true London colour - Pret as inescapable, unthreatening, premium-mediocre locus; the fossil Club culture; the agglomeration, in this absurdly expensive place, of poorly-paid, ambiguously Cultural people from all over. |
| Introducing Speech and Language Processing (2005) by John Coleman | None yet |
| Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem (1997) by Simon Singh | Good. Lucid in many places ("any logic which relies on a conjecture is conjecture"). Does well in using plain language to communicate some of the exciting complexity and dismaying complication of higher maths (but not as well as Kanigel on Ramanujan). |
| The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky (2005) by Joel Spolsky | Odd beast: a time capsule where half the items are of purely historical interest, and half are general and extremely wise arguments that are still not acted upon today. He had planned them to be annual collections, but they didn't happen, so this looks to represent more than one year's best. Recent enough to tell us something about the internet, though with lots of anachronism. But it's more at the lexical level - "weblog", "Sociable media" - than the semantic. Found (eminent media researcher) danah boyd ludicrous: she calls developers autistic, and calls people with several online identities multiple-personality disordered (a person is one person. So all their activities have to be one person!) Disappointing, typical social theory. She aggressively pushes a horrendous risky single-sign-in for all sites based on these shitty polemics and nothing else. Contains helpful principles which will not age:, e.g. "if you can't understand the spec for a new technology, don't worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won't be that important". [Various]</li> |
| The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements (2009) by Nils J. Nilsson | A sweet informal history of AI research from a Stanford doyen. In places it is actually oral history - ...Jack was the Director of DARPA from 1987 to 1989 and presided over some cutbacks in AI research (including the cancellation of one of my own research projects) Like any history, the history of computing is full of little myths - e.g. that Lovelace was the first programmer, that von Neumann originated stored-program memory, that ENIAC was the first true computer, that hardware and software is a clean and natural division in kind... Nilsson calmly lets out the air of these and more. [Free here] |
| The First Computers: History and Architectures (2000) by Raul Rojas | Papers from an obscure and high-calibre conference: the presenters include an inventor of ALGOL, Turing's assistant on the ACE... Lots of details you can't find elsewhere - like the first ever fully-electronic computer (Hoelzer's unknown 50 Jahre Analog Computer). 4/5, only if you are into this corner of the world. |
| Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) by Thomas Piketty | Was very impressed by this first time round, but the subsequent scholarly pushback convinces me it's too flawed to endorse without including this list of corrections: * Magness: Piketty's data don't account for bias in income tax reporting. This undermines his claim that inequality is now as bad as it was in the early 1900s: when tax codes change dramatically, as they did through the pre-war period and in 1986, the data become unrepresentative (without adjustment). After adjustment, it looks like inequality fell much less in the postwar boom and has risen much less, post-80s. Piketty's core claims:
The above research finds that the first is true in some places (in the UK, the US and Canada?), but each of the middle three is questionable. (4) could happen but we're not given much reason to think it inevitable. Summary: Piketty's data collection and descriptive work is mostly good, his analysis and modelling is flawed enough to undo his policy recommendations (5). ----- The resentful econ undergrad in me thrilled to see Piketty saying this: To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in. There is one great advantage of being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything. He's keen to emphasise his ideological hygiene, that he's a real-deal empiricist. Weighed down by overstatement of its own achievement ("the fundamental laws of capitalism"). With a few more diagrams and boxed definitions, this would make an excellent intro macro textbook, gentle and empirically obsessive as it is. Lot of redundancy - whoa-there steady-now summary paragraphs every few pages - but I suppose that's what you need to do if you aim to be understood by policymakers. |
| Seven Languages in Seven Weeks (2010) by Bruce A. Tate | Very approachable, but the exercises are repetitive. (My reading group stopped at Prolog, too irritated to go on.) Useful for searching through some very different languages, if you're new or aren't sure what you're looking for. |
| Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2016) by Cathy O'Neil | Important and flawed. It is very hard to think clearly about these things (witness the many inconsistent uses of the term "bias" in the field) but O'Neil goes some way toward this. She is more balanced than average, recognising that algorithms can be an improvement over human bias and pettiness (she praises FICO scores as the liberating thing it was, moving money from those bank managers liked to reliable people of any stripe). Following recent convention, she calls the decision systems 'algorithms'. But it isn't the inaccurate abstract program that does the harm, but the credulous lack of validation. Programs only do harm when they are allowed to make or guide decisions. See also "recommender systems", "info filtering systems", "decision-making systems", "credit scoring". Her framework is useful. When is a system dangerous?: Opacity Is the subject aware they are being modelled? Scale Does the model make decisions about many thousands of people? Damage Does the model work against the subject's interests? [Data #2, Theory #1, Theory #3, Values #1]</li> |
| Doing Data Science (2013) by Rachel Schutt | The first third is: Talking About Data Science. But that's good; two careful, socially conscious techies talking is nice, and you would never get the dozens of handy heuristics in this from a usual STEM textbook. Crunchier than it looks - half the value is in the dull-looking, unannotated code samples at the end of each chapter, and isn't spelled out. Pedagogy! It is galling, then, that the data for chapters 6 and 8 has already link-rotted away. And half of the cool startups who came to talk to the class are dead and forgotten already. Only worth it if you can find the data. [Thinking #1, Theory 5 #2]</li> |
| Thrilling Cities (1963) by Ian Fleming | Before he was very famous, he got paid to go round the world and recommend hotels and restaurants. But being Fleming, he threw in lots of cynical and lascivious detail. And the travel-guide parts have passed right through "uselessly dated" and come back round to "interesting as history". As you expect, his cruelty is blunt and monotone, spanning the nations and races. But he is strangely aware of this.
Shallow, witty, diverting. If this is a man. |
| Thin Air (2018) by Richard K. Morgan | Mind candy. Blasted through it in two sittings. People persist in calling Morgan's writing noir, but it's too free and fulfilled to be noir - his protagonists get laid all the time, his protagonists swear, his protagonists dish out a great deal more than they get. Morgan makes cyberpunk look subtle. But it's cool stuff and I've read everything he's written, even though half of it reuses the same kind of super-protagonist, the same kind of dialogue, the same kind of gimmick weapons, the same kind of grimdark Chomskyan geopolitics (arespolitics). But the prose is mostly fast and smart enough to carry it off, again. Ideas: * Codeflies, artificial mosquitoes as delivery mechanism for compulsory updates to implants. Hellish. |
| Basic Statistics: Understanding Conventional Methods and Modern Insights (2009) by Rand R. Wilcox | None yet |
| Evolution as a Religion (Routledge Classics) (1985) by Mary Midgley | The title gives an extremely misleading idea; you'd think it was a standard ignorant tu quoque work of romantic theism. But it isn't. Instead she traces how easy it is for scientists (including acknowledged lucid greats like Wilson, Tegmark) to slip into philosophy and end up committing howlers. |
| Rendezvous with Rama (Rama, #1) (1973) by Arthur C. Clarke | Didn't get it, but I was quite young. |
| Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez | Less soppy than I expected. Ending is great. |
| Bully for Brontosaurus (1991) by Stephen Jay Gould | This meant a lot to me as a teen. Just one bit: the essay "Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples" - with its shocking claim that only 30% of women orgasm from "PIV" intercourse - scandalised me. (He bases this on the notably shoddy work of Kinsey and Hite, but it may be worse than that.) The main point of that piece - using the pleasure-poor design of the two genitalia to attack a straw man view he calls "hyperadaptationism" - had less effect on me, luckily. There are odd synopses of each essay here. (I give general reasons to distrust Gould here.) |
| David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (2012) by Marco Livingstone | Superficially superficial, wholly lovable, highly postmodern. This whole retrospective is on his recent distinctive work in the Yorkshire woods. The words are less annoying than usual for coffee-table-badge books. Keep looking til you like it. |
| Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History (1998) by Stephen Jay Gould | Start by listing Gould's virtues: passionate about paleontology and paleontologists, contagiously curious about nature and obscure history, scrupulously fair to the religious and the pre-modern, animated by justice. For an academic, his prose is highly flavoursome and fun. He has a considered opinion about Darwin's handwriting and the meaning of baseball. One of his essay collections was very important to me as a teen, showing me that I could unify truth-seeking and justice-seeking, and with style. But this is all countermanded, because he is just not trustworthy on human topics, and neither on core evolutionary theory, I'm told. From his enormously influential, fallacious dismissal of intelligence research in general and Morton in particular, to his dishonest coup of public discourse over punctuated equilibrium (pushing the flashy and revolutionary version in literary magazines, retreating to minimal and uncontentious forms in the science journals who could actually evaluate it), he muddied the waters even as he brandished real literary talent and noble political intentions. This is unforgiveable: empirical clarity is too rare and precious to sacrifice so. Maynard Smith: "Gould" the protagonist is a much loved character who reveals himself to be learned, subtle, open-minded, tolerant, funny, gracious to his opponents, a tireless adversary of cultural prejudice, able to swim upstream against popular opinion with unflinching moral courage, able to pierce the surface appearances that capture others, and indeed to be not only the most brilliant innovator in biology since Darwin, but more importantly to be the voice of humane reason against the forces of ignorance, passion, incuriousity, and injustice. The author Gould, not least because he labors to beguile his audience into confusing his fictional targets with actual people and fields, is sadly none of these things. Yet in the final analysis, there are genuine grounds for hope in the immense and enduring popularity of Gould. Gould is popular, we think, because readers see in "Gould" the embodiment of humane reason, the best aspirations of the scientific impulse. It is this "Gould" that we will continue to honor, and, who, indeed, would fight to bring the illumination that modern evolutionary science can offer into wider use. </i> Along with Lewontin and Rose, Gould mediated a huge contradiction in our culture: they allowed the C20th left to feel we were scientific, in our comfortable blank-slatism. That we had already incorporated the deep challenge of evolutionary biology - since these eminent men told us it had no human implications. Read Gould for fun and uplift, but take great care, for he cares about other things more than truth. (Read Midgley and Singer first if the politics scare you; they might stop you fleeing into Gould's dodgy arms.) From James. The Leonardo and Columbus esays are 4/5.</li> |
| Little Wolf's Diary of Daring Deeds (1996) by Ian Whybrow | None yet |
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1) (1979) by Douglas Adams | None yet |
| Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau | The philosophy is fine, and was plenty nutritious for me, as a teenager: "Think hard, go your own way, don't hurt animals." The nature worship is a red herring, though. |
| Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) by James Gleick | Romantic, dramatic, constructive pop science: the physics, meteorology and maths in this was famed but not well-explained before this came out. The theme of the very different results presented here is unprecedented successes in recognising and explaining nonlinear systems. Very human: every researcher is profiled sensitively, generally as an outsider challenging the stuffy, desk-bound precepts of 'linear science'. Since ornery, heroic Mandelbrot is included here, you get an exciting ride even if you don't like maths or science or the world or the underlying generative process of all instances of beauty. "Chaos" is a bad name for the field: it implies randomness, indeterminism, intractability. Better to question why "order" can only refer to equilibrium or periodic patterns - why it is we think of order as boring. "Deterministic disorder" is more honest - and better yet is Lao-Bin's "order without periodicity". Also, the diagrams are poor by contemporary standards: I had to stare at them for a while before grokking the concept. Borne on what felt like an epochal wave, Gleick overreaches. He calls Smale and Mandelbrot "the end of the reductionist program in science". How is seeking and finding a precise (nonlinear) equation - which is the case in the work of all these men - for a system holist!? I don't actually know if the maths in here has changed everything: maybe it has, and they suffer from the Seinfeld effect for dynamical systems, seeming obvious after the fact. But I do know that the Santa Fe strain of work is more of a tolerated eccentric uncle than a science-upending behemoth. |
| Stumbling on Happiness (2006) by Daniel Todd Gilbert | Warning: Probably hasn't borne the replication crisis well. |
| Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites (2009) by Robin Nixon | Half of the internet runs on PHP, a language which was not initially intended to be used for actual programs. This article, PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design</i></b>, a long list of design criticisms and roaring frustration, is how I learned the language in the first place. It is indispensable, rigorous, and wise. I had to look up not a few terms in it, because I am not a computer scientist at all, but a sneaky back-stairs conversion boy. All inquiry is hard; this might be because the mind was not initially intended to be used for real, permanent inquiry. But an often overlooked fact is that people are looking out for you; that is what half of all books are. In the tech world they cry lookout! a click away. If you care. * I didn't read tech books during my first year, instead just blundering on with the step debugger and StackOverflow. This was a serious mistake, not least because my brain is geared towards book-learning and depth-first top-down imposition of order. This is excellent for people starting from 0, but too slow for anyone with much practical experience. |
| The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald | None yet |
| The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010) by Siddhartha Mukherjee | Here now in his triumph where all things falter, (Swinburne) Quite lyrical but exhausting. All the way from Galen to personal oncogenetics. The section on pre-anesthesia radical surgery was truly nauseating. A horrendous macho fad: Haagensen wrote in 1956: 'it is my duty to carry out as radical an operation as the... anatomy permits.' The sheer amount of money and genius thrown at cancer - with merely gradual returns - is not really considered in terms of its opportunity cost, by Mukherjee of anyone - what diseases might we have cured with those hundreds of billions? What giant, clever prevention studies run? But never mind: cancer won the PR war (against apathy, against political indifference, against more cost-effective causes) very early on, with the chemo pioneer Farber and his use of Jimmy The campaign against cancer, Farber learned, was much like a political campaign: it needed icons, mascots, images, slogans—the strategies of advertising as much as the tools of science. For any illness to rise to political prominence, it needed to be marketed, just as a political campaign needed marketing. A disease needed to be transformed politically before it could be transformed scientifically. and later with the powerful patient blocs. Not sure who would benefit from reading this closely; there's too much detail. Maybe med school freshers? |
| Critique of Pure Reason (1781) by Immanuel Kant | Actually only read the "Transcendental Analytic", only about 1/8th of the whole. Enough. Difficult, flashy apodixis. His arguments are gappy; prose awful; goals anyway radically different from mine (he wanted certainty, exhaustiveness, the establishment of free will at any metaphysical cost: a.k.a. your submission). I don't doubt that there's enough subtlety and complexity to spend a career reading him. I just doubt there's world enough and time for me to return for the rest. |
| Big Java: Late Objects (1991) by Cay S. Horstmann | Relatively friendly intro to the 1000 working concepts of OOP. Java is not the place to start programming but universities love it so this book is a coping strategy. |
| Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (2013) by Melissa Mohr | Cool blast through three-and-a-bit millennia of talk of Christ's bowels and fucking shit. She distinguishes between 'obscenities' and 'oaths' (the first takes profane subjects, the second sacred) and then between the proper and the vain oath (e.g. "Bejasus! Godammit! Hell's teeth!"). Adding the generalisation that 'we swear about what we care about', she can use known changes in the expressive power of swearwords to cleverly trace the movement of taboos across cultures and over time. (Very broadly: power went from Shit's precedence to Holy and now back and with more political terms.) Rome's nasty little sexuality is seen to be the model of a lot of our crap associations; in the Middle Ages vain oaths were criminal while scholars and physicians used 'cunt' in textbooks without heat. In our time, racial slurs (very young as slurs – only around WWII for their worst malevolence) have taken the biscuit from sex, excrement and God - which you can see as encouraging (if that means we now care about the targets of racial language) - or depressing (if that means we now care more about Race, dividing lines for their own sake). Mohr is full of fact without being trivial; she lets graffiti, court records, and primary quotation damn the damnable – e.g. DH Lawrence's holy cock-mysticism, the spume of Twitter bigots. |
| Intermediate Microeconomics: A Modern Approach (1987) by Hal R. Varian | This kicked my arse; it was way above my mathematical level when I first encountered it. |
| The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968) by Judith Kerr | None yet |
| The Princess Bride (1973) by William Goldman | None yet |
| Daft Wee Stories (2015) by Limmy | Happily twisted, fine. His Twitter is a better, million-word performance piece. |
| Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (1974) by P.G. Wodehouse | A bad Wodehouse but better than most books. This late (1974), the dischord and ugliness of the real world encroaches a bit: I think at this juncture I may have looked askance at him a bit. I hadn't realized that that was what he was, and it rather shocked me, because I'm not any too keen on Communists. "And I am a man who likes nice things. I want to branch out." Dahlia on fixing a horserace: There are too many people around with scruples and high principles and all that sort of guff. You can't do the simplest thing without somebody jumping on the back of your neck because you've offended against his blasted code of ethics. --- Wooster's taboo: None? |
| When the Wind Blows (1982) by Raymond Briggs | None yet |
| The Man of Feeling (1771) by Henry MacKenzie | I suppose I should dislike it because it's a precursor of Romanticism, that eventually destructive and retrograde movement. But it's also a precursor to Dickens, to David Mitchell, to Rebecca Sugar, so leave it alone. |
| What Is This Thing Called Science? (1976) by Alan F. Chalmers | None yet |
| On Sense and Reference () by Gottlob Frege | None yet |
| Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (1637) by René Descartes | Descartes teaches lots of things, but the most relevant is the terrible power of motivated reasoning to pervert someone - even if the reasoner is hugely intelligent. But not only. Catherine Wilson forced me to think of Descartes as more than a strong mathematician, incomplete scientist, bigoted apriorist and shoddy Analytic. Not least, she wrote this, maybe the brassiest passage I've ever seen in an academic journal: if Descartes had written a Preface to the Meditations that was truthful, faithful to his firmest convictions, and philosophically consistent, the relevant section would have gone something like this: Charitable to say the least, but that's what we owe the very distant. |
| Death in Venice (1911) by Thomas Mann | None yet |
| Metaphysics: A Guide and Anthology (2004) by Tim Crane | None yet |
| Aesthetics (1997) by Susan Feagin | None yet |
| Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction (2000) by Alex Rosenberg | None yet |
| A Sentimental Journey (1768) by Laurence Sterne | None yet |
| The Grass Is Singing (1950) by Doris Lessing | None yet |
| Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1) (1958) by Chinua Achebe | You don't see the opinion "tribal feudalism was bad, colonialism was worse" much. Nor here. |
| Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad | None yet |
| A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings (1843) by Charles Dickens | On reading the passage about the allegorical children Ignorance and Want, the lecturer broke down in tears. |
| Logic (1999) by Paul Tomassi | Friendly, quirky, but the topic is much better taught with a computer. (Speaking from hard experience) |
| A History of Rock Music: 1951-2000 (2003) by Piero Scaruffi | A dizzying parade of names, about three-quarters of which I'd never heard of. Completely idiosyncratic - for instance he doesn't rate the Beatles at all - but absolutely consistent and catholic. One of his principles: He maintains an art vs pop distinction I don't agree with anymore: fundamentally, being an art musician is a different kind of job... than the job of popular entertainer. The art musician is pursuing a research program that will be appreciated mainly by his peers and by the "critics" (functioning as historians of music), not by the public... The goal of an art musician is, first and foremost, to do what s/he feels is important... He is willing to forgive incompetence, contempt and if only there is a cup of originality in it. This is really a stand-in for his website, which is an astonishing, rambling, deep testament to him, on history, neuroscience, AI, poetry, politics and whatever. I hope I leave behind something nearly as towering and distinctive. |
| High Fidelity (1995) by Nick Hornby | Loved it at the time, probably because I was Rob, as a teenager (emotionally incompetent, hooded by vivid insecurity, monomanaical about music). |
| Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1) (1987) by Iain M. Banks | Not the place to start. Prose is a bit flat, the plot a bit neat (now you are in space. now you have a ship). But it also has the most focussed treatment of the key tension of the series: what does the Absolute Liberal do with their enemies? What about people who don't want freedom, tolerance, management, intervention, rational subalterity? |
| Naming and Necessity (1980) by Saul A. Kripke | None yet |
| Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction (1999) by William G. Lycan | You have to know philosophy of language to get modern philosophy, but you don't have to like it. |
| The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness (2008) by Mark Rowlands | I think this was the first work I read from the (large) genre "Disgruntled philosopher of life uses book to vent about the analytics and say some wise stuff". There is also a very cute animal who is not a metaphor. |
| The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) by Muriel Spark | None yet |
| Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion (2007) by Aaron Preston | As a student I was much vexed by analytic philosophy. This was partially sour grapes (because I didn't know enough maths to keep up with some of it), but also partially fair: it isn't what it says it is. Roughly: modern, modest, science-friendly clarification.) Preston's polemic is that analytic philosophy isn't real and never was, in the sense that it isn't actually a school, a set of views, or even a methodology. (Instead it's a Anglophone social clique.) The nominally distinctive part of it was, according to Preston, the linguistic thesis: that "philosophy is wholly or largely a matter of linguistic analysis." While some analytics in the canon did think this, most don't and never did. This is dodgy. John Wisdom is quoted saying that what analytics have in common is their seeking "new insight into old truths". Amazingly, that seems about right, and in the plainest possible terms. Exciting but excessive. |
| Holes (Holes, #1) (1998) by Louis Sachar | None yet |
| Heretics: Adventures With The Enemies Of Science (2013) by Will Storr | Irritating but righteous. Not quite what it looks like: another Ronson-Theroux journalist, accosting another set of tragicomic kooks). OK, it is that, but it's also a grim reflection on how confusing and muddy the world is, on the universality of extreme bias - plus dollops of Storr's personal traumas and peccadilloes. (Half the book is his confessing to childhood theft, psychosis, academic failure, and petty vendettas.) Rather than getting to the bottom of ESP, or morgellons, or homeopathy, or past-life regression, Storr tries to understand the character of the people who believe and disbelieve in them. Besides confronting unusual beliefs without (as much) prejudice, The Heretics is about coming to terms with the fact that we are all riddled with deep obstacles to objectivity: ingroupism and confirmation bias; representation realism; emotional reasoning; the terrifyingly unreliable reconstructive nature of memory; the sad nonidentity of intelligence and rationality; evolutionarily adaptive delusions of superiority and agency. These are illustrated by interviews with a creationist, Sheldrake, Irving, Ramdev, Monckton, the Morgellons victims*, and even Randi.
Storr is seriously out of his depth on the science: he is always at least second-hand from the evidence (when interviewing researchers), and often third-hand (most of his citations are pop science books), and so several chapters suffer from journalism's classic problem, false balance. The reason this isn't a call to shut the book is because he doesn't spare himself, states this repeatedly - and this is in fact the theme of his book: that almost all of us are unable to infer the truth about a shocking diversity of things.* For instance, not just the past-life cranks, but also the Skeptics he encounters are out of their depth, and deserve the calling-out they get from him. No one can think they're past the need for doubt. I am surprised, for a start, that so few of these disciples of empirical evidence seem to be familiar with the scientific literature on the subject that impassions them so. I am suspicious, too, about the real source of their rage. If they are motivated, as they frequently insist, by altruistic concern over the dangers of supernatural belief, why don't they obsess over jihadist Muslims, homophobic Christians or racist Jewish settlers? Why this focus on stage psychics, ghosthunters and alt-med hippies? During our conversation, I asked Randi if he has ever, in his life, changed his position on anything due to an examination of the evidence. After a long silence, he said, 'That's a good question. I have had a few surprises along the way that got my attention rather sharply.' That's not how memory works though, is it? Even given his unusual humility, Storr is too literal-minded and prosecutorial ("I have been looking for evidence that James Randi is a liar"). Storr is disillusioned with particular Skeptics, and reacts by throwing out scepticism: For many Skeptics, evidence-based truth has been sacralised. It has caused them to become irrational in their judgements of the motives of those with whom they do not agree... And when Randi corrects himself in the course of a sentence ("I didn't go to grade school at all, I went to the first few grades of grade school"), Storr leaps on this as a serious contradiction rather than just the patchy nature of speech. Sure, he talks about his emotional bias against scepticism - but he still leaves in this idiot journo behaviour, the uncharitable coaxing out of flaws. These chapters were a good ethnography of 'traditional' (nontechnical) rationality. But Storr doesn't know about the other kind (which both foregrounds and copes with all the cognitive biases he is so struck and scarred by), and so his conclusion about rationalism is completely awry.** The title is fitting in a few ways: Storr sees these people as persecuted underdogs (he likes many of the quacks and fringeists, and so focusses on the arrogance and bias of the - however correct - mainstream figures dealing with them); and they certainly have the holy madness of people who cry out despite knowing they will be ostracised. Over the last few months, John E Mack has become a kind of hero to me. Despite his earlier caution, he ended up believing in amazing things: intergalactic space travel and terrifying encounters in alien craft that travelled seamlessly through nonphysical dimensions. And when his bosses tried to silence him, he hired a lawyer. He fought back against the dean and his dreary minions. He battled hard in the name of craziness... David Irving is interesting in this regard: he does not act like a fraud (e.g. he sues people for libel, even though this brings intensive scrutiny of his research), but rather a sort of compulsive masochist-contrarian. Stranger still, his (beloved) family were all solid anti-Nazi soldiers in WWII. (Storr contorts himself to explain Irving's identification with Hitler as due to their sharing an admiration of the British forces (...)) Storr's awful experience on a Vipassana retreat is a vivid example of the Buddhist dark night of the soul. We don't know what fraction of people suffer terribly from meditation, but despite its cuddly image, there's surely large overlap with the 8% of people who are clinically depressive and/or anxious. The chapter on psi does not represent the state of evidence properly - perhaps because one of his proof-readers was Professor Daryl Bloody Bem. *** The ending is stirring but tilts over into relativism: The Skeptic tells the story of Randi the hero; the psychic of Randi the devil. We all make these unconscious plot decisions... But the question is to what degree! And the degree of lostness, of inverse rationality, varies by many orders of whatever magnitude you wish to pick. Storr's disquiet at the sheer power of cognitive bias, and the systematic failures of yes/no science (that is: statistical significance rather than effect size estimation) is well and good. (Gelman: I think 'the probability that a model or a hypothesis is true' is generally a meaningless statement except as noted in certain narrow albeit important examples..) And his humane approach is certainly bound to be more compelling to mystics and flakes than e.g. deGrasse Tyson's smug dismissals. But Storr is scared of grey, of the fact that doubt is only reducible and not eliminable. This is because he doesn't know anything about our most beautiful weapons: probabilism, Bayesian inference, Analysis. I recommend Elephant in the Brain or Rationality from A to Z instead as an approach to the vital, dreadful side of cognition (including advice on avoiding being a fake, partial, traditional sceptic); they have less angst and false equivalences, and were written by people who understand the balance of evidence. Actually that's too strong; I am frustrated with Storr because he is so similar to me, except he doesn't grasp that the technical is the path out of (many) biases. There's a lot wrong with it and you should probably read it, and how often can one say that? * Storr is right that skeptics can lack compassion. The "Morgellons" people are victims regardless of what their etiology turns out to be (mental illness, nerve disorders, tropical rat mites, or yes malicious sentient fibres). At minimum, they are victims of bad fortune plus rigid and actually unscientific medical practices. The Lesswrong style of rationalist has less of this problem IMO (more emotional literacy; a more Californian culture). ** Storr: I am concerned that I have overstated my argument. In my haste to write my own coherent story, I have barely acknowledged the obvious truth that minds do sometimes change. People find faith and they lose it. Mystics become Skeptics. Politicians cross the floor. I wonder why this happens. Is it when the reality of what is actually happening in our lives overpowers the myth that we make of themselves? Are we simply pursuing ever more glorious hero missions?... *** Important caveat to the headline of that linked article from Gelman:
|
| Our Dumb World: The Onion's Atlas of the Planet Earth (2007) by The Onion | None yet |
| Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3) (1999) by J.K. Rowling | None yet |
| Kafka's Dick (1986) by Alan Bennett | None yet |
| People (2012) by Alan Bennett | None yet |
| Smut (2011) by Alan Bennett | None yet |
| The Lady in the Van (1999) by Alan Bennett | None yet |
| Bob Dylan Chronicles: Volume 1 (2004) by Bob Dylan | Impressive, melodious and laborious plagiarism. |
| The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos #2) (1990) by Dan Simmons | Not a sequel: the third act of the first book. A strange mix of very clever and kind of ridiculous. The camp Gothic tone intensifies, piling mystery on the mystical, but eventually resolves in an unexpectedly rosy and metaphysical cadence. But you have to get through 450 pages of sand, impalings, twists, people writing poetry furiously as a walking knife guts them, etc. I'm not sure if it was worth it, but it certainly was Grand. Ridiculous and Clarke-magic-based sci-fi like Dune, grim and spiked like Blindsight (though turned completely upside down at the end: Watts is a deadly serious treatment of epiphenomenalism and illusionism; Simmons' universe is extremely idealist/dualist), maybe the most extreme I've seen outside of medieval Christians or the hippies.) Questions which get answered, usually 500 pages in: Its appetite for mysticism is surprising. The only super-AI shown in any real detail speaks in koans, and is not especially impressive. This is especially odd since the rest of the ending extols our creativity and scepticism and courage, i.e. the Enlightenment. The ending is both too neat - all the loose ends tied up, several revivals, the baddies gone without a fight, the missing element in the Grand Unified Theory is the Human Spirit - and surprisingly harsh Too long and slow to recommend to everyone, but rich and novel for people who can get past that. --- How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: Some, this time. The Ousters are eventually shown as rad anarchists with wings and stuff. Software development: No. Actual Science: Not really. |
| Da Capo Best Music Writing 2005 (2005) by J.T. LeRoy | None yet |
| Da Capo Best Music Writing 2004 (2004) by Mickey Hart | None yet |
| The Colonel (Firefall, #1.5) (2014) by Peter Watts | Not long enough for Watts' highly inventive, highly depressive details to overwhelm you. |
| Feersum Endjinn (1994) by Iain M. Banks | Half the characters in this are ghosts, and one of the less-noted things about ghost stories is that they are wildly optimistic: they tend to show justice prevailing. Yes, fine, the ghost's revenge is a gory, creepy, retributive justice, and a bit late, but it's still the victim's triumph. The sumtym narayter Bascule makes or breaks the book. He's a good character - Molesworth on the Web - but I couldn't stand his phonetically told sections when I read this as a teen, and you'll see the reviews below focus on him despite him being only about a quarter of the focalisation. Bad spelling (cognitive dysfunction) is rare in sci-fi - let alone in SF titles - because the authors are trying to be taken seriously to make up for the genre fiction status? - and I've gotten over it since. Maybe better as audiobook. The characters are squatting their own civ. What lives on (after a relatively gentle apocalypse) is more self-conscious, historically conscious than that in Book of the New Sun. Not ruined, just forgotten, off the wavefront, using the space elevator as a house. The cyberspace is pretty good (better than Hyperion or Snow Crash or Neuromancer because less neat). The mist was the world was the data corpus was the Crypto-sphere was the history of the world was the future of the world was the guardian of un-done things was the summation of intelligent purpose was chaos was pure thought was the untouched was the utterly corrupted was the end and the beginning was the exiled and the resiled, was the creature and the machine was the life and the inanimate was the evil and the good was the hate and the love was the compassion and the indifference was everything and nothing and nothing and nothing. One virtuoso passage, on the species' trajectory after a nebula occludes the sun: so humanity left the surface of the world to the ice, wind and snow, and sheltered, reduced and impoverished, within the stony depths of the planet's skin, finally coming to resemble nothing more than parasites in the cooling pelt of some huge dying animal. Problems: |
| The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories (2018) by Jay Rubin | All the classic contradictions - kawaii and banality, sullen obesiance and batshit intensity, mono no aware and sexual frustration. There are five great stories ("Hell Screen", 'Sanshirō', "American Hijiki", "Pink", "Mr. English") and 10 or so enjoyable squibs (out of around 40). There aren't many great sentences, but greatness doesn't strictly need em. spinning slowly all in unison, and Naomi found herself joining them, looking up into the sky just as she had before, but this time she felt she was falling, and...perhaps... they could go back to before they'd twisted their bodies in wicked prayer and find some other way to free themselves from a world become a living hell, and so she vowed that once they'd wound the world back a full nineteen years, they would take it in their hands again and make it theirs at last; on and on she spun, every revolution a prayer in reverse. Conspicuous by its absence is Shōwa fascism* - there are no positive or negative references, nor (modern German-style) defensive rightful disownment. The war is there, the terrible firestorms, the terrible hunger; but nothing of the cult (a death cult, king cult, Prussia cult, and race cult) that caused them. There is a little bit of Edo totalitarianism (a lord having a maiden burned alive to render a painting of hell more realistic) at least. That said, one of the great achievements of 'American Hijiki' is to show how resentment and insularity can come from other sources than hibakusha trauma or psychotic Imperial pique. no Japanese can understand it, probably, if he's not my age. No Japanese who can have an ordinary conversation with an American, who can go to America and have Americans all around him without going crazy, who can see an American enter his field of vision and feel no need to brace himself, who can speak English without embarrassment, who condemns Americans, who applauds Americans, no Japanese like this can understand... what I have is an incurable disease, the Great American Allergy. The allure and/or horror of Western things (booze, books, bodies) features in maybe half of these. It is very common for the stories to end on an inconclusive, ambiguous, middle-distance-staring notes. I continue to see little in Mishima's lascivious, sadistic honour, though I suppose I should thus admire the portrayal of an alien outlook, which might well have overtaken the liberal-ironic-rationalist one. But Akutagawa does that better. In general I didn't see much correlation between eminence and quality (though this judgment is from behind that thick screen, translation). Only one piece, 'Same as Always' (about harming your child) stands for Japan's powerful, distinctive kind of horror. The Hiroshima piece is surprisingly flat, journalistic. I've cried at exhibits about the bombs before, so it ain't me. I liked Murakami's introduction, where he admits hostility to, and ignorance of, modern Japanese fiction: for a long while I was convinced that, with a few exceptions, early modern and contemporary Japanese literature was simply boring. There were many reasons for this, but foremost among them may be that the novels and stories we were assigned to read in school were pretty bad. My "I-novel allergy" was also quite strong back then (these days, to be sure, it has become less intense), and since you can't hope either to make your way through or to understand modern Japanese literature if you're going to avoid its constitutional predisposition to producing "I novels," I made a conscious effort while young to avoid getting anywhere near Japanese literature. though both of his included stories are kind of dull, unaffecting. --- * In a sense, Imperial Japan was too fascist to be fascist, since "fascism" was a filthy European idea. --- Ranked: • "Hell Screen" by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa • "In the Box" by Taeko Kōno Below the cut: • "Unforgettable People" by Doppo Kunikida |
| Ring for Jeeves (Jeeves, #10) (1953) by P.G. Wodehouse | Quite different from the prewar entries; much more focus on American foibles (there's a Bob Hope joke!) and there's an element of self-parody / Flanderisation. (e.g. Jeeves responds to highly surprising events by "twitching three hairs of his right eyebrow". It was a screenplay by someone else originally, which might explain its relative lack of subplots and higher-order intentionality."Faute de what?" It's surely not coincidence that Jeeves' master in this is named Rowcester (pronounced "Rooster"). "Mr Wooster is attending a school which does not permit its student body to employ gentlemen's personal gentlemen." --- Rowcester's taboo: mauve pyjamas |
| A Briefer History of Time (1988) by Stephen Hawking | None yet |
| The Annotated Collected Poems (2008) by Edward Thomas | None yet |
| Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1) (1989) by Dan Simmons | Starts terribly, with a brooding protagonist playing a grand piano outside in a storm. Also, despite being set in 3200CE or whatever, it makes dozens of of leaden references to the culture of C20th Earth. But the structure (6 tales from 7 travellers, cf. Chaucer) and the sheer variety of styles and themes soon kicks in and drags you through a delicious cyber-goth intrigue. The poet character is annoying, but he's meant to be. (The key problem of metafiction: to write a great poet character, you really have to be a great poet yourself. Nabokov was, but even he dodged the issue by making Pale Fire about a flawed poet.) At one point it implies that Keats' poems were retrocaused by schemes of time-travelling AIs, which is a thing I must admire. |
| Waltz With Bashir: A Lebanon War Story (2008) by Ari Folman | Comic of the crushing film about the Lebanon war. Starkly honest and bipartisan. It suits lobbyists for us to forget the large part of the population that are anti-settler. Even better on the unreliability of memory, self-service. |
| Making Money (Discworld, #36; Moist Von Lipwig, #2) (2007) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea Cycle, #2) (1970) by Ursula K. Le Guin | None yet |
| Desperate Characters (1970) by Paula Fox | Good portentous realism.Wife: "Oh, never mind what I say." Fox draws intense, evil significance out of ordinary irritations (a cat bite, a smashed window, a feud at work) - as we do when at our lowest. It's dark without being Gothic; apocalyptic without melodrama; heartbroken without self-pity. On a hospital waiting room: It was a dead hole, smelling of synthetic leather and disinfectant, both of which odors seemed to emanate from the torn scratched material of the seats that lined the three walls. It smelled of the tobacco ashes which had flooded the two standing metal ashtrays. On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef. There was the smell of peanut shells and of the waxy candy wrappers that littered the floor, the smell of old newspapers, dry, inky, smothering and faintly like a urinal, the smell of sweat from armpits and groins and backs and faces, pouring out and drying up in the lifeless air, the smell of clothes... a bouquet of animal being, flowing out, drying up, but leaving a peculiar and ineradicable odor of despair in the room as though chemistry was transformed into spirit, an ascension of a kind... The quiet, careful way thatevery character is sketched in their paranoia is convincing, and unnerving. Sure, it's about upper-middle class people's pain, but that's still pain. The least tractable kind, in fact. |
| Lullaby (2002) by Chuck Palahniuk | None yet |
| Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S. Thompson | Tremendous prose and fantastic drawings, but at the end of it all he wasn't saying much. |
| End of an Old Song (1995) by J.D. Scott | Good, nasty coming of age of some Borders boys: one diffident and Carawayan, one coiled and voracious. The narrator's sole distinguishing quality is eloquence about his friend, and for once this device is not taken for granted – people remark on his skill at describing and paeaning Alastair. Scott reuses certain idiosyncratic, ear-worm words – "illimitable", "aviary" as an adjective for a woman – to good effect. "She's English." I said. Alastair made a Scotch noise in the back of his throat. Annoyed at the conclusion – it's an Oxfordian twist that I resent. But the details make it – rationing, the Scotch cringe, the good and miserable wages of sin. |
| Dune Messiah (Dune #2) (1969) by Frank Herbert | None yet |
| Children of Dune (Dune Chronicles #3) (1976) by Frank Herbert | None yet |
| The Witches (1983) by Roald Dahl | None yet |
| Canal Dreams (1989) by Iain Banks | None yet |
| The Bridge (1986) by Iain Banks | Inventive, echoes of the Culture in places, but still grounded |
| Carpe Jugulum (Discworld #23; Witches #6) (1998) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus | None yet |
| Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) by Susanna Clarke | None yet |
| The Demolished Man (1953) by Alfred Bester | None yet |
| J (2014) by Howard Jacobson | Picked this up looking for a laugh, so my god. Of sordid, heartbroken, soft totalitarianism. The ineliminable danger of being different, and the specific danger for one difference in particular. A companion piece to The Book of Dave, underneath Britain's (and humanity's) downside. : Britain insulates itself against a self-inflicted atrocity by pushing away history and strongly banning modernist or pessimist ideas and people. So many despicable characters, like the art professor who defines everything by how little it reflects darkness or human brutality, 'primitivism' and 'degeneracy' (the irony being that this attitude, of art as mere grinning decoration, is itself a backslide from modernism, however empty and stupid much conceptual art is). There was something uncanny about her, the seriousness with which she took her work, her obduracy, the size of her vocabulary, the lack of bounce in her hair, the flat shoes she wore, her failure often to get a joke, her way of overdoing sympathy as as though understanding beat snogging. The book (if not Jacobson) has a terrifying attitude towards bigotry: that it's never going away because it based on the deep need of exclusive identity, that bad marriages and ethnic atrocities appeal to something much deeper and more formal than what happens to have been socialised into us. 'Necessary Opposites', as he puts it: '...Identity is nothing but illusion.' It starts slow, give it 50 pages to worm its way. |
| Moving Pictures (Discworld, #10; Industrial Revolution, #1) (1990) by Terry Pratchett | Bit messy, not yet the masterful pastiche of Maskerade, Soul Music, Night Watch. It is called the first book of Pratchett's 'Industrial Revolution' series. But that really came much earlier: Equal Rites (book 3) or, better, Sourcery which is the beginning of the Disc's disenchantment, and so of Vetinari's market reforms. |
| The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler | A pinnacle of style. He lays it out and winds it up within about 90 pages, then drawls out a subplot over the last 40. One reason it's still so fresh is the understatement. The "fuck"s are all em-dashed out, and basically everybody is constantly dry and laconic with each other, Marlowe most of all of course. In fact it's notable when one character is inarticulate ("Carol Lundgren, the boy killer with the limited vocabulary...") "Sit down next to him," Brady snapped. "Hold it on him low down, away from the door..." ("Leg artery") It wears noir's obligatory cynicism lightly: "I'm a copper," he said, "a plain ordinary copper. Reasonably honest. As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style." Being a copper I like to see the law win. I'd like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred guys that got knocked over on their first caper and never had a break since. [But] We just don't run our country that way. Constantly balances concision and winning detail, e.g: "Ohls growled and turned to me, his eyebrows bristling. «You're on the air, Marlowe. Give it to him." Its homophobia is what dates it, with very contemporaneous nonsensical stuff like: I still held the automatic more or less pointed at him, but he swung on me just the same. It caught me flush on the chin. I backstepped fast enough to keep from falling, but I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like. |
| Sophie's World (1991) by Jostein Gaarder | Ponderous and meta, sure, but it's also romantic about thinking and I'll forgive a lot for a drop of that. It is a long version of this beautiful idea of Gödel's:Engaging in philosophy is salutary in any case, even when no positive results emerge from it (and I remain perplexed). It has the effect that 'the colors brighten', that is, reality appears more clearly as such. This bit was moving: Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick. |
| The City & the City (2009) by China Miéville | Heavy-handed metaphysical mystery (: there is another world - economic world, national world - visible but the vision suppressed). His usual incandescence is present, but under a shade: the prose is conventional, with spectacular Miévillian words like 'topolganger' (an identical-but-Other place) popping up only twice a chapter, rather than twice a page. Similarly scarce are his characteristic use of detail – protagonist Borlu is in an open relationship with a woman identified only as an economic historian. Hints of The Matrix's ontological sensationalism and noir's worn-out idioms, but it works because Mieville's good enough (with ontology, but also generally) to redeem clichés. tC&tC twists repeatedly without losing credibility; the Cities' omnimalevolent atmospheres make great noir. There's even a rooftop showdown. An unfair consequence of extreme talent is that your 'merely' interesting, well-constructed books are marked down, judged by ghostly expectations. |
| Singularity Sky (Eschaton, #1) (2003) by Charles Stross | First 100 pages are very uninspiring but then we get a classic Strossian rant-vista
Fun, but not nearly as mind-bending as his or Egan or Vinge's best. Every few months Stross lets rip apocalyptic prophecy on his blog. Anyone else, and I'd probably stop reading. It's not that I think he's right, it's that his chains of thought are the kind of thing which are sometimes right. |
| The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Discworld, #28) (2001) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| The House of God (1978) by Samuel Shem | Updikean satire, more delightful than funny. Its surrealism, puns (Mrs Risenshein, an LOL in NAD [litle old lady in no obvious distress]), sexual glibness earn it a right to sentimentality in the face of human filth and pain:
Shem's dialogue is pleasurable - the Flann O'Joyce variety of brainy silliness. His two eloquent Irish cops are the best people in the book: "Top o' the morning to you, brave Sergeant Finton Gilheeney." Like any psychologically ambitious work of the mid-C20th, it has a lot of Freud in it, much of it going unchallenged. The book is also about the distress and pain of an extremely lucky and insulated and remunerated man surrounded by women who do massive amounts for him, but you mostly forget this, it is that good. I imagine there are still pockets of people out there who still believe in the 1950s George Clooney heroism and omnicompetence of doctors. So Shem, hot-shot prof at BMS, and his book have work to do. [Theory #2, Values #2]</li> |
| Jingo (Discworld, #21; City Watch, #4) (1997) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| My Uncle Oswald (1979) by Roald Dahl | Comic novella about raping famous men for money. So, one of the first real person slashfics in history. Actually scandalous; one can only imagine the ruckus if it was published today. The eponymous rogue teams up with a livestock scientist and a beautiful accomplice ("Yasmin Howcomely, a girl absolutely soaked in sex") to date-rape the great men of early C20th Europe. Then blackmail them, and steal their semen to sell off. Drugging Freud, Monet and Proust with a psychotic aphrodisiac, the three conspirators collect a Nobel sperm bank. Most of the men are disposed of in one pithy paragraph, with only comic details supplied. It's scandalous because of its levity. The plot has more in common with A Serbian Film than Carry On, yet it keeps up the latter's matey banter. At one point Yasmin comes across Picasso, who promptly rapes and dismisses her, without need of the "Sudanese blister beetle" drug. Needless to say, this is tremendous sport: "Do you know what he did afterwards?" Yasmin said. "He just buttoned up his trousers and said, 'Thank you, mademoiselle. That was very refreshing. Now I must get back to my work.' And he turned away, Oswald! He just turned away and started painting again!" The sexual prowess of the drugged men is a means for Oswald to reflect on their overall quality. (The volume they produce is shorthand for his esteem of them, e.g.: "Fifty straws from Kipling.") It leaves Dahl room to propound a general ranking of the giant personalities of the eC20th. For instance, Einstein and Freud are able to resist their inverted rape for some minutes, earning both respect and suspicion. And of Freud: "You should have seen his face, Oswald. You really should have seen it. The Beetle was hitting him and the sexcrazy glint was coming into h</span></span>is eyes and he was beginning to flap his arms like an old crow. But I'll say this for him. He didn't jump me right away. He held off for at least a minute or so while he tried to analyze what the hell was happening. He looked down at his trousers. Then he looked up at me... He was really very decent about it all. As soon as he'd had his first explosion... he jumped away and ran back to his desk stark naked and began writing notes. He must be terrifically strong-minded. Great intellectual curiosity." He is made into a real man - no more humourless vegetarian prude. Sad and standard in "one of [Dahl's] lightest comic works". Oswald is not Dahl; some of Oswald's opinions of his victims are cartoonishly snobbish; its idiotic, Lawrentian theory of virility is only used because it is very funny; and Oswald receives a brutal comeuppance for exploiting Yasmin that it's implied he never recovers from. A dazzling and ridiculous book, and as far as I can tell it evaded all opprobrium because it was published in the gap between the sexual revolution and the rise of PC. From the above you already know if you should avoid it.</td> </tr> |
| The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1) (1985) by Margaret Atwood | None yet |
| Unsong (2017) by Scott Alexander | I usually don't mind puns but Will probably bump it up when it goes through a copy-edit. |
| Revelation Space (Revelation Space, #1) (2000) by Alastair Reynolds | Sorta sterile prose but still very readable goth space opera. Simmonsian - "Stoners" and "shrouders". Herbertian atavism and castes. Shadowplay is good. Ideas are good - but I compare everyone's ideas to Banks and Stross. POV switches way too frequently - sometimes on every other page. This produces glibness. The narrative takes a series of 10 year slips, or 22 year slips, between scenes, which produces agreeable disorientation. Absolutely incredible denouement, best in recent memory. How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: Notable because of its lack of play with human nature: Reynolds' people - no matter how bionic or brainwashed by aliens - are just us in a weird setting. Also the same politics and same weapons. The aliens are properly alien, though. Software development: None I can remember. Actual Science: Not its game. |
| Still Life with Woodpecker (1980) by Tom Robbins | Cynical comedy about the radical hippies. DeLillo on MDMA. The narrator is loud (talking to his typewriter and the moon), louder even than say Douglas Adams: It worked. Mongooses did kill the rats. They also killed chickens, young pigs, birds, cats, dogs, and small children. There have been reports of mongooses attacked motorbikes, power lawn mowers, golf carts, and James Mitchener. Hawaii had traded its rat problem for a mongoose problem... Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem While it mocks New Age politics, Robbins still loves an outlaw and a weirdo, and so he takes on their anarchic personal project, to "preserve insanity" and all that. A better world has gotta start somewhere. Why not with you and me? Conclusion is funny and irresponsible: when faced with a conflict between social good and romantic individualism (as we all always are), ditch the former. Don't take it seriously - think of it as textual scat-singing - and you'll probably mildly like it. |
| Truckers: The First Book of the Nomes (1989) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Woken Furies (Takeshi Kovacs, #3) (2005) by Richard K. Morgan | Read immediately after the 2nd book. This one errs on the splattery side: cybersplatterpunk. Nasty, entertaining look at revolution and market forces. Quotable too: On oppression: "This enemy you cannot kill. You can only drive it back damaged into the depths, and teach your children to watch the waves for its return"; on political pieties: "it's amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with". Morgan still manages to surprise – e.g. the fully sadistic massacre of misogynist priests is hard to forget. The sea planet itself is the best of the new characters, weird and postmodern in layout, mechanics, oligarchy, mores. -- Social development: The last of the Kovacs novels – I'll miss the nasty universe, with its fully fleshed-out cybersociety – its religions still boycotting technologies, its new dilemmas (which clone should I repay if their interests conflict?) and crime; its remarriage customs when one spouse gets a new body… It holds up. Software development: No. Actual Science: Eh. |
| Trainspotting (1993) by Irvine Welsh | Minking, mankit, but only superficially amoral - the spike in the femoral artery, the period blood in the soup, the desperate crab-bucket scrabble away, away from the meaningful (the comparatively boring). Genuinely part of a renaissance in Scots self-consciousness. Which tells you more about how low that was, before. (This was me and my mates' mantra at school:
) Film's better than the book, mostly because of the music but also its rendition of that soliloquy. |
| Look to Windward (Culture, #7) (2000) by Iain M. Banks | Another chronicle of Culture fuckups; this time, trying to reform a caste system and sparking a genocidal civil war. It's tense and unpleasant throughout, because of this moral mud.
|
| Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1) (2000) by China Miéville | Enormous steampunk social commentary dressed in gorgeous nasty prose (think Nabokov on America). His dank, evil city, 'New Crobuzon', is a dark reboot of Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork (itself a funhouse mirror of Elizabethan London) without its animating sense of fun and justice. Instead, it has class consciousness; satires on academic, tabloid and political speech, misogyny, and a tainted political economy of science/capital/government. Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings' motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief's laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. What I take to be the central metaphor: one of the oppressed races are found to have a native power - the 'potential energy of crisis' - which, with a scientific harness, could revolutionise the world: i.e. Classical Marxism. Our heroes are not especially heroic. |
| Beyond the Deepwoods (The Edge Chronicles: The Twig Saga #1) (1998) by Paul Stewart | None yet |
| Steppenwolf (1927) by Hermann Hesse | Aging Romantic pessimist Harry comes to a crisis, and learns that fun is fun (and meaningful). I've been avoiding this book because of its status in rockist, hedonist circles, but after the first 50 pages it begins to subvert this reputation, and itself, over and over again until charming. Hesse also inserts himself, as the domineering, sparkling 'Hermine' which is strange and excellent. Would've changed my life if I'd read it aged 16, or in 1930. As it is, Regina Spektor, the Supremes and DJ Hixxy had already forced me to admit the existence and glory of non-cognitive, non-consequential, non-political quality. (Read aloud) |
| The World According to Garp (1978) by John Irving | I think this was the one I liked. |
| The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson | None yet |
| Deaf Sentence (2008) by David Lodge | Gentle, silly-solemn but limp campus novel. Examines being middle-class middle-age without angst, despite the narrator's being very hard of hearing. Though there is a sudden token Auschwitz section which gets about one page of build-up and is soon left behind (when the actual plot revives itself). It's less farcical - its characters' ambitions less contemptible - its plot less unabashedly neat than Lodge's usual style (though there is this: "Perhaps one day we'll turn up in a campus novel" – "God, I hope not"). I miss that. |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde | None yet |
| Pyramids (Discworld, #7) (1989) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| The Commitments (The Barrytown Trilogy, #1; Jimmy Rabbitte, #1) (1987) by Roddy Doyle | None yet |
| A Handful of Dust (1934) by Evelyn Waugh | Funny idle-rich tragedy as usual. Read aloud, and I was at the limits of my sight-reading here; Waugh's timing and compression are too grand to be scudded, really. Check this out for tight material symbolism: Beaver had a dark little sitting-room (on the ground floor, behind the dining room) and his own telephone… objects that had stood in his father's dressing room; indestructible presents for his wedding and twenty-first birthday, ivory, brass-bound, covered in pigskin, crested and gold-mounted, expressive of Edwardian masculinity…(implies Beaver is subordinate to guests and his dead dad, who was married before 21, unlike him...). Is Brenda's infidelity punished in a regressive Victorian way? Yes. But pater gets his too: the nasty colonialist final act is topped off with a crushing twist: Dickens unto death. |
| The Atrocity Archives (Laundry Files, #1) (2004) by Charles Stross | Four books in, I'm starting to get annoyed at every character sharing Stross' fondness for naff nerd references at moments of high drama. But it took four books. So! Nazi mages, Turing as the founder of scientific magic, and some very rigorous nonsense – e.g. the killer gaze of the Medusa is a quantum observer-effect in which the collapse of a super-position adds protons to carbon nuclei, forming silicon(!) Cosma Shalizi calls it 'mind candy', which is perfect. |
| Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) by Philip K. Dick | None yet |
| And the Land Lay Still (2010) by James Robertson | None yet |
| Glasshouse (2006) by Charles Stross | Sickly-satisfying but blunt satire on memory, gender and the dark side of memes. A bunch of polymorphous, polyamorous, post-scarcity posthumans volunteer for a closed-system experiment replicating the strictures of 1990s Nacirema, and are quite rightly appalled by the prison of social norms and physical limitations. (Not to mention the sinister panopticon modifications of the experimenters, with a public point-scoring table of conformism and no contraception.) The space-opera frame (a software virus that censors people's minds) is good too, wielding the deepest creepiness: brainwashing which actually works.\tI've been thinking that maybe I lucked out with him - there's potential for abuse in this 'atomic relationship' thing...
I love him for his quiet use of the technical for emotional ends, as when two characters "merge their deltas". The most interesting sci-fi writer alive? |
| Toast, and Other Stories (2002) by Charles Stross | His first album, with all the glad rough edges and density of new ideas that implies. Bunch of short stories showing off his range and introducing themes. About half are very good, though the others are becoming very dated as the last twenty years of tech and tech hype overtake his speculations. Heady subversions of the Lovecraftian, the Clancyan, the techno-optimist, and the Doctorovian. The stories are also often silly and humane. His books sometimes receive symposia from eminent academics. Start with Accelerando though. |
| Overtime (Laundry Files, #3.5) (2009) by Charles Stross | Men in Black crossed with the organisational despair of Dilbert , rather than the existential awe of Lovecraft. ("My department, Forecasting Operations, is tasked with attempting to evaluate the efficacy of proposed action initiatives in pursuit of the organization's goals—notably, the prevention of incursions by gibbering horrors from beyond space-time."). The first Stross I read. I expected forbidding, stark post-Ballard literariness, but it's matey, British, nerdy (BBC, C++, and Bayes jokes). |
| Accelerando (2005) by Charles Stross | A scary family-dynasty epic told at that point in history where generational gaps grow unbridgeably vast on the spume of telescoping technological progression. First book is a wonderful freewheel through the near-future, with his technolibertarian booster protagonist – Sam Altman meets Richard Stallman meets Ventakesh Rao – running around as midwife to the future. Includes a nepotistic jaunt through Edinburgh because why not (it's a tech town after all). It is funny and prescient about our dependence on feeds and open-source expansion. Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human. The confusing part is that the first third of it is among my favourite books and I recommend it often. But the later books work less well; they become less and less convincing as we reach the singularity (his grasp of the physics and the economics of computers and space is characteristically excellent, and it's all hard enough) - more and more of that omniscient voiceover guy is needed. Not everyone is concerned with the deep future. But it's important! If we live or die, that doesn't matter—that's not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we're stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It's downright embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I agree with Kahneman, though, that it's wrong to put as much weight on a weak ending as people tend to; the experiencing self, who was deeply impressed most of the time, should not be relegated so. In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle. As always, many incredible thoughts embodied in very vivid scenes – it deserves the technical glossary supplied by fans here - and you've no regrets about spending time with him. But again I've the patronising sense that he fluffed it. Book I 5/5, Book II 3/5, Book III 2/5. [Free! here.] |
| The Blade Itself (The First Law, #1) (2006) by Joe Abercrombie | Prose is a delight, very free-flowing . There's a sarcastic wizard, a torturer for a protagonist, a corrupt feudal society. 'The blade itself' is from Homer - a rare moment where he recriminates about war. Good details - the torturer's inner monologue is always asking questions, casting doubt - the amputee waggling his stump thoughtfully, scared people forgetting where their sword is (when it's in their hand). Addictive. |
| Surfacing (1972) by Margaret Atwood | Ponderous and mean, gnomic and agnostic, as usual. Lots of good details about oafishness and gendered crappiness between and within genders, as usual. Her friend applying makeup isa seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere, hairless lobed angel in the same heaven where God is a circle, captive princess in someone's head. She is locked in, she isn't allowed to eat or shit or cry or give birth, nothing goes in, nothing comes out. She takes her clothes off or puts them on, paper doll wardrobe, she copulates under strobe lights with the man's torso while his brain watches from its glassed-in control cubicle at the other end of the room, her face twists into poses of exultation and total abandonment, that is all. The anti-Americanism of the (Canadian) protagonists - so venomous it actually deserves the full title racism - is funny. It hides behind deep-ecology and Romantic critique: It doesn't matter what country they're from, my head said, they're still Americans, they're what's in store for us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus... Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbled, and I couldn't help him... David (a rapey leftist idiot) is anti-Yank from the start, but the narrator eventually sinks into a similar kind of hallucinatory environmentalist racism, as part of her rejection of 'the city' and the modern world. It's unclear why her friends are her friends, since they are trivial and cruel, as she is (initially) not. There's maybe one sympathetic character in the whole book, a taciturn Quebecois handyman who doesn't symbolise much of anything, as far as I can see (not the city, sure, but neither her mystical primitive). The narrator is full of non sequiturs like "If you tell your children God doesn't exist they will be forced to believe you are the god", little anti-rational digs which never go challenged. Just because both revolution (David) and the status quo ("Americans"), men and women, are awful, doesn't mean that nature is any better. She starts off with strong run-on stream of consciousness - I slide my tongue around the ice cream, trying to concentrate on it, they put seaweed in it now, but I'm starting to shake, why is the road different, he shouldn't have allowed them to do it, I want to turn around and go back to the city and never find out what happened to him. I'll start crying, that would be horrible, none of them would know what to do and neither would I. I bite down into the cone and I can't feel anything for a minute but the knife-hard pain up the side of my face. Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts invent a different pain. I'm all right.- but apparently forgets this sentence structure about halfway through. Oddly, it's sort of mirror of An American Dream: the same atavism, same disgust with modernity, but with violence suffered rather than gleefully inflicted. Surfacing gets called 'important'. I suppose because of the affectless, doubting-feminist agency of a divorcee angle; I hope it isn't because people think the protagonist had an admirable spiritual journey when really she's driven insane by mistreatment and boredom. |
| Man Plus (Man Plus #1) (1976) by Frederik Pohl | Disappointing. The plot is almost totally driven by dull sexual jealousy. Read Gateway instead. |
| Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen | I somehow managed to read this right through without grasping an absolutely basic point - which stops it being the tittering romantic comedy it is mistaken for: The reason everyone in this is obsessed with frilly things like suitors and débuts and balls is that marriage was the most important decision in a woman's whole life, one of the few she had power over.* You only got one shot. The result determined whether your life was an abusive wreck, or hey pretty ok. (At the time, to get a divorce you needed 1) to put up with it for three years, 2) to then blow the annual salary of 5 people (£200 then, ~£100,000 in today's money) bringing a fucking private Act of Parliament; 3) to publicly and credibly state your husband's "incest, sodomy, bigamy, or desertion" (not his adultery) and maybe also deal with MPs leering at your sex life. Oh, and no remarriage ever, i.e. no socially acceptable relationships ever again.) All this makes the book about something important, rather than important (or readable) itself. And Austen hardly covers this grimdark aspect. But I will probably have to read it again. --- * You might say that the primary-relationship-hunt is still the most important decision in modern people's lives. I think that's right for some people, but it's still less important than it was: now it's not the only decision in your life, and now you get to try again if you are unlucky or unwise. |
| American Gods (American Gods, #1) (2001) by Neil Gaiman | None yet |
| The Master and Margarita (1967) by Mikhail Bulgakov | Faust in Moscow with laffs and a less-straightforward moral; also a solemn and harrowing Passion play; also a revenge play on the various apparatchiks and shill artists that made Bulgakov's life a constant question mark. I loved book one, in which the devil upends Stalinist control with seances, magic tricks, telegram lulz, and horrible trolling of only somewhat venal people. Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes! It has a sweet fairytale air over and above the murders and the Satanic chaos. Follow me reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out! Was wondering if it's a Christian novel, but it is heretical to balls. Yeshua to Pilate: \tIn fact, I'm beginning to fear that this confusion will go on for a long time. And all because [Mark] writes down what I said incorrectly. |
| Snuff (Discworld, #39; City Watch #8) (2011) by Terry Pratchett | Dark and politically worthy, but not his best. He's been reusing jokes in recent books, and I refuse to speculate on the cause. See here for my theory of Discworld's international development. |
| Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1) (2011) by James S.A. Corey | Meaty, fine. Book has far fewer plot holes than the show. (Still some though: why does Johnson not put any of his people on the flight to Eros? Why are these intelligent characters so idiotic about aseptic procedure when handling the ultra-horror organism?) How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: The Belters are an ok attempt at showing the start of speciation. Their creole language is pretty good, also the mannerisms designed for legibility in an EVA suit. Software development: Naomi is the only coder, maintaining however many million lines. Actual Science: the spaceflight physics is good. The economics of the Belt make little sense. The protomolecule (a nanotech spore virus capable of infecting anything regardless of biochemistry) strains belief even before it starts messing with the nature of electromagnetism and gravity in an entire AU volume. |
| Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1) (2013) by Ann Leckie | Extremely similar to Left Hand of Darkness: undidactic gender-bending, bonding on an ice world, the grey realpolitik of empires, cultural interpenetration, high variance in tech levels. Leckie's world has a lot of detail but she mostly manages to avoid this kind of opaque sentence: On Shis'urna, in Ors, the Justice of Ente Seven Issa who had accompanied Lieutenant Skaaiat to Jen Shinnan's sat with me in the lower level of the house. Best bit is the implications of high-tech dictatorship: the dark emperor has surveillance footage of everything within their domain, and thousands of clones of themself, and can edit memories, etc. This makes for extreme stability. (The bit that reassured me, early on, that this wasn't going to be irksome is that the Terrible Galactic Imperialists are the ones with the post-gender society.) The politics aren't that prominent; the quest looms larger. There is this section, which doesn't manage to be as thoughtful as Oscar Wilde in 1891: here's the truth: luxury always comes at someone else's expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn't generally have to see that, if one doesn't wish. You're free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience. That seems to be true of her imperialists, the Radch. But why? They have extremely competent superhuman AIs, like the protagonist, but for some reason their economy is still scarce and material. The protagonist One Esk is quite good; think Commander Data plus an oath of vengeance. The superior force serving a blithe master: I'm actually reminded of Jeeves (high praise). That said, the morality of her vengeance quest is dubious: she knows she's setting off a galactic civil war and doesn't even think her assassination will accomplish anything. Maybe the next book will do a Dune Messiah and turn the triumph of this book to ashes and despair. --------------------------- How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: Some. Lots of different genderings and a nice baroque Space Feudalism. Software development: None. Actual Science: None? |
| Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick | None yet |
| Brideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century (2010) by John Crace | A tasting platter of C20th literature (one book synopsised per year of the century), as well as very successful pastiche, as well as highbrow larfs, and also, occasionally, a tiny philosophical critique of revered writers. It is of course easy to make anything ridiculous if you compress it enough, but Crace is not cheap about it. He reserves most of his scorn for the obscene sensationalists (Ballard, Burroughs, Joyce, Kundera). Here is the main joke Crace makes in at least half of all of them, fourth-wall shamelessness:"Why do you do Junk, Bill?" I read books about books because I'm a prig: my ignorance of these things makes me anxious. As a result of reading Crace, I can tell I won't read about fifty of the hundred. So, big gains, even if the larfs wear thin halfway through. |
| Vile Bodies (1930) by Evelyn Waugh | Another very dark, funny cattle-prodding of the posh and awful. Lord Monomark, Ginger Littlejohn, Colonel Blount, The Drunken Major, Lottie Crump, The Honourable Agatha Runcible, Miles Malpractice... The Bright Young Things – who are dim – ludicrous wagers – which are won – and the runaway motorcars – oh. Jeeves and Wooster if it had death, teeth, madness and war in. Predicts the next war, or, rather, concocts it in order to punish the frivolous protagonists. |
| Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck | None yet |
| The Czar's Madman (1978) by Jaan Kross | Pleasant, mostly fabricated historical novel about an obscure Estonian nobleman who sent his friend Czar Alexander a draft constitution which ended the absolute monarchy, and inherited titles, and removed the Czar from military command, and gave out universal education and the franchise, and who got what you'd expect in return. All the events come to us filtered through a ignoble narrator representing the standard 'enlightened' view of the time: sure the Romanovs are evil, but for God's sake don't say so. Lots to admire, in the slow, tense pace - nothing really happens in the present, it's all uncovered in letters - or in his handling of Timo's idealism/insanity. This prison scene made me laugh, on the tube: 'Timo - are you really sure it was the Czar?' But Kross is clumsy in inserting an enchanting peasant as Timo's wife; everyone who knows her is a complete Eeva fanboy, rhapsodising. But it's not clear why; she's brave and catty but otherwise pretty indistinct. There's definitely an undercurrent of promoting Estonian accomplishments here - not many of Timo and Eeva's grand and broad virtues are attested in the evidence, which makes them Mary and Marty Sue in Kross' fanfiction - but it strikes me that this is not just chauvinism, given Kross' context. Consider: an Estonian living under Russian totalitarianism writes about an Estonian speaking out against Russian totalitarianism. I resent Kross for the M. Night Shymalan ending, a bit, though it is possible that I should be resenting the narrator's fantasies of it instead. |
| All the Sad Young Literary Men (2008) by Keith Gessen | Ivy League Arts boys fail at life, cut coupons, measure themselves ironically against Lenin – At the same time, Mark had not been with a woman in many months. What would Lenin have done? Lenin would have called Mark's hesitation a social-democratic scruple. It's pretty clear what Lenin would have done. - 'Blech', I hear you say. But it flows so smoothly that it's hard to hold its tragic treatment of untragic subjects against it. It follows real life quite closely – we see [Al Gore]'s daughter at college, and a cartoon [Chomsky] – Lomaski in his office was sweaty, skinny, ill-preserved, drinking tea after tea so that his teeth seemed to yellow while Sam watched. There are gauche jpegs of Hegel, Lincoln, Gore inserted in the text, in an equivocal Safran Foer way. Meh. The women – i.e. the boys' ideas of the women – are the fixation: they set the structure and timbre and volume of everything else. I think I am hard on it because I might have written it in a different life. Clever, but. (Extra half point for an unclichéd Palestine chapter.) |
| The Lathe of Heaven (1971) by Ursula K. Le Guin | Hot-footed mystical parable, afloat on a bed of Tao, psychoanalysis, and Nietzsche. Bad guy's a Grand Unscrupulous Utilitarian: excellent, manipulative, and innocently destructive (Confucius?). Her memorable para-omnipotent protagonist George Orr is put-upon, dismissible, infuriatingly passive (or, rather, wu wei): the Tao. Scifi has a lot of conventions which can easily end in literary clumsiness – think contrived alien names, more or less stupid extrapolations from current science, brooding passages about the curst Capitalised Social Change of Twenty-three-dickety-four – but LeGuin, even this early, was in charge of them. Gripping, but top-heavy. --- How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: Too full of psychoanalysis to be sound. The bit where George solves racism by turning everyone grey, to awful effect, is good. Software development: None. Actual Science: Not its aim. |
| Before They Are Hanged (The First Law, #2) (2007) by Joe Abercrombie | So yeah it's about a big siege, a big battle and a big quest, but somehow new and uncliched. The heroes, about their quest: "What are we doing here?"; "Got nowhere better to be". |
| Candide (1759) by Voltaire | Very fun, brash, unfair to Leibniz. |
| Inversions (Culture, #6) (1998) by Iain M. Banks | None yet |
| The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil (2013) by Stephen Collins | Gorgeous artwork, musical plot, but not as deep as I thought it was |
| The Book of Dave: A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future (2006) by Will Self | None yet |
| Trial of the Clone: An Interactive Adventure! (2012) by Zach Weinersmith | Fun! Satire of Star Wars and classic scifi, with your character's greed and passive-aggression matched only by his/her incompetence. Bellylaughed a lot, which is unusual for me with books. Sometimes the gags fall back on scat when it gets tired of mocking religion, but I mean that in the best possible way. |
| Redwall (Redwall, #1) (1986) by Brian Jacques | None yet |
| A Story For Europe (1996) by Will Self | None yet |
| Capital (2013) by John Lanchester | Grand account of London's strange socio-emotional contortion up to 2008. When he listed the banker's sky-high rationalised outgoings ("nanny: £20,000 plus employment tax nonsense"), I thought Capital was going to be didactic; when its first chapters revealed its prose to be a plain story-book, I thought it was going to be pat and mundane. Instead it's humane, deliberate and clear, implying radical critique while focussing on the inside of the matter, flicking between a dozen vivid characters (who collide neatly in the very way of The C21st Novel) and noting the sharp line between the City people and the immigrants who serve them. (There's a sick sharp bit where a pro bono human rights lawyer wants to be begged for their services.) Lanchester uses whodunit tension without detracting from his main achievement, which is engrossing ordinariness (traffic wardens and Polish rewiring, infidelious twinges and infant irrationality). |
| Stamboul Train (1932) by Graham Greene | Better known as Orient Express. It's like he tried to write a stupid book – murder on a train, a neurotic Jewish financier, a doomed third-rate dancer, a clumsy lesbian journalist - and failed. Actually about gender and lasting damage:"why do you do all this for me? I'm not pretty. I guess I'm not clever." Heartbreaking in his usual profound manner. |
| Flight to Arras (1942) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | An elegy written during the defeat of France; I've never found anything this nationalist moving before. Probably because it is about the nation's failure rather than shining destiny. The central thought is that war is futile and absurd but that he must continue. The existentialism can get kind of leaden in comparison to his other stuff. |
| Much Obliged, Jeeves (1971) by P.G. Wodehouse | Wooster's taboo: Playing the banjolele (flashback). Triangle: Spode-Bassett-Bertie-Florence-Ginger-Magnolia Subplot: Tuppy and Runkle's hangover cure Aunt: Dahlia Antagonist: Spode, Runkle, the actually evil Bingley. Expedient: spiking a cad's drink, thieving a porringer, fixing some hustings, blackmail. --- Pretty bloody dark actually: "You mean you slipped him a Mickey Finn?" ! |
| Caliban's War (The Expanse, #2) (2012) by James S.A. Corey | A very close redux of the first book, but without this being annoying (like Leviathan Wakes it has: a lost child as Macguffin, a dastardly black-lab Earth conspiracy, and Holden blabbing way too much on every frequency). Highly readable, went through it in two sittings. A new character, Prax, is even more annoying and Hollywood-emotional than Holden, which might be intentional to make us disdain Holden less. Villains were sketched extremely roughly: there's actually barely any scenes with them. How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: Very little. Same political structures, similar international antipathies. There's UBI and a world government on Earth but no sign of the associated efficiencies or psychological gains. There's one polyamorous commune mentioned. Software development: Basically none. People still dock spaceships by hand, which we've left behind. Naomi hacks on "basically all" of the milspec software on the Rocinante, which is impossible to do safely with current tooling. Actual Science: there is serious air and food scarcity in the outer planets, which is good. The heroic vigilante mission is shown being crowdsourced, which is charming. |
| Timescape (1980) by Gregory Benford | Amazing as formal experiment - how much physics detail (and physicist detail) can you put in a novel before it falls over? Lots of the pettiness, the indeterminate frustration, and the glory of academic life. A patchwork of details though - but if you like either physics or telling minutiae then you'll like this. The core plot device, communication backwards through time, is a direct consequence of taking the Wheeler-Feynman interpretation literally. Benford is also extremely acute about both Californian and English vice. Perhaps that was the difference between merely thinking about experiments and actually having to do them. It must be harder to believe in serene mathematical beauties when you have dirty hands. Grad student maxims: Mother nature is a bitch. Gordon savored the clammy fullness of the breeze that had tunneled its way up from the Potomac... a welcome relief from California's monotonous excellence. Britain's degradation is depicted in terms of particular institutions: The newsagent's a door down proclaimed on a chalkboard the dreadful news that the Times Literary Supplement had gone belly-up. The relationships - highly conventional, highly nuclear - are odd, but feel real because of all the little jokes, gestures, and support they have, and which life has. "God damn, I love you," he said, suddenly grinning. Her smile took on a wry cast. Beneath the flickering street lights she kept her eyes intently on the road, "That's the trouble with going domestic. You move in with a man and pretty soon, when he says he loves you, you hear underneath it that he's thanking you." And I can forgive a lot of a C20th novel if it disses Freud: He had oscillated in mood through 1967, not buying Penny's Freud-steeped recipes for repair... "Isn't it a little obvious to be so hostile to analysis?" she said once... he felt the clanky, machinelike language was a betrayal, a trap. Psychology had modeled itself after the hard sciences... but they had taken Newtonian clockwork as their example... His intutition told him that no such exterior analysis could capture what rubbed and chafed between them. The slowly growing apocalypse (though global) is mostly discussed by characters in Britain, so we get a highly amusing contrast between California (1963, pre-apocalypse) and Cambridge (1998, during), where the Americans are all clean and hopeful and the Brits slowly starving and fishing in sewers: Mercury glowed as if alive beneath the filmed water. It gave off a warm, smudged glitter, a thin trapped snake worth a hundred guineas. "A find! A find!" Johnny chanted... They queued up to turn in their pint of the silvery stuff to the Hunt Facilitator. In line with current theory, Renfrew noted, social groupings were now facilitated, not led. The best subplot is probably the reptilian Oxbridge chad reverting to a heavily-armed feudal lord, including harem husbandry, as society breaks down. Peterson calculated that quite enough had been done along the lines of intimidate-the-visitor and decided a gesture of indifference was needed. "Do you mind if I smoke?" Never mind the tachyons; there's some truly far-out notions in this, e.g. Queen Elizabeth had abdicated in favor of her eldest son the previous Christmas and he had chosen to be crowned on his fiftieth birthday, in November. And indeed reality reasserts itself in the face of this rank authorial whimsy: "Did you hear about the Coronation? They've cancelled preparations [owing to the total breakdown of law and order]." I wonder if the ending - the triumph and social ascent of the man who just receives the future signals; the literal fading-away of the team that built the theory and transmitter in conditions of terrible scarcity - is a jab at someone in particular. Here's Renfrew's last word - after succeeding, but never knowing that he has: He was trying a modification of the signal correlator when the lights winked out. Utter blackness rushed in. The distant generator rattled and chugged into silence. It took a long time to feel his way out and into the light. It was a bleak, gray noon, but he did not notice; it was enough to be outside. He could hear no sound from Cambridge at all. The breeze carried a sour tang. No birds. No aircraft. He walked south, towards Grantchester. He look back once at the low square profile of the Cav and in the diffused light he raised a hand to it. He thought of nested universes, onion skin within onion skin... For so long now he had been transfixed by the past. It had deadened him this real world around him. He knew, now, without knowing quite how he knew, that it was forever lost... Rather than feeling despair, he was elated, free. Marjorie lay up ahead, no doubt frightened to be alone. He remembered her preserves on the uncompromising straight shelving, and smiled. They could eat those for some time. Have some easy meals together, as they did in the days before the children. There was really quite a lot ahead to do, when you thought about it. About a third too long; I honestly think I could edit out a hundred pages and get a great book. Maybe this is 4* even so. |
| Saturn's Children (Freyaverse #1) (2008) by Charles Stross | Morbid, playful. Robots emancipated by our death fall into slaving each other. Stross' science makes it: he defamiliarises ordinary human conditions (e.g. water is just another arbitrary compound to them, and the emphasis on, well, time that fiction about humans finds it hard to do without is off), he focusses on the many many vagaries of spaceflight ("The dirty truth is that space travel is shit…"), and offers a harsh, clean sociology ("Architecture and economics are the unacknowledged products of planetography")... Prose is hard to describe: there's definitely a Douglas Adams twinkle in there, but it's buried beneath hard science, sexual complexity and glib lifts ("that corner of me which is forever Juliette"). His society's accidental oligarchy is dissatisfying; the plot's repetitive and disintegrates towards the end. Still cool, obtrusive. (The cover of my copy wasn't anywhere near as hideous as that ^ one.) |
| Market Forces (2004) by Richard K. Morgan |  </div>So totally a book of its time: of cinematic Adbustersish rage and paranoia. By 2086, military aid has been fully privatised, making a free market of unilateral political force: All over the world, men and women still find causes worth killing and dying for. And who are we to argue with them? Have we lived in their circumstances? Have we felt what they feel? No. It is not our place to say if they are right or wrong. At Shorn Conflict Investments, we are concerned with only two things. Will they win? And will it pay? Morgan's ultra-capitalism is internally coherent, but weighed down by Chomskyan exaggeration and a clumsy Mad Max road-rage system in which people drive FAST and MEAN to get corporate promotion. (Awwwww shit: metaphor!!) Like many a bright-eyed anti-globaliser, Morgan overdoes it; at one point, a senior partner at Shorn erupts into a caricature inhuman plutocrat. I've added numbering to the exec's rant because it is such a dense cluster of Chomskyan muddled good intentions: Do you really think we can 0) afford to have the developing world develop? You think we could have survived the rise of a modern, articulated Chinese superpower twenty years ago? You think we could manage an Africa full of countries run by intelligent, a) uncorrupt democrats? Or a Latin America run by men like Barranco? Just imagine it for a moment. Whole populations getting 1) educated, and 2) healthy, and 3) secure, and 4) aspirational. 5) Women's right's, for god's sake! We can't afford these things to happen, Chris. Who's going to 6) soak up our subsidised food surplus for us? 7) Who's going to make our shoes and shirts? 8) Who's going to supply us with cheap labour and cheap raw materials? 9) Who's going to buy our arms?" 0) A totally false dichotomy: uncoerced trade is never zero-sum! Also, everyone has an economic interest in the economic development of the world; roughly, the richer my neighbours are, the more they can buy from me, the richer am I. This economic naivete is balanced by his characteristic virtues: pace, cool uncliched weapons, pro-social rage (here, wifebeaters and Nazis suffer atrocities). In a rarity for SF, Morgan underestimates the rate of tech growth (by 2086): for instance, their drones are much larger and more limited in application than ours are already. (The book is also a good portrait of ordinary marital pain.) One of his warders offered to let him have some books, but when the promised haul arrived, it consisted of a bare half-dozen battered paperbacks by authors Chris had never heard of. He picked one at random, a luridly violent far-future crime novel about a detective who could exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted: it all seemed very far-fetched. A few nice meanings in there: Morgan's apparent self-deprecation is actually bragging about his still being in print in a hundred years; Kovacs is just this book's Faulkner character plus genetic mods; thus Faulkner finding the book "alien" is a serious comment on his lack of self-awareness, and explains why the loss of Carla is so fatal to his character (he can't introspect enough to prevent his fall). Crass and flashy, but psychologically ambitious. I've read everything Morgan has written despite usually disagreeing with him. |
| The Hydrogen Sonata (Culture #10) (2012) by Iain M. Banks | His last utopian statement. Tame by the histrionic standards of space opera and his own usual plot webs – though there are the usual infuriating Machiavellis and convincing dilemmas. Grim implications about immortality, decadence, international relations. Worth reading all of the full Culture books just for the discussions between AIs. |
| The Fowler Family Business (2002) by Jonathan Meades | Unsentimental, by which I mean unpleasant. On fertility and death, delusion and meaning, undertakers and civil engineers. Many beautiful passages, much reflection on the course of recent British history - but never didactic - Ben and Ben's fellow squash prodigy, keen, bulgy-muscled Nolan Oates lolled side by side on a striped recliner and a Portofino chair chosen by Naomi and bought by Henry out of the fruits of his labours burying and burning the dead for the children of the dead. They cycled through the night, not knowing where they were going, ignoring maps, signposts, stars, anxious only to be far from that flat scrubland. Fear fuelled their tendons, pushed the pedals hard. They were oblivious to the sycamore's grazes and to the stiff hills. Their tyres purred. They passed hamlets, silos, byres, kennels, the illumined windows of hostile hearths. The swarthy bulk of a moor's escarpment slumped against the sky, a beast best left to lie. The world was every shade of black: slave, sump, crow, char. Clumsy clouds lumbered into each other, blind, bloated, slomo, piling up in a piggyback of obese buggers over the terrible trees. The night was loud with the shrieks and moans of creatures berating their fate and their want of shelter. When the rain came it was from a sluice that stretched from one horizon to the next. The road became a tide against them. and anyway it's extremely well-grounded in Meades' obsessive attention to detail (not just artistic detail, any detail) The miracle of life. That baby could now bring a carbon-fibre racket into contact with a rubber ball travelling at 90 m.p.h. in such a way that the ball's speed would be so reduced that when it touched the front wall of the court it would plummet vertically to the floor. That was a miracle. And so was the human ingenuity which made the connection between that ball's terminal trajectory and a dead bird and advertised that ingenuity by the use of the figurative construction 'to kill a ball'. Telephones, butterfly stroke, nylon-tip pens, the emotive capability of music, the way some people are blond and some are left-handed, the shapes of faces in clouds, water's inability to flow uphill, the tastiness of animals' flesh, pain, bustles, reptiles' poison sacs, sinus drainage, cantilevering, DNA testing – miracles of life, all of them. Meades is an aesthete - but still rightly unforgiving of art in the wrong place, here an experimental postmodernist roundabout that kills five. It get better when it stops sneering. The middle section portrays two professions, two quiet lives: funeral director and civil engineer, warm family man and late bloomer: Exclusion, Henry recognised, was what defined every profession. He practised it himself. It was what differentiated him from civilians. Without exclusion and the stamp of expertise it brought … well, the unthinkable might occur: the bereaved might realise that they could do it themselves, take the law into their own hands. They'd conduct backyard cremations. They'd dig graves in their gardens as though burying the family pet. The middle seems natalist; the nuclear family seem much happier. Just wait. The death of your parents as only their being "denied a future of rages, chair-lifts, incontinence, slobbering aphasia, fright, wind, butter on the rug, soup on the cardie... How long he would have had to prepare himself for the embalming job of a lifetime, how long he would have had to watch as all dignity left her and she became a machine for processing soup into diarrhoea. It might be painful watching them turn into veg, decline into insentient senescence before our eyes but at least it's a process that acquaints us with loss gradually.". (Meades contrives a neat point about human nature: when the Crystal Palace burns down, the fire engines couldn't reach it to save it because the roads are congested with spectators. This isn't accurate but whatev.) Oscillates between sympathy and unforgiving light; suddenly swerves away from two offered happy endings. Not sure what to make of the grim climax - the cuckold going off the deep end, becoming unmoored from his home, his work, his decency. Meades is no patriarch, so the implication shouldn't be 'so would you'. I think it's about the madness of biology, its inhumane imperatives and tragic spread. Good but not a patch on his films. |
| The Algebraist (2004) by Iain M. Banks | Satisfying mind candy. (Themes: the fate of citizens in a war between fascists; simulationism as an official state religion; a jolly solipsistic species which enjoys civil war). Too full of infodumps and too circuitous to reach his personal best (which I would say is the genre's personal best): it lacks the grander metaphysical framework of the Culture books, which handle civilization at the limit - where philosophy is at last unavoidable because practical matters have been solved and tucked away. It does have a right good baddie - a calm galactic overlord driven to be demonic and obscene for PR reasons. But the protagonist, a thoughtful manipulated academic, isn't interesting. I missed the book's grand conceit the first time I read this: the MacGuffin that drives everything is an epic, lost book called the The Algebraist, described only as being:
3*/5. (Series is 5/5 despite most of its books being 3.5s.) How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: Less stark than the Culture books, but still above-average: depicts an extremely long-lived but still lively species... Software development: None? Actual Science: Little |
| Building Stories (2012) by Chris Ware | Enormous, 3 kilo, 150-piece jigsaw-comic about ordinary desperation at varying physical scales (from anthropomorphised insect up to anthropomorphised house). I actually resented the format at first - it's a unwieldy doorstop that cannot be read outside - but by the end it's a pleasing experiment: that Ware has succeeded in making the order of reading more or less irrelevant is of course incredible. |
| James and the Giant Peach (1961) by Roald Dahl | None yet |
| The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick | None yet |
| 1984 (1949) by George Orwell | Intentionally mind-numbing. The prose isn't up to his extraordinarily high standard. |
| Boy: Tales of Childhood (Roald Dahl's Autobiography, #1) (1984) by Roald Dahl | None yet |
| Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality (2005) by Steven Poole | Startling and witty analysis of the language of modern politics:UNSPEAK - a mode of speech that persuades by stealth, e.g., climate change [rather than global warming], war on terror [rather than war on Afghanistan], ethnic cleansing [rather than genocide], road map [rather than plan], community [rather than 'some self-elected representatives of a supposedly unified group'], 'barrier' [rather than 'wall' or 'checkpoint' or 'annexation']. With Ben Goldacre, Poole is a model for political writing: eloquent, empirical rage. The book's noticeably a product of the time - attacking New Labour and the Bush administration in particular - but its principles transfer. |
| Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero (2014) by James Romm | How did the Roman empire last so long with leaders like this? Seneca is complex, if by complex you mean "among the most contradictory people in history". He was a vocal ascetic and one of the richest men in the world. He was a beautiful exponent of liberty and prudence, and a shill for an insane rapist for a decade - but it would have worse to abandon Rome to Nero and his rapey mates. Thrasea Paetus is the respective true stoic, the noble abstainer. Classic historian move: when dealing with possibilities that don't appeal to him, Romm just hems and haws and says that they're implausible; I'm not even mad. He also reports very dubious "evidence" via Dio and Tacitus, like the content of private conversations between Agrippina and Nero with no one else present. Sense of doom on Seneca's family throughout, including his blameless nephew. Why didn't they run? They were so rich, and the government was so much smaller and poorly-informed. |
| Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1) (1974) by Robert M. Pirsig | Manages to put forward an actual critique of rationalism without being either vague and platitudinous, or irrational and irrationally proud of it. Smooth read, some beautiful bits, but a failure if it's primarily a vehicle for a metaphysics. |
| The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt (2015) by Andrea Wulf | None yet |
| Die Kreutzer Sonate (1889) by Leo Tolstoy | None yet |
| The Collected Dorothy Parker (1944) by Dorothy Parker | Sharp and funny but insubstantial. Good for Sunday nights maybe. |
| The End of the Affair (1951) by Graham Greene | None yet |
| The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) by Oscar Wilde | None yet |
| Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Revised Edition) (1983) by Benedict Anderson | [a nation is a community because], regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail within each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. |
| Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (2010) by John Quiggin | With Irrational Exuberance, Fool's Gold and Black Swan, one of the best Great Recession books, precisely because it isn't narrowly focussed on the Noughties. The key point is that the pipeline of ideas from academia to policy is terrible; it doesn't clear out old disconfirmed ideas, and anyway policy is often based on freshman year lies-to-children. Quiggin does do a little anti-neoclassical hectoring on top of that, but from what I know (from an undergrad in economics) much of it's fair. I'm not sure about his Efficient Market chapter anymore; there are places where it sure seems to operate, as long as the market is liquid. (Which is of course the rub.) |
| Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone And No One Can Pay (2009) by John Lanchester | None yet |
| On Bullshit (1986) by Harry G. Frankfurt | A joke, but a helpful and increasingly disquoted one. A model for philosophy making itself useful. |
| Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia (2014) by Peter Pomerantsev | Anecdotal evidence of the new culture, which is both orchestrated and predated upon by an amoral mafia state. Postmodern dictatorship unnerves me more than the clumsy fascism of the Ba'ath or Juche. It's one thing to steal almost everything from your people; one thing to demean, torture and murder millions; one thing to employ a large fraction of the entire country as rabid unaccountable secret police. Even if you do all of this, your people still know you're evil and long for your death. It says something about me that the perversion of meaning, the co-optation of language, and erasing the possibility of objectivity is more emotionally taxing than straightforward torture kleptocracy ("say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude..."). The most appalling figure in Pomerantsev's long list is Vladislav Surkov. He is at first hard to credit as real: think Russell Brand crossed with Don Draper crossed with Laurentii Beria. His exploits sound like totally mental conspiracy theories, but are actually(?) open secrets: ... the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk with phones bearing the names of all the "independent" party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern art exhibitions... The book is all anecdote. He does state some statistics, but without sourcing; the book has no footnotes. We need to do better than this, what with the Kremlin's online troll army. It is journalism, then, not social theory: a picture of a hundred or so people. Russia is so skewed that one can capture some important things about by focussing on the ultra-powerful: Berezovsky and Putin, Surkov and Deripaska. Pomerantsev views the "international development consultants" trying to improve matters as bumbling, ineffective ambassadors of our best side. He's very glib in attributing daddy issues, as if psychology were that straightforward, as if Freud were that credible. His prose has the distracting, unbalanced sentences of indifferently translated work ("developers steal so much money during construction that even the most VIP, luxury, elite of the skyscrapers cracks and sink ever so quickly"; "out to make a few quick quid"). The drama of it all is wearing: he was a Channel 4-style hack documentarian before becoming a respected literary insider. It is much the same as Adam Curtis' hyperactive, over-theorised view. But this is still good, outraging and intelligent (e.g. he takes for granted that we will understand the contrast between Kaliningrad as the home of Kant and grand larceny and sleaze). A small salvo of authenticity against the Kremlin's apparent wall of disinformation and corruption. I wish I knew a better book on the same topic but it's new and behind a language barrier. |
| Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016 () by Stewart Lee | I thought I should go [to the British Comedy Awards], as it's hard to make the stake back in a world where the public expect to steal all content for nothing. Like Francis Wheen or Clive James' collections, a useful critical record of the dumb minutiae Britain obsessed over, over the last ten years. Good prose and there's usually one laugh every 6 or 7 pages to boot. He uses "comedian" as an honorific, but "TV comedian" as an insult. God bless some smug wankers. |
| Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (1987) by Willard Van Orman Quine | None yet |
| The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) by George Orwell | Had a pretty large impact on me, which is strange when you consider he was writing about a society that subsequently had 70 years of relatively pro-poor growth. I now only remember him being grim about the monotony of the diet (white bread and dripping times 365) and the fewness of the shillings. |
| Computation and Modelling in Insurance and Finance (International Series on Actuarial Science) (2014) by Erik Bølviken | Read it for work. Quite friendly and thoughtful, though not enough of those (nor broad enough) to be a good introduction to the modern way of science (which I am still looking for). He is extremely direct about the costs and benefits of numerical work, and his maths is all well-motivated. [Free! here] |
| How to Be Idle (2004) by Tom Hodgkinson | None yet |
| Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (2013) by Ved Mehta | Curious portraits of Oxbridge people: the ordinary-language philosophers just as they were awaking from their long radical nap, and the arsey titans of Modern history (Trevor-Roper, Carr, Taylor, Namier). The book was originally a New Yorker series, fitting their house style – gossip about the transcendental – but there's more gossip than concepts. We get to relive all the angry Times responses to bitchy reviews, learn what Toynbee ordered for dinner at the Athenaeum in late '62; also the hair colour of everyone involved (Murdoch 'straight and blonde, recalling the peasant aspect of Saint Joan'). To their faces, Mehta is too much the deferential alumn, tentatively prodding the dons to be unkind about their peers. The humans are worth it, if you already care: Austin and Namier are tragic hubristic husks; Hare, Ayer, and Toynbee's charisma blare straight through Mehta's quiet journalism. The common point between the history and philosophy of the time is both fields' slow recovery from positivism/Wittgensteinian reductionism - the cautious return of theory, and of human posits. (In a sense Wittgenstein was still a reductionist when he was a holist, since he obsessed over language even as he denied science's entry into various sides of life.) Mehta has some spirit: after meeting Strawson (Snr.) he says "I took my leave of the scaled-down Kant."; he finishes the book with this wonderful medievalism: Unless a philosopher finds for us an acceptable faith or synthesis – as Plato and Aristotle did together for their age, and St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant for theirs – we remain becalmed on a painted ocean of controversy, and for better or worse, insofar as the past is a compass to the future, there will never be anyone to whistle thrice for us and say, once and for all, 'The game is done! I've won! I've won!' |
| Steve Jobs (2011) by Walter Isaacson | Spot the odd one out: Franklin, Einstein, da Vinci, Kissinger, Jobs. (Trick question! there's two odds out: the first three had huge positive effects on science and society; while Jobs' and Kissinger's impact on the world is respectively "eh?" and "catastrophic".) I don't really understand what people see in Jobs, "the most beloved billionaire". He was a turd to just about everyone he met from the age of about 12. in the middle of seventh grade he gave his parents an ultimatum. 'I insisted they put me in a different school'. Financially this was a tough demand; his parent were barely making ends meet, but by this point there was little doubt that they would eventually bend to his will. 'When they resisted, I told them I would just quit going to school if I had to go back...' Some of those people happened to be brilliant, and responded fairly well to being treated like dirt. How much credit does this omnidickery deserve? (I've been told I'm missing the value of management skills, gumption, motivational speaking. OK, then be clear it was this and not innovation, not engineering, not design. Kottke: "Between Woz and Jobs, Woz was the innovator, the inventor. Steve Jobs was the marketing person.". Also the thief.) In the absence of Jobs, it's hard to see it taking much longer than a couple of years for someone to introduce nice personal computers, computer fonts, portable MP3, heartfelt CGI, or omnisurveillance bricks. And maybe those others wouldn't charge through the nose. Catch the ring of pure mania here: 'If I had never dropped in on that single [calligraphy] course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. I suppose the evidence in favour of him being talented (and not just being lucky and dominating some talented people) is the string of successes (Apple, NeXT, Pixar, Apple). Not a huge sample size, but big in context. I now have lots of questions, none of which Isaacson raises or settles. (In this regard it's much shallower than either his Einstein or Kissinger books.): * Could we have gotten the expensive gizmos without all the abuse? * What was the net effect of his life? * His personal philosophy seems straightforwardly terrible, all the worst of kneejerk Sixties exoticism. Intuition over reason ("more powerful than intellect"), AND will over sympathy, AND nature over science, AND post-truth ("[Jobs'] reality distortion field was a confounding melange of charismatic rhetoric, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.") What's the point of being a 'spiritual being' if you're still a dick afterward? * Macs are highly underpowered for their price. In theory, this represents a grave loss of consumer surplus; that is, it loses the point of an economy. But I can't just say that, because people queue up for this stuff. Either they're all exquisite aesthetes who gain surplus by looking at their device during those long extra minutes it takes to finish processing, or the social cachet compensates. I don't have a clear idea of how to judge surplus when computers are not about computing. * Your view of Gates vs Jobs is very telling. One is uncool and compromising, but has saved many millions of lives; the other is cool and uncompromising, but, after reading Isaacson, it would not surprise me to hear that none of Jobs' $3.3bn went on philanthropy (it might have been anonymous). * Do we need reality distorters? Must we be led into greatness by visionary liars and rogues? (Musk has a bit of this too.) "If you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him 'Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are."Sure is no way that attitude could ever do any harm. I suppose I should just be grateful he stayed out of politics. Wasn't sure what to rate the book, since it is mostly clear about a dubious subject. Isaacson often stumbles into the Distortion Field "'I think I might have headed to New York if I didn't go to college', [Jobs] recalled, musing on how different his world - and perhaps all of ours - might have been..." but a bit less than usual. |
| Tales of the Unexpected (1979) by Roald Dahl | None yet |
| The Complete Prose of Woody Allen (1989) by Woody Allen | None yet |
| Red ice (1987) by Colin Mackay | Bitter, accusatory poems on Stalinism from a self-described "European pessimist" (i.e. in the line of Diogenes, Hobbes, Arnold, Spengler, Schopenhauer). A sensitive man betrayed by the terrible course of communism, he goes in for nihilism:We were hungry for belief (This isn't generally what it feels like to change your mind on something important; it rings of deconversion rather than grudging error-correction.) Mackay had a terrible time of it, he suffered without even getting thrilling hubris or an heroic end. Many canonical artists had unusually hard lives and/or mood disorders. But it's not necessarily that sad people write better. Instead here's what I think happens: audiences do not default to being receptive to others: we need to be woken up to a book, whether by personal recommendation, or shared biographical detail, or some other gimmick. A tragic biography is the most reliable primer. (Witness the death bump.) (It's not nice to attack the hegemony of the sad in art. 1) They are still good, when they're good; 2) they are often Witnesses, speakers-against-power, and anyone can be crushed by having to do that; 3) leave them some bloody consolation!) I would love Mackay's poems to be incredible; I was extremely moved by Mackay's (self-published) suicide diary. But they're just ok. Of moons, angels, deserts, atomisation, Hendrix. Red Ice was written well before Bosnia (the crowning horror of his life), but it's already overflowing with ruined empathy and snarly emptiness and survivor's guilt. Are there great paintings in only black and grey? Well, sort of. Calvary features four times in twenty poems. the mountains are mere hills Mackay was trying genocide verse, forty years after Adorno and twenty-five after Geoffrey Hill. (Does it matter, being late to the worst thing ever? No, but do it right, do it new.) The brute fact of the C20th drives him to nostalgia and lairy isolation
So the poems are chaste, romanticism with the innocent wonder ripped out; unleavened except for his spurious racial memory of everything being ok, once. (Wordsworth at Katyn. I do not think highly of Wordsworth.) The long title poem has automatic force, being as it is about the gulags and the shame of apologism (Lenin and Stalin (and Trotsky and...)). But it's also uncompressed, clumsy with rage ("stop these follies of the human race!"). It condemns by MacDiarmid and Sartre by name, which is rare and ok. On hypocrisy, silence on Soviet abuses in favour of focusing on lesser Western crimes:</li>
There is one poem that really gets somewhere: "Phantoms", a fast, vocal, twisted/triumphant repudiation of war and hippies alike.
And "Holy, Wholly My Own" is admirable Golden Age pap. I want to call him 'Nightwatchman of the ex-socialist Scotch soul', but I don't know if that's a sentimental response to the poor bastard and not the poor bastard's work at all. All that said: I'm still thinking about this book (or this man) five years later. Plus one. |
| Appeal to Reason: 25 Years In These Times (2002) by James Weinstein | Anthology of news from an American newspaper written largely by leftist academics. But at least these selected pieces are actually a fairly low-ideology portrait of shocking events, unreported or begrudgingly reported by mainstream sources. It's way left of the Guardian and still undeluded. I'd never looked into the Contras scandal which In these Times scooped – if you don't know, this was that time Reagan-funded murderers imported massive amounts of crack into the US using government money. Even the Zizek(!) piece (on 9/11) is low-key, wise, and borne out by history. Now, we are forced to strike back, to deal with real enemies in the real world … but whom to strike? Whatever the response, it will never hit the right target, bringing us full satisfaction. The spectacle of America attacking Afghanistan would be just that: If the greatest power in the world were to destroy one of the poorest countries, where peasants barely survive on barren hills, would this not be the ultimate case of the impotent acting out? Afghanistan is already reduced to rubble, destroyed by continuous war during the past two decades. The impending attack brings to mind the anecdote about the madman who searches for his lost key beneath a street light; asked why he searches there, when he actually lost the key in a dark corner, he answers: "But it is easier to search under strong light!" Is it not the ultimate irony that Kabul already looks like downtown Manhattan? |
| How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays (1992) by Umberto Eco | Bunch of satirical pieces about academia and consumerism. One piece, analysing a cheap mail-order catalogue, is quite affecting. Hasn't aged all that well; like stand-up sketches about door-to-door salesmen. This has the feel of a notebook which is cool? |
| Totally Wired: Post Punk Interviews And Overviews (2009) by Simon Reynolds | Less impressive collection, but his love of the music shines through, and his scepticism about the more wanky post-punks helps considerably. David Byrne and Green Gartside come across particularly well. |
| Bring The Noise: 20 Years of writing about Hip Rock and Hip-Hop (2007) by Simon Reynolds | My favourite pop writer traces his own development, from slightly clumsy Marxist projecting onto old-school rap, to the most acute pop-culture theorist we have. |
| Of Mutability (2010) by Jo Shapcott | Massive, as far as contemporary poetry goes. ('What dyou mean it's on display in the front of the shop?') Of water, London, transformation, plainness. It's a moderate book. Moderately sad, moderately whimsical, moderately vulgar ("Piss Flower"), moderately modern, moderately transcendental. Good. Am I supposed to say this makes it immoderately British? |
| Until Before After (2010) by Ciaran Carson | Solemnly blatant. Plainly good. 157 unpunctuated sentence-poems, each poem holding maybe three jarring, run-on thoughts. It's melancholy, about loss, time and rhythm, but present itself as neither pitiful nor gnostic. It's really difficult to parse, but you don't resent that. There's a shout-out to China Miéville in the back, which is mad! because these poems are stylistically nothing like Miéville's clotted, neologistic prose. There are maybe 2 words less than a hundred years old in the whole book ("credit card"). Closer inspection. |
| Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews, Misadventures, 1984-99 (1999) by Geoff Dyer | 3-page essays on French or Italian figures or places (Althusser, Cartier-Bresson) or unusual objects of aesthetic attention (Action Man). What we call "research" is just incidental to Dyer - glittering coincidences and correlations fall into his lap as he sets about reading, apparently, everything. He's usually better. |
| Conundrum (1974) by Jan Morris | "I was three or perhaps four years old when I realised I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. It is my earliest memory." Memoir by our first trans national treasure. (Even theDaily Mail said: A compelling and moving read, a world away from the tabloid titillation that normally surrounds the subject. !!) Her: I see now that, like the silent prisoners I was really deprived of an identity... I realize that the chief cause of my disquiet was the fact that I had none. I was not to others what I was to myself. I did not conform to the dictionary's definition - 'itself, and not something else'. Technically detailed - dealing with the nittygritty of eight years of medical tourism, voice training, colleague adjustment, and a compulsory divorce from her wife - it leaves lots about the subjective experience of crossing unanalysed. Which is both fine and disappointing. |
| Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (1901) by Wendy Steiner | Thesis is that idea of beauty and of women were so intertwined a hundred years ago that Modernism was misogynistic - i.e. in form, as well as just some of its practitioners happening to be. Furthermore, that this, as part of a wider smashing of old things, relates to feminism finally breaking out and establishing new options for women (?) Not sure of the truth-value, but I liked this anyway. |
| Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine (1996) by Stephen Braun | I started taking caffeine quite late, so thought I'd check up on it. This is fun, with lots of historical flavour and scientific wonder. (The coolest fact in it is that the body's direct link between effort and fatigue is the result of an incredibly elegant cycle using adenosine: the production of energy in the body (by breaking down adenosine triphosphate) is exactly the same process as inducing sleep, as the process' byproduct adenosine triggers dampening receptors in the brain.) He doesn't give a straight answer to the question "Does our rapid formation of caffeine tolerance make its long-term effects zero-sum?" but the evidence isn't good. |
| Hamewith (1900) by Charles Murray | I'm away from home, and so must have a falsely distinctive version of it. ("Thir's a pig in ilka bed.") Murray's poems about Aberdeenshire were written from South Africa, and they're funny and surprisingly brutal. Some jingoism too, unfortunately, though check out 'Dockens Afore His Peers' for subversion. He avoids the kailyard by focussing on tatties instead (the Classics, drunks and work-sore backs, over the lad o' pairts and the light on the rapeseed). |
| Consciousness Explained (1991) by Daniel C. Dennett | Damn: impressed. The title's supreme arrogance is misleading: his prose is clear, stylish and flowing, he's expert in the relevant experiments, and he's much less hectoring in book form – he admits his theory's counter-intuitive and hostile appearance, he flags alternate positions and possibilities, and it's hard to doubt him when he says he'd change his mind if the science pointed away from his detailed eliminativism. I am very resistant to eliminative materialism – in fact I've never been able to take it seriously - so that he manages to patch over my failure of imagination is a mark of the book's power. You begin to wonder – for instance when he talks about his work on children with multiple personalities disorder – if he's cultivating a humane exterior to make his theory more palatable. But it's probably just that our backlash against his loud, cartoon atheism overlooks his humanity. The first section, where he admits the wonder and difficulty of studying consciousness, and carefully lays out the method ahead, is a model for modern scientifically engaged philosophy – and at the end he suggests a dozen novel, detailed experiments to test his theory (ante up). Can't ignore him. Minus a point for being twenty years old on a topic where that matters. |
| Notes of a Native Son (1955) by James Baldwin | Early essays on black-consciousness via pop culture. This prefigures the modern internet left (Racialicious and Feministing) by 60 years; but with a wit and casual familiarity with high art that prefigures Clive James, though with a more tragic air. |
| Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression (1999) by Lewis Wolpert | Clear, historical, philosophical stuff, and since he suffers from a filthy case himself he can wield authority properly for once. The chapters on the cultural variation in the expression of the illness (e.g. as a result of even more intense disdain for mental illness, Asians tend to report its symptoms as physical ailments rather than mental malaise) is startling to hear coming from such a conservative scientist, and all the more persuasive as a result. Learnt a very good word, too: "somatisation". I'd read Scott Alexander instead; the field is still moving a lot. |
| Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction (1986) by Germaine Greer | Was expecting this to be theory-laden and partisan, but the keynote of its 80 pages is just love, context, facts. Deflating the man-myth while insisting on the highly modern philosophy of life to be read into him. |
| The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy, and the New Fundamentalism (2005) by Dick Taverne | Grumpy attack on the strange alliance of anti-vaxers, environmentalists, and anti-globalisers that attack science (when and only when it contradicts their ideologies). I suppose we could call this an early entry in the culture war. Greenpeace's internal culture turns out to be surprisingly Stalinist, and they have repeatedly made convenient errors / told lies when it suits them. Nuclear power safety for instance. It is fair to associate their successful campaign against Golden rice with some fraction of the millions of blindnesses and deaths associated with vitamin A deficiency. Rorty is cited in this - as a man of unreason - and Taverne's whole chapter on postmodernism is a bog-standard strawman. Still mostly good. He is optimistic in the manner of successful scientists. I preferred 'The Rational Optimist' and 'Enlightenment Now'; they're more constructive. |
| Preludes & Nocturnes (The Sandman, #1) (1991) by Neil Gaiman | None yet |
| Broken Angels (Takeshi Kovacs, #2) (2003) by Richard K. Morgan | Morgan has a niche: stylish, sorta politically-literate hi-octane plotfests. Altered Carbon was noir; this one's war reportage. Kovacs - his broke-down hard-boiled super-soldier - is good, able to carry off the witty sociopathy of the action hero involuntarily – tropes are brutally programmed into him. 'Quell', Morgan's Marx-figure, lurks larger here. There's a bucket of great tech ideas, but they're never the focus; the people scrambling in the wake of their machines are still recognisably human. Great names, too (a nuked town named "Sauberville", a mercenary broker named "Semetaire".) His many characters are vivid; his prose brash; his themes large, dark, but not moping. |
| Sociology () by Anthony Giddens | (Credibility note: I went to sociology lectures I wasn't registered for; that plus this book is all I know. The following thus risks making the mistake of disgruntled undergrads everywhere: assuming that my limited understanding of a field is all the field is. Still:) Even that might have exhausted the intellectual benefits. Owing to blameless methodological difficulties (e.g. the 'causal density' of human behaviour, that little experimentation is possible, Hawthorne effects, low statistical power), those benefits are mostly 1) reminders and details of how social structures hurt people, and 2) some new vocabulary - rather than subterranean insight or predictive progress in the understanding of societies. (Kudos to Giddens for this passage: "…is sociology merely a restatement, in abstract jargon, of things we already know? Sociology at its worst can be exactly that…") (1): If you already don't persecute people out of ignorance, and already know which groups are ill-treated or unlucky (whether or not you ill-treat them), then (1) is already checked off. (2): Some of those new words: 'socialisation' vs 'structuration', Verstehen oder Erklärung, or the disturbing hypothesis stereotype threat, or the master status of a given society, or the 'manifest' vs the 'latent' functions of an action. Sociology seems good at unpicking 'neoliberal' delusions (roughly the set of theodicies that say, "Everything bad about society is just individuals making free decisions, so back off") – but is (usually) poor at following through with the counterpart doubt: wondering if our neat structural explanations are as applicable or explanatory as we like to think. Interactionism is one clearly valuable strand, because it's empirical and bottom-up. (It is harder for us to disappear up our own ass with our ear that close to the ground.) Also there's whatever school Kieran Healy represents - unless, cruel fate, he's the only one. |
| Falling Towards England (1985) by Clive James | None yet |
| Anthologie Prévert () by Jacques Prévert | Hooray for the only poems I can read in French!* Nursery rhymes, but with razorwire not far beneath. The simplicity (loads of basic nouns repeated dozens of times – "oiseaux" and "roi", "oiseaux" and "roi") makes me look look nervily over my shoulder – for the real attacker. 'Chant Song' is so gorgeous, daft. * As of 2014; bit better now. |
| The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, #3) (2000) by Philip Pullman | Its blunt, scrutable way of making atheism seem heroic probably wouldn't stand a re-read, but this was a big deal when I was 12. |
| Death at the Excelsior and Other Stories (1921) by P.G. Wodehouse | Non-Jeeves stories are skippable. Though early, the Jeeves ones are as good as always:
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| Question Everything: 132 science questions - and their unexpected answers (2014) by New Scientist | 132 lovely earthings of sky-high theory. Not much new, but good as refresher course and mind candy. The tacit connections between the answers are the real thing – for instance, I guessed (wrongly) that synchrotron radiation and Cherenkov radiation were based on the same mechanism, and feel very happy that a quick and public disconfirmation was available. Here |
| Solitude: A Return to the Self (1988) by Anthony Storr | Really enjoyed this, and the core idea (being social is not a necessary condition of flourishing for some people) is important and still insufficiently appreciated. The method is not scientific (but this is only a problem because it uses the pseudoscientific register of psychoanalysis). I find it hard to place Storr - almost all of his work was hagiographies of Freud and Jung, but he seems to have reviewed Richard Webster's classic hatchet job well, and Jeffrey Masson's famous hatchet job poorly, so I dunno. |
| Confessions (1789) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau | I am prejudiced against Rousseau, him with his straightforwardly false anthropology, melodramatic politics, and preposterous egotism. His three big legacies are even easier to disparage – 'Revolution as salvation', 'Feelings as truer than thoughts', and the 'Noble savage' idea. This much arrayed against him, it's miraculous that Confessions ('the first modern autobiography') is as clear and wise as it is – a deeply honest story by a deeply deluded man. (Just one instance of courage: to talk about being a sexual sub, as a man, in eC18th Europe!) Still he is a stroppy Forrest Gump – blundering into great events, loudly blaming them for the collision – but he is also big enough to test the great iconoclasts of his time. (Strong parallels with DH Lawrence, another supremely wilful, influential, and ridiculous soul.) Skim heavily. |
| Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost, & Where Did it Go? (2004) by Michael Bywater | He seems to know about everything as long as it's obscure and marginal: old network protocols and Latin conjugations, how meerschaums and primitive sweets were made... It's Grumpy Old Men except with teeth, wit, & iconoclasm and without mummery, ressentiment, & squidge. "Remember, then, the founding principle of British public life, which is His fond memory of corporal punishment is a bit off, but generally he's balanced, seeing what's been gained by loss. Examines both our tendency to stupid nostalgia and stupid amnesia. Never heard of him, watch for it. (I lost my copy immediately before finishing it.) |
| Iris Murdoch, a Writer at War: Letters and Diaries, 1939-1945 (2002) by Iris Murdoch | Was pleased to find her young and conceited – letters laced with 'mon dieu!'s and 'passim's and 'ye gods!'es. To my shame, these people are all always learning five languages at once, wittily discussing the exigencies of Turkish declaratives. Interesting how comfortable Conradi is to contradict her – apparently she excised quite a lot from her archive, mostly on sex. Some fuckups despite his breadth (: Thompson's last letter is dated '43 here!) and one piece of gratuitous dramaturgy: he includes only one reply from David Hicks, making him seem sadistic rather than grudging and aloof. Her generosity / terrible co-dependence in the face of Hicks' brutal breakup is too moving. Note: in this period, Murdoch copied many Treasury documents and passed them to the Soviets. How much harm this did is arguable, but it doesn't speak well of her political sense. |
| Karl Marx (1999) by Francis Wheen | Portrait of Karl Jeremiah Wooster Cosby Marx. Wheen's an ideal biographer: fearless, careful, sympathetic on balance. (So, ideal for the readers rather than the subject.) Most of his shortish book is debunking slanders; the rest is in cementing others. Was Marx a bully? No: bullies take weak targets. A dogmatist? No; he spent twenty years researching one-quarter of his big book, and admired his bourgeois forebears Ricardo and Feuerbach. Was he a Whig 'historian'? Sort of. Petty? Oh yes indeed. A hypocritical idealist? Tried not to be. Anti-semite? Yes, or, used the same language. Russophobe? Definitely somewhat. A bourgeois patriarch? Very much so. A heartless philanderer? Once. A show-off? Yup. I came up with an epitaph for him – "KM. Excellent journalist, journeyman economist, awful leader." but I am not learned enough to assert it yet. Wheen is in a rush (Hegel's system gets five lines) but he writes well, seems to have read everything in the vicinity. |
| New Selected Poems, 1984-2004 (2004) by Carol Ann Duffy | I'd thought of her as sort of obvious – all first-order, meaning near the surface, all on worthy themes like childhood perversity and elderly loss. But her best ("Auden's Alphabet", "Shooting Stars") see her wielding that obviousness well and having fun with drudgery. More historical pieces than I expected, too. Impression: 'dissolving into childhood', life as school forever, if school is undemonstrative alienation and uninteresting torment. The epic autobiographical "Laughter of Stafford Girls' School" is good; the key to it is that after the anti-authoritarian lark, the poem follows home the prim teachers who failed to control the ruckus. |
| The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia (2014) by Michael Booth | Fault-finding things received opinion finds no fault with?: good. Booth says the weather, the expense, the pressurised homogeneity of ethnicity and manner leading to marginalisation, the hypocrisy (e.g. Statoil's tar sands) and the diet are the subtractions. But actually he's a massive fan of the countries. The bit on their peerless state education (for decades, Finnish kids have scored the highest on tests with the lowest inequality – but note the kids' own satisfaction with the system is the lowest on record) bases the whole Scandinavian Miracle on their school systems: "It is no coincidence that the region that is consistently judged to have the highest levels of wellbeing, also has the greatest equality of educational opportunity… To achieve authentic, sustained happiness, above all else you need power over your own life…" How to recreate this? He concludes that it's a difficult-to-copy feedback loop from 1) actually respecting teachers and funding everyone's Master's, so 2) attracting excellent people, who 3) teach excellently and thus 1) earn the respect of their charges and society... Booth can be a bit glib ("Is it still racist if they're rich?"), and is obsessed with tax to the point where he has to ask five different professors how on earth people don't simply die from 50% income tax. But he gets into the cracks: "please don't [form a separate Nordic Union]. Truly the rest of us would not stand a chance." |
| I, Robot (Robot, #0.1) (1950) by Isaac Asimov | So sunny! So clumsy! ("His dark eyes smoldered.") So misanthropic! (The humans call the bots "Boy", who call humans "master".) So warmly cool! The story 'Evidence' is 4/5. |
| Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009) by Barbara Ehrenreich | Sharp! Blames the tendency in its many forms – the New Age mystic sort, the New Age pseudoscience sort, the self-help, motivational, pink ribbon, megachurch, and respectable positive psychology forms – for suffering and tastelessness (...including the whole 2008 financial crisis...). Sardonic muscle:
Was disturbed by her personal impressions of the legit psychologists (e.g. Seligman's profiteering and evasiveness, the blitheness of it to WEIRDness and other biases). |
| The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices (2002) by Xinran | Horrible and yet somehow ripping portrait of patriarchal suffering. It's undermined by the editing; the narrative is too neat (at one point she happens to bump into the family of the homeless woman that called her saying how much she missed them). Maybe she just had a very cinematic few years, as one of the most famous women in the country, but the many coincidences and stranger-than-fiction dovetails make it difficult to take it too seriously. I don't actually doubt that the interviews happened, nor that she received the aggregate worry and misery for thousands. It's just that she portrays as a little village where Xinran was wise mother, with all distant rumours bursting into her life. Maybe my reaction is a cheap defence against e.g. the thought of an 11 year old repeatedly giving themselves pneumonia to avoid their rapist father and other tales of ordinary madness. |
| The Blunders of Our Governments (2013) by Anthony King | Insofar as anything is uncontroversial in politics – the most mired of intellectual backwaters – this sticks to uncontroversial blunders. So we only get the internally incoherent or screwy policies like Suez; poll tax; ERM Black Wednesday. (The book's larger point is that there are more and more of these to come, because of the shape of Westminster's gears.) They've a compressed, formal style – hiding their anger. So ministerial ignorance and snobbishness gets called "cultural disconnect". First chapter is a list of state successes (green belts, social housing boom and sale, Clean Air, seat belts, vaccinations, minimum wage, smoking ban, swine flu prep) included as a counter-libertarian tonic before launching into the peaky blunders. (This actually made my chest swell with hope or pride.) |
| Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty (2008) by Gerd Gigerenzer | Yet another volley in the 'rationality wars'. GG sets himself against the heuristics and biases folk (though note he is also not of the fatuous constructionist camp which says, roughly: 'it's impossible for everyone to be irrational, because reason is only social, so we are the measure of it') by minimising the apparent irrationality uncovered by the cognitive sciences in the last little while. Key claims:
- - But though his work on presenting natural frequencies is super-important, and his points about actual decisions always being 'ecological' (rather than a mathematical problem) I suspect he's (still) 1) attacking a straw version of Kahneman-Gilovich-Slovic-Stanovich: no-one is saying that perfect, everyday Bayesian algorithmics is attainable by humans; nor are the misconceptions in table 1.1 (p.9) ever stated as strongly as this. Also 2) GG's evidence on e.g. the framing of the conjunction fallacy doesn't replicate. But anyway this is well-argued, well-written, scientific in the highest sense, and wrong? Read this instead. Not as deep as I expected, but I admire his empirical work. |
| The Regulars (2009) by Sarah Stolfa | Very overexposed and yet kind portraits from a Philadelphia bar she tended. No action soever, just an ordinary sleazy goofy beauty. All worth it. Foreword from Jonathan Franzen is full-on 'eh'. |
| Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists (1995) by Dennis E. Shasha | An oral history of pioneer computing. These people aren't generally regarded as what they are: simply that sort of philosopher who actually solves problems / or else rules out their possibility of solution.
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| The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) by Barbara Ehrenreich | Unstereotypical gender sociology: traces the male revolt – years before the sexual revolution – against the comparably rigid breadwinner social role inflicted on them. At the time it was too universal to have a name; it was just known vaguely as 'Conformity' or 'Maturity'. On the white-collar worker:Their labor had a ghostly quantity that made it hard to quantify and even harder to link to the biochemistry of blood and tissues. Its key virtue is that she sympathises (more with the Vidals and Roths than the Menckens and Kerouacs, obviously - but in general too). The key thesis: In psychiatric theory and popular culture, the image of the irresponsible male blurred into the shadowy figure of the homosexual... Fear of homosexuality kept men in line as husbands and breadwinners; and, at the same time, the association with failure and immaturity made it almost impossible for homosexual men to assert a positive image... |
| Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (2009) by Paul Collier | Economist slices through much bullshit in the course of identifying empirical handles on democracy in the extremely-poor world. His work is deadly serious, innovative and data-rich; but this book is chatty and low on representations of his mostly unprecedented, mostly persuasive data. How much does an A-K cost in different parts of the world? Are peacekeepers worth it? Does democracy promote civil war in the absence of wealth? and such vital things. |
| Books I Did Not Read This Year () by Kieran Healy | None yet |
| Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers (2006) by Don Marquis | Funny, bitchy slander of the hippies and pseuds of a century ago. Vague, snobbish, hypocritical, self-congratulatory, appropriative: that is, not much has changed in our New Agers. Repetitive – too many puns about howdahs, etc – and more than three-quarters of it assumes the voices of rhythmically insufferable idiots. Anyway its real value, apart from hammering home the difference between Marquis' own true poetic voice and the banal vers libre he merely uses here, is as history lesson. Orientalist, relativist bohemian mysticism was far from an innovation of the Sixties, since the cant and conceit of Hermione's guests is a perfect match. Notice that, even while despairing of Hermione, Marquis hangs around her all the same, a hanger-on to hangers-on. Give it an hour. |
| Irrationality (1992) by Stuart Sutherland | None yet |
| Consciousness and the Novel (2002) by David Lodge | Friendly and sensible grab-bag. He's certainly much, much more trustworthy than other humanities academics, on either topic. His main question: what implications do the new cognitive and biological sciences have for yr subjective life and art? How damaged would the great novels be by decentreing and anti-human stuff? (Aside from the long and thoughtful opening essay, inspired in large part by Dennett, we are given a jovial bunch to consider: Dickens, Forster, Amis elder and younger, James, Updike, with Roth and Kierkegaard the outliers.) Closing interview, with Craig Raine, is seriously stilted, but it's because he doesn't want to play the invited game, waffling deepity. And so this book: refusing to hide from the reality of the mind, succeeding in holding books to that reality, against great odds. |
| Sentenced to Life: Poems (2015) by Clive James | Poems written in the (extended) tail-end of his prognosis, mostly to his estranged wife. Plain, Classical, of cycles and renewal, death as travel, and the similarity of ends to beginnings. Her sumptuous fragments still went flying on Some rage: against Assad and his torturers, against unreflective environmentalism, against obscurantism (Laura Riding or Gabriele d'Annunzio). Black humour relieving the strain of being wise and stoical. Wanted to love this, but it is just good. It really picks up halfway through. His simple ones about e.g. Oxfam shops / action films are better than the cosmic ones. Best are 'Plot Points', 'Echo Point', 'Transit Visa', 'Event Horizon', 'Nature Programme', 'The Emperor's Last Words'. |
| Neptune's Brood (Freyaverse, #2) (2013) by Charles Stross | Extended essay on the macroeconomics of space bitcoin and the Graeberian lightness of debt. Also dead good breakneck fun, as always. Protagonist is a historian of finance and a gentle soul in ravenous space capitalism. Set in the Saturn's Children world, with perhaps too much in common with that book (a powerful, psychotic matriarch antagonist; economic pressure as main plot driver; a serially manipulated and unviolent lead; space travel is shit). But good. Note: Stross devises a species of terrifying scavenger, the 'Bezos worm', which fall upon the wounded in vast packs, and incorporate prey into their intestinal lining, stealing their genetic essence to ease future cannibalism. |
| Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008) by Donella H. Meadows | An attempt to make holism rigorous; given holism's deep intuitive appeal for people, the attempt is worthy. But I was hostile to this at first – mostly because her field helped breed a generation of pseuds who use 'reductionism' as an insult (rather than as a straightforward fact, or a useful way of thinking, instances of which denote the highest achievements of the species). Let's get clear:
So stated, there is no conflict between good old reduction and shiny systems thinking. But Meadows distils the juicy bits into <200pp here, and freely admits that systems theory has an intractable indeterminacy built into it, and says this, too: Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is "out there," rather than "in here." It's almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for… the technical fix that will make a problem go away. Can it resolve empirical questions the way physics does, though? In saying, probably rightly, that a flow could go either way, depending on the state of the rest of the system and neighbouring systems, you lose or sideline crucial power to find out a single cause's influence, and thereby know more or less exactly what to do to the system. In other places, knowledge comes from isolating causes. A reductionist can agree with all the clever diagrams in this, happily concede that they illustrate the gnarly problems of collective action and feedback and other ecosystems very clearly - and not give up their peerlessly successful method / ontological stance at all. * Also |
| Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World (2003) by Bruce Schneier | Some hard lessons taken from computer security spun out into a general theory of Defence. His language is a little banal, but there is a fully worked-out and rigorous model of the world underneath, deferring to neither the creeping establishment nor the splurging radicals. |
| To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (2013) by Evgeny Morozov | Sharp and original mismash of intellectual history, law, political economy, as well as an ok bit of polemical sociology and theory of Design. His targets are the 'solutionists', those technocrat techies who derive from the half of the Enlightenment which became positivism. (It is roughly: the will to perfect things and people, plus theorism, plus economism, plus the sheer power and scope of modern software.) Morozov is, bluntly, afraid for us all because software is eating the world:Imperfection, ambiguity, opacity, disorder and the opportunity to err, to sin: all of these are constitutive of human freedom, and any concentrated attempt to root them out will root out that freedom as well... we risk finding ourselves with a politics devoid of everything that makes politics desirable, with humans who have lost their basic capacity for moral reasoning, with lackluster cultural institutions that don't take risks and, most terrifyingly, with a perfectly controlled social environment that would make dissent not just impossible but possibly even unthinkable... But I do not want the freedom to believe harmful falsehoods, nor the freedom to hide my errors behind ambiguity; nor the freedom to throw away resources which others need. And I don't want the freedom to waste my life. Technology is the only untried way of responding to our grave Darwinian inheritance of intolerance, selfishness, and irrationality. But Morozov makes his case well about the specific case of technologised politics. |
| Selected Letters, 1940-1985 (1992) by Philip Larkin | In which his sheer vulgarity and vitality show through. Letters were a massive part of his life, the only time he was (able to be) properly social or affectionate. Only shows his letters, not the interlocutors, which amplifies the grim humour and passive aggression. Couldn't believe how big a DH Lawrence fan he is.How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really. I hate it when you go, for the dreary failure & selfishness on my part it seems to symbolise - this is nothing to do with Maeve, you've always come before her; it's my own unwillingness to give myself to anyone else that's at fault - like promising to stand on one leg for the rest of one's life... My great trouble, as usual, is that I lack desires. Life is to know what you want, & to get it. But I don't feel I desire anything. I am unconvinced of the worth of literature. I don't want money or position. I find it easier to abstain from women that sustain the trouble of them & the creakings of my own monastic personality. Silliness abounds, particularly in the spells where he and Amis are railing against the world: Now there can only be don't normally take anyone over 55, like to do a few tests if you don't mind, am returning it because it isn't really up to your own high standard, afraid I must stop coming Mr Larkin hope you find another cleaning lady to And he is totally obsessed with the passage of time throughout his entire life. I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn't matter if you've done anything or not. His existential decline is so steep in the 70s that I actually couldn't finish, too sad. |
| The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (1985) by Oliver Sacks | Repetitive and overwrought, but also of course astonishing and extravagant and humane. Quirky case-study format and title suggest a voyeuristic pop sci jaunt, but it's deadly serious, theoretically couched, concerned with the poor buggers' well-being. He's against "mindless neurology and bodiless psychology", the cognitive elitism and relegation of emotion and spirit of his field. "Disease is not always just an affliction, but sometimes a proud engine of altered states" – so we see a man with severe Tourette's is an excellent pro jazz drummer, a woman with debilitating migraines is the polymath Hildegard of Bingen. Sacks has a funny habit of using philosophers' names as misrepresentative pejoratives – a man with radical amnesia is a 'Humean' (: a flow of unrelated sensations), a woman who loses sense of her own body has a 'Wittgensteinian' life (: doubting the hinge proposition 'here is a hand'). Actually, that last one works, never mind. |
| Humanity's Burden (2008) by James L.A. Webb Jr. | Worthy, thoughtful, and on one of the most important topics in the history of the world. Didn't know that malaria was one of the many curses of the Columbian Exchange: it wasn't even on the continent before us. It was, however, prevalent in the marshes of Essex. Not useful per se, but it gives you a sense of the size and ancestry of the beast we are hunting. (4/5 iff you're already motivated by wanting mosquitoes dead) (Notable for being one of the most hideous book covers I've ever seen.) |
| Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008) by Richard H. Thaler | Nutritious, wonkish, inspiring cynicism. Distillation of decades of research that overturned a few social sciences for the better. Both theoretically significant and intensely practical: If you've never understood pensions, or Medicare, or rational marriage, read this. As is true of all social science books eventually, it cites a bunch of unreplicable BS. Wansink, Gilovich, Baumeister, Dweck. (This just in: Dweck is not unreplicable bs, she is merely enormously overheated and exaggerated bs.) |
| Intention (1963) by G.E.M. Anscombe | Christ: difficult. Very brief, very ordinary, and yet unsettling. Her language looks very clear – it's jargon-free – but on engaging with it you see it's blurred, terse, arduous. She never introduces the question at hand, nor does she make any introduction at all: on page 1 she sets about the concept with a monologue, an air of Wittgenstein's observational tragedy. Anyway I'm pretty sure it's about the problem of intention ('what answers 'why?', and why does it?' Or: 'how can teleology be explained in terms of brute causation (science)?'). I think her points are that: * * * * * (That needs more work to be representative: She thinks this knowledge isn't based on observing oneself or post-hoc theorising. Intention was intended as the first piece of the first 'proper', psychologised account of agency. (She thought one needed an action theory before one could have a real moral theory. But consequentialism sidesteps that need, just as it ducks the free-will responsibility question, and the warm-glow problem, and the meta-ethical status of moral language... But a key need, one consequentialism can never avoid, is people's need to assert their own importance and metaphysical uniqueness.) If you take nothing else from it, take the "reasons" vs "causes" distinction seriously. It is a real problem, necessary for serious inquiry into humans. |
| Wireless (2009) by Charles Stross | None yet |
| The Book Of Dead Philosophers (2008) by Simon Critchley | List of little biographies, ends and attitudes to endings. Plenty of good anecdotes – Avicenna's raging horn, Nietzsche's supposed 'lethal masturbation', Ayer vs Tyson – but Critchley's argument ("my constant concern in these seemingly morbid pages is the meaning and possibility of happiness") is lost in the plurality of attitudes on display. In a weird way he is building a new canon, including Mohists and Daoists, Christian saints, John Toland, women. A good toilet book, or introduction to (continental) philosophy. |
| Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008) by Douglas A. Blackmon | The South deluded itself that the Negro was happy in his place; the North deluded itself with the with the illusion that it had freed the Negro. – MLK Toe-curling account of the extra century of quasi-slavery in America: hidden in plain sight from 1865-1945, hidden in archives and historians' de-emphasis since then. Blackmon's point is that 'Jim Crow segregation' is a grave euphemism. Sham laws, racist courts, and 'prisoner leasing' led to millions of (especially) black men spending years in forced labour for 'vagrancy'. Blackmon's research is maybe exemplary, but his prose is really poor. |
| Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing (2009) by Rob Spillman | Africans set down in English, whether by birth or choice. 'Contemporary' is pushing it a bit, since these pieces are from the last sixty years, but the scope raises the bar. A chebe laid the ground for Anglophone (and Francophone) African writing when he mocked the incommensurability people, who said we could not speak to each other. |
| Two Kafka Plays: Kafka's Dick & The Insurance (1987) by Alan Bennett | KD is fun and uncliched but quite didactic. Its irreverence is not mostly directed at Kafka, despite the aggressive-seeming title. IM relies heavily on lighting, juxtaposition, and Daniel Day-Lewis' tics. Either play is much more likely to endear Kafka to you than his own books, or any of the absurd battery of critical texts on him. This is my favourite thing on Kafka: There are many perils in writing about Kafka. His work has been garrisoned by armies of critics with some fifteen thousand books about him at the last count. As there is a Fortress Freud so is there a Fortress Kafka, Kafka his own castle. For admission a certain high seriousness must be deemed essential and I am not sure I have it. One is nervous about presuming even to write his name, wanting to beg pardon for doing so, if only because Kafka was so reluctant to write his name himself. Like the Hebrew name of God, it is a name that should not be spoken, particularly by an Englishman. In his dreams Kafka once met an Englishman. He was in a good grey flannel suit, the flannel also covering his face... The Channel is a slipper bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom. This propensity I am sure I have not escaped or tried to: but then there is something that is English about Kafka, and it is not only his self-deprecation. A vegetarian and fond of the sun, he seems a familiar crank; if he'd been living in England at the turn of the century, and not in Prague, one can imagine him going out hiking and spending evenings with like-minded friends in Letchworth... You do not necessarily need to read Kafka's Dick after reading that. |
| Hitch 22: A Memoir (2010) by Christopher Hitchens | Stylish and consequential. He spread word of some of the most terrible injustices of his day; was arrested by several authoritarian regimes for it; he wrote three original, important books (on Teresa, Kissinger and Orwell); he had a lot of fun. That's a good life. Why, then, are we so uneasy? Because of his changing his mind so forcefully about revolution? About America? Because his direct, tactless opposition to conservative Islam sounds vaguely similar to that of contemporary racists? Because he found Thatcher sexy? He raised my estimation of the British 'International Socialists' (i.e. Trots) of the 1960s by a giant interval: though nearly powerless and outnumbered on all sides, they really did resist both the US and Soviet empires and the humourlessness and cultishness of their peers, and post-modern, Foucaultian passivity, and really did manage to help in undramatic ways (fundraising, letter-writing, war tourism). Bravura. How did he get from there to chilling with Wolfowitz? Well, on some points Hitchens didn't change at all; the Left did:
But never mind that. Lots of gossip, lots of travel writing, lots of quotation from the heart, lots of interesting digressions about the old New Left, nationalisms, Jewishness - have you ever heard of the Haskalah? - and two massive eulogies to his dear friends James Fenton and Martin Amis. Everything he said and did from the age of about 18 proceeded from a fully-developed worldview: sarcastic, elevated, British post-Marxist intellectuality. He becomes the Hitchens you know - the drawling, boozy pal of neocons, more Dawkins than Dawkins is ("Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock'.") - late on in life and even later in the book, so even if you refuse to forgive him his shocking, but internally consistent transformations, it doesn't warp the weft. Beautiful despite crudeness; very modern in several clashing senses. In one sentence: The establishment's awful, until you get well in it. |
| More What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (2000) by Robert Cowley | Little counterfactuals involving single decisions in single lives that would (probably) have had vast effects on the present world. Needed this book because, at my school, the big historical cliches - Hastings - were divorced from their effects. Had Socrates died before meeting Plato, two thousand years of persuasive anti-democratic thought might have been prevented; had Zheng He just kept going, a Confucian America without a divine mandate to convert and subjugate, and an overwhelmed, boxed-in and thus united pre-colonial Europe might have resulted. It may be coincidental, but it is suggestive nonetheless that the interest among serious historians in counterfactual analysis basically corresponds with the rise of a dramatically new way of looking at the physics of complex systems, known popularly as chaos theory. They are also just great stories, cf. Adam Gopnik's It is the aim of all academic historians in our time to drain as much drama from history as is consistent with the facts; and it is the goal of popular historians to add as much drama to history as is consistent with the facts, or can be made to seem so. This is the former people doing the latter work. Damn good fun, and maybe valuable in the absence of proper modelling. |
| The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next (2006) by Lee Smolin | Not sure how much of this I understood at the time |
| The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2013) by David Graeber | Bureaucracy is the dominant structure in adult life throughout the world. And everybody hates it, including the people nominally in power. How does that work? This discursive and suggestive answer is full of his usual sparkling insights and big dubious historical claims:The organization of the Soviet Union was directly modeled on that of the German postal service. He is sadly not to be trusted on technical economic matters. But he's good on a lot of other things. His point about corporate life being just as bureaucratic as public orgs, but rarely called such in policy debates, is very important, and that left utopias also tend to wrap themselves in inane regulation. Book is in general slightly overegged - but compared to most anarchist social theory he is a model of rigour, epistemic care and systematic focus. (In fact he is very critical of academic theorists and applied leftists both):
Grovels to standpoint theory when he is told that they had similar ideas earlier (which he hadn't read and which they never put so clearly). But pure and clear and witty, heretical to his tribes - and as original as always.
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| In Praise of Love (2009) by Alain Badiou | A leftist defence of marriage and a postmodern attempt at making love a big deal, ontologically speaking; beyond this initial frisson of meta-contrarian goodness, though: meh. Book's a bite-sized transcription of a formal literary talk - a genre which may well have no good instance. Here's the solitary pair of beautiful moments in an otherwise lukewarm bath of the history of philosophy of love and lazy sub-systematic Lacanian guesswork*:
Clearer prose than you'd expect, though, isn't it? * e.g. laziness: his claim about there being four "conditions" of philosophy, none of which are in fact necessary conditions, and one of which is good old dyadic love: |
| The Days of Surprise (2015) by Paul Durcan | Disconcerting autobiographical fun; sometimes jolly to the point of childishness - gynaecologists! priests!. And so full up with the Church, though teasing its pretensions and persisting brutalities. Here is the grand title poem, both Under Milk Wood for Ringsend his town and an occasional for Francis' coronation (who is, much like himself, "A figure of childlike passivity / As well as childlike authority"). A lovely man, clearly. When angry, he mocks his own anger. He does not denounce; instead he scolds. Also full of lovely banal lists: I sat down under a recycling bin and wept – wept for joy and ecstasy and grief and anguish and the whole jing bang lot and Moses and Isabel Gilsenan and Johannes Scotus Eriugena and Georgie Hyde-Lees and Eimear McBride and Robert Heffernan and Katie Taylor and Christine Dwyer Hickey and Mo Farah and Roisin O'Brien and Joe Canning and Máire Logue and Rory and Columbanus and Enda and Fionnuala and Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Michael D. Higgins and – and – and – and – and – and – and – and – SABINA! Best are "The Actors' Chapel"; and the title one. |
| The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus (98) by Tacitus | De Origine et situ Germanorum (98) by Publius Tacitus, translated by Lamberto Bozzi (2012). Versified well, which makes even the boring bits about ploughs a pleasure. I read this aloud, and me and the audience had a long inconclusive discussion about how many of the claims are likely to be complete bullshit. Most interesting were: the prevalence of Greek myths among the Goths, and Tacitus' very early cross-cultural approval of some things. For when on chastity a woman cheats Nowhere near as racist as expected! |
| The Whole Woman (1999) by Germaine Greer | None yet |
| Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) by Jared Diamond | Recognisably a popularisation, but it's in an under-reported field (speculative human geography) so it is still high in nourishing insight. Exciting, thoughtful, deserving. Q: Why is it that you white people developed much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but The title's misleading: all three of those pro-colonialist environmental factors are merely proximate effects of what he argues is the ultimate cause of world inequality: domesticable crops and livestock on a continent which happens to be oriented in a way that makes its climate very similar across wide latitudes. His theory explicitly disclaims racist explanations of world history - e.g. his chapter on the conquistadors is the most harrowing account I've ever read - and he says things like When I arrived in New Guinea for the first time, it became clear to me that New Guineans are curious, questioning, talkative people with complex languages and social relationships, on the average at least as intelligent as Europeans and Americans. In New Guinea, I'm the dope who can't do elementary things like follow an unmarked trail or light a fire in the rain. Yet the anthropologists' party line on him is just that: that he's a racist and, almost worse in that circle, a determinist, a dirty reductionist. I feel perfectly fair in explaining their rancour by his skilful scientific intrusion on their ill-tended turf. (Diamond was originally an ornithologist and geneticist.) Engaging and original as it is, his thesis faces a hard explanatory limit: agriculture has not been the limiting factor on economies for more than 200 years, and yet the Great Divergence dates from then and not earlier. Diamond could appeal to simple path-dependency: "we win now because we won then" or argue that the technological and military edge yielded land, and that land yielded the economic miracle. But the evidence (also known as Gregory Clark) certainly does not warrant crop or zoological supremacism. Anyway I know of no better introduction to cultural evolution theory, human population genetics, the Clovis / pre-Clovis controversy, philology, New Guinean traditionalism, the origins and downsides of civilization, animal husbandry, and the ancient history of Africa. The rub is that you can't stop with him, because he doesn't go for all the angles. In one sentence: See Q&A above. 4/5 (minus a half for awful references - vague, without page numbers in the text or in the source, nor footnotes).</li> |
| The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy (2011) by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne | A slightly strained oral history of the least romanticised scientists: Bayesian statisticians. She makes up for the long-missing romanticism single-handed! The two-hundred year eclipse of the Bayesian method was much longer than that suffered by even the irrationally-maligned continental drift theory (50 years). And this neglect and opprobrium was suffered by a paradigm now accepted everywhere as powerful and useful in literally all kinds of research. She wins us over, particularly with her chapter on the secretive, truculent, omnicompetent genius John Tukey, who used Bayesian methods for elections 40 years before Fivethirtyeight, with comparable success. But her prose is borderline, with lots of clear but dim-bulb sentences. She has one infuriating mannerism: she constantly refers to Bayes' rule, Bayesian logical foundations after Bayes, Bayesian inference, and personalist Bayesian epistemology by the single terrible metonym "Bayes": At its heart, Bayes runs counter to the deeply held conviction that science requires total objectivity and precision. Bayes is a measure of belief. I suppose she did this to elide away jargon, but it both equivocates between very different entities, hides the complexity of the 'Bayesian' marquee, invites the idea that the frequentists were attacking a logically sound theorem, and produces a whole list of bizarre images, where we see the reclusive Reverend doing all these things: cracking Enigma and Tunny, finding H-Bombs lost at sea, calculating appropriate worker's comp amounts in the absence of reliable data, attributing The Federalist Papers to Hamilton, and blocking 99.9% of the spam email from reaching you (yes, you). It is also even more unfair to Laplace than usual. (It was he who developed Bayesianism into the powerful applied framework it is, into more than a single gambler's theorem. Ok, so "Laplace-Coxism" is admittedly even less admissible as a term to which the wise and honest may repair.) Grammatical twitching aside this was a fun introduction to an important thing. She focusses on the soft, social side (and on applications vaguely summarised). There was a huge amount of factional bitching between these serious and cloistered men: Attending his first Bayesian conference in 1976, Jim Berger was shocked to see half the room yelling at the other half. Everyone seemed to be good friends, but their priors were split between the personally subjective, like Savage's, and the objective, like Jeffrey's - with no definitive experiment to decide the issue. This human focus means she gives no treatment of Cox's theorem, certainly the most remarkable result in formal epistemology (and probability theory?), and one of the main things which rationally warrants the partisanship and excitement she displays for Bayesian thought throughout. ("Justified fundamentalism", as one great commentator puts it!) It proves that any attempt to use numbers to model belief must be Bayesian or logically equivalent to it. With other results, it raises Bayesianism to the only viable quantitative theory of rationality and of right learning, a behemoth of which Aristotelian logic is a mere special case. No doubt I'm unusual in finding this the most exciting bit. She's to be applauded for digging out novel examples of Bayesian analysis which were classified or which avoided using the word: early actuarial work, Tukey's US election model, the pre-Three-Mile-Island federal report of reactor safety, and the entire field of operational research. But she is so concerned with emphasising the (genuine) long oppression of the paradigm that she under-emphasises the good reasons to resist Bayesian methods before 1980: they were simply computationally intractable before MCMC. (Which makes the sheer effort put in to shortcuts and approximation methods by ingenious people quite tragic; they just aren't needed anymore, thirty years later.) To her credit, she does mention the parallel dogmatism of the 60s Bayesians and the presumptive overenthusiasm of some people in the last 10 years. (The great contemporary frequentist, Deborah Mayo, is able to subtitle her blog "Frequentists in Exile" without being absurd - even though Stats 101 and "Methods for [Social Science]" courses are still everywhere dominated by canned Fisherian tests and frames. She means exile from the philosophy of statistics and probability.) Insofar as you want to understand the large trends of the present and coming age, you need to know its economics; insofar as you must understand the new economics, you must understand AI; insofar as you must understand AI, you must understand machine learning and decision theory; insofar as you must understand machine learning, you must understand both frequentism and Bayesianism. Insofar as you do not yet have the mathematics to understand Bayesianism, nor the excitement of the promise of a final, real synthesis of objective with subjective, you must read this gentle prose work. Once you are excited by its vague promises, you can find progressively more rigorous people and will have actually have reason to stomach the formalism. 3/5, 4*/5 for those just beginning the march. |
| A Structured Approach to the Adam Smith Problem () by Hodder, Christopher | The third PhD I have ever read, the first to which I've contributed, and certainly the best-written. "The "Adam Smith Problem" is just that Smith's two big books seem to dramatically contradict each other: WoN is methodologically and normatively individualist and abstracts out the economy from the rest of human life, but ToMS is a holistic and altruistic picture, one which subsumes economic behaviour as a special case of all virtuous or vicious actions. Hodder's job, which, remarkably, went undone over 200 years of scholarly debate, is to consider the possible explanations (e.g. "Smith divides society into disjoint private and public spheres"; "one of the two books is ironic"; "he changed his mind"; "he was a idjit") through close exegesis and logical reconstruction, and somehow weigh them. The conclusion is satisfying enough: What is the Adam Smith Problem?: A debate on a problem; the debate was the problem. Basically, a series of bad readers (from the German Historicists to Paul Samuelson) misread certain key terms and passages, imputed an anachronistic atheism and efficient-causation empiricism to him, and then propagated a straw-man ("a shadow history") throughout the secondary literature and the tertiary sewer we call the media. (They also missed the timing and the explicit initial audience of WoN: the book is avowedly a polemic to affect British trade policy, and a highly successful one at that.) Hodder writes with absolutely minimal jargon; this is as easily grasped as C18th political economy can be. One of my notes was that an institutionalised marker might penalise it for omitting jargon to the degree it does; after all, what's the point if just anyone can waltz in to constructive thought without using the gaudy tools made in desperation by knowledge pieceworkers?:
I do wonder at the fact that someone with no historiographical background and only half an economics degree could make substantive corrections and suggestions at the very frontier of the field's knowledge of a canonical figure. In one way this is nice: reason is a universal solvent, and specific facts make up relatively little of total intellectual work! But in another way sad: the pompousness and boundary-work of the non-formal academic fields is again shown to be needless, and narrowing. |
| Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany (2015) by Norman Ohler | Such an insultingly dumb plot - "the Nazis act as they do because they are all on crystal meth" - except it's nonfiction and quite plausible. The 70-hour assaults of Blitzkrieg in particular could not have happened without heavy stimulants. And Hitler becomes much more understandable when you learn of his ten year binge on injected pharmaceuticals. Juicy bits: [Around 1923] forty per cent of Berlin doctors were said to be addicted to morphine Ohler argues that drugs have been overlooked as the (unsustainable) engine of the Nazi economic recovery, and of the alien intensity of the ideology, because people took Goebbels at his word about the Nazi drive for natural organic wellness and purity and so ignored this 'medicine' that millions of Germans were supplied by the state and IG. I don't know whether Ohler is making a revisionist stretch or not, but certainly Pervitin had a role. |
| The Globe (The Science of Discworld, #2) (2002) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Diggers (Bromeliad Trilogy, #2) (1990) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Unseen Academicals (Discworld, #37; Rincewind #8) (2009) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) by Tom Stoppard | None yet |
| Eric (Discworld, #9; Rincewind #4) (1990) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (1990) by David Foster Wallace | The first book on hip-hop? Certainly the first High Academic one. Though, not really a book, as they frequently acknowledge: it's a "sampler". And not expert, as they constantly acknowledge: more than half of it is them pseudo-nervously hedging about being two elite white guys peering into what was then a fairly closed circle. A solid effort too - it knows and guesses and connects more than most critics today, despite the scene being far more ethnically closed, and far less obviously of artistic wealth; despite their often comically mishearing the lyrics; and despite not being able to find anything out about the people behind the music, because no-one returned their calls (until they pretended to be journalists). Anyway this has 80pp of recognisably enervated DFW popping off the top of this allocortex, decent fuel for the fire of an admirer, or at any rate the only coal on offer (he was embarrassed by this book, but it is too stylish and enthusiastic to be embarrassing to us):
I had been putting off reading this because of the title: I didn't know about Schooly D's track, so I read the verb in a gross academic voice ("in which we give rappers true signification") rather than the adjectival sense they actually meant ("rappers who signify"). Costello's bits are ok, DJ "MC" to MC "DFW". Wallace is harder than Costello - noting that MCs really are just yuppies, that Chuck D's claims to not be glorifying violence are absurd, that part of the fascination of hard rap is the snuff-spiral of trying to be nastier and nastier than previous hard rappers, which is just the commercial impulse of Alice Cooper minus musicianship. But this is also a winning early bet: that rap is poetry, that it was and would be "the decade's most important and influential pop movement":
Your enjoyment will depend on you giving a crap about the sheer horror of rap's initial context and being able to tolerate intentionally torturous pomo prose and juxtapositions (e.g. I Dream of Jeannie vs race riots). I loved it and twice missed my stop on the tube reading it. [Data #1, Theory #1, Values #1, Thinking #2]</li> |
| Kissinger (1992) by Walter Isaacson | Balanced coverage of the great monster, including his meteoric rise from penniless immigrant German Jew to a permanent spot in the highest caste of global influence; his academic conceit (the longest-ever thesis at Harvard), and his ceaseless inveigling and brown-nosing. (In case you don't know, Kissinger is probably the greatest war criminal in American history.) Res ipsa loquitur:Whenever peace — conceived as the avoidance of war — has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community. [A more proper goal is] stability based on an equilibrium of forces. There's not a lot of editorial from Isaacson. He respects Kissinger's single-mindedness and intellectual clout, while giving us plenty of his egotism and blandly evil wonkishness:
Isaacson soft-pedals the mass chaos and death Kissinger gave rise to. And much more has come to light about Kissinger's personal responsibility for it, since Isaacson published this. Dr Strangelove wasn't based on Kissinger, but I find it impossible not to think of Peter Sellars (or Woody Allen) when reading about the tragic success of this erotomaniacal egomaniac. Hitchens' Trial of Henry Kissinger is much more salient. |
| Universal Harvester (2017) by John Darnielle | A horror story without antagonist. Honouring and questioning rural homeliness and human twistedness. Haunting, in a toothache-on-the-brain style, and with his characteristic eye for detail, but not operating at the heights of ravaged beauty we know he can reach. In the movies, people almost never talked about the towns they spent their lives in; they ran around having adventures and never stopped to get their bearings. It was weird, when you thought about it. They only remembered where they were from if they wanted to complain about how awful it was there, or, later, to remember it as a place of infinite promise, a place whose light had been hidden from them until it became unrecoverable, at which point its gleam would become impossible to resist. There are perhaps too many passages that drift off from a concrete event into abstraction, and which then finish on a short, suggestive raised-eyebrow sort of sentence. Like:
Nerd haiku. Master of Reality is still his best fiction; his lyrics 1991 - 2009 are still his best words. |
| The Romanovs: 1613-1918 (2016) by Simon Sebag Montefiore | Long, shallow parade of the tsars from 1600 onwards. Focusses on the wars, the mistresses and the lulz, not on welfare or data. Still good if you're completely ignorant, like me. One insight: when you read "Peter the Great", or "Catherine the Great" (or indeed Frederick), remember that this epithet only holds if you append "...For an Warmongering Autocrat" in your head. I wanted to like Catherine II, but on gaining power she of course betrays the ideals of her powerless writing. In lieu of analysis, here's Peter the Great:
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| Prescriptions for the Mind: A Critical View of Contemporary Psychiatry (2008) by Joel Paris | Not what you'd expect ("DSM hiss!! Pharma woo!!"). An 'evidence-based psychiatrist' (a good guy), his main target is people who overinterpret current neuroscience and just churn out pills. He concedes that the old analysts were 'brainless' but calls the worst of the new brain-scan boom 'mindless'. The evidence for talk therapy – things like CBT (for anxiety and personality disorders) – is much better than I'd thought, and Paris reckons this is now overlooked in favour of cheaper and truthier biological determinism. A good, hard thing to say: "What causes mental illness? By and large, advances in neuroscience notwithstanding, we still don't know." |
| The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory (2007) by Torkel Klingberg | Nice gentle probe of our faddish fear that tech is pumping too much info through us, and thereby vitiates our branes and produces ADHD. Working memory, if you haven't heard, is trumpeted as the constitutive component of intelligence. Klingberg's optimistic about it all, pointing to the Flynn effect as an epidemiological sign that we are (cognitively) ok with being overloaded. His own research is much more promising about training working memory and gF than others I'd read... |
| Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim (2004) by Ziauddin Sardar | Wanted a life of Muhammad to match the life of Luther, but the available biographies were credulous, downplaying his Machiavellian – or rather, since he was successful, his 'Napoleonic' – accomplishments and mercantile background. So, the 'sceptical Muslim' it is: Sardar has been everywhere, involved in every other big event in the Muslim world for 40 years. He gets beaten up by Iranian revolutionaries; sees Bin Laden in Peshawar in '85; is offered £5m by the Saudis to shut up; is at Anwar's side in Malaysia; his nephew worked in the WTC in late 2001. He shows the full crushing procession of forces in Muslims' lives – Western bootprints old and new, Israel locking up 1.6 million and scattering a million others to the wind, the former Ba'athists, the Brotherhood, the 'simpleton' Tablighi Jamaat, Saudi power soft and hard, and a dozen home-grown oppressions and gross inequalities. Sardar in the middle: willing the backward chaos to end, but recoiling from the resulting medieval theocracies. "But maybe paradise does not want to be found". Bit aimless but I suppose instructive. |
| Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human (2005) by Joel Garreau | Pop account of near-future technological accelerations and explosions. (AKA transhumanism v bioconservatism.) We face four types of dislocating technologies: Genetics, Robotics, Infotech and Nanotech. Garreau gives loads of stage time to two dogmatic cranks from each side: Kurzweil (booster technocrat), and Fukuyama (neocon fearmonger) as well as an unclassifiable polymath, Jaron Lanier. But this is sadly just the way science journalism is done, and Garreau is later courageous in half-endorsing the transcendent transhuman rationale of beautiful bioprogressive Bostrom. Unfortunately his prose is Gladwellian, full of glib pop references and leaden line-break punch-lines. Still a balanced intro to the scenarios and figureheads. You really should read something on the ethics of these technologies: I recommend Pearce, Bostrom, or Sandberg. |
| Seeing Things: Poems (1991) by Seamus Heaney | Don't like nature poets. The post-Thoreau tend to be casually nihilistic about science and humanity, however much beauty and innocence they display. But Heaney's a naturalist, not a nature poet. He talks about the same few things – stone, dirt, the nature of light for a child, the act of building, wind – hundreds of times and still casts newness. It hurts to read for some reason – he's never miserable, and rarely handles even abstract tragedy explicitly, but I get tight behind my eyes. |
| The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (2009) by Peter Singer | None yet |
| Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (2018) by David Reich | Incredibly detailed and fresh, but also repetitive and indiscriminate. Had to think quite hard looking at some of the many diagrams showing e.g. hundreds of thousands of years of almost-noise recombination. Archeology has been transformed in the last decade, by the ancient DNA hunt. Reich allows us something precious, to see large and profound errors corrected, nearly as they are first discovered. But it just isn't that readable and the forest of details obscures even the giant new facts (Denisovan cross-breeding with us, Neanderthalian cross-breeding with us, very different pictures of paths of migration...) |
| Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000) by Anthony Bourdain | Lots to dislike but I like it. The prose is just a voiceover: short sentences, newline punchlines, chatty laddish bluster. You wouldn't want to spend time with young Bourdain; too edgy, too miserable, too addled. At no point does he disown his wild years, but this is written as a different, charming, distant man. I suppose this made him a star because honesty and filth are rare in high cuisine, or in the received notion of high cuisine. He refers to himself as a "cook" throughout (or even "cookie"), endearingly. Anyone else playing at being a junkie cuisinier, sexual tyrannosaurus, smash-hit author, primetime travel host, and, most recently, jiujitsu japer would surely be risible. But his enthusiasm is convincing. It may well be that Bourdain was a 6/10 chef; I can tell you he's a 6/10 writer, at least as prose goes. But domains multiply when they intersect. |
| And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future (2016) by Yanis Varoufakis | Much better than I thought it'd be! Literary, clear, almost bipartisan. As a former socialist finance minister, he has a healthy blend of actual economic knowledge and smouldering will to improve an irrational status quo. (He uses "irrational" far more than the usual pejoratives: "greedy" or "exploitative" or "neoliberal".) He makes lots of literary allusions and shares personal tales of fascist Greece. These make the deadly dull business of postwar European monetary politics readable. He talks about the duty of surplus nations to stabilize the world system, which is true and good but unworkable. He has a remarkable admiration for American institutions and figures - not just the New Dealers, but also, in a way, for Volcker and Geithner - while also pointing out astutely. Full marks for tone, basically. A good writer, with only a couple of wrongfooted sentences. Potted history of post-war international macroeconomics. His policies do not much resemble socialism: all the same neoliberal institutions exist in Varoufakisland. He'd just use them to help the vulnerable. America (Harry White, Volcker) had a chance to stabilise the world, but instead grabbed national interest at the expense of others. Then - according to Varoufakis - they grabbed hegemony at the expense of their own, which is even more depressing. His current-account focussed theory is a bit narrow. There is already a eurozone surplus recycling mechanism, for instance. His 2015 Greek finance policies continue to look better than the current blind bailout plus permadeflation solution: Greece should have defaulted. His (and Holland's) recommendations are very sensible. Despite being short, it is really repetitive; I skimmed chapters 4-6 heavily. It is also disappointingly short on private gossip about the dark back-corridors of Brussels; he saved that for the next book. |
(c) African Sonata (c.2000) by Vladimir Kush2/5: Only for enthusiasts. 25th percentile.
| The Lost Worlds of 2001 (1971) by Arthur C. Clarke | Read while passing time in someone else's house. Lots of detail about Kubrick's brutal whims and maniacally hands-on approach to everything. (In preproduction he threw the bones into the air and filmed the arc himself, apparently, nearly giving himself a head injury.) They both come across as two quite silly men with odd amounts of access to astronauts and presidents and captains of industry. I was expecting to see something about Clarke's dismay (at working for several years at something essentially discarded), but he totally kept it out of this. Most of this is deleted scenes from the novel. They're very thin and discardable. |
| Elysium Fire (Prefect Dreyfus Emergency, #2) (2018) by Alastair Reynolds | Both rushed and too long. Characters do lots of excessively dumb stuff, including the most sober and clever characters, Dreyfus and Aumonier, who both act like Maverick badasses here. The contrivance at the beginning (to artificially promote Ng and concoct some drama with Sparver) is too transparent. Way too many board meetings with people doing an increment of exposition and muttering darkly. There is another scary exponential problem, but unlike in the last book, halfway through it gets capped at 2000 potential deaths. Intentionally small stakes can be good (see Cibola Burn from the Expanse series), but here it just sends up the emoting and silliness from previously professional agents. Still readable, but it undermines the characters that made the first pop. |
| Visions Of Joanna Newsom (2010) by Brad Buchanan | An incredible artist who deserves a book of criticism, but not this one. |
| At the Strangers' Gate: Arrivals in New York (2017) by Adam Gopnik | Gopnik is one of the best writers alive, in the limited sense that his prose is unerring and musical, that he can make any subject interesting for twenty minutes. But this book, about being young, poor, and dizzily romantic in 80s New York, is too thin, 90% style. I don't resent reading about him and his wife hanging around department stores, nor even the long passage praising his wife, but I also don't take away anything beyond the mouthfeel of his words. In some sense their impractical romanticism - spending their last savings on one fancy suit, appreciating graffiti, lingering around Bloomingdale's not buying anything - was straightforwardly aspirational and material. Not bohemian, or, temporarily, on the way up, merely waiting to become an aesthete and, glory of glories, a tastemaker. This is the great tension of arty people, particularly if (as the Gopniks do not) you have pretensions to moral superiority: really you are rejecting one consumerism for another. Book people get away with this most, because the sensuality and pleasure of great writing is hidden between the covers. One solution is to get into high-status trash (you can't be accused of narrow sensualism for liking Tracey Emin or Billy Childish); far more common is to contort yourself so that liking and buying art is a moral action, if not a cleaner and more beautifully non-instrumental kind of moral action than merely doing something for someone.
Note the smooth way in which a cool irreverent idea - "It's human nature to turn a mouth taste into a moral taste" - becomes a certain precept "Every mouth taste instantly becomes a moral taste" just by lightness and repetition. This is the downside of being this good at prose: you can make things sound simpler than they are. The humour is ever-present but vanishingly slight. When he loses his only pair of suit trousers, he devotes five pages to a comic lament for them. But it's the echo of comedy.
There are still three or four wonderful points, the best of the New Yorker's shallow profundity
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| Pariah (Warhammer 40,000) (2012) by Dan Abnett | None yet |
| Junktion (2005) by Matthew Farrer | Decent mind candy, quick work. 80% of it is pretty much one intermittent action sequence. The only literary flourish is the protagonist constantly trying to distract himself - from a sheer drop, from the prospect of assailants above, from his culpability, from his impotence. Necromunda (focussing on the under-underclass of a world-city) is much less Gothic, mystical, triumphal than the usual 40k stuff. But still nasty, unredeemed, temporary, claustrophobic. |
| Intermittent Fasting and Feasting: Use Strategic Periods of Fasting and Feasting to Burn Fat Like a Beast, Build Muscle Like a Freak and Eat One Meal a ... Fasting One Meal a Day Book 1) () by Siim Land | Normally I wouldn't take health advice from a bodybuilding rando. But I'm already persuaded by normal channels about the benefits of fasting, so this is for the art of it. Much better than it looks. He is probably too enthusiastic about fasting and keto (though his definition is broad: he skips breakfast every day to get a 16 hour mini-fast). But the evidence is solid for occasional fasts (for weight maintenance in a superstimulating environment, anti-inflammation, immune health, "autophagy" cleanup time). Very practical. Most important: Not getting enough electrolytes is the most common reason why people fail fasting Free here, though it plugs his paid diet regime. http://www.siimland.co/full-guide-to-intermittent-fasting/ |
| Microsoft Windows Networking Essentials (2011) by Darril Gibson | Despite the name, a decent intro to the universal protocols. |
| The End of Mr. Y (2006) by Scarlett Thomas | Only saved from being actively contemptible by its ambition, its attempt to use both science and weird French theory. Sex was pretty risible too iirc. |
| The Odyssey (-700) by Homer | I don't want to hector Homer. But somehow this was both boring and evil, both childish and didactic. I won't belabour the book's immorality, since it is so obvious; it's the near-total absence of artistic merit that is apparently not obvious. I found nothing in it worth reading or quoting until Book 9, nearly half way through. Songs of praise of warmongering pirates. (People love pirates, and I say let em. Just don't call them paragons.) The ideology is dad porn, a set of thin, obvious, animal values. "Kings do whatever they want - death for messing with a noble; don't cross the priests; offer huge sacrifices; always do what your husband and dad say; the unlucky and the disabled are cursed and to be shunned; blood is blood is blood." The ghost(Odysseus sleeps with half a dozen other women and demigods, most of them begging him to, and needless to say suffers nothing of it.) There's no mention of the suffering of the several cities he sacks, or the many tacitly raped women. Dozens of people are murdered for being rude, though. For a quasi-sacred text there's a surprising amount of unpunished priest killing (e.g. Leodes). The structure is awful: we see almost nothing of Odysseus for the first quarter of the poem, instead following his son around as he listens to a series of boring old men. Most of Odysseus' feats are not shown, are instead related by him as unaffecting stories. (I suppose we could amuse ourselves by treating this as unreliable narration, but they certainly didn't.) And the poem doesn't end at its climax, instead meandering on through another few books of pointless back-patting. (Should I go easy? After all, this is groundbreaking work, the prototype of art. Sure; I'll go easy if you stop hyping it and making everyone read it as an exemplar.) It must be a cliche among classicists that the 'Classical' civilisations were not classical in the sense of being austere, logical, tasteful, or contemplative. That they were not Apollonian, that only a handful of people in them were. I hope my rant here is not just me being misled by the modern sense of "hero" - but the fact is that Odysseus wins, is praised endlessly, and his rights trump all else. This isn't just me being clueless, post-oral, and close-minded: The ancients were well aware that the ending is unsatisfying crap. One popular headcanon was that, after Odysseus slays the suitors, he is immediately exiled from Ithaca, set adrift again. Cue the music! --- One reading of Odysseus' name is as variant of the verb 'to be hated'. So a calque might be "King Punchable of Ithaca". ("the most unhappy man alive") Odysseus is treated incredibly well by almost everyone, despite his crimes. Complete strangers oil him up and dress him in fine "woolen cloak and tunic" eleven times, and he is given precious weaponry and potions for nothing several times. This is supposed to reflect on him, but instead it shows the Greek ideal of hospitality, one of the few nice things in that culture. He appears to sincerely miss Ithaca (his status more than his wife), weeping frequently. But he also fucks about all the time, for instance staying an entire year voluntarily enjoying Circe. It is completely unclear what O does to deserve his fortune. (Whereas his misfortune is always directly linked to his own machismo or idiocy.) The only virtues we see him exercise directly (not counting brute aggression and discus throwing) are courage and cunning (specifically lying). Ok, he also makes one good speech: 'Listen to me, my friends, despite your grief. I suppose we can put the rest down to charisma, the oddest and least rational of human powers. 'It seems that everybody loves this man, Everyone extols him without him ever demonstrating the virtues they extol. (Politeness, propriety, wisdom, strategy...) Every other idiot is "godlike" at something or other, and seeing the state of their gods you see how this could be true. At least it's funny: He went out of his bedroom like a god King Menelaus, you are right... Your voice is like a god's to us. Majestic, holy King Alcinous (The gods are stupid mirrors of Greek nobility; for instance they have supernatural slaves, the nymphs.) This at least is a philosophical difference between them and I: in their superstitious idealist mode, properties aren't for describing the present, but instead the timeless essence of a thing: Ships are "black", "hollow", "swift" or "curved", never "brown", "slow" or "wobbly"... Penelope is "prudent Penelope", never "swift-footed Penelope", even if she is moving quickly. Telemachus is thoughtful, even when he seems particularly immature. All the feats of the heroes are totally dependent on the power of gods. If they say you can't sail, you can't. His skin Athena poured unearthly charm Without Hermes or Athena constantly intervening, O would be nowhere, achieve nothing. One nice tension here though: But death is universal. Even gods One of the few times I felt sympathy for Odysseus was when he was trying to lead his men, who are mainly large-adult-sons. (Same with the suitors.) One breaks his neck falling down a ladder. They undo a month of work by playing with the bag of winds. Several times they are totally paralysed by their wailing and tantrums. As when The other men... Odysseus occasionally draws his sword on them for backtalking him, or running around like Muppets. Their deaths are roughly equally due to Odysseus' aggression and avarice, and their own foolishness. I cheered the uprising against him, who are completely in the right. But of course they lose, because of mere divine intervention. --- OK I lied: I will talk about evil. Though by the end of this I was jaded and dismissive, the aftermath of Odysseus slaughtering the suitors still struck me as an atrocity unusual for the genre: "When the whole house is set in proper order, I've read de Sade, Kaczynski, Himmler, Houellebecq, Egan and Watts at their most dyspeptic; it's not that I'm squeamish about real or fictional evil, or that my sulking sense of justice blinds me to aesthetics. This sort of thing happened; nothing cannot be said; maybe even nothing cannot be said beautifully. It's just that, again, there is nearly no nobility and no classicism in this. I am so glad this culture is gone. --- Did its audience know the story was bullshit? Or was it scripture to them? (Like most scripture, it is pathetically ignoble, violent, and self-serving.) Well, they don't seem to have had scripture, not even Hesiod. So Homer is more like Dante or Milton for them: not sacred, but pious and moralising. How big was mighty Troy? How noble was godlike Odysseus? How petty their pantheon? How long this epic? --- * Even thought-provoking bits like the lotus eaters or Cyclopean anarchism are over in less than half a page. * Surprised when Zeus was described as "husband of Hera". * The "no man" pun thing was so stupid I had to put the book down for a couple of days. --- Normally I would stop reading a book this bad, but I read it to prepare for Ulysses, so I dragged myself through. Wilson's introduction takes up a quarter of the entire book. It's good and sane but repetitive, taking pains to spell out all the ignoble and questionable, all the ugly and clumsy parts. I don't know how she keeps up her enthusiasm for the book, in the face of them, but more power to her. Plus two points for Wilson's intro and demystified translation. |
| The Wreck of the Archangel: Poems (1995) by George Mackay Brown | Barely there. You can do things with extremely plain, terse, noun-based poetry - I have in mind Ciaran Carson. But this is too minimal for me. |
| The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (2012) by Philip J. Guo | Question: Is your book meant as a critique of academia or a call for reform? most Ph.D. students are directly training for a job that they will never get. (Imagine how disconcerting it would be if medical or law school graduates couldn't get jobs as doctors or lawyers, respectively.) Strange one. It's 100 pages of minor mental breakdowns, ten thousand hours of mind-numbing gruntwork, stupid status games, and disillusionment - all in plain, businesslike, affectless prose. Also, there's very little technical detail in it. You'd think he was describing painting a house, rather than a painful initiation into the partially-insane system of placing logic incarnate in harness (a system with surprisingly weak links to discovery and progress). research was my only job, and I wouldn't be able to earn a degree unless I succeeded at it. My mood was inextricably tied to how well I was progressing every day, and during those months, progress was painfully slow. He spends two years of his life on nasty little problems, thousands of hours of config and debugging, nothing to show for it, no papers, no new results. The top CS schools don't let you graduate until you get 4 papers in "top" conferences: layers upon layers of luck and gatekeeping, only modestly correlated with your efforts. Oh, and you are unlikely to have much choice of project either. A recipe for misery. This is at the very top of the game, too: Stanford with full funding and annual internships at the big lads. It is both reassuring and horrifying to hear that elite groups waste months and submit total shit sometimes. In the end, it took three attempts by four Ph.D. students over the course of five years before Dawson's initial Klee-UC idea turned into a published paper. Of those four students, only one "survived"—I quit the Klee project, and two others quit the Ph.D. program altogether.</i> Guo is no Jeremiah: despite his suffering, despite his very penetrating analysis of the waste and the idiocies, he doesn't declaim the system. He just analyses the narrow, nonscientific incentives of those around him and gets on with winning the game. He talks like this: "i think that leveraging [software] and aligning with both of your interests and incentives will be the best way for me to both make a contribution and also to feel satisfied about making concrete forward progress every day.". He uses 'top-tier' without scare quotes. At one point he dispassionately notes that half a dozen of his papers were rejected because he wasn't fluent in the specific sub-field's "rhetorical tricks, newfangled buzzwords, and marketing-related contortions required to satisfy reviewers". That is, he comes up against bullshit Bourdieuan micro-distinctions, boundary work, irrelevant to science, and shrugs and sets about learning how to pass as an insider. Look elsewhere for the relevant denunciations. It would be cynical to think that he doesn't milk the politics of postgraduate pain because he landed well, is a professor now - instead just envy him his inner calm: my six years of Ph.D. training have made me wiser, savvier, grittier, and more steely, focused, creative, eloquent, perceptive, and professionally effective than I was as a fresh college graduate. (Two obvious caveats: Not every Ph.D. student received these benefits—many grew jaded and burned-out from their struggles. Also, lots of people cultivate these positive traits without going through a Ph.D. program.)... There is this to be said for the American seven year ditch: Guo was able to suffer and wander for three entire years before he had his first big idea. That's the other side: the incredible privilege of being paid to read, paid to talk to clever people, paid to think new thoughts. But who says privileges have to feel nice, or not drive you half-mad? A very valuable warning for some tiny fraction of the world, a flat curio for some other tiny voyeur fraction.</td> </tr> |
| Some of the Best from Tor.com, 2019 edition (2020) by Elizabeth Bear | Very formulaic, two or three formulae. 1) the tragic child; 2) bullied outcast responding with excess force; 3) Gaiman-Whedon fairytales winking too hard. Portentous in all but five cases, mostly clumsily so. Glorifying bad decisions just because they are autonomous. Sprinkling of non-English languages, otherwise less knowledge than I look for. Good amount of very bad poetry too. I'd have stopped reading this about a quarter through, but I was looking for new writers. I figured that if Tor snagged Egan, Abercrombie, Miéville, Reynolds, Stross, surely some of the other 22 authors, chosen from presumed thousands, would be good. 3 are (Larson, Tidbeck and Kemper), but this knowledge cost me more than I thought. Great Ok: Meh Bad ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Painless by Rich Larson. Really nice. Dozens of original details. I liked the recycling replicator, feeding a stray your fingers, the Arabic-Hausa neologisms, procedural cartoons, dying face unlock. I flinched for the CIPA characters even though it means nothing to them. The Song, Erinn Kemper. Plenty of tension and ambiguity, unlike the other stories. Say you work on a machine that kills the creatures you love, because that's how you get to study them alive. Characters with more than one value, making terrible decisions, not solving problems, not quipping, not punching up. The setup relies on you thinking there's a difference in kind between killing a whale and killing a cow, which I don't. There's even a dig at monomaniacal Greens: "the carbon footprint resulting from eating whale meat is substantially lower than that of beef(...)" Works. "Blue Morphos in the Garden" by Lis Mitchell. Playful sort of death, natural afterlife. I am glad the protagonist pushes back against the ancestor-worship and collective subsumption. "Don't you think it's selfish not to leave something that Lily can see, that she can tell her children about?" "Water: A History" by KJ Kabza. romance vs economics. Still touched by the blind contrarian spirit of this volume, but at least it's well done. "Skinner Box" by Carole Johnstone. Trapped in a tiny spaceship with your lover and your rapist. Angsty astronauts, too horny and sadistic to live. You can't send people this fucked up into space. But we will. Narrator is called a genius but shows no signs of it. Johnstone manages to make deep learning nasty, just by associating it with these mean narrow bastards. Nice mention of Graphcore, my local overweening tech giant. "I don't like the unpredictability of people. Of neocortexes. But I hate the predictability of nanites. The incorruptibility." Cruel, vague, but has a few ideas at least. "One/Zero". Warzone children scene manipulative, saccharine. At least she's thinking big, Santa Superintelligence / Surveill. Boy and god. AI unbixes itself and everything goes swell. Attempt at lyrical Uplift mandala but ends up clumsy and soppy-stern. "Seonag and the Seawolves" by M. Evan MacGriogair. Nice Celtic colour and rhythm, though actually it gets in the way of the images. The Gaelic is mostly not translated, and I didn't bother to google it. Portentous as usual, far too many one-sentence paragraphs, but it does islander prejudice and peaty magic well. "Old Media" by Annalee Newitz. Central conceit - that we would have economically-profitable human slavery at the same time as human-level AI - is full-on nonsense, but I actually didn't mind much. Goofy picture of a future humanities degree, studying harem anime and anti-robotism with your ace robot gf. She [robot gf] looked so beautiful that John thought his heart would crack open like the space eggs in a kaiju movie, full of lava and lightning and life forms that had never walked the Earth. "More Real Than Him" by Silvia Park. Protagonist is a basic K-pop stan and a sexist haxxor snob. (Hard to imagine such being technically talented, but some surely are.) Fun. "The Hundredth House Had No Walls" by Laurie Penny. Extremely conventional subversion of fairy tales, the princess saves herself in this one eh. Flat and clear and fine. "Beyond the El" by John Chu. Maudlin food magic. Few outright errors, as well as an apparently intentional hypernegation tic ("aren't not exactly rich", "the wind was not freezing"). Sister character is a boring 2D sociopath. "As the Last I May Know" by S. L. Huang. Nuclear Omelas. Contains a dreadful slander on Otto Hahn, naming the warmonger nuke-happy president after him. Dreadful haiku. I'd have liked some details on how exactly they kept their nuclear secrets for 200 years; we didn't manage two. The story hinges on a false dichotomy, that the superweapon will necessarily kill children. Unless it's a very dense population, or the enemy are using hostages, then she doesn't explain why there's no tactical use. "Deriving Life" by Elizabeth Bear. Incredibly glib, replacing the rightful defamiliarisation and mirror-darkly of SF with applause lights ("Can you imagine a planet full of assholes who used to just . . . cut down trees?") Premise is bizarre and cool and she doesn't pull it off. "Articulated Restraint" by Mary Robinette Kowal. Really irritating. Why do people glorify going to space when you're physically messed up? I guess this would be less pointless if you liked the character from elsewhere. I guess the actual Apollo equipment protocol details are nice. Would be one star without the Egan, Larson, Tidbeck, Kemper 3-stars. |
| Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016) by Cal Newport | Quite shallow. He uses himself and Carl Jung as exemplars of the method - "I published 4 books in 10 years" and so on - but why should I judge either of them to have made a positive impact, merely because they published a lot? Lots of cherry-picked anecdotes in the normal bad self-help mode, with no attention to survivorship bias. Deep Work has the same feel as the disgraced Why We Sleep: empirically sloppy exaggeration of a plausibly ultra-important topic. Unlike Walker, Newport is not explicitly claiming scientific authority though. The topic is networked technology as a force against individual productivity. There's a weak and a strong form:
Newport makes both claims ("Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work."), and the strong one is poorly justified to say the least. But the weak form is plausible and important enough on its own. I wondered how much this was just a rehash of the Flow idea, and in fact Newport does give it its due. It seems fair to update the idea after 40 great years of tech and the culture of tech. (I had no mobile phone until I was 17, no smartphone until I was 27. My abstinence would be much harder now.) The weak evidence could be forgiven if the claims were weaker, or if the tone was less pompous. Plus two stars for being about an important possibility, minus one for being unrigorous, minus one for tone. Things I try to do: * Track your amount of deep work hours every day. * Protect your morning: get out of bed quickly and don't browse. * Do "time blocking", earmarking a whole day for focused work * Batch shallow work (emails, meetings) in one time slots, probably the evening. He talks about scheduling your entire day, which I suspect is perverse. And "become hard to reach" is only possible for people who are already successful / in particular careers. ymmv. |
| The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (2009) by Richard G. Wilkinson | The Piketty of the noughties - i.e. it's a bestselling forest of empirical detail, with lots of methodological problems and ideological overinterpretation. I was very impressed, as an undergrad with the same axe to grind as the authors. How does it hold up after ten years? Well, we've learned what a forest (or garden) of empirical detail sadly often means: data dredging, cherry-picking, p-hacking and so on. Here's a meta-analysis contradicting the health thesis, from 2004. Here's the excellent analyst Nintil contradicting the growth thesis. Up-to-date critique (from a partisan figure) here. |
| Mays 20 (2012) by John Darnielle | It's impossible to be the Darnielle completist I am. On top of the maybe 400 commercial objects ("8 to 20 On a Weapons Charge is a bonus track from ~1 copy of Taking the Dative"), there are: a complete but unreleased album, three dozen online-only ephemeral downloads, a hundred covers, a hundred live-only bootleg-only songs, a hundred more known "missing" songs, dozens of songs with no attestation but a title or a verse, and who knows how many more we couldn't snatch from him out of the air. Some of his best have been performed exactly once, and probably never again. There's two good strong pages of JD here, plus his hand in picking and ordering some really ordinary student poetry. It's sort of nice that it's so ordinary; if the bar were higher it would leave people behind, and poetry is now the last place to leave anyone behind. (Except the reader.) It's sort of terrible that the ordinary student art in here will attend much greater success, commanding heights, just because it is in here. Scott Annett's 'Cranes' is quite nice. Alexander Freer's 'Preliminary Communication' is an unsuccessful attempt at my favourite, difficult sort of poem, the bipartite-contrasted-abstract+concrete thingy, more than three words to a line. Felt nothing for the photos. I was a student writer, in fact more of a student writer than a student. What makes student writing? Earnestness, of course, and the attendant humour gap. An excess of night, nakedness, ribs, blood, pain, the word "fucking" but not much fucking. Syntax shortage. Sensual tongue effects without sensible teeth. Formulas hidden behind frantic formal experiment and pique. Derivativeness as homage. Either sensitive outsiderdom or cartoonish total radicalism or both. It's hard to imagine that student writers could get over themselves, could become less clumsy, could settle into themselves, could understand others, could try to actually affect the world. But apparently some do, like Darnielle. |
| Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (2017) by Matthew Walker | [The following review is too credulous: I wrote it before it became clear that the book is at best a noble-lie exaggeration and at worst statistical fraud with unjustified practical claims. Downgrade your credence in all nonfiction that's outside your expertise, including reviews like this one.] Walker: \tScientists have discovered a revolutionary treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You'll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested? Important topic: he claims there's a free, riskless intervention to add years to your lifespan and fundamentally improve your mind. (The flip side of this claim is a horror story about a society that mentally disables its members.) Our school system, ladies and gents: \tMore than 80 percent of public high schools in the United States begin before 8:15 a.m. Almost 50 percent of those start before 7:20 a.m. School buses for a 7:20 a.m. start time usually begin picking up kids at around 5:45 a.m. As a result, some children and teenagers must wake up at 5:30 a.m., 5:15 a.m., or even earlier, and do so five days out of every seven, for years on end. This is lunacy... And elsewhere he notes that time in school is useless without restfulness. Burn it down. \tInsufficient sleep has also been linked to aggression, bullying, and behavioral problems in children across a range of ages. A similar relationship between a lack of sleep and violence has been observed in adult prison populations; places that, I should add, are woefully poor at enabling good sleep that could reduce aggression, violence, psychiatric disturbance, and suicide The theory of sleep (circadian rhythm and adenosine cycle determining when, NREM and REM determining what) is very neat but I'm not qualified to say if it's mature. There's also vast and baffling cross-species variation, which Walker doesn't pretend to understand: "amount (e.g., [hours per day]), form (e.g., half-brain, whole-brain), and pattern (monophasic, biphasic, polyphasic)" or ground / tree. The adenosine cycle - the absolutely failsafe connection between activity and fatigue - is one of my favourite theories in biology. (The account here doesn't do it justice.) He's sceptical of oral melatonin therapy, but he doesn't consider the main argument in favour, which is that our many hours of blue-light at night is a systematic deviation from ancestral conditions, with no sensible alternative mitigation (f.lux can only do so much). (He instead puts faith in warm LEDs and smart bulbs, currently thousands of dollars each.) At least he doesn't spread the unsupported idea that taking it results in negative hormonal feedback. This doesn't surprise me:
- but this is the price of having it over-the-counter in the first place. (It is anyway completely safe to take a 6x dose, just much less effective.) He's very in favour of afternoon naps, the "biphasic" pattern, based on relatively weak observational evidence:
There's lots of evolutionary speculation, which really pisses off some readers for some reason, even when tagged as speculation. (e.g. Do teenagers stay up later to procreate outwith parental supervision?) He is a crusader all right - for instance, he doesn't really do any cost-benefit consideration, instead just maximising sleep, even instead of taking your asthma meds. Yes, the costs of sleep deprivation are extremely high - but so's the cost of spending 30 years in a coma. I think I'm pretty much optimised: I already quit caffeine, redshifted all screens, got 0.3mg melatonin, started wearing an eye mask, don't drink much, exercise every day, fixed a bedtime, and live somewhere quiet with big bedroom windows. (I also got a less melodramatic and anxious worldview by studying economic history, which Walker doesn't cover - fair enough, since the intervention can only help scared intellectuals.) Things which I enjoy enough to handle the sleep cost: nicotine and eating late. Twelve Tips for Healthy Sleep: |
| The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967) by Marshall McLuhan | Damn silly fun. Good to chat about, hard to take seriously |
| Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness (2006) by Jon Ronson | Spot of pleasant mundane stuff from a man more often immersed in extremes. Still sharp, but only by the standards of English weekend columns. |
| SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (2009) by Steven D. Levitt | Contrarianism unbound by prior plausibility. Most chapters contain something wrong and/or harmful. e.g. the drunk-driving vs drunk-walking claim. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-what-went-wrong I'm relatively fond of geoengineering, but their uncritical acceptance of Myhrvold's irreversible schtick is scary and foolish. A bit more reliable than Gladwell, but this isn't saying much. |
| Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2005) by Steven D. Levitt | We and others have noted a discouraging tendency in the Freakonomics body of work to present speculative or even erroneous claims with an air of certainty. - Gelman and Fung Entertaining but misleading. Levitt's proper work deserves admiration, for its ability to make dry econometric bs exciting, and for its willingness to push strong counterintuitive policy based on the available evidence. But presented without the error bars, like in this book, it's not to be relied upon. The most important claim in this, that legalising abortion caused a big permanent fall in crime rates two decades later, is (to my surprise) actually much the same status as it was 20 years ago: plausible, contested, surviving its errors, unsure. Go for 'The Undercover Economist's or 'Filthy Lucre' or 'The Armchair Economist' instead. |
| Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility & Desirability of Peace (1967) by Leonard C. Lewin | None yet |
| The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1) (2015) by N.K. Jemisin | Good for a YA book. Interesting lore, good structure, inconsistent worldbuilding, portentous/glib tone, painful slang. Lore: the Earth hates us, which is why there is so much suffering. Includes a (true) evolutionary gradient: Earth our father knew He would need clever life, so He used the Seasons to shape us out of animals: clever hands for making things and clever minds for solving problems and clever tongues for working together and clever sessapinae to warn us of danger. The people became what Father Earth needed, and then more than He needed. Then we turned on Him, and He has burned with hatred for us ever since. She later ruins this interesting cosmogony by clubbing you over the head with a message (that the lethal climate shock Seasons started after people polluted the world too much). The world is a blend of GoT survivalist folk religion and apocalyptically cyclical climate, X-Men despised chaos mages, Battlestar breeding body horror, Earthsea folk magic and wu wei, and superstitious racism. It mostly works. Structure: Three quite different focal characters, later shown to be the same person over time. I didn't spot the first unification coming, and it was satisfying. She leaves the big Soylent Green reveal until page 108; until then you're left wondering if all the grey objectification is justified by the terrible security risk. She's pretty glib about the two communities outside the Empire, full of earthquake witches who are shown regularly freezing or nuking things when even mildly irked. The utopian pirate community is also heavily rose-tinted - sure, they do kill people in order to take their stuff in a time of terrible scarcity... but hey they're really sexually liberated and not racist at all. Inconsistent: High Fantasy (subsisting commune agrarians, feudalism, omnipotent wizards) which also boasts C20th science, somehow. An in-universe history book describes one catastrophe as: "aerosolizing sufficient steam and particulate matter to trigger acidic rain and sky occlusion over the Somidlats..." They have penicillin without an industrial revolution, electric lights before steam. Ordinary C15th cannon are an experimental wunderweapon to them. More: most births have some risk (<1%) of being a giant nuclear volcano generator, but the Evil Empire does nothing to control reproduction, and has the parents administer very insecure self-regulation. Pretentious portentousness: There passes a time of happiness in your life, which I will not describe to you. It is unimportant. Perhaps you think it wrong that I dwell so much on the horrors, the pain, but pain is what shapes us, after all. We are creatures born of heat and pressure and grinding, ceaseless movement. To be still is to be... not.Of a character which until about 10 pages earlier had been a despised / tolerated frenemy: now your eyes are drawn away from the horror that remains of your mentor, your lover, your friend... I forgive Ada Palmer this style. But 1) she's not that bad; 2) she's aping the sentimentalist C18th, and 3) she has far greater philosophical sense. Glib: it turns out that the comm is called Meov, and the man who has stepped forward is Harlas, their headman. Syenite mispronounces vulgar words, inadvertently making them more vulgar, and makes instant friends of half the crew by doing so. "lol, applause!" Bad slang: "rogga", "comm", "orogeny" (every time, I thought "erogenous?"), really bad interjections (' "Evil, eating Earth", you whisper'; 'for shit's sake, she stilled a rusting volcano made by a broken obelisk'). The occasional good bit of slang (like "grits" for the young rock mages) is smothered in exposition: that's what she is now, an unimportant bit of rock ready to be polished into usefulness.... Better writers (Atwood or Le Guin or Banks) leave it up to you. Everything is spelled out here. The book gets roundly worse in the second half, with two chapters (16 and 17) full of hollow plot devices and applause lights (Damaya only explores the Main building so she can drive the plot forward when the hollow character Binof arrives, immediately afterwards). Also arguably Innon, there to be objectified and let Jemisin write 'good sex' scenes. Lots of Representation: polyamory, transgenderism, a dozen skin colours. Of course, fantasy doesn't represent anything, so strictly speaking that's a misnomer. It doesn't matter what the ethnic demographics of your lava-world are, relative to ours; you can have as much or as little typical sexuality etc as you like, any colour can be a minority, as long as it makes sense in that world. Do the choices of identities fit Jemisin's world? Is Tonkee's transgenderism, among feudalism, a personal idiosyncrasy? A hormone thing? A magic thing? We're given no reason for any of the identities she introduces to celebrate. But it mostly doesn't get in the way. Jemisin fumbles the "in a corrupt world, lawful complicity or violent revolution?" angle. At least in this instalment, there's little acknowledgment that killing an entire city because a handful of people in its government committed atrocities isn't on: 'He's not crazy at all, and he never has been' |
| Modern Scottish Culture (2005) by Michael Gardiner | None yet |
| Poverty Safari (2017) by Darren McGarvey | Read this because I am an unironic fan of the author's hip-hop opera about the luridly dystopian consequences of saying 'No' to the Scottish referendum. But it peaks with its epigram, Tom Leonard's "Liason Coordinator". More of an autobiography than I was expecting, lots about his own insecurities and appalling suffering, the quasi-political rage inspired by them, and his slow maturing into social work and art. Unfortunately the prose is really, really stiff. One of his observations is that poverty makes you unable to articulate poverty. So should I sympathise? I've a similarly uncultured background (though not a tenth as violent) and I still managed to get an ear for High English. (He isn't deep enough to analyse the politics of language, but he namechecks people who do, like Tom Leonard.) And but you can write in Scots now, if you're great, if you're brave, as shown by Welsh (Booker Prize longlist '93), Kelman (Booker win '94) and Leonard (anthologised in the Penguin Book of English Verse, IMO the highest honour in poetry). my sense of grievance with anyone I perceived as well-off. In my community, some people fought about football, others over politics and religion, but my simmering resentment, if not concentrated completely on my mother, lay with those in society who appeared to be doing much better than the rest of us, those who were gliding through life unimpeded by the constraints of poverty and the material disadvantage and self-doubt that comes with it. Many big sociological / psychology claims - some truisms, some false - but almost no citations for either. (e.g. He has this harebrained idea that Florida is a rich high-status place, when 5 seconds on wiki or passing familiarity with American memes gives the lie to that.) "according to Wikipedia" is as far as the scholarship goes. One intriguing detail about lC20th poverty: "you keep the big blue crate of European Union stew you've been donated well out of view" - food aid to Scotland in the 90s! Our "government cheese". There's a surprising section where he tries to tie Seneca and the other good old lads to modern common sense, to do some genealogy of morals, but he can't carry it. He also tries to square the circle of the giant malevolent nature/nuture catfight, but understandably can't lift that either. (He's more on the personal responsibility side than you'd expect for a Pollok Free Stater.) |
| Prison Pit, Vol. 1 (2009) by Johnny Ryan | Nasty, stupid, but not lazy. (Several single actions, like Cannibal Fuckface's fall, are rendered over 6 entire pages, dragging out some detail and almost pathos from what is otherwise boring edgelord fodder.) |
| Small is Beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered (1973) by Ernst F. Schumacher | Loveable nonsense. His rejection of growth - as if environmentally neutral or positive productivity growth didn't exist, as if advanced technology can't stabilise and repair the damage of earlier technologies, as if material gain had no good moral effects - is fatal, and more popular now than it was in the 70s. |
| Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead (2012) by Charlie Sweatpants | A clever outsized blogpost. The points are true, the arguments fine, and personally I like that rabbit-hole mania when a smart person spends way too much time on something. But who's the audience? The fan who knows that Zombie Simpsons sucks, but wants to indulge in hating the studio? The youngster who hasn't seen it pre-reanimation? Someone was going to say it, and now they have. |
| Post Office (1971) by Charles Bukowski | Nasty, but so is life if you're nasty. The casual rape scene and casual racism should prompt us to ask why Bukowski wanted us to hate Chinaski, who is generally a close Imitation of him, a facsimile factotum. |
| Fashion Beast (2013) by Alan Moore | Nasty curio, with Malcolm McLaren(!) presumably supplying most of the pop nastiness. Would have been subversive in the 80s maybe. |
| Focusing (1978) by Eugene T. Gendlin | 2/5 with an asterisk.* Confusing. There's a mixture of classic self-help red flags: My philosophy leads to new concepts in physics and biology... Focusing is now a worldwide network... this can seem insane to the rest of our society. How could new realistic ideas and steps arise from the body? This new institution is changing the atomization of society... Unlocking the wisdom of your body... using the body's own life-centered and inherently positive direction and force... 'Focusing has been crucial for many bodyworkers. I would hope that it would be more widely integrated within the education of Somatics practitioners. - Don Hanlon Johnson, Professor, California Institute of Integral Studies' The most important rule for a therapist to observe, while helping someone to focus, is to stay out of the focuser's way... [Soon:] Another agitated, self-destructive emotional spiral was beginning and I interrupted her. IF DURING THESE INSTRUCTIONS SOMEWHERE YOU HAVE SPENT A LITTLE WHILE SENSING AND TOUCHING AN UNCLEAR HOLISTIC BODY SENSE OF THIS PROBLEM, THEN YOU HAVE FOCUSED. ...but also things I know to be true and which aren't in the interest of a therapist / self-help guru to say: Why doesn't therapy succeed more often? In the rarer cases when it does succeed, what is it that those patients and therapists do? What is it that the majority fail to do? When the revolution in self-help [democratization] takes place and people do these helpful processes with each other, will professional psychotherapy be unnecessary? It did take place, we are they; it didn't change much, because most of it is nonsense. I suppose it is cheaper than the old way. (There is of course the possibility that he's saying them to disarm me.) I got incredibly annoyed at him going on about this 'method' for 50 pages without describing it; skip to chapter 4 if you do too. It's roughly 1) Clear your head Is this profound? No. Is it crackpot? Also no. Also annoying was his dismissing alternative strategies for handling problems, all of which I sometimes like. He belittles 'belittling the problem' (e.g. reminding yourself that others have it worse - which is both noble and effective); 'analyzing' (he rightly belittles Freudian Analysis, i.e. blaming your present state on the nastiest past event that comes to mind, but as if breaking things into subproblems is always a bad idea); just enduring it (often just works for me); lecturing yourself (often works for me because parts of me want to listen). Why is it so hard for writers like this to concede that some things don't work for some people? (They lose authority I suppose.) Surprising that he's a sincere empiricist, or at least trying to be. One reason why research is so important is precisely that it can surprise you and tell you that your subjective convictions are wrong... As hard as it was for me to accept the finding that therapy doesn't do the job, research findings can never hurt you. They move you forward. This is a list of about 100 studies on the topic (Ctrl+F "Table 1"), no doubt with a terrible file-drawer problem. Total n~=500, probably with a lot of duplication. Measures used are a mix of standard boring ones like PFQ and woo boring ones like Gestalt. Gendlin makes a few specific, testable claims (which is always to be encouraged so allow me to hereby present him with his certificate of falsifiability at worst): * "therapy has better outcomes when clients 'focus". Too vague, but a few of the studies are nominally about this. That review was cursory but tells me enough. (You might think you could just look at clinical practice, 40 years on - which, outside of California, doesn't exactly foreground Gendlin - to get a sense of whether it works as well as he claims. But medicine is too far from a rational system for that.) The core idea is not insane. It's that there is an equivalent of proprioception for your own emotions, and that you can't change anything about yourself except through it. There's a touch of the old Zen problem to it, that you're trying to describe a nonverbal thing in words. But then, most descriptions aren't descriptions of verbal processes - consider e.g. "Succulent plants' dark fixation makes them ideal for air quality control in bedrooms". What about support from respectable, academic phenomenology? I don't know that there is any such thing. There may be non-propositional, non-procedural knowledge. It wouldn't be surprising - the conscious mind is a relatively small and unskilled thing. It's Gendlin's idea of our apriori and undeluded access to it that's the problem. Gendlin's experiments don't establish the existence or the access. I find it hard to think how to test this, actually. If the epistemology of focusing was real, what would be different about its practitioners? Happiness? Cortisol? Decision speed? I don't know. We are too skilled at deluding ourselves. It would be pretty easy to run an experiment where Gendlinites tried to predict which patients recover, and then check that against normies' predictions. To be fair, this book isn't his strongest face ("I also want this book to be readable by anyone"). But I'm not grading on intended audience (and I wasn't encouraged by those no-power, pre-Crisis psychology studies either). Open questions: why should there be any therapy that works in general? Grant that there is bodily knowledge; where is this knowledge stored? The enteric nervous system? Why should introspection work? Theory of mind is for modelling other people so that they can't harm me. This is all probably harmless; people doing Rogerian listening to each other is unlikely to cause any problems (in fact, since it's free, then if the null hypothesis of talk psychotherapy is true, this might be a social improvement; same benefit without the deadweight); he doesn't advocate withdrawal from treatment (pills are completely absent from the picture, actually). And the opportunity cost of trying this is low, because other self-help is worse. Not for me; maybe for you. * Gendlin seems like a very nice man, he's just not the discoverer of the one neat trick to psychiatry. The emphasis (3 chapters) here on helping others and not just yourself in sweet. His acceptance of the need for science makes it easier to get at him than at other self-helpists, which makes me feel bad about getting at him and not them. (I won't get at them because they're not worth arguing with.) |
| Becoming a Successful Scientist: Strategic Thinking for Scientific Discovery (2009) by Craig Loehle | Pretty sensible but very long-winded and staid. I suppose it is actually quite vigorous and irreverent, coming from an organisation man:study can be a substitute for productive work Darwin considered himself to be a geologist, but the world remembers largely his biology. Should Goethe be in the literature, biology, physics, or philosophy department? He actually was most proud of his work on optics, though that work was largely flawed. Would Newton or Fisher find comfortable academic niches today? All graduate students are taught that it is essential to become an expert. As a short-term goal this is, of course, valid. Academic search committees are also looking for experts. As a lifestyle, however, becoming an expert can inhibit creativity... As one becomes more of an expert, a larger and more complex network of facts and explanations accumulates and solidifies, making it difficult to entertain radical alternative ideas or to recognize new problems... An Aristotle or Freud may create a set of bars within which most people pace rigidly, never noticing clues from outside the cage it is much more likely that one can work at 100% mental clarity for about four hours. If one keeps this in mind, then a distinction can be made between critical issues that need full clarity and intense effort, which become part of the four hours of work per day, and those parts of a project that are routine and become part of the rest of the day... returning calls, coding a clearly designed subroutine, ordering equipment, attending seminars, editing reports, etc But these are the only interesting bits in 300 pages. This is true but the book doesn't help much: scientists are largely uncoached and are rarely introspective. They spend a lot of --- * He gives examples from many different domains (ecology, epidemiology, physics, hardware), but so I spotted some errors. --- Anyway: as a scientist you want problems. But not just any problem - something that both doesn't fit, & has important implications. Advice I read in this, or read into it: * A theory can be inconsistent or incomplete: one generate contradiction, the other keeps explanations weak. --- (Alternative books: Medawar, Cajal, Polya, Hamming, anything by Feynman. Stenhardt's model is more rigorous than the rest put together but I don't know if it's helpful.) |
| The Go-Between (1953) by L.P. Hartley | Was too young for it when I tried it. Love the band though. |
| Lord Foul's Bane (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, #1) (1977) by Stephen R. Donaldson | Dimly remember reading this. |
| Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (1991) by Douglas R. Hofstadter | One of a pile of Mind books I grabbed desperately for a first-year philosophy essay. Did not understand it (naturally that didn't stop me citing it). Will have another go some day |
| Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart (2007) by Tim Butcher | None yet |
| Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China (2008) by James M. Fallows | Just ok. China is changing so fast that we can't read 10-year-old journalism and claim to have that much relevant knowledge. But if you didn't know about their astonishing industry (more manufacturing workers in Guangdong than all of the US by 2007) or their horrendously serious reality shows, or their super-rich (including the usual eco-friendly super-rich) then it might update you. I was surprised that Fallows is so eminent without having even much spoken Mandarin, but he's immersed in other ways. |
| She Came to Stay (1943) by Simone de Beauvoir | Like Norman Mailer at his nastiest. The spitting rage of bad polyamory. |
| Making Mortal Choices: Three Exercises in Moral Casuistry (1996) by Hugo Bedau | None yet |
| The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth's Past #1) (2006) by Liu Cixin | Dense, clever, and it conveys a pleasant worldview; but also rushed and clumsy. In fact the prose is awful - full of flat descriptions of people's reactions, people's full names inserted into the dialogue - and the characters are completely interchangeable ciphers (apart from the one who is a stock renegade cop, and the one who is the Ultimate Eco-Terrorist). Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current? There's almost no 'showing' in the entire book. For most people, perhaps time would have gradually healed these wounds. After all, during the Cultural Revolution, many people suffered fates similar to hers, and compared to many of them, Ye was relatively fortunate. But Ye had the mental habits of a scientist, and she refused to forget. Rather, she looked with a rational gaze on the madness and hatred that had harmed her. Ye's rational consideration of humanity's evil side began the day she read Silent Spring. This is no impediment to good hard scifi, it just means that the reference author is Asimov, not Banks or LeGuin. Liu's ideas are well worth the trip - firing at a nuke as a last-resort for disarming it (since the small ones rely on a sealed pressurised container) is about the least ambitious thought in it: Twenty minutes later, Three Body's Von Neumann architecture human-formation computer had begun full operations under the Qin 1.0 operating system. "Run solar orbit computation software 'Three Body 1.0'!" Newton screamed at the top of his lungs. "Start the master computing module! Load the differential calculus module! Load the finite element analysis module! Load the spectral method module! Enter initial condition parameters … and begin calculation!" The motherboard sparkled as the display formation flashed with indicators in every color. The human computer began the long computation. I don't understand why this won the Hugo - except, that, being foreign, it didn't trigger canned political backlash on either side of the sad affair we have made the Hugos. Tom Clancy for real nerds. 2/5 in this translation, anyway. |
| Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness () by Zach Weinersmith | Ecology: The attempt to discover all the poorly understood species in a system, then misunderstand them at the same time. |
| 'We in Scotland': Thatcherism in a Cold Climate (2009) by David Torrance | I was amazed that this is the only book about her reception in Scotland. Growing up during Blair, Thatcher was still by far the most famous politician in Scotland; small children knew to hate her, to sing rhymes about one of her policies. But actually our booklessness fits - we don't really analyse why she was a demon. Adults might mutter something about the poll tax or the shipyards or the Belgrano, but in general people don't think about what she actually did, they just follow the received wisdom that she was a bloodthirsty high-heid ogre who killed jobs for fun. (If Malcolm Rifkind is willing to write the foreword for your book, you'd be forgiven for inferring something about its slant - and indeed MR characterises the opposition as merely disliking a bossy English woman speaking down to them in RP. This is risible, and predictably risible.) Torrance reports the month-by-month history. He's impatient with kneejerk anti-Thatcherism, the kind which forgets her relative electoral gains in '79 and '83, which ignores the global forces of deindustrialisation which Thatcher had relatively little power over (only unused power to slow and soften the effects). There's no Tories shyer than Scottish Tories, but they're there - 29% in the last election, back up to early Thatcher levels. She repeatedly used Scotland as a policy testing ground, in what it's fair to call naked opportunism. (Little to lose by 1989, electorally.) She galvanised opposition and gave the country an Other to unite against. We threw eggs, rioted against regressive taxation, and drew funny satire - but bought our council houses off her, hoovered up our shares in BT and Steel, and mostly accepted her careerist world, disorganised labour. The poll tax finished her - but she still won, and all it cost her was a century of hatred. After reading this I still don't know what the bottom line is. |
| Modern Masters of Science Fiction: Iain M. Banks () by Paul Kincaid | Overview of both the literary and scifi books, one-by-one. Thus skimmable by anyone who would want to read it in the first place (...) Worth it, for fans, for the absolutely amazing interview with a PhD student, in which he refuses all invitations to pompous theory:
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| The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music, 1972-1993 (1994) by Nick Kent | Deeply conventional in the distinictive way that rock snobs all are. |
| The Quarry Wood (1928) by Nan Shepherd | Capital-r-Romantic coming-of-age in the north-east of Scotland. I fit three out four of its demographics (Doric speakers, Aberdeen students, de novo idealist, but not a woman), but this still didn't leave much impact. It is lovely to have a personal literature for your specific time and place - elsewhere for people like me there's half of Canongate and Carcanet. But still. It catches the excitement of going to uni from the middle of nowhere, after being starved of ideas: The grey Crown, that had soared through so many generations above the surge and excitement of youth, had told her that wisdom is patient and waits for her people... In the long Library too - where thought, the enquiring experiencing spirit, the essence of man's long tussle with his destiny, was captured and preserved: a desiccated powder set free, volatile, live at the touch of a living mind - she learned to be quiet... They might clutch at her, these dead men, storming and battering at the citadel of her identity...
But the gasping forbidden love at the heart of the book is too bland to carry it. Also I hated the Doric being italicised; it felt like a stage wink. |
| The New Testament in Scots (1983) by William Laughton Lorimer | 1967 CE:Gin I speak wi the tungs o men an angels, but hae nae luve i my hairt, I am no nane better nor dunnerin bress or a rínging cymbal. Gin I hae the gift o prophecíe an am acquent wi the saicret mind o God, an ken aathing ither at man may ken, an gin I hae siccan faith as can flit the hills frae their larachs - gin I hae aa that, but hae nae luve i my hairt, I am nocht. Gin I skail aa my guids an graith in awmous, an gin I gíe up my bodie tae be brunt in aiss - gin I een dae that, but hae nae luve i my hairt, I am nane the better o it. In the form that survived, Scots is a uniformly profane language – not in the sense of profanity, but as in worldly and comic and demotic. Some of that opinion is classist stereotype; it certainly wasn't true four hundred years ago (the devotional poems of Dunbar and Henryson stand up to the sacred efforts in any language); but most is real, down to Knox's decision on a legally-mandatory bible in English, but even more to the cultural capture of the nation's Anglicised elites, but even more than that to the simple dictates of shared economic activity, over three hundred years: i.e. we gave English our sacred talk, then we gave English our intellectual talk, and then trade talk, and law talk, and all their formal accoutrements. Until only the informal and proletarian was left. Atweill, the kitsch prevails ("Hoots ma wee bonnie lassie! Ahiiii wid wauk fyv hhundrid myles"). When Lorimer wrote this, the dialectisation of Scots, and the cutesy granny-aff-a-bus process wasn't so advanced - but this is the register we moderns read it in, unless we are rural and lucky. (Nasty but probable thing I once heard a linguist lecture on: relatively few languages develop the scientific-philosophical register and benefit from its sharpening vocabularies. He reckoned that only nine ever have, fully: Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, German, French, English. Scots definitely had speakers sophisticated enough, in its High Medieval heyday, but the internationalist use of Latin precluded it.) Lorimer saw a Bible translation as one of two conditions of revitalising braid Scots - the language, rather than the dialect Scots English. (The other big brick being the Dictionary.) Well, we have both now, and they are not enough. The argument for bringing back languages is only superficially humane, since language is for communication first, and our condition is more and more a global one. (I find it difficult to fault Katja Grace's analysis: the standard arguments fail, the present matters more than the past: because it is where value happens.) Lorimer translated it straight from the Koine Greek over a full decade, finishing the second draft just before his death. The art comes in his rendering the apostles with their own voice and distinctive idiolect. (Paul is, here as ever, a nasty little man: smug and litigious.) While I'm very glad this exists, the book itself can do little for me, whatever language it's wearing. (Nothing takes me further from religious awe than the actual things we said God said. Hauflin' indeed.) N/A. |
| Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) by David Graeber | Exciting and well-written but unreliable and unfocussed. The main thesis is that debt isn't straightforward accounting: all systems of debt require a hidden moral assumption, which is that it's bad to be indebted, that debt overrules other moral claims like equity or even survival:paying one's debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way. To establish this he goes into an array of human economies: slaving, gift economies, Kula rings... but the brute fact of diverse institutions doesn't really connect with his moral thesis. Then this all goes towards his grand equating of the market and the state (so that people will resist both of them). He argues that formal debt (of accountants and lawyers) causes poverty and violence relative to traditional informal debt (of cousins, dowries, and sheep). But this is wildly inconsistent with the last two hundred years of social development; poverty is a fraction of what it was, and violence (including state violence, including incarceration as violence) is also down. He gets worked up about "the myth of barter", the largely silly idea that there was generally a transition from pure barter economies to money economies at some point in cultural history. Even if we grant this, his estimation of the significance of barter being rare is excessive. It doesn't have any clear moral bearing. His debt Jubilee idea, coming as it did post-Recession, is superficially good, especially since giant financiers had just received trillions in bailouts. But if we made debt forgiveness a common concern, we'd just be redistributing money to those best at obtaining credit via excessive self-esteem, credentials or scamming. And post-Jubilee credit system would immediately dry up, or sting us with vast interest rates. They couldn't exist otherwise, and then homeowning and car purchase would again be only within reach for the rich. There are dozens or more or less serious errors in it. (Still less unreliable than most anarchism and most cultural anthropology.) If you still want to read it, you really should take note of the huge errata others have helpfully contributed to Graeber, not that he'd thank them: - Henry Farrell This is 4/5 for style and ambition, provided you don't take any particular claim too seriously. Read Clark and McCloskey for real Big Economics. |
| The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2003) by Joel Bakan | None yet |
| 僕のヒーローアカデミア 1 [Boku No Hero Academia 1] (My Hero Academia, #1) (2014) by Kohei Horikoshi | Comprehensively formulaic (hero school with wimp protagonist) but it's a likeable formula. None of the consistency or logical stretching you'd want to take it seriously. (How does the hero economy work? Who pays for the destroyed arenas? You might think I'm being petty, but One Punch Man does both the economics and the perverse social dynamics in its stride.) |
| Stardust (1997) by Neil Gaiman | None yet |
| Shade's Children (1997) by Garth Nix | None yet |
| Scream for Jeeves: A Parody (1994) by Peter H. Cannon | Clever enough mashup, and obviously loving, but the prose misses the mark on every page, jolting us out of Plum's dreamworld without even sending into Howard's nightmarish one. (It might seem shallow to judge something on the prose alone, but you can't have Jeeves without perfect pitch, it consists in comic timing and music; if you come at the master you best not miss.) Critical essay linking Wodehouse, Lovecraft and Doyle is also clever. W and L we're both fantasy authors you see. I realise there's a lot of Jeeves homage going around, published and Authorised, and so not looking like the fanfiction it is. |
| Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea / The Mysterious Island / Journey to the Centre of the Earth / Around the World in Eighty Days (1994) by Jules Verne | None yet |
| How to Read Nietzsche (2005) by Keith Ansell-Pearson | None yet |
| Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (1982) by Emmanuel Levinas | Incomprehensible - and it's difficult to believe that's due to honest ambition, or honest confusion. Taking him on face value (pardon the pun) though, his ethics makes infinities out of molehills and so has no help to offer us. |
| Translations (1981) by Brian Friel | Classic highschool fodder: language and politics, clever virtuous underdogs and dastardly imperialists. |
| Angry Aztecs (2001) by Terry Deary | I think these were the only history books I read until I was 20 years old. It sufficed! Obviously it's not good for your only exposure to history to be the 100 most dramatic moments, the 100 most elite and unrepresentative people. (For each page of a regular history book I should imagine the lives of a thousand peasants.) But very few people have any grasp of history beyond this superficial roll call, so it didn't hurt me much to delay it. Our need for "people's history" is great: it at least has a chance of being an accurate picture of the past. (Many particular instances of people's history are fatally false or misleading though, because the contrarianism and ideological heat of the topic draws parasites and shills.) |
| Bloody Scotland (Horrible Histories Special) (1997) by Terry Deary | I think these were the only history books I read until I was 20 years old. It sufficed! Obviously it's not good for your only exposure to history to be the 100 most dramatic moments, the 100 most elite and unrepresentative people. (For each page of a regular history book I should imagine the lives of a thousand peasants.) But very few people have any grasp of history beyond this superficial roll call, so it didn't hurt me much to delay it. Our need for "people's history" is great: it at least has a chance of being an accurate picture of the past. (Many particular instances of people's history are fatally false or misleading though, because the contrarianism and ideological heat of the topic draws parasites and shills.) |
| The Vicious Vikings (1994) by Terry Deary | I think these were the only history books I read until I was 20 years old. It sufficed! Obviously it's not good for your only exposure to history to be the 100 most dramatic moments, the 100 most elite and unrepresentative people. (For each page of a regular history book I should imagine the lives of a thousand peasants.) But very few people have any grasp of history beyond this superficial roll call, so it didn't hurt me much to delay it. Our need for "people's history" is great: it at least has a chance of being an accurate picture of the past. (Many particular instances of people's history are fatally false or misleading though, because the contrarianism and ideological heat of the topic draws parasites and shills.) |
| The Blitzed Brits (1994) by Terry Deary | I think these were the only history books I read until I was 20 years old. It sufficed! Obviously it's not good for your only exposure to history to be the 100 most dramatic moments, the 100 most elite and unrepresentative people. (For each page of a regular history book I should imagine the lives of a thousand peasants.) But very few people have any grasp of history beyond this superficial roll call, so it didn't hurt me much to delay it. Our need for "people's history" is great: it at least has a chance of being an accurate picture of the past. (Many particular instances of people's history are fatally false or misleading though, because the contrarianism and ideological heat of the topic draws parasites and shills.) |
| The Terrible Tudors (1993) by Terry Deary | I think these were the only history books I read until I was 20 years old. It sufficed! Obviously it's not good for your only exposure to history to be the 100 most dramatic moments, the 100 most elite and unrepresentative people. (For each page of a regular history book I should imagine the lives of a thousand peasants.) But very few people have any grasp of history beyond this superficial roll call, so it didn't hurt me much to delay it. Our need for "people's history" is great: it at least has a chance of being an accurate picture of the past. (Many particular instances of people's history are fatally false or misleading though, because the contrarianism and ideological heat of the topic draws parasites and shills.) |
| The Annotated Chronicles (Dragonlance: Dragonlance Chronicles) (1985) by Margaret Weis | Pretty sure I got this just to have a thicker book than the kid smugly brandishing Lord of the Rings. Pretty standard D&D-writeup fare. |
| The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files, #3) (2010) by Charles Stross | Deeply conventional mind candy - it may be the skewed mores of the Cthulhu Mythos post-Whedon, but those are pretty conformist these days. Though the right reference class for this series is Robert Rankin, not Lovecraft. Lots of clumsy geek references (re: trains, smartphone fetishes, programming concepts), and lots of clumsy US-centric edits ("taking the DLR to Canary Wharf in the east of London" said no Londoner ever). I wonder if this is just because he writes so fast these days (~2 books a year). His great strength remains the tawdriness of office life (which he manages to accurately display despite also displaying ancient tentacular spectacles). e.g. a nice touch here: the office audit of paperclip usage - previously a joke about pedantry and bureaucracy gone wild - is revealed to have a deadly serious rationale. One surprising grey area in the plot: I continue to have mixed feelings about Stross, but hey I continue to read him. (Book #1, Atrocity Archives works best because it subverts James Bond more, and the Nazi villains are fun, and the gag hasn't worn thin.) |
| Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017) by Robert M. Sapolsky | Has an ingenious structure: starting with a piece of behaviour, work backwards through the many scales that caused it: from the nerve bundles that enable the muscle motion, through the brain processing that ordered those, through that morning's hormonal predisposing, foetal genetic construction, all the way to the ancestral environment. Sapolsky is engagingly cranky about various things: traditional misogynies, war. He uses the neologism "pseudospeciation" (i.e. the dehumanising kind of racism) about 50 times. He is often thrillingly unimpressed: Jane Goodall blew everyone's socks off by reporting the now-iconic fact that chimps make tools... Most cultural anthropologists weren't thrilled by Goodall's revolution, and now emphasise definitions that cut chimps and other hoi polloi out of the party. There's a fondness for the thinking of Alfred Kroeber, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Clifford Geertz, three heavyweights who focused on how culture is about ideas and symbols, rather than the mere behaviours in which they instantiate, or material products like flint blades or iPhones... But he's way too credulous about social science. For instance, I recommend skipping the last half of chapter 3, on social psychology, entirely. In the space of two pages (p90-1) he cites power pose, facial feedback, ego depletion, and himmicanes; all as exciting, uncontroversial fact. This is a clean sweep of recent studies well-known to be p-hacked, low-power and spurious. He also endorses the results of Implicit Association and stereotype threat tests far too strongly. I don't know enough about neuroscience or endocrinology or ethology to make a similar recommendation for the other chapters. But the "Gell-Mann amnesia" effect sadly suggests that we should (partially) discount everything else in here, primates aside; evidence of credulity in one domain is evidence for others. (Best case, he just didn't keep up with the latest research dramas. Though some results, like the litter -> theft link or the Macbeth effect, have been comprehensively criticised for 8+ years now, so.) He also takes anthropologists at their qualitative, cherry-picking word when they try to maintain their academic boundary against Pinker's work on violence. Still worth it for his first-hand stories - him watching Somali oil workers conduct ritual argument, him watching a troop of baboons spread a culture - a pocket of pacifism and gender sanity in the psychotic roundabout of nature. Minus 1 point because his empirical judgments are unreliable. : ( |
| Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (1985) by Georges Bataille | Someone trying to out-Nietzsche Nietzsche. How? Well, Fritz was quite chaste and polite, so Bataille lards on lots of genitalia and violence. (You can get the flavour of Bataille's philosophy from Magritte's unprintable sketches, illustrations for GB's writing.) Quite ordinary French Theory, cocks aside. |
| Who Touched Base in My Thought Shower?: A Treasury of Unbearable Office Jargon (2013) by Steven Poole | Poole is one of the Guardian's sharpest knives. Like Zizek or Debord if they were funny and could write. This is kind of phoned-in though, because the language described is self-defeating, self-ridiculing. For anyone outside it, anyway. |
| No Other Place: Poetry from the Aberdeen University Review () by Ian A. Olson | Got this as a xmas present for someone - but I know they encourage pre-using media presents (why wouldn't you?) so I snuck a read. Lots of poems about Aberdeen U specifically, which got me good and sentimental. The final piece, by Archibald Wavell, is amazing:
|
| Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture (1996) by Cairns Craig | None yet |
| Life of Pi (2001) by Yann Martel | None yet |
| The Demon Archer (Hugh Corbett, #11) (1999) by Paul Doherty | Stuck with me for some reason. |
| Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley | Arguably harmful. Not to be read without also reading his recantation, Island - but it always is. |
| Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol (1966) by Okot p'Bitek | Nasty-funny Juvenalian satire of westernised Africans. For some reason nativism (e.g. calling foreigners ugly or smelly, mocking locals who take up foreign customs) gets a pass in post-colonial writing. |
| Is Belief in God Good, Bad or Irrelevant?: A Professor and a Punk Rocker Discuss Science, Religion, Naturalism & Christianity (2006) by Preston Jones | Actually two professors but never mind. New Atheism peaked when I was about 16, the peak age for insufferable overconfidence. So credit to my dumbass teenage self for picking this, an adversarial collaboration that heard out the Christian. In fact, the Christian is the editor, and gives himself the final word. (I probably only read it cos I'm a massive BR fanboy, though.) It's nothing special - neither Jones nor Graffin are very original at apologetics / unapologetics (compared to say Lane Craig or Hitchens or Dennett). Eh. I haven't thought about religion in years, and thank god for that. |
| The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance (2010) by Jim Al-Khalili | Surprisingly dull and unanalytical. al-Khalili is good-natured and knowledgeable, but he puts in too many people, too many dates, and too little science. He tries to cover seven hundred years and multiple kingdoms, and the theological and military context, and ends up shallowly mentioning these things and little more. It would have been better to focus on the greats - Khwarizmi, Kindi, Haytham, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd - and explain their actual achievements, then note that work of this calibre was done by others over centuries too. Cool questions al-Khalili barely touches: * The Byzantines ruled Greece. How did they lose Greek thought, while the caliphate found it? "Greatest" - 'greatest Muslim physicist', 'greatest Indian mathematician', 'greatest clinician ever' - appears 90 times in 250 pages. We are never told what specific achievements earn them the superlative. al-Kindi: "We ought not to be embarrassed of appreciating the truth and of obtaining it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. Nothing should be dearer to the seeker of truth than the truth itself, and there is no deterioration of the truth, nor belittling either of one who speaks it or conveys it." It was nice to learn a word for this awesome form of Islam, the Mu'talizi. (I could have guessed from the kind of person who uses their name as an insult: "In contemporary Salafi jihadism, the epithet or supposed allegations of being a Muʿtazilite have been used between rival groups as a means of denouncing their credibility." The caliphate was a remarkably open society, for its time. This is only confusing because our received images come from the past few centuries of fundamentalism. Sad: The Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, who is one of the most influential intellectuals in the Muslim world today, has stressed that censorship in today's Muslim world is stronger than at any other time in history. |
| Napoleon: The Path to Power (2007) by Philip G. Dwyer | How did a "haggard and ghastly" foreigner from a poor-noble family end up ruling two-thirds of Europe, getting one in every 200 people in the world killed (his namesake wars were the same size, though not the same shape, as the Holocaust), becoming one of the most successful generals in history? Dwyer's answer is via various sorts of creativity: nepotism, plagiarism, disloyalty, false advertising, ignoring orders (and then going AWOL to avoid reprisal), and but also actual military acumen. This is true but the broader answer is: with the help of all the revolutionaries whose violence he used. The Corsican freedom fighters, the mob, the fucked-up Jacobins, and the Thermidorians each broke France, creating a ladder of corpses for people like Boney. (This feat is repeated by psychos in most revolutions.) He made general at 26 through an unearned political appointment, and was given absolute command of 63,000 men soon after. Dwyer is out to get Napoleon: he sees propaganda everywhere (even in Boney's private diary, aged 18). The whole book is obsessed with the Construction of Napoleon - for instance, did you know that when he won a battle, he told people about it expecting praise? This sentence, or its proposition, is repeated more than a hundred times:
Of course it's possible, but so what? What is its probability? (I continue to read nonfiction which isn't data-driven - more fool me, I suppose.) It's weird to feel annoyed by the hypercritical spirit; I'm usually on the other side of this fence. Dwyer is at least jargon-free. And Napoleon certainly lies all the time - to his rivals, his friends, and to posterity. An odd case: both genius and fraud - a genius of dishonesty. (Like Edison?) Much of this long book is just a prose list of events, many of them insignificant (not to say prurient). There is basically no military detail - most of the major battles get half a page. Fine as reference work maybe. --- Misc: * I knew that standing armies of the day were rammed full of pillagers, rapists, and thieves, but I was surprised to find that their generals were little better - Napoleon extracted about 80 million francs (maybe half a billion dollars?) from the Italians he conquered, under the name "requisitions". * The many portraits of N are comically dissimilar - simply because done by artists who had never seen him or any image of him. * His romantic insecurity is also surprising: he writes to Josephine much more than she replies, and is constantly crestfallen to find her gone without saying where. * "Jacobin" is a terrible choice of name for a social justice magazine. It's more like "Khmer Rouge Weekly" or "the Daily Witchfinder" than anything laudable: ~40,000 executed or left to rot and a hundred thousand in the Vendée, mostly religious peasants, as well as atrocities like mass slow drownings). The Jacobins deserve some share of Napoleon's millions of dead too - for all that N was only pretending to be a Jacobin. Of course, the revolution nominally ended feudalism, redistributed land, and claimed to establish human rights. But we know in hindsight that this could have been done without killing 1% of the country and 0.6% of everyone alive - for instance, it was in Britain, and it was by earlier and later French republicans. So you got some nicer rhetoric in exchange for millions of gallons of blood. It suits me to call the Jacobins a perversion of the Enlightenment. This has lately been characterised as a trick - if it's wrong for Jacobin to cherry-pick the bits they like about the Jacobins (anger, radicalisation, protest marches, beautiful lip-service to egalitarianism) then it's wrong for me to say they're not really part of 'the Enlightenment'. But it is a sick joke of history that Montesquieu's rage at torture, Condorcet's rational politics, and Bentham's impressive moral generosity must share a name with these torturing and bigoted totalitarians. But why is Jacobin called Jacobin?
: just idiocy, not malice. |
| Jennifer Government (2002) by Max Barry | Dumb fun, mind candy. Go for Richard Morgan instead if you want more politically serious schlock, go for Stephenson if you want actual dystopian awe. |
| Vellum (The Book of All Hours, #1) (2005) by Hal Duncan | Loads and loads of ideas (angels! gay angels! history is written on skin!), a few impressive sentences, but with almost no effort to make any of them relate to any other. Cloud Atlas without the overarching sense. |
| Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002) by Francis Fukuyama | Attack on transhumanism brought to you by a man most famous for being wrong. Now he worries that science is going to make life too easy – that overcoming human evolution's horrible legacy issues (e.g. ubiquitous mental illness, moral myopia, unspeakable death) with biotechnology will amount to the death of the soul. (Where the soul is that which thrives on adversity, is real / spiritual / creative, and Takes Responsibility.) I shouldn't mock; Fukuyama at least handles this fear secularly and rationally, and his existential claim is not wrong by definition; also, it is interesting to him endorse regulation for once. This is a clear statement of a common (the default?) position on a matter of huge importance. However, his arguments are piss-poor: he argues via 1) using fictional evidence – Brave New World and the Bible; by 2) suggesting, without real evidence, that there are insurmountable trade-offs between longevity and cognition, happiness and creativity, and personality and freedom; and by 3) a truly massive suppressed premise: that things are ok as they are (or, at least, as good as they get). The first section, laying out 2002's cutting edge in life extension, neuropharmacology, and genetic engineering, is fair and good. He accuses bioethicists of being gung-ho shills for Industry, which is interesting, but completely opposed to my experience of them as timid precautionists. If you read it, read Bostrom too. |
| Battle Royale, Vol. 01 (Battle Royale, #1) (2000) by Koushun Takami | Villain was pretty good, a classic Japanese anti-sensuality horrorshow. And clearly the premise appeals to people, since the sanitised dayglo version did well. |
| The Arctic Incident (Artemis Fowl #2) (2002) by Eoin Colfer | None yet |
| From Russia With Love (James Bond, #5) (1957) by Ian Fleming | Can't find the bit where he describes Klebb as "smelling like a lesbian", but I'd struggle to invent such a detail. |
| The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It (2014) by Owen Jones | Begins very well:
But this awareness didn't immunise him to self-service: instead of writing a book about just "the people with power", or "people who abuse their power", he focusses on one sort: the many cronies and neoliberals that cling to the country's upper reaches. The Jonesian Establishment consists of: fiscally conservative think tanks (but not powerful fiscally liberal ones); Old Boy MPs (but not originally working-class ones, however much they use the same revolving doors); the news media (but not himself, with 500,000 followers); the police; all corporate bosses; anything to do with the City. This is only a problem because of his choice of term, which implies that his description covers all the powerful in Britain. (A big omission, for instance, are the unions. Unite and Unison have extremely frequent meetings with the most powerful politicians in the country - quite rightly - and have an incredibly strong role in selecting some of those people - quite dubiously. They sometimes use this power against the public interest, e.g. GMB propping up Trident. But they are not Establishment to Jones.*) He is thinking clearly, and that's half the work in finding the truth, which is half the work in changing the world. But, above the level of reporting individual events, he is just not empirically reliable: he notes that the Sun has 3m readers and just assumes that this means they are all-powerful in elections. Actually the (British, C21st) media has little effect on election outcomes - they produce only 1-2% swings.** A more general problem: Jones has a fundamentally moral conception of society's problems: "the poor primarily suffer because of the greed or cowardice or ignorance of our rulers. Nationalisations and the £20 minimum wage would have no real downside." This is as opposed to the engineering conception, which sees the constraints, tradeoffs, and tries to design solutions with these in mind. Still, my sympathies are with people who get attacked on both sides of a war, as Jones often does - for being both naively idealistic about economics and democracy, and insufficiently radical and obedient to the party line. He bears some millstones, like his totally unanalysed use of the Left/Right divide (he prefaces every single bloody interview with bloody anyone with a binary tag, one way or the other). Anyway this is fine as very recent political history. (If you were paying attention to politics during the Noughties, then you maybe won't learn much new here, but it's a great primer for the foreign or young.) I was angry afterward, so clearly he is effective at his chosen task; god knows if political anger is what we need though. (I read a lot of non-data-driven nonfiction, god knows why. Maybe so my anger can be relevant at least, or in preparation for pseuds' dinner parties.) * (I also wish he'd stop capitalising the damn word all the time.) ** A belief in the brain-washing power of the media - to change voting behaviour, to instil sexism, to desensitize us to violence - is one of the defining quirks of the modern hard left, despite there being decent counter-evidence against each effect. Percipi est esse. |
| The Decline And Fall Of Science (1989) by Celia Green | Sullen Objectivist / parapsychologist rant, aimed at convincing someone to give her £10m ("Considering how much there is to be done in this subject, that much would be reasonable"). Somehow this blared forth from elite trappings, Hamish Hamilton. Behold her ancient sneer:In the early days of psychical research, that is to say, during the short period before the volume of activity in the subject petered out on account of the decline of civilisation... Chapter 1 is "The Decline and Fall of Civilisation". 6 and 7 get the declines of physics and medicine out of the way in 22 pages. Chapter 14: "Psychokinesis". Chapter 17: "Conclusion, for the Particular Attention of Millionaires". So I admit I picked this up to laugh at it: the first page has Green declare herself an unappreciated genius, followed by pages of mostly inapt aphorisms: When people talk about 'the sanctity of the individual' they mean 'the sanctity of the statistical norm'.</blockquote>Women are the last people to entrust with children. Those who have repressed their own aspirations will scarcely be tolerant of the aspirations of others.'Social justice' – the expression of universal hatred. |
| A Clue to the Exit (2000) by Edward St. Aubyn | Has many of St Aubyn's distinctive virtues - acute black comedy about every social stratum, characters creatively misspending resources, the sometime delight of being exploited, actual knowledge of modern philosophy - but this time it doesn't gel. The protagonist, Fairburn, writes a book with Patrick Melrose as a character - which invites us to identify Fairburn with St Aubyn. But it doesn't fit very well; Fairburn's life work is meaningless and saccharine. They are both troubled and self-destructive and possibly redeemed I suppose. The enframed narrative with Patrick is annoying, and annoyingly this is intentional: Yesterday Angelique came into the bedroom holding my thin manuscript. She moved towards the open window and I surged up from the pillows shouting, 'Don't!' This is a good skewering of upper-middle-class / academic conceit: The warden's sly, pedantic chuckle seemed to reverberate among the bookshops and gargoyles that guarded the taxi rank; his gurgling complacencies soaked the golden buildings until they split open like soggy trifle. Perhaps they had once been intended for something serious, but there had been too many puns, too many Latin tags, too many acrostics, too many fiendish crossword puzzles, too many witty misquotations and too many sly chuckles for them to do anything but rot, however noble and solid they might look to the winking eye of a tourist's camera. Many, many different ideas about consciousness show up appear, from the zany (Penrose and Sheldrake) to the canonical (Colin McGinn and Galen Strawson). The stuff on Penrose and Sheldrake is accurate, in the weak sense that it describes their positions correctly. Sadly it's mysterianism that wins over Patrick / Charlie. The conclusion is roughly a celebration of the mere manifest image, quietism, Wittgenstein's gallic shrug. It manages to miss the point of scientific interest in consciousness, and underestimate the progress it's made already: I saw the latest cluster of books to emerge from the great consciousness debate: Emotional Intelligence, The Feeling Brain, The Heart's Reasons. I felt the giddy relief of knowing that I wasn't going to read any of them. The fact that science has decided to include emotion in its majestic worldview seems about as astute as an astronomer discovering the moon. Oh well. Plenty of cynical goodness besides. For instance, I have felt the following emotion, back when I didn't have the spine to refuse to go clubbing: I sat down on a velvet bench and through all the smoke and the bad music and the undesirable desire I suddenly allowed myself to become relaxed. Even here there was no need to posture. The essential question remained the same. Where could I find freedom in this situation? I looked around and felt reconciled with all the people in Alessandro's party and all the people in the room. I could spray adjectives at them for the rest of the evening, but in the end they were just people struggling to be happy with only the most unpromising material at their disposal. |
| The Dictionary of Received Ideas (1913) by Gustave Flaubert | Stuff White People Like plus Speak your Branes, but minus two hundred years. This is Flaubert being bitchy about C19th France bourgeoisie/hipsters: the contradictory and petty zeitgeist. I myself have used 'alabaster' to describe a woman, whoops. |
| Knots (1970) by R.D. Laing | Wildcard psychologist writes meh tongue-twisters about the horror of recursivity."JACK: Forgive me. His point's that conflict escalates because we forget the original contention and argue about the argument instead. Which is neat if not exhaustive. His logic's more sophisticated than I expected – "Jack sees / that there is something Jill can't see and Jack sees / that Jill can't see she can't see it. // Although Jack can see Jill can't see she can't see it / he can't see that he can't see it himself." – but repetition kills the wit. (Laing is on my list of Very Harmful But Oddly Lionized People - see also Cesar Chavez, Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, Frida Kahlo, Leon Trotsky, Zhou Enlai - but he has nothing on Freud in that regard.) |
| Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life (2005) by Leonard Mlodinow | A masked autobiography, which masking I resented. About 180pp of anxious stories about LM, and Caltech local colour; about 20pp of original, direct quotation from RP. but even these are not so distinctive. Feynman's work and worldview are fantastic and nourishing, but get it from him. (Funny line from a blurb in the front of this book: "physics, that seemingly grey subculture".) 2/5 for anyone who knows about RP already. |
| Vineland (1990) by Thomas Pynchon | Didn't get it, first time through anyway. |
| In the Light of What We Know (2014) by Zia Haider Rahman | Two globish co-dependents of unequal intelligence but equal mawkishness take turns at monologue, for ages and ages. One's oracular, the other Boswellian, which means that both talk about the nasty past of the oracular one, Zafar. Everyone's always trying to educate everyone else, without invitation. Tragic, panoptic, and treats big C21st problems – neocolonialism, quant finance, the ineffectiveness of NGOs, the nature of the transnational élite that administers all these things. But also dull, overwritten and clumsily polymathic (characters can be found over-reading, variously, Gödel, Middlemarch, the birth of Bangladesh, the Brit-pop band James). The book is aware of its own pomp – there's a long discussion of sincerity as virtue and vice, a raging attack on Anglophone Indian literature, and Zafar quotes more and more as he disintegrates, suggesting that the book's larding of quotations is a knowing prop. But while I don't know whether it's Zafar or Rahman that the book's clumsiness is rooted in, I don't have to, to know that his conceit of desperate knowledge didn't take root in me. I shouldn't say panoptic: there's only one woman in this, really, and we don't see much even of her except as deceiver and appalling vehicle for privilege. Chapter 14's good – a big bickering, drunken dinner with Pakistani elites, and there are details to admire throughout (Zafar broods over microaggressions, and some of his apercus are sparkling – like his characterisation of maths as "thinking without the encumbrance of knowledge", or his likening of a good essay to "a good dress – long enough to cover the important bits, short enough to be interesting"). Last, very superficially: there are no speech marks, and this deadens the dialogue for me; it makes everything look past-tense and snarky. (Ok sure this works incredibly well in Blood Meridian, but only because all the men in that are wholly dead inside). Will Self minus electricity; Coetzee minus originality and 12-gauge philosophy. Speaking as a pompous generalist and an inveterate over-writer… |
| Nexus (Nexus, #1) (2012) by Ramez Naam | Deeply unsubtle bio-libertarian thriller. Tom Clancy plus software plus anti-statism plus globalisation. Lots of ideas; Naam knows enough about code and brain-machine interfaces to make gestures towards the big info-nano-tech turning point in our near-to-mid-future, and acknowledges the horrors it is likely to enable. ("The Chandler Act (aka the Emerging Technological Threats Act of 2032) is the opening salvo in a new War on Science. To understand the future course of this war, one need only look at the history of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Like those two manufactured "wars", this one will be never-ending, freedom-destroying, counterproductive, and ultimately understood to have caused far more damage than the supposed threat it was aimed at ever could have.") He has a nice message: \tBroad dissemination and individual choice turn most technologies into a plus. If only the elites have access, it's a dystopia.. But the cheap prose and action (and the abuse of Nietzsche) are too wearing, particularly coming right after Stross, a master thereof. |
| Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2000) by Steve Krug | Very clear, very humane. Underneath his smiley-grumpy homilies is an intuitive brand of cognitive science. (He gives a couple of scientific citations, but the model has much more to do with simple sympathetic cynicism than evidence.) That is: Minimise text; have a strong visual hierarchy of size, prominence, clickability; have clear spaced sections of content on each page; keep page names literal; keep the background quiet; never write instructions - make it wordlessly, mindlessly obvious; use conventions unless you have a good reason not to. Which is obviously all good stuff, but overall I didn't like the dad-joke air. |
| Stig of the Dump (1963) by Clive King | None yet |
| High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication (2008) by Baron Schwartz | Databasing is all of the following: a hard precondition of almost all modern social activities; the high-stakes application of some very deep intellectual tortures; unutterably boring. This book's a nice intro to higher-level considerations: Query tuning (i.e. ask the question better), indexing (i.e. ask if it's been asked before), server tuning (ask a better person), replication (ask several people), benchmarking (ask trick questions). Not exactly chatty, but as engaging as you could expect:The chapter concludes with recommendations for the long term care and feeding of your column indexes. And it's not as gruesomely platform-specific as the title implies. changing hardware might, in the best case, give you a 10-fold increase in speed. But tuning queries can often give you 1000-fold performance increase. Seriously. Not deep, though: they namedrop B-trees and the query optimiser, but do not explain them beyond noting that they are very good and you should trust them. I haven't yet seen a bad O'Reilly book. |
| Programming Pig (2011) by Alan Gates | Another totally readable introduction to something new, without a full StackOverflow safety net yet. (Pig is very good, like an imperative, Pythonic SQL: an omnivorous abstraction over MapReduce with Pythonic data structures, optional Java typing, optional schema declaration, fully extensible in Java, Python, etc. Pig is not Turing-complete, but offers several no-fuss ways to extend and delegate, including this beam of sunlight. I'm porting a bunch of SAS and MapReduce code into Pig Latin atm; the job can sometimes be done in 10 times fewer lines.) However, I read this in the slightly dazed and impermeable way that I read anything I am to read for work. [Free!] |
| How Should a Person Be? (2010) by Sheila Heti | Ooft. Uncomfortable navel-gazing about navel-gazing. Autobiographical metafictional first-world problems: unrequited narcissism and joint solipsism. Also writer's block. It's hard to talk about pretentious things that know they are and discuss it well: this is masterful about sophomorism and novel about the navel. It directs interpretation – 'I can't call it wanky, it just called itself wanky!'. Heti's deadly serious about frivolous things, but also important ones (e.g. the passage detailing her sexual masochism, or 'The White Men Go to Africa', mocking poverty tourists.) The artistic equivalent of a hundred selfies. The answer to the title is "Like my friend Margaux but not too much so": twee and wilful and sceptical and direct. |
| This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014) by Naomi Klein | Exciting but not persuasive. It's an attempt to borrow the prestige and consensus of the Green movement to push through all the expensive social policies she wanted anyway. That sounds cynical, but she says as much right at the start of the book: I was propelled into a deeper engagement with [environmentalism] partly because I realized it could be a catalyst for forms of social and economic justice in which I already believed... liberals are still averting their eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism since William Blake's 'dark Satanic Mills' Here's what I think the central argument is (she never comes out and says it): Climate change is an existential risk. But the subtitle's misleading; she constantly blurs the distinction between two theses: 1) 'solving the climate crisis will require regulation of the market', and 2) 'solving the climate crisis will require the abolition of capitalism' In most of this she doesn't endorse (2) at all - "there is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy" - and surprisingly she doesn't deny that communism was worse for the environment than the C20th Western system: ...the truth is that, while contemporary, hyper-globalized capitalism has exacerbated the climate crisis, it did not create it. We started treating the atmosphere as our waste dump when we began using coal on a commercial scale in the late 1700s and engaged in similarly reckless ecological practices well before that. Moreover, humans have behaved in this shortsighted way not only under capitalist systems, but under systems that called themselves socialist as well... If you read closely enough you see her actual target is not capitalism but 'extractivism', the (ancient!) tendency of people to exploit natural resources relentlessly. The cause of extractivism is fatuously said to be the philosophical divide between mind and body, whence also science and the industrial revolution. This causation is ascertained in one line, with a vague citation to unnamed feminist scholars having "recognised" (by which she means conclusively demonstrated) this at some point (pp.177). She's really good at generating urgency and panic: she calls anything that doesn't cut all 10 petagrams of emissions right away a "failure". And since it's a failure, therefore confront and block and yell. (Needless to say, activism can't make all the cuts in time either.) She has a chapter on each of the non-political solutions: so she is sequentially anti-nuclear, anti-GM, anti-geoengineering, anti-cap, anti-tax, anti-Branson, anti-'corporate reponsibility'. I suspect she's wrong about most of these. But she is most wrong on the matter of carbon pricing and Big Green. We need to stop subsidising fossil fuels (you can blame lobbying for those if you like, but this is still a massive government failure). And pricing is the best and least dangerous policy option. In their stead she promotes "planning and banning" (vast micromanagement of allowed resources and technologies), divestment (which we know has no long-term effect on public companies) and blockading machinery (which sorta works but at terrible human cost). She also wants North America to be more northern European, with
That's most evocative of the Netherlands. But their infrastructure was not born of mass politics, green or otherwise, but rather of high energy costs and low land per capita. Joseph Heath explains that this cost difference creates the demand for transit, bike lanes, and pedestrian-friendly cities, just like the electricity price creates the demand for efficient housing. This is what drives the style of planning that predominates in that country. You can do all the "planning" of urban development you want, but unless people actually want to live in the high-density houses you're building, they will remain empty. The reason they are attractive to people in the Netherlands is that the alternatives are unattractive, largely because of the cost. Anyway the market is decarbonising. I would say that we have the benefit of the three years of progress since she wrote this, but the (capitalist) trend was clear back then too: 17% renewables growth per year. Electric cars are now cheaper to run than fossil ones and the price curve is tending quickly and strongly down. New-build solar power is now cheaper per megawatt than oil, and the associated storage cells for night are becoming cheaper even faster. These are both market developments (boosted by subsidies but more and more self-sustaining). She has a long section on how having a child was the cause of her environmentalism - but she fails to reconcile this with the fact that having a child in the developed world is the single most significant environmental footprint for an individual; it would take an extraordinary amount of work to just zero out this harm. As economics this is shaky, and as politics unlikely, but she remains a good journalist. Where by journalist I mean 'person who works at the "These terrible unknown things are happening; here is what the people involved say. What might it mean?" level'. She also writes at the "Here is the big picture and what to do about it" level though, and honestly I recommend just walking right by those bits (pages 1 through 300). Minus a point because it falsely maligns effective and politically available environment policies, and so has done expected harm. Read Mackay and OWiD instead. |
| Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (2004) by Kate Fox | Pretty funny, maybe the first bit of cultural anthropology I've liked (because it is low-level and in fact exasperatingly empirical). Here is her on her own tribe:
Even with a style like that, this gets repetitive. But her explicit decoding would be so, so helpful to incomers or neuroatypicals. She is particularly good on the subtle way that class is central in Britain (not "no oiks allowed" but rather "can he choose and pronounce the word 'toilet' "). |
| Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park, #1) (1990) by Michael Crichton | Frankensaurus. Both very clumsy and ahead of its time. Crichton is often described as a one-legged stool: i.e. he has good ideas, but no prose or characters. Ian Malcolm, his sexy radfem primitivist chaos theorist is an exception, and if anything the film's (iconic) depiction of him is less striking and seductive than the sneering pole depicted here. It's worth picking on Malcolm because he's depicted as prescient, fundamentally correct about the island; he gets the most airtime by far, with the only pushback being Hammond saying "pish posh!" every so often - (Unless you count the raptor attacking him as a discursive act); he is even given the chapter header pages to be oracular on, slowly drawing a dragon curve as if it meant anything. And his philosophy, endorsed by Crichton, is tepid and dismaying finger-wagging. So: He denies that modern life is better than premodern life and endorses Sahlins' lazy-bushman hypothesis:
The first claim is flatly false: average housework by US women decreased by about 14 hours(!) a week over this period. (Table 6, last column.) This is despite ballooning house sizes, inventory of objects to maintain, and time actually spent with the children. It also omits our greatly increased levels of hygiene and personal fragrance, though I suppose that could be zero-sum if we habituate to it. The second is false but not as flatly. I can't find anyone speculating "twenty hours" about the economy of the Upper Paleolithic French. If Crichton is merely mashing up the famous Bushman studies with the punchy image of Lascaux, then despite celebrated dissemination by anthropologists, the claim is untrue: contemporary African hunter-gatherers spend more than 50 hours a week on food production. Worse, Malcolm's smug rant puts zero weight on the giant disease burden, the constant warfare, the giant boredom, the crushing conformity and illiberty of nomad life, and the perfect absence of intellectual life among the ancients. (Judging by the hostility of Pinker's reviewers, Ian Malcolm is still with us, railing against e.g. consumerism and overpopulation - as if those weren't people just trying to live their lives - and reductionism, denying or minimising the huge material and spiritual gains of science and other blessed modernities.) More: Malcolm is himself wildly overconfident about modelling, e.g. the fit of basic fractal theory to the park disaster; Crichton is credulous about the almost-completely unfulfilled promises of the wild-eyed Santa Fe set. The latter claim is true for all phenomena except pure random number generators though; the untrue version Crichton means depends on ignorantly thinking that "predict" always (or ever) means "predict with certainty". Crichton was a programmer, and there's a nice wee code listing in a critical moment, in a made up language resembling Perl + Forth + COBOL. Definitely optimised for making the reader feel smart for reading it, or vindicated in skipping it. But points still. |
| Cash (1997) by Johnny Cash | Oh no! Just a list of sentences, and bucolic, undirected sentences at that. The origin story is obviously compelling, and the Sun records bit is tasty. But he fails to say anything interesting about the road, the drugs, or the country Scene which he so resents, nor the amazing Rubin work which brought him back his immortality. There are flashes of spirit ("As I've often said, I grew up under socialism, and it saved my family"), but otherwise this is one long Acknowledgments page. |
| The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, #1) (1950) by C.S. Lewis | Don't really understand the appeal. Famous Five plus the weaker bits of Lord of the Rings |
| The Magus (1965) by John Fowles | Contemptible, but worth reading: it gets really good around page 450. The way there is a slog: the de Sade epigrams, the unreflective Freudianism, this:
Snobbery, delusion, bad sex, worse chat, and the limits of reason: Ladies and gentlemen: we were The Existentialists! Not a patch on Alain-Fournier, nor on Lanark, nor Bioy Casares. The eponymous sage is not sagacious, just imperious. I liked the vignettes that show Conchis' personality as a stolen (or put-on) patchwork of people he had met in his life (the nasty aesthete Comte, the mad Norwegian mystic, the Nazi firing squad). It took quite a long time for me to realise that Fowles might not endorse the nasty blithering of basically every character. (The book seems to have Bad Fans and Bad Haters who never realise this.)
Anyway my time was recompensed by the great big postmodern explosion of the last 150 pages. Some very lovely passages throughout too:
The ending, so easily hated, does not strike me as meaning "to win love eternal, go on just hit her in the face", despite appearances. It is rather a parting stab at your opinion of Nicholas, a big Straussian dischord thrown into the supposed perfect cadence of the godgame people's efforts; Lily's grand second commandment dissolves suddenly, saltily, and then: a warm mist descends. Go guess. Fine if you're a glutton for philosophical dialogues and Truman Show recursions. |
| Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) by D.H. Lawrence | Alright, so it might be easy to mock (e.g. Connie insists on referring to orgasm as her "crisis"), and it's definitely on the Well of Loneliness / Uncle Tom's Cabin / Yellow Wallpaper side (of books that we can be glad were written and read without wanting to read them ourselves). And sure its idea of class and relative virility is dumb. Also its dichotomising and opposing mind and body, and its revaluation of the body over the mind. And its whole mythology of the phallus. Maybe it reads like a Mills and Boon in places (note that the gruff Northern gamekeeper is really a decorated officer back from the Raj with perfectly fine vowels if he felt like using them)... &c &c |
| Object-oriented Software Engineering (2001) by Timothy Lethbridge | Software engineering is just a fancy word for design. It consists in getting a long way away from your code – procedural, data, architectural, set-theoretic abstraction – which I resented at first, but which is far more important than it looks. UML is a rigorous, machine-readable graphical logic. Rather than lines of code, design patterns are the real units of serious work. This book is painfully exoteric (infected by the 'stakeholder' bureaucratese bug), relentless plain, and occasionally the examples are not illustrative, but all right fine. (NB 5 years later: The top-down OOP / UML approach has never been useful to me in 5 years of professional coding.) |
| The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger | Mostly annoying, but I can see how it was important (for at least lending an actual voice, at least pointing at the real deal hyperactive aimlessness of many young adults). |
| The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1) (2014) by Becky Chambers | Chatty, hollow, twee. |
| Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis (2013) by Holden Karau | Tool books are difficult to stomach: their contents are so much more ephemeral than other technical books. It's not worth it: in 10 years, will it matter? etc. (This is an incredibly high bar to pose, but that's how high my opinion is of the technical pursuits.) O'Reilly soften this blow, occasionally, by enlisting really brilliant authors who bring in the eternal and the broad while pootering around their narrow furrow. (I am incredibly fond of Alan Gates for this, for instance.) Spark is the biggest deal by far in my corner of the world and will probably affect your life in minor ways you will never pin down (see O'Neil below). [Theory #1, Thinking #1]</li> |
| The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (2015) by Pedro Domingos | Overambitious pop science from a lively and charming narrator. He tries to sketch all of machine learning in a couple hundred pages. The warmth of his teaching voice comes through the page:
but he needs a better editor, more even than Nassim Taleb does. This is often just a stream-of-consciousness analogy-dump, and with precise topics that just doesn't fly. (Both Penguin productions.) There's more wrong with it than prose, unfortunately: he gives equal time to unpromising approaches (genetic programming, analogical reasoning) and so has to skim over the single most important approach (deep learning), with no real sense of the giant differences in success. Couple this with his terrible argument against AI risk ("unlike humans, computers don't have a will of their own. They're products of engineering, not evolution... the evaluation function is determined by us. A more powerful computer will just optimize it better... The same reasoning applies to all AI systems because they all—explicitly or implicitly—have the same three components. They can vary what they do, even come up with surprising plans, but only in service of the goals we set them.") and it becomes actively unhelpful. (Pedantic aside: he commits linguistic violence every time he uses "algorithm" instead of the unsexy true referent, "program". He obviously knows the distinction much better than I do, but skips this to talk down / excitingly to the audience.) Read his great dense paper instead. DNF 50% |
| Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (2009) by Dambisa Moyo | Sloppy and overzealous. Also a careless rehash of the highly original economist Peter Bauer. Don't read this, even if you think that foreign aid is usually great (read Easterly or Riddell for accurate disillusionment instead). |
| High Performance MySQL: Optimierung, Datensicherung, Replikation & Lastverteilung () by Baron Schwartz | None yet |
| The Codeless Code () by QI | Violent twee parables about software development. Generally overwrought, and you can get them in a minute or two each time, unlike the bizarre original koans, which demand convoluted confabulation. But 'Codeless Code' is an instance of an important genre: the romanticisation of the highly abstract and novel. We need such things; otherwise those of us without internal wellsprings of meaning will find it boring, and will thus never excel; otherwise a culture will never grow, and nothing human lasts without growing a culture. There is enough art, except regarding new matters, new concepts, new possibilities, where there is nowhere near enough. "Ah!", you say, "But Yudkowsky did just this, and got roundly mocked and called a cult leader and divers other bad things." Yes: that is the main tax we pay to be on the internet. I think of Yudkowsky as George Eliot thinks of Carlyle (though she hated him btw):
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| Economics (2000) by David K.H. Begg | None yet |
| Romanitas (Romanitas, #1) (2005) by Sophia McDougall | None yet |
| A Fate Worse Than Debt (1988) by Susan George | Early critique of development loans. However, now pretty irrelevant: e.g. relies on the notion of altruistic Soviet replacement for imperialist aid / balancing out of two imperialist aids. |
| The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn | There's an excellent and useful model of science in here, but it's wrapped in two massive dreadful epistemological cockups (incommensurability and ontological relativism). |
| Bertrand Russell and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy () by Ray Monk | Too specialised, even speaking as a Russell fan who was taking a course on the origins of the Analytics at the time. |
| A Doll's House (1879) by Henrik Ibsen | None yet |
| The Playboy of the Western World (1907) by J.M. Synge | None yet |
| Utopia (1516) by Thomas More | Fun to talk about, not to read. There is this section, which is an early prediction of what would happen to British sharecroppers in the coming centuries:
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| Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? () by Edmund L. Gettier | None yet |
| The Cider House Rules (1985) by John Irving | None yet |
| Abhorsen (Abhorsen, #3) (2003) by Garth Nix | None yet |
| Lirael (Abhorsen, #2) (2001) by Garth Nix | None yet |
| Sabriel (Abhorsen, #1) (1995) by Garth Nix | None yet |
| 112 Gripes about the French: The 1945 Handbook for American GIs in Occupied France (2013) by Leo Rosten | File with Chrysanthemum and the Sword: limited but good-hearted practical anthropology. I doubt anything this well-written would escape a military bureaucracy these days. |
| Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4) (2000) by J.K. Rowling | None yet |
| Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2) (1998) by J.K. Rowling | None yet |
| Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Harry Potter, #1) (1997) by J.K. Rowling | None yet |
| The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969) by Charles Bukowski | None yet |
| The Uncommon Reader (2007) by Alan Bennett | None yet |
| The Arsonists (1958) by Max Frisch | Main gag is how obvious it was that the Nazis were going to be the Nazis - the arsonists repeatedly tell their genial host that they are arsonists, ask for his help with the fuses, bring him a wreath with his name on it, etc. I suspect that's probably hindsight bias (half of the German Jews did manage to flee Germany, but some was due to the initial Nazi policy of encouraging emigration). Is the Doctor Heidegger? Funny-sad, anyway. |
| Laughable Loves (1970) by Milan Kundera | None yet |
| Groosham Grange (Groosham Grange, #1) (1988) by Anthony Horowitz | None yet |
| When Nietzsche Wept (1992) by Irvin D. Yalom | Pretty annoying fanfiction. Yalom crowbars Breuer (proto-Freud, the Anna O. guy) into Nietzsche's life, because it would've stretched taste to have Young Freud (pre-Charcot) do it. His is a strange one-dimensional Nietzsche, with none of the real one's lightness, humour, and contempt. (I imagine the portrayal of Breuer is equally simplistic and annoying, but I'm not interested in finding out.) Much like In the Light of What We Know: an oracle and a servant discoursing like desperate teenagers, for hundreds of pages. As usual with psychoanalysts, Yalom gives little time to the organic causes of Nietzsche's mental disorders. He was very ill for most of his life; he wasn't a macho prick in the usual sense, since he poured himself out in letters. Yalom doesn't succeed in porting this outpour. |
| The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sherlock Holmes, #5) (1902) by Arthur Conan Doyle | Dull, four-fifths preamble. Got whodunit, didn't see why. |
| The Light Fantastic (Discworld, #2; Rincewind #2) (1986) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Matilda (1988) by Roald Dahl | None yet |
| Equal Rites (Discworld, #3; Witches, #1) (1987) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| Espedair Street (1987) by Iain Banks | First-person sulking by an ambivalently Scottish, ambivalently Left, ambivalently alive Standard Banks Man. Book aims to study spiritual clumsiness and pop music, ending up in a mid-life crisis at 30. Has its moments ("We put a value on what we treasure, and so cheapen it"; this line always gives me goosebumps "her blonde hair slid across the pillow like gold chains over snow (and for an instant I thought Suzanne takes you down…)"). |
| Open the Door (1920) by Catherine Carswell | Wise but wearing bildungsroman, full with super-Romantic sincerity. Joanna's life is about embracing pleasure and freedom, but is suffused with the bible; even living godlessly, J thinks in its language and punishes herself in its mood. Unconventionally emotional: while she doesn't love her husband ("What they had was not love, but it had beauty, and it served.") and doesn't grieve her mother's death, Joanna (and Carswell) are brimming with strange new emotions: at one point she's thrilled to ecstasy by a dripping tap. ("It was the still small voice of a new birth, of a new life, of a new world… For it was the voice before creation, secure, unearthly, frail as filigree yet faithful as a star.") Ornamented, worthy, but hard work. Probably important. |
| Surviving (Vagabond) (2009) by Allan Massie | Drunk or ex-drunk Anglos bitch around Rome. Some of the literary references are a bit much ("The boy was reading Stendhal; how bad could he be?") but the nasty driving fatigue underneath is good. Has a really ugly binding and font, so I've compensated the score in case I am shallow. |
| Skavenslayer (Gotrek & Felix #2) (1999) by William King | None yet |
| The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (The Hundred-Year-Old Man, #1) (2009) by Jonas Jonasson | Surprisingly acerbic! The advertised Scandinavian pop silliness is present, but tamped down nicely by the Gulliver's Travels satire: a man blown around by the mad political convulsions of the past century. Key tension: the book's main target is people in the grip of political ideologies. The eponymous Allan is held up as a model exception: possessing sensible, apolitical, unfashionable grit and humour. But Allan ends up enabling atrocities: he saves Franco's life in '39! He gives Stalin the bomb! Are we supposed to conclude, against the narrator and protagonist, that political neutrality is actually a horror? Jokes were ok, this tension was good. In one sentence: You shouldn't underestimate old people or hurt anyone over politics, lol. |
| The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2009) by Philip Pullman | Or: "A Story." It's intentionally didactic, but that knowing intention doesn't stop it being annoying. Found myself reading it just to see what Pullman's next revision would be (e.g, Joseph being bullied into taking the teenage Mary for a wife). "I remember him," said the blind man. "Jesus. He come here on the Sabbath, like a fool. The priests wouldn't let him heal anyone on Sabbath. He should've known that." Compassionate, subtler than the title suggests, dull. |
| And Then There Were None (1939) by Agatha Christie | My first go with her. Didn't guess the baddie. (Read aloud) |
| The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (1985) by Roald Dahl | None yet |
| On the Edge (1998) by Edward St. Aubyn | His weakest, which is still pretty good. A practice run for the glorious Mother's Milk, same themes and many of the same vocal tics. I was disappointed to find him being sympathetic and fair to my ideological enemies, the mystic anti-rationalists. Shout out to Findhorn too! |
| Feynman (2011) by Jim Ottaviani | Brilliant man with a peerless anti-authoritarian anti-pomp streak. But this is hagiography, presenting his good puns as profundities and his bad puns as good puns. It avoids his maths and almost avoids physics, which needless to say is vitiating when dealing with the lives of technicians. Worthwhile for its 20-page comic distillation of his (already distilled) pop masterpiece QED. |
| Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) by Jules Verne | Proper boring. First 150 pages (out of 220) is a completely uneventful dialogue about an obscure Victorian geological debate. Narrator is kind of charming. Didn't help that we were just waiting for the dinosaurs to appear. DNF 60%. |
| Kick-Ass 2 (2012) by Mark Millar | Eh; art's really good, but the dialogue and world are lazy, hardcorer-than-thou (the only centrefold is of a groin being bitten; also "I feel like Rihanna after a quiet night in"). Inevitably, matching gangs of vigilantes and villains form, with the attendant cheap gags ("I'm Insect-Man!"). The bit where they tweet each other is good (and surreally true, á la the last Israel incursion). |
| An American Dream (1965) by Norman Mailer | Maybe Kennedy deserves this much hatred but I doubt it. Jackie O certainly doesn't. |
| Abaddon's Gate (The Expanse, #3) (2013) by James S.A. Corey | Very enjoyable still. The admirable parts here are the tiny fraction of the conflict that the aliens cause; all the rest (95%) is humans backstabbing humans. How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: Belters are still too roughly sketched. How can they work? Not IRA-style cells plus official deniability, not military hierarchy, no discussion of their democracy, just Fred Johnson the guerilla tsar... Software development: Little unless you count ascended-Miller. Actual Science: Treatment of momentum and dynamics is good, besides of course the Wormhole Stargate thing. |
| Wild Harbour (1936) by Ian Macpherson | Post-apocalyptic Morayshire folk do Cold War survivalism before the Cold War? I was of course primed to love this, but it's a lead ball of a book, drab and flattened. This probably makes it a brilliant picture of the era's background of vast fear, but that doesn't make for a good read. The three characters are just scared, and though their hardships are harsh indeed, they're oddly unaffecting. The political economy that drove them out there is completely absent, only represented by sketched armed thugs. Nor is the world-justifying love of the central couple convincing, either. So it's tragic, but in no meaningful or honourable way. The prose does sometimes have a lovely Doric lilt - "We were but young in stealth. As we drove along the Spey, the silent night was full of ears that harkened to our passing. It was midnight when our second journey ended, and dark, dark." |
| The Shape of Water (Inspector Montalbano, #1) (1994) by Andrea Camilleri | Cynical but not very cynical, funny but not very funny. Uses food for comic and existential relief between murders. Maybe Sicilians or Sicily fans love the book's local colour, but meh. Half a point to compensate for possible bad translation. |
| The Ghost Brigades (Old Man's War, #2) (2006) by John Scalzi | None yet |
| Strata (1981) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| A Hat Full of Sky (Discworld, #32; Tiffany Aching, #2) (2004) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| John Dies at the End (John Dies at the End, #1) (2007) by David Wong | There was a time, as yet unnamed, before self-conscious Social Media but after broadband. Sketch it in totems: LimeWire, ytmnd, Something Awful, Dramatica, Uncyclopedia. Thence was JDatE born. Slapstick body horror, and you'll know already what you'll make of it from that description. This is scarier than it is funny, but not a huge amount of either. I'm very happy that Wong was anointed by the internet, that the gatekeepers were evaded but. |
| The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2006) by John Boyne | None yet |
| The Color of Magic (Discworld, #1; Rincewind, #1) (1983) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| George's Marvellous Medicine (1981) by Roald Dahl | None yet |
| The Green Isle of the Great Deep (1944) by Neil M. Gunn | Odd anti-rationalist fantasy on the model of TH White. (What's the word for the pre-Tolkien, pre-swords-and-sorcery model of fantasy?) Everything is oblique, from the discussion of Auschwitz at the start, to the Kafkan bureaucracy seated in a pastoral landscape. I admire his portrayal of the totalitarian Administrators: when defeated, they are not destroyed but put in their place. There are also passages like this:…to achieve the blessed intention, something practical had to be done. Things could not be left in the hands of the Administrators. In the story of man, that had been tried times without number and always it had failed. (The revolving Earth, pitted with its tragedies, cried in a far voice from the midst of space: 'You cannot leave me to politicians.') A good children's book: pure of heart and finely weighted. But too didactic for me. |
| Resurrection Men (Inspector Rebus, #13) (2001) by Ian Rankin | None yet |
| Critique of Criminal Reason (Hanno Stiffeniis, #1) (2006) by Michael Gregorio | Couldn't resist this after reading the blurb - Kant solving murder mysteries in wintry Konigsberg - but gave up after 80 pages of samey dirty Gothic blah. Crime fiction is rarely compassionate, fantastic, or realistic - three ways fiction can impress me. DNF 25% |
| The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5) (2014) by Charles Stross | Brave, for a writer of taste to write a vampire book, these days. But then in a sense Stross doesn't give a shit, since he has written a vampire book in which the vampires are literally high-frequency investment bankers who become vampires literally because of high-frequency investment banking. Then there's his occult computer science ("Magic is a side-effect of certain classes of mathematics… Sensible magicians use computers."). Stross is the only writer I know who depicts the corporate/bureaucratic way of life, as well as just its deadening language. Millions of people now spend much of their lives within a structure encouraging this mindset; we need art that knows its vagaries and petty circumlocutions and administrivia. |
| Cibola Burn (The Expanse, #4) (2014) by James S.A. Corey | Just fine. Plus a half for reusing Miller, a dead man, so well. This passage was good (maybe need to be there though): what a genetic algorithm feels like from inside -
And the awww shiit political implication rant at the end is very satisfying. What I like about this book is the small stakes - instead of the usual "all the solar system FOREVERRR" it's about the fate of 200 folk on a backwater. The villain is interesting, implausible: a corporate bushidō deontologist, willing to die for his shareholders. Cyberpunk without cyberpunk's irony. How does it do as Serious science fiction? Social development: None. The super aliens also have no society. Software development: None. Actual Science: The aliens change the laws of physics repeatedly (nuclear fusion stops working), but the authors at least try to do counterfactual physics to this. The aliens were fissioning lithium for energy, which seems unlikely but I suppose not impossible. |
| The Stories of Eva Luna (1989) by Isabel Allende | None yet |
| The Wee Free Men (Discworld, #30; Tiffany Aching, #1) (2003) by Terry Pratchett | None yet |
| The Life of a Stupid Man (1927) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa | Tiny selection of tiny prose poems. Contains "In a Grove" which was later made into Rashōmon. Insofar as the following sentence makes sense: it's good but Rashōmon is better. The other bits are suggestive and modern, but not moving, aside from the bit where the glum Marty Stu reels off all the German Romantics he loves. |
| The Gathering (2007) by Anne Enright | Remember trudging through it but don't remember anything else about it. |
| Murphy (1938) by Samuel Beckett | Not sure what everyone's laughing at. Which is quite a literary effect. |
| Old Man's War (Old Man's War, #1) (2005) by John Scalzi | None yet |
| The Witches of Chiswick (2003) by Robert Rankin | Fortean lulz |
| The Sprouts of Wrath (1988) by Robert Rankin | Pratchett on ket: that is, slurred, free-associating, oddly sexual. Only for nerdy British teenagers and probably not even them. |
| Burning Chrome (Sprawl, #0) (1986) by William Gibson | Uneven. "Johnny Mnemonic" is great though, much more teenaged and subculture-boosting fun than the film. |
| The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories (1995) by Angela Carter | None yet |
| Skellig (Skellig, #1) (1998) by David Almond | None yet |
| Get Doomed: A Fucking Novella () by Paul Wilhelm Crowe | Scattered, scatological Robert Rankinism, written for a friend. Every chapter is called "In which Rupert finds a map"; there is no map and are no Ruperts. The fact that I am a principal sidekick in it (killed on page 3 by a tidal wave of kebab mank and reanimated as a Roomba with a T-Pain vocoder) is besides the besides. |
| The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) by John Buchan | Totally straightforward book: it is entirely constructed of plot plus the geography of the Borders. Even so, it's just about full enough of archaic words to be diverting. Totally irresponsible book: it made of Germans omnimalevolent villains in 1915, blaming them tout court for the war, and suppressing ambiguity. Buchan was an unusually humane imperialist, and couldn't know we'd do this properly at (Read aloud) |
| Neverwhere (London Below, #1) (1996) by Neil Gaiman | None yet |
| Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein | It's a strange read, bloated, full of chauvinist banter. It's like George Bernard Shaw wrote a script for the 50s sitcom 'Bewitched'. There are only two female characters: a megalomanaical shrew, and a nubile and devoted secretary (it's just there happens to be 7 copies of the latter character). I appreciate his building up a cynical, scientific-humanist world, then tearing it down abruptly at the start of the second book, where two archangels comment on the scene below. The Muslim linguist character is interesting but borderline (his differences emphasised, often mocked - his nickname is "Stinky"! - but also brilliant and accepted by all the protagonists): [Mahmoud] held a vast but carefully concealed distaste for all things American. Their incredible polytheistic babel of religions... their cooking, their manners, their bastard architecture and sickly arts... and their blind, pathetic, arrogant beleief in their superiority. Their women most of all, their immodest, assertive women, with their gaunt, starved bodies which nevertheless reminded him disturbingly of houris (...) (If that made you cringe you ain't seen nothing. It is so easy to show this book in a terrible light: Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's partly her own fault. That tenth time - well all right. Give him the heave ho into the bottomless pit. Support for the arts - *merde*! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore. ) I read the modern, unabridged cut and regret it. The last two sections are flabby and pretty much skimmable, if not skippable. (As is my new policy, I read this precisely because it was denounced on the internet. Though it turns out the denouncer is actually a critical fan, and the article is entirely fair.) Comparison of Dune and SiaSL: Both are didactic as hell. Both use magical superhumans to drive the plot in an otherwise sciency setting. Both use a religion their founders do not believe in to obtain power. Both treat water as sacred. Both include cannibals for similar reasons. However, they are deeply different where it matters: Dune is a thing book, SiaSL is a people book. First third 4/5, second two-thirds 2/5. [Library] |
| Naked Lunch (1959) by William S. Burroughs | Disgusting but virtuous. I liked his scientific reports more. |
| The Loved One (1948) by Evelyn Waugh | Extremely slight but stylish. Couple good gags. I didn't spot that the protagonist was a sociopath until the last ten pages; is this an intentional twist or am I dim? Hard to tell the difference between ennui and malignity. |
| The Fountainhead (1943) by Ayn Rand | Expected to hate it, but it's actually dumb fun if you don't stop and think. Obviously the philosophy (ethical egoism + logical word salad) is toxic (and there's that sex scene...), but it works fine as a trashy yarn, the reader's equivalent of moshing to Rage Against the Machine. There is exactly one good idea in it: the villain, Ellsworth Toohey is a fake socialist, a grand demagogue, a wolf in sheep's ideology. Because he's actually one of her Übermenschen - a brutal, self-actualised spirit just using socialism - he's thus a Worthy Opponent for her pet mavericks. His role in the book is risibly didactic: "Yes, fine, my heroes are assholes," Rand says, "but look how much worse they are when they pretend to be good!" |
| The Shepherd's Crown (Discworld, #41; Tiffany Aching, #5) (2015) by Terry Pratchett | Don't know if the flatness of this comes from its being Young Adult, or from the smoothened, modern nature of his late Discworld, or from the cortical atrophy. Little of his obliquity and spark to show; it feels like someone else's writing, and no doubt it substantially was. Trades on past power, and what power it was: his witches are pre-modern doctor, social worker, priest, undertaker, and night watch. Came to say goodbye, and I got that after 5 short chapters. [Values #3] |
| The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2005) by Iain Banks | Banks was important to me as a boy – The Crow Road, though even darker than his sinister average, offers a sincere and positive vision of atheism – but I've been less enthralled on rereading the real-world novels (his scifi feel like instant classics). This is relatively light, offering the familiar Banks themes: the extended-family drama, a focus on human foibles, and globalised Scotland, which are enough. |
| Black Man (2007) by Richard K. Morgan | Another geno-soldiers-get-invented-banned-and-what-then chin-scratcher. Nearer us in time and space than his Kovacs novels (this isn't interstellar) – but they've still all forgotten us, bar the historians. Morgan lets genetic determinism run away with the plot: everyone's always explaining themselves with reference to their or others' "wiring". At one point the protagonist hears a similarity in two people's diction and "wondered idly what genes the two men might share". Also his theme, 'GM humans as future Other' gets ponderous inbetween the ultraviolence. But Morgan is always worthwhile: his books suspend the ideological alongside the unhappily sexual alongside big strange guns (e.g. an AIDS pistol, loaded with GM virus 'Falwell'). More mature in some ways – there's a feminist imam, and a religious character he doesn't have violent contempt for – but also a bit busy and contralto. Stross and Morgan refer to 'black labs' a lot – that is, dastardly underground geneticists. Every single time they did, I wondered what the authors had against Labradors. Sort it out. |
| Another Country (1962) by James Baldwin | An Important (rather than good) book, formally and lyrically grim. Impossibility of interracial love among racism, impossibility of calm for anyone with any really big plans, impossibility of sexual satisfaction, impossibility of peace for a manly man, impossibility of finishing the damn thing. DNF 50% |
| The Business (1999) by Iain Banks | None yet |
| The Inheritance of Loss (2005) by Kiran Desai | None yet |
| Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (1981) by Joseph M. Williams | None yet |
| The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan (2001) by Donald Richie | The greatest gaijin? Famous for introducing Japan's cinema to the West, but actually fewer than half of his thoughts are anything to do with that. Richie has an eC20th directness about describing other peoples - think Martha Gellhorn or Kipling - their 'pure skin', their atrocity-enabling 'innocence', their circuitousness and tribalism. (It is now sometimes inappropriate, sometimes oppressive to emphasise differences so.) I cannot imagine Plato thriving here [Japan], with all his absolutes ("the truth," "the beauty")... Maybe that is why Japan is so backward (by comparison) in some areas: philosophy, diagnosis. And perhaps why it is so forward in others.
Similar to Hitchens in its consistent, adventurous aestheticism, though with much quieter prose; however, neither has that certain Alastair Reid transcendence. Minus a half for seriously ugly layout and typography, but I will seek out his real books. In one sentence: Ah, so innocent, so subtle, so far from Ohio. |
| The Secret Life of Numbers: 50 Easy Pieces on How Mathematicians Work And Think (2006) by George G. Szpiro | Tiny happy columns on false proofs, primacy wars, Newton as a gigantic loon, and the Swiss maths scene. He assumes no background - explaining primes even - but is concise and so not hand-holding. Lots of repetition because originally standalone columns, lots of bucolia because he likes mathematicians so much. Harsh words for Wolfram, though. The banality of eternal truth:
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| Radical Renfrew: Poetry from the French Revolution to World War I (1990) by Tom Leonard | A nice thing about Britain, or the Old World at large, is that there's a piece of art for most places. Thus even my tiny village has a passable ballad, 'where the river meets the sea', while my mate's Wirral has a full seven hundred years of contempt to draw on (as well as my top album of 1998). Paisley has the first bit of Espedair Street – but also hundreds of Industrial Era pamphlets and gazetteers that Tom Leonard dug through, finding a hotbed of utopian socialism, zero-wave feminism and farmer's rage. (I don't know if it'll sink in with locals though; they're more likely to get excited about Gerard Butler going to Paisley Grammar.) "Radical" isn't a compliment, as Leonard (and Kelman, and Nairn, and Macleod) think it is, but it often marks at least interesting things. See here. |
| Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) by Barack Obama | Way, way less bland than you'd expect from a campaigning suit. |
| The Intellectual (2002) by Steve Fuller | None yet |
| The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) by Christine de Pizan | Morally pioneering obviously, but it's old bad prose (at least in translation, and probably not only). |
| Beauty (2009) by Roger Scruton | All I remember from studying this is that he thought photography wasn't art because only point-and-click Cartier-Bressonish is real photography, so that kind of photographer isn't very causally involved in their subject, so photos aren't Representations of ideas, so (...). |
| Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010) by Martha C. Nussbaum | None yet |
| Sentenced to Life (2015) by Clive James | None yet |
| Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions (2008) by Christian Lander | Pointless. It mocks a certain small, ridiculous group - C21st upper-middle-class lefty American hipsters -and ignores the rest of its titular target. What does it mean to say that The Wire, green tea, or public transport are white things? Not that they're not for other people. Not that most whites like them (they don't). Not that they're bad. Not that they're good. The point is to mock pretentious people, whose contempt for practicality, and idiot love of anything which calls itself authentic or nonmainstream, are very fun to bash. Mere socially acceptable stereotyping; the site exists to let people chortle and roll their eyes, get revenge on ponces. But if you're interested in mocking that group you already knew what the fads are, so you and Lander are just patting each other on the back, or, rather, reaching around. Insofar as it encourages self-consciousness among accidentally-consumerist hipsters: ok. Insofar as it sneers at trends that actually could change the world if adopted en masse (e.g. vegetarianism, cycling, taking the fucking train), go away. |
| How To Live Forever Or Die Trying: On The New Immortality (2007) by Bryan Appleyard | Critical account of transhumanism. He focuses on the sensational bits, morbidness, cryonics, and the inveterate pill-munching. (Not sure why attempting to resist death is more morbid than totally submitting to it.) Bit of a mishmash, with an extended middle section on Ultimate Meaning and Medieval funeral habits not totally meshing - and his grasp of the science is, as he admits, insufficient. Not as unbalanced as e.g. Wieseltier or Kass. |
| The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman (2000) by Timothy Ferriss | I like self-experimenters - they risk themselves to give knowledge to, potentially, billions - but the one thing they must have is a sense of the limits of their findings. This is a hodgepodge of extreme, nominally scientific Pareto "lifehacks" for: rapid weight-loss, lazy bodybuilding, polyphasic sleep blah, regeneration from chronic injury, DIY female orgasm therapy. His conspicuous consumption of medical attention is risible ("Just $3800 four times a year for this battery of vanity tests!"); as is his name-dropping as self-promotion. Ferriss has a... creative grasp of biochemistry, and his brute lack of self-doubt lets him be productively provocative (e.g. "I do not accept the Lipid Hypothesis of cardiac disease"; "DO NOT EAT FRUIT"). He quotes heavily from experts, and he does do everything he advocates. The main advantage of him is that he is fearless about ridicule, actually following what he sees as the evidence. Thus there's a long section on the bodybuilding potential of vegetarian diets - which got him lots of scorn from the meathead-o-sphere - as well as an idiosyncratic list of the substrates that vegists are often missing. (Boron, anyone?) He's pretty fixated on testosterone and infertility. I initially scoffed at his fear of phones irradiating his testicles - but there actually is reason to think so. Not your average loud guru pseud. |
| Aphorisms and Thoughts (1838) by Napoléon Bonaparte | Compiled by Honore de Balzac, one wonders how carefully. Not very good, mostly. He's obviouslytruly independent - e.g. there's praise for Muhammad here, lots of fearless anticlerical scepticism, lots of examination of despots. He's not coherent at all - he's both an anti-intellectual "man of action" and a shiny-eyed Enlightenment rationalist; Machiavellian bastard and Aristotelian virtue-seeker; imperial elitist and populist revolutionary. Consider: Napoleon caused the deaths of between 3 and 7 million people (i.e. 0.5% of every person alive at the time), imposing significant effects on almost the entire world - and he's a very average writer. Read him next to Nietzsche, who plausibly never harmed anyone in his entire life, but whose writing stills scorches and stuns us. (This gets better when we remember that Nietzsche considered Napoleon one of a handful of people who have been truly 'great'.) Charitable reading: We happen to have caught up with Napoleon's thoughts, but not with Nietzsche's. Some good lines that don't depend on their speaker being extraordinary for impact: </li>
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| Hijack Reality: Deptford X: A 'How To' Guide to Organize a Really Top Notch Art Festival (2009) by Roberta Smith | Aggrandised history of a cute London art festival he helped found. I'm not much into zany free play atm. Art, as an institution, seems much more hollow and ritualistic than it recently did. Which leads me to wonder: am I on the CP-Snow-seesaw? Does my current enthusiasm for science mean I must gain some contempt for arts? (Art might be the proper home of structuralist waffle - being, as it sometimes is, a floating system of signs with no correspondence or weight.) |
| Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) by Mark Fisher | Fisher was strange. He's a very clear thinker who nonetheless devotes most of his writing to extremely unclear people, the Hegel/Baudrillard approach to society, existence, and pop culture. He is humane, focussing on why we might think we need these Theorists. Thesis here is the usual one, that capitalism has mind control powers somehow. |
| Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties & the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (2001) by Gary Lachman | Thesis: Charles Manson, Scientology, and Altamont were not horrible subversions of the 60s' ideology - but its logical conclusion. A series of pop history lessons, and is in fact a bit too full of sections like: "...and then Ram Dass went to India and met Guru McFamous who also knew Bastard McProfound who was notorious for writing a best-selling book of consciousness revolution and being racist for kicks". This is a fairly clear-eyed account of a bunch of creeps who still have lots of cultural capital, but not very deep about why anti-rationalism persists in a world so drastically improved by reason's yields. |
| Thinking About Texts - PUBLICATION CANCELED: An Introduction to English Studies (2009) by Chris Hopkins | Just an A-level English textbook, with good long extracts. English students at my university were taught very little Theory indeed - and while this made discussions much less pompous, they were also kinda toothless. Without theory, "English" has little to distinguish it, being just an odd dilution of narrow history and philosophy, with sprinklings of sexy concepts from newer humanities (e.g. Media studies, Race studies, Queer theory, Area studies). |
| Mogworld (2010) by Yahtzee Croshaw | Pop-pomo treatment of fantasy conventions: Self-aware videogame NPCs living and suffering in an uninspired swords-n-sorcery MMO. The parts where the characters begin to realise that the gods are incompetent nerds are my favourite. It doesn't have the stylish vitriol of his famed game reviews, but the ending is suitably brutal, and there is a sad tension throughout (the protagonist repeatedly and sincerely asks to be killed) which elevates things a bit. |
| The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (2012) by Stephen Grosz | Neat, sad, surprising, overcoming my strong prior against psychoanalysis. A series of polished case studies illustrating the wide variety of ways we can be broken-down and knotted-up. Settles into a pattern: 'difficult patient's puzzling actions are to be explained by a timeless subversion - thus, praise can be destructive, pain is vitally informative, spitting in people's faces can be a defence mechanism', etc. He's honest about the questionable utility of his field – he doesn't seem to help many of these people, let alone cure them – and this makes the book ok. |
| Some Recent Attacks (1992) by James Kelman | Detailed, paranoid leftism, mostly about local issues, Glasgow council and British race relations. Little general interest. Published by the redoubtable AK Press – the channel for anarchism into the pre-internet teen bedrooms of Britain. |
| A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel And Einstein (2004) by Palle Yourgrau | Slightly crankish popularisation of his work on a mathematical argument of Godel's which maybe demonstrates time's nonexistence (in an ideal system close to General Relativity). Yourgrau argues this case using the overlooked friendship between E & G to stir up human interest. He beats the drum a bit hard, taking popularisation to mean "add superlatives and jibes" ("He was a German Jew among WASPS"). I get the feeling that Einstein's in the title more to boost sales / Godel's profile than because the men's relationship is all that critical to the proof Yourgrau thinks has been hushed up or ignored. |
| Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (1995) by Daniel Goleman | Like Focusing, this presents itself exactly as empty self-help blah books do, despite having a modicum of real research behind it. (It doesn't help that the sequel is a dialogue with the Dalai Lama - who, though an important world figure, isn't exactly an authority on contemporary cognitive science.) The core claim would be important if true: "IQ, abstract fluid intelligence, is fully separable from EQ, the rapid and humane understanding of social situations, emotional networks, and intentionality." But it isn't. |
| Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence (2012) by Scott Hames | Bunch of mostly radical Scots thinking things through, mostly badly and without any sense of cost:benefit. The entry by Asher is a perfect example of the horrible clotted prose of the humanities today: form as a wall obscuring content, (assuming there actually is content behind it). In summary: - John Aberdein: The SNP suck. We already control plenty and little changed. Still we must go independent to have any hope of foiling capitalism. Take the fisheries and mines, and take out tax evaders. -Armstrong: SNP are crypto-unionists. Diluters! (They're keeping Sterling, the Queen, NATO, same bankers, low tax.) Need "Internationalism from below". - Alan Bissett: We are atomised because of Thatcher. Despite the jokes, do not underestimate what Braveheart and Trainspotting did for us. May 2011 majority is The Moment. - Jo Calder: Go Independent for proper arts funding(!) - Margi: Scotland is a woman. - Galloway: Scotland is a teenager. - Suhayl Saadi: Wooo! Waa! Hypercognitivist hoots mon! |
| Learning to Live: A User's Manual (1996) by Luc Ferry | Awful title, awful cover, but interesting. Another instance of the biggest trope in pop philosophy: 'reclaiming philosophy from the analysts'. (The problem with the trope is that two quite different things are sharing the name: roughly normative self-help and apriori, protoscientific conceptual analysis.) Ferry is a compleat product of the elite École culture – Sorbonne, philosophy prof, did his time in office - but his insistence on clarity, even when talking about the likes of Bourdieu and Gadamer, and</a> his rejection of their anti-humanism is free of hauteur. Try to imagine Jeremy Hunt or Betsy DeVos writing something this literary. (It makes Nietzsche out as more unavoidable than he is?)</td> </tr> |
| Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off & Dracula (1987) by Liz Lochhead | Never read her before. Not sure how she slipped me by, given the local unanimity about her, as literary. figurehead. Hard to picture – there's lots of disjointed speech and speaking to camera. No doubt it was important to take Mary off the shortbread tin and into her real betrayal at the time. |
| Fruit-Gathering (1916) by Rabindranath Tagore | Really wanted to like him – he's an inspiration in the abstract. But it's unreconstructed Romanticism, based in cheap inversions ("the dignity of peasants! The worthlessness of wealth!") but also odd deathly religiosity. I liked #8: Be ready to launch forth, my heart! and let those linger who must. For your name has been called in the morning sky. Wait for none! The desire of the bud is for the night and dew, but the blown flower cries for the freedom of light. Burst your sheath, my heart, and come forth!</li> |
| The Gun Seller (1996) by Hugh Laurie | Urgh. Douglas Adams crossed with Ian Fleming, with the latter's clumsiness and Adams' loud prose. Addresses grave military-industrial politics via flashy froth. I suppose his unmacho, anti-sex secret agent is an ok idea, but the gauche chapter epigrams and joke prose were distressing. |
| Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization (2000) by Elaine Svenonius | Analytic philosophy of libraries. Cold and relentlessly substantial about the many many issues entailed in cramming the output of humanity's outputters into one framework. Factual claims about the world constitute only a small subset of information broadly construed… It is not possible, at least without wincing, to refer to The Iliad, The Messiah, or the paintings in the Sistine Chapel as data... Info studies comes across as gargantuan, librarians building the least ambiguous & most exhaustive language in the world: the god's eye view of the diary of the human race. (But then along came Search...) Read half, the remainder being users' details of bibliographic languages. |
| The Thistle and the Rose Six Centuries of Love and Hate Between the Scots and the English (2005) by Allan Massie | Light history via biographies of the obvious (Mary Queen, Scott, Livingstone, Buchan) and nearly unknown (Waugh's granddad, a soldier called Henry Dundas). Charles Churchill on Scots:Into our places, states and beds they creep; Weighted towards mongrel literary figures and quashing polarisations; Anglo-Scots and pro-Stuart Englishmen feature heavily. (Disproportionately.) He's soft on empire and Thatcher, is unjudgmental in general. Welcome scepticism about some organising myths – the idea of a race called the 'Celts', the idea that Scotland is or has 'always' been more Left (when e.g. half the votes in 1955 were Tory). |
| The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2007) by A.J. Jacobs | The Old Testament has roughly 700 rules of varying severity and absurdity; Jacobs tried to follow all of them for a year. For a host of reasons, this can't be done, and so this is a reductio of biblical literalism. It is also a sympathetic anthropology of the literal Other Side, who are low-status, even in parts of America. * * * </ol> An extremely open-minded man; he meets the Creation Museum people, and the Amish, and the snake handlers. I didn't like the constant stream of cheap gags or his wielding family details for padding. I def didn't like his earnest attempt to use cognitive dissonance to delude himself into theism:
(That simply strikes me as choosing to be mistaken and then hardening oneself to injustice.) He is not quite sophisticated enough to pull off rigorous naturalist wonder fully (but again this is me cruelly comparing a journalist to Nietzsche, Pessoa, Gopnik). But the following affirmation of mythos here is more or less my view:
Literalism is impossible, immoral and inconsistent with our new, better picture of the world; biblical liberalism is mercenary and inconsistent with itself. So don't bother? |
| I'd Rather We Got Casinos: And Other Black Thoughts (2009) by Larry Wilmore | (As in, "Are you in favor of Black History Month?" "Hell no. Twenty-eight days of trivia to make up for centuries of oppression? I'd rather we got casinos.") Irreverent about stuff good people don't tend to be: 'community leaders', the funeral for the 'n'-word, Jesus' race, Katrina, Letter from Birmingham Jail, The Man. His patter is sometimes pleasurably baroque: "A pudgy patron of society would suffer an indignity and cry out, 'This is unmitigated gall! Unmitigated gall, I tell you!'"… Lines this good scattered throughout. |
| On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare () by Noam Chomsky | Rally round and settle in, once again, to hear the West's most popular critic on his specialist subject: the barely recognised crimes of rich democracies. (Note, however, that this isn't really a book: it's a transcript of Chomsky in discussion with someone with even less ideological care than he. Also, the title is cool but misleading, since they don't actually go in to the plausible claim that the West's foreign policy has been terroristic, and since I don't think drones come up at all.) It is selective as history and nearly worthless as economics, but I do not begrudge Chomsky continuing his fifty-year marathon of talking about covert realpolitik: these sorts of manipulations are almost unreported at the time, go wholly unpunished, and are rapidly forgotten. Like what? Well, begin with Leopold II, skip to the Enola Gay, or Britain's Palestine, Operation Boot, Operation PBFORTUNE, Lumumba, the Plain of Jars, and the long systematic atrocity "Operation Condor" (involving us and Pinochet, Noriega and Just Cause, Suharto, El Salvador), or that Iraq matter. But even though it handles these real crimes, On Western Terrorism turns out to be an echo-chamber - a mix of apparently detailed research (e.g. they appeal to some 'declassified embassy reports' to back up some claims) and pervasive confirmation bias. The main problem's exaggeration. In one breath they move from a righteous skit on the original colonial genocides to a view of world politics in which everything that happens now is the outcome of decisions in Brussels and Washington. From "The West has, historically and recently, been hypocritically violent and anti-democratic" to "Everything bad in the world is due to the West". That sounds like a sure straw man, but here's the man himself: (Oh? malaria? dysentery? precarious subsistence farming? Hutu-on-Tutsi genocide?) He's at it again here: although it is mostly Rwanda, Uganda who are murdering millions of innocent [Congolese] people, behind this are always Western geopolitical and economic interests. Well. It's true that, as well as the flat-out murders in the links above, our governments bear shame for ignoring unbelievably destructive ongoing wars in e.g. the Congo. But failing to prevent murder is not murder, nor necessarily accessory to - especially if we remember that C&V's judicious attitude to military intervention would have precluded direct action anyway. There is a logical chasm between what one could only perhaps prevent - given enough luck and blood - and what one is the cause of. (I agree that the two situations place similar responsibilities on us, by the way - but in the absence of simple solutions, that hypothetical responsibility does not make them the same.) Similarly: capitalism produces enormous inequality but mostly inadvertently relieves poverty: poverty is our default from before there was a world-system. But C&V and others of the demagogic school persist in blaming all the world's ills on rich bores whose uncaring exploitation often works better for the poor than altruistic direct action. (This is very counterintuitive; so much for intuition.) Why do I disagree? They say it's cos I'm a dupe: There have been very sophisticated propaganda systems developed in the last hundred years and they colonized minds including the minds of the perpetrators. That's why the intellectual classes in the West generally can't see it. I say it's because while their description of our foreign policy is (depressingly) fair, on the foreign policy of rival governments they are uncritical, whitewashing, and on historical alternatives to our type of society they are naive and cherry-picking, where they give evidence at all. What might a real radical say in response to my aspersions? "Fuck balance! Balance is what lets them get away with it! Fuck evidence! Evidence is what makes people think I'm wrong!" Vltchek is much more skewed than Chomsky. He's earnest, and clearly devoted to first-hand reporting of the abuse of powerless people. But, oddly, depressingly, this immersion in the frontline has robbed him of perspective (and in fact it doesn't get more front-line: he was tortured in East Timor in 1996). He suffers the defining mistake of recent leftism: the enemy of my enemy error, where you'll approve of anyone who resists the West. In fact, his comments, taken over the whole book, amount to a flirting defence of totalitarianism - he romanticises the Soviets, Assad's Syria, and Ecuador. Both of them exchange the Eurocentric rose-tint of our mainstream for lenses warped in the reverse direction. And it all rests, ultimately, on tacit belief in the 'superior virtue of the oppressed' - the strange belief that being bombed makes the bomb recipient better than you. (Sure, they're probably more virtuous than the bombers, but that's not saying much.) Our governments being awful does not mean that others are not. Quite the reverse. Also: Chomsky bashes the 'Black Book' of Communism not by challenging its accounting, but by saying that Western capitalism's toll was worse (no footnote, but see the lone India example below); and the Prague Spring is utterly minimised with the same ugly break-a-few-eggs fallacy. Vltchek: Moscow's invasion of 1968 to put down the Prague Spring was not necessarily something that should have happened... but there was no massacre performed by the Soviets; few people fell under the tanks. Most of what happened was accidents; some people who died were drunk. (The direct death toll was 72 plus suicides, if that's what he means.) That's the first big problem. The other huge one is the complete lack of footnotes, even as they make the boldest possible claims. As a result, even I identified some errors in the course of my single superficial reading. (Ok, so some failings are just the vagaries of live dialogue as compared to writing; but Vltchek (or Pluto Press at least) would be forgiven for editing the damn thing for basic evidence.) The only research cited in support of the claim that capitalism causes more excess death from starvation is Dreze and Sen's reputable 1981 study 'Hunger and Public Action (p.214 here). C&V use this to compare excess deaths in India (as an instance of a market democracy) in 1947-1979 with that of Communist China, pointing out that Dreze and Sen place the toll in India at some 100 million, next to China's '25-30' million. (First cockup: citing thirty-year-old research underestimates the toll of Mao's famine by perhaps 20m people.) But the comparison doesn't do the work they put it to (that is, condemning capitalism): India was almost an autarkic command economy (in which perhaps two-thirds of all formal, non-subsistence employment was public-sector) in that period; it does not serve them as an exemplar of neoliberal starvation. Even if it did, we would again come up against their curious equation of failure to prevent an intractable thing with causing the thing in the first place. As far as I can tell, their reasoning really is: "Capitalism exists, and poverty exists, so, capitalism causes poverty." But it would take one of two things for capitalism to be responsible for poverty: causation, as evidenced by e.g. a gross increase in the number of poor people under its penumbra; or its impeding a more effective solution to poverty. But the proportion of (utterly) poor people, in this supremely Late-capitalist world is the lowest it has ever been; and the remaining poverty is not at all simple to fix; and capitalist countries really did try, throwing enormous amounts of money and thought at the problem for going-on 70 years. To be responsible for poverty in the way C&V say, either capitalism or old socialism would have to be omnipotent, and - among other fairly strong disconfirmations for that idea - the 20th century shows both of those to be untrue. (The commercial success of Chomsky in his enormously capitalist society, is an extra data point toward rubbishing any strong statement about capitalism's mind-control powers.) (Vltchek talks about global warming briefly, and I was about to reach for the recent debunking of claims of Polynesian evacuation – but in fact it turns out his sources were better; the president of Kiribati has since publicly floated a national evac plan.) A less straightforward quibble: they think this book is about the West, I think it's about humans with power. I had believed Chomsky more humane than this talk makes him seem (see for example his sombre 90s piece on the Black Book) - that is, I want to pin the blame for this biased and maudlin tract on Vltchek. But his long-standing dismissal of some non-Western massacres at last makes me wonder. On a less uninspired and dispiriting note: if there is a system less bad than Swedish capitalism, it does not exist in the past. So it must be invented, negotiated, and tested. Chomsky and the other socially enraged ostalgiacs in his ambit are not mostly doing that; Erik Olin Wright and David Graber and Nancy Fraser and others are at least trying. * Finally, what's so bad about being excessive and dogmatic in your criticism of awful things? (Why should anti-oppression efforts need to justify themselves? They're anti-oppression!) Well, apart from it being dangerous and ignoble to be so firmly wrong, taking this tack means that your true conclusions will be dismissed as just more of your typical excesses. But even given their slips, hyperbole, and complacency, there's no way around some of C&V's key claims: Our governments have not in general been a positive force in the rest of the world; this is not well-known within our societies; as long as the US is legally immune from prosecution, international justice is a joke; we have often given money and guns to the worst people in the world; we did this for little more than control and for stuff. |
| Living End: The Future of Death, Aging and Immortality (2008) by Brian Clegg | Cambridge neuroscientist lets himself go, speculating a bit aimlessly on the meaning and ends of present trends. He goes via Gilgamesh, Swift and Woolf as much as HeLa, Hayflick and Kirkwood. Core evidence-based conclusions are: Life expectancy increases are not slowing down much; dementia is exploding upwards; we know very little about aging and have almost no power over it (but a start has been made – e.g. we know inflammation is important if not the core – and ). The core attitudinal point is to view aging as a disease and death an injustice. Cute ("build a dream, write that novel… have lots of sex"), and it comes from an insider, but not so deep. I recommend instead Nick Bostrom(as kaleidoscopic booster), Bryan Appleyard (as somewhat sympathetic sceptic) and Michael Sandel and Habermas (as non-contemptible bioconservatives). |
| Anselm (2008) by Sandra Visser | An Analyst metaphysician and a Catholic Medievalist walk into a bar… V&W manage to make light of a thousand years' semantic drift and logical innovations; so their Anselm turns out to be an ingenious and honest rationalist wrestling with the many millstones of Christian lore. (e.g. Making original sin's indiscriminate infinite hellfire seem just, making the Trinity seem unavoidable rather than a logical error enforced by state terror.) Anselm's work is a testament to the cornucopaic potential of motivated reasoning – a.k.a philosophy, in its middle millennium. A testament to something. |
| The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume (2005) by Roderick Graham | Gossipy. Says at the start that he isn't aiming at Hume's thought or worldview – just his personality, context, happenstance – but since Hume spent a big chunk of his adult life alone thinking, this is quixotic, and Graham predictably does have to go into the Treatise and Essays and Dialogues (and to be frank he does so badly, uncritically). This is filled instead with all the bad reviews Hume got, and the clubs he got into, and the middlebrows that quarrelled with him rather than his eternal legacies, i.e. judgment under uncertainty, reason's motivational inertia, cognitive naturalism, the frailty of natural theology, the kernel of so much modern philosophy. The bit on Rousseau as incredible drama queen is good – here is JJ's reaction to Hume looking at him: where, great God! did this good man borrow those eyes he fixes so sternly and unaccountably on his friends! My trouble increased even to a degree of fainting; and had I not been relieved by an effusion of tears, I'd been suffocated… in a transport, which I still remember with delight, I sprang on his neck, embraced him eagerly while almost choked with sobbing... Graham is super-fond of the C18th's loud intellectual tribalism, but it's not enough. |
| Between Faith and Doubt: Dialogues on Religion and Reason (2010) by John Harwood Hick | Why would one want to take away someone's sense of the ultimate goodness and unity of things – want, that is, to be a New sort of atheist? Well, you might have misread history so that religious identity looms as the main cause of violence. Or you might note their continuing key role in keeping heinous oppression going (particularly as regards women and gays). Better, you might view the act of worship as in fact degrading to the worshipper, or see the epistemology implicit in religious practice as an unhealthy and obstructive stance to the world. (Preventing as it does healing doubt and energetic inquiry; outmoded as it is given the better methods at hand.) Anyway: Hick of the rearguard talks fairly and at length with a fictional scientistic interlocutor, demonstrating how - if the theist is willing to retreat, ad-hoc, about ten times - scientism actually cannot touch them. Amusing example: Hick responds to the solid neurological explanation of religious experience by saying that this is all perfectly consistent with electrical induction in the right angular gyrus just enabling us to perceive the spiritual world. I like bullet-biting of this magnitude. Hick ends this mostly fair tourney still "as certain as it is possible to be" about God, despite only having parried the critical arguments at great metaphysical cost with deep special pleading. At least his atheist doesn't convert at the end, as they did in medieval apologetics. |
| Ban This Filth!: Letters From the Mary Whitehouse Archive (2012) by Ben Thompson | Rather than dismissing her as just the archetypal religious-conservative idiot, how about treating her as a scared and angry lady who prefigured modern ambivalence about the extremes of our culture? OK, so it turns out paying attention doesn't make her less ridiculous, but she's certainly no longer alone: moral criticism of pop is an enormous cottage internet industry. Her small-mindedness put her, somehow, on the same lines as nominally compassionate ideology does some of our contemporaries. (The ends meet in the middle?) Ahem: the actual book. Whitehouse's letters are just boring, monotonous and prim – the patronising or bureaucratic replies from the BBC or Granada are much more interesting (in which the Establishment stands up for smut). Thomson's a thorough but overheated curator – for instance when he likens Whitehouse to Lenin because they were each dead good at getting loads of people involved in things. (Call his enthusiasm Golden Hammer Marxism.) Thomson:
Hrm: she's not the reason people use complaint as a political tool! (Particularly not if you view protest as organised complaint. There is a distinction between complaint and protest - one is the expression of distaste, the other the ascription of injustice - but it's tricky for beasts like us to tell them strictly apart.) Was she the prototype? Yeah, maybe. Luckily for us she lost. |
| Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (2012) by Eric Klinenberg | Important topic – tracking the fast rise of one-tenant housing just as soon as a country becomes rich enough, tracing the ideological roots of normative pairing, looking at chimps and orangutans and showing the large caveats in the research that claims that married people are on average happier. But that's all covered in the preface, and Klinenberg's prose is canting and repetitive – after chapter 4 I could not stand any more of his interviewees' corporate self-conceptions and language ("I needed this in order to grow as a person"). It is wholly cool and righteous to live alone; talking about it this way is revolting. |
| The Stairwell (2014) by Michael Longley | Flickers between the Classical general and the wattle-byre specific. All really personal – but not in the universally interesting melodramatic way. It is personal in the way that hanging around the vestibule of a friend of a friend of a friend's house when one didn't know they were dropping past and one quite needs the toilet is personal. Also, it's full up with the (apparently haute Irish?) obsession with Attic Greece. One or two amazing ones – see "Amelia's Poem" : Amelia, your newborn name |
| The Philosophical Programmer: Reflections on the Moth in the Machine (1998) by Daniel Kohanski | Damn! Would have been fantastic to read first, before the stress and sheer pace of How To Program overcame the space I had in mind for What It Is To Program. Gentle, brief, happy introduction to the totally basic elements and history. Not abstract or sweeping enough for its stated aims, though. See Floridi for the grand social/phenomenological bits, Dennett and Minsky for its relevance to all thought. |
| Constructions (1974) by Michael Frayn | Book of aphorisms, glorifying unanalysed practice and the majority of the world which is beyond theory. Self-consciously Wittgensteinian (PI), as he declares repeatedly in the preface. This declaration is a shame, because it means that his nice-enough notes on perception, knowledge and emotion are vastly, vastly overshadowed by the giant spectre he has called up; it's PI without the thought experiments and devastating reductios. But a nice supplement to it:Look at your hand. Its structure does not match the structure of assertions, the structure of facts. Your hand is continuous. Assertions and facts are discontinuous.... You lift your index finger half an inch; it passes through a million facts. Look at the way your hand goes on and on, while the clock ticks, and the sun moves a little further across the sky. (The brutal conservative relativism underpinning PI is, needless to say, not addressed either.) |
| Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998) by Daniel Goleman | None yet |
| The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (2005) by Robin Lane Fox | Was tired of my own titanic ignorance (Where was Carthage? Were Spartans Communist? Did Greeks love their wives? What did upper class women do all day?) and mostly got ok answers. Bit of a story-book, though he does always tell us when he papers over something controversial. Most common phrases in this are 'surely' and 'in my view' (e.g. he just says that the Greeks probably had our kind of parental affections), which is nice. Classicists really do get a lot of room to make stuff up (cough, I mean abduction, inference to the best explanation). |
| Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt (2012) by Richard Holloway | The emotional case for not being religious. I should like him - he is the most honourable instance of a public figure rationally changing his mind in living memory. And another thing sorely needed: a sympathetic, literate public nonbeliever. Also he quotes poetry from memory - for its sense, not in order to curry literary status. (We know this because he leaves the attribution of the poems to the endnotes.) He is adorable, basically, and quotable to boot. But there's a clunkiness too, one I can't quite articulate. As a boy he loved religion's melodrama and un-Scottish grandeur; he goes away to an eccentric militarist monastery, aged 14:
Fun! Rammed full of order and space, but not religion per se. He was always unorthodox: he gave communion to just anyone who walked into church, happily married off divorcees, joined the LGBT movement and even claims to have held a Catholic gay marriage in the 90s. I am childish enough to enjoy his swearing, as the Bishop said to the actress. He had no more place on a government bioethics committee than any other nice clever old man, but I don't suppose he did any harm at all. In one sentence: Religion is pretty nice, but you must take it less seriously. |
| The Forward Book of Poetry 2017 () by Various | Mostly bad. I adore Harry Giles though; his big one here, 'Brave', is a roaring, bouncing Orlando Furioso schtick with more point and more verbal invention than the rest summed up, paist-apocalptic RPGs and all: Acause incomer will ayeways be a clarty wird |
| Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference (2015) by David Halpern | Nudge but for UK policy wonks. Decent but undistinguished, lots of detail about how Whitehall does and doesn't work. |
| In Search of Blandings () by N.T.P. Murphy | Strange book: labour of love tracing the historical bases of Wodehouse's fantasies, e.g. the huge number of family in-jokes he included, which club was the Drones. But the reason we are still reading P.G. en masse is his unreality, his ahistorical escapism. Nice history of vaudeville and music hall too. For obsessives, which despite appearances I am apparently not. |
| Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir (2015) by Terry Gilliam | Surprisingly bland, sturdy. No drugs, for instance. But actually this is well and good - a stable life being very helpful in the production of the wild and new. Lots and lots of name-dropping, which I feel is included for our benefit rather than his; "ah, yes, recognise that one, ok". He endorses something that I, a sheltered western European, have previously felt about America, but which I assumed was a ridiculous exaggeration:
I was intrigued to learn that Brando was a compulsive consequentialist:
The first thing about him I like. Here is one real hallucination:
3/5.. Skip to chapter 7 in fact. |
| In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic (2011) by Professor X. | Encounters with unlucky Americans and the system that thieves money and part of their lives. The human cost of credential inflation and hegemonic education.
45% of the 20 million annual enrolments do not finish the course. A lot of this is due to ability deficit (measured by remedial class enrollment), besides obvious financial constraints. Because of the sheepskin effect - part of a degree is not worth much to the job market - and the low social return on completed education, this means billions of dollars, and millions of years of life wasted. Not to mention the unnecessary stress and humiliation of pushing people into it. This book is just a minor autobiographical expansion of this essay; you should read Caplan instead. One thing I got from the expanded version: I'd forgotten the grinding quietism that a lot of arts people have.
This is another unfair advantage of STEM: it is hard for depressive people there to think that they've only learned illusory or useless things. Knowledge, especially the creation or sintering-together of new knowledge, is the most stable coin of meaning. 3/5. [Original essay 4/5.] |
| Flying Visits (1986) by Clive James | Strange to be both open-hearted and snide about other cultures. |
| The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays (2009) by Chinua Achebe | Title suggests nostalgia for colonialism: you need to know who he is for the gag to work. He waffles a bit, full of avuncular banality more than post-colonial ire. The most shocking bit is about Jim Crow in Africa – up to 1961, black people had to sat behind a partition at the back of the bus, in fucking Zambia. |
| Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006) by Amartya Sen | Nice but repetitive. In one ugly sentence 'how overlooking intersectionality ruins worldviews and gets folks killed'. He repeats this idea fifty times or so, but it's a fine one. It's stats-free but I mostly trust him, he's proved his mastery. "Widespread interest in global inequalities, of which anti-globalization protests are a part, [is the] embodiment of what Hume was talking about in his claim that closer economic relations would bring distant people within the reach of a 'gradual enlargement of our regards to justice'."– neat, catching the antithesis in the thesis. I don't get on with Sen's prose: he's clear and warm but studied in a way that chafes me. |
| The Retreat of Reason: Political Correctness and the Corruption of Public Debate in Modern Britain (2006) by Anthony Browne | Pamphlet about PC by a man most famous for arguing that Britain's AIDS came from African immigrants. Tricky: the pamphlet is pumped up with outrage, and on the face of it his central claim is hallucinatory tabloid racism at its worst. On the other hand, he's careful to list PC's achievements, and official figures underlie some of his arguments. I wasn't skilled enough to judge when I read this. Like everyone, he tries to claim the rational high ground over his enemies, but the connection between identity politics and postmodern irrationality is nowhere near the tight causation he claims. He seems to be genuinely hurt by the reaction to his argument. Reality is fucked up; if we can't even test any hypothesis which offends anyone, then we are doomed to delusion and early death. |
| Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (1936) by Edwin Muir | Exciting, novel and almost totally wrong, in a fertile and important way. Muir diagnoses four hundred years of post-Reformation Scottish art as weak, makes giant claims about national psychology, and traces out a Scottish Renaissance at odds with the nationalists, MacDiarmid in particular (Muir thinks it's not the Union's fault but Knox's.) A sort of radical conservatism. Pairing Muir with Allan Massie's careful hatchet-introduction strikes me as a public service. |
| Shakespeare is Hard, But So is Life: A Radical Guide to Shakespearian Tragedy (2002) by Fintan O'Toole | Angry. Angry at lazy teaching, angry at Aristotelian crap being applied to and vitiating Shakey, angry at four hundred years of racists reading Othello. Ra ra raar. |
| The Faber Book of Useful Verse (1981) by Simon Brett | Amusing mnemonics and proverbs, mostly from ancients and Victorians. Includes a canto explaining exactly how James Watt's steam engine was different and several songs to remember the list of English monarchs and US presidencies, etc. |
| The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946) by Ruth Benedict |
- obviously I had to read the book this sentence refers to, and pay it much more heed than I otherwise would've War anthropology! That is, anthropology conducted by the opposite side of a total war, for predictive military purposes of the highest consequence. She was of course robbed of the moral superiority of field work by an ocean and a bunch of tanks and whatnot, so this is all based on expat interviews and extremely secondary sources. I'm still struggling to overcome my deep suspicion of cultural anthropology; thus I was actively drawn to Benedict by this hatchet job, by a modern relativist anthropologist. Sadly the book's only ok, very nicely written but falsely general. She introduces the key terms of the toxic wartime Inazo-Satsuma-Shówa ideology, but mislabels this particular modernist system as "the Japanese worldview". Even so, in the one truly essential passage, Benedict lays out (and later tries to ameliorate) a popular reified caricature of the Japanese: as morbid, conformist, and paradoxical: the Japanese have been described in the most fantastic series of '...but also's' ever used for any nation of the world. When a serious observer is writing about peoples other than the Japanese and says they are unprecedentedly polite, he is not likely to add, 'But also insolent and overbearing.' When he says people of some nation are incomparably rigid in their behaviour, he does not add, 'But they also adapt themselves readily to extreme innovations'. When he says a people are submissive, he does not explain too that they are not easily amenable to control from above... When he says they act mostly out of concern for others' opinions, he does not then go on to tell that they have a truly terrifying conscience... People say she made this worse, but you can't claim that she didn't know something was up with the Western concepts used. There's an intriguing suggestion that the book is actually a satire (Geertz: "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is no more a prettied-up science-without-tears policy tract than [Gulliver's Travels] is a children's book."). But she actually was attached to military intelligence at the time and actually interviewed Japanese-American internees, and I find I don't much care either way. In one sentence: The above long passage with a question mark on it. |
| Why Your Five-Year-Old Could Not Have Done That: Modern Art Explained (2012) by Susie Hodge | An attempted defence of the current reigning artistic paradigm: low-skill, high-concept, contemptuous of past, audience, and self; identitarian. Call it anaesthetic conceptualism. It is also a nice illustrated catalogue of some recent objects that have managed to piss various people off. 150 years ago, we direly needed people to make art larger, to stand against the Academic approach of Nice Hard Mimesis Only. The problem is that since the 50s many artists replaced that shallow spectacle of mere mimetic skill with the even shallower spectacle of empty originality and flashy cynicism. This book has such a patronising presentation; it could have been named "How to explain conceptualism to your five year-old". (I guess that could have been an intentional irony, but to me it just told me what she thinks of anyone sceptical of the trend. But some kudos for being clear, since this makes the hollowness of her points blatant.) I have to applaud her; unlike the rest of her curator peers, she has at least attempted to justify a gigantically expensive, creativity-draining, status-hogging practice with close readings. I should also thank her for tacitly admitting that the only hermeneutics that can justify anaesthetic conceptualism is a small-minded and super-conservative intentionalism (i.e. 'what matters about the work is what the artist meant').* "It doesn't really matter how the object looks; what really matters is how deep the creator was and how much history you can project on it." But this philosophy of art is convincing to no-one not already invested in the great tedious playground. I dislike most of this art, and this way of talking about it, because I want to love art.*** Anyway, this is a useful catalogue of the kind of low-skill pieces that have only recently been possible and that you need to know about to move in certain presumably unbearable circles.
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| Bitter Experience Has Taught Me (2013) by Nicholas Lezard | Smooth, uninspired columns about bohemia (that is, bourgeois poverty), knitted together post hoc. I really like his book reviews - they are breezy, fearless, concise and yet unhurried. But this isn't very funny and not all that bitter, apart from in a few apercus:
His straddling class lines is interesting - his private schooling, Booker dinner invites, and going out with Allegra Mostyn-Owen clash well with his freeloading, bread-line salary (net of child support) and thieving of ashtrays from embassy mixers. I may be down on him because I used Pessoa as reference class and not Tim Dowling or Saki. |
| No Logo (2000) by Naomi Klein | I took it very seriously as a teen. Read Rebel Sell instead. |
| The Victorians (2002) by A.N. Wilson | Witty and sloppy synopsis. It is neither materialist nor idealist: he locates power in single people. Or, in anecdotes about people really. (Is that still materialism? Funny kind if so.) He has such a huge throbbing agenda - e.g. his caricature of Bentham, his bizarre claim that capitalism suppresses individuality, rather than being totally, totally dependent on it - but I didn't resent it because he is so patent about it and because he is funny:
He loves Disraeli and Albert, hates Gladstone and Palmerston. I have no idea if this is an original position. Got tired of his tone and scattergun of stories about two-thirds in. About as good as popular history that isn't data-driven can be. In one sentence: This is where modernity - feminism, multiculturalism, managerialism, professionalism, mechanised warfare - originated: in little moments that happened to people who happened to write them down for me. |
| Out Of The Storm: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther (2007) by Derek Wilson | Poppy, secularish, filled a large gap. Downplays Luther's anti-Semitism, who knows if rightly? A huge, dictatorial person, without whom fake European unity could have continued and prevented Enlightenment and the attempt at real European unity. |
| Travelers of a Hundred Ages: The Japanese as Revealed Through 1,000 Years of Diaries (1989) by Donald Keene | Bought this expecting a book of diaries; instead it is a book of essays about diaries, with fairly sparse quotations from the diaries I wanted to read. My rating may be undiluted petulance, as a result. |
| On the Move: A Life (2015) by Oliver Sacks | Rushed, unworthy: just a string of events and bad prose extracts lifted straight out of his adolescence. Also two long chapters exaggerating the achievements of two scientific titans vs consciousness studies (Crick and Edelman). Hadn't known his love life was so fraught - he looks like such a bull (and indeed Bennett remembers Sacks at Oxford as a brash alpha). Weightlifting chat is endearing in an intellectual. Read his real books, Uncle Tungsten for autobiography. [Values #3, Theory #1] |
| Born to Run (2016) by Bruce Springsteen | Fans only. Though you probably will be one, if you've given him the time: he is unusual among rock auteurs, populist and wholesome to the point of naivete: I was... a circumstantial bohemian - I didn't do any drugs or drink... I was barely holding on to myself as it was. I couldn't imagine introducing unknown agents into my system. I needed control and those ever-elusive boundaries... Music was going to get me as high as I needed to go... the counterculture stood by definition in opposition to the conservative blue-collar experience I'd had. Prose is clumsy enough to be actually his work, and is eloquent by rockstar standards: When it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets our town with the smell of damp coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafé factory at the town's eastern edge. I don't like coffee but I like that smell. It's comforting; it unites the town in a common sensory experience; it's good industry, like the roaring rug mill that fills our ears, brings work and signals our town's vitality. There is a place here—you can hear it, smell it—where people make lives, suffer pain, enjoy small pleasures, play baseball, die, make love, have kids, drink themselves drunk on spring nights and do their best to hold off the demons that seek to destroy us, our homes, our families, our town... He's had thirty years of psychotherapy, the poor sod. He is intellectual enough to take his feelings and their theories seriously - but not intellectual enough to be sceptical about their interminable and unscientific faffing. [Values #3] |
| Empire (2000) by Michael Hardt | A crock of shit. Economics without reference to anything actually economic, Marxism without even speculative economics, melodrama without sweetness. Prose was less clotted than I expected though. |
| Interpreting, Pollock (1999) by Jeremy Lewison | Does Expressionism do anything but look cool and foil the old School of Paris? I'm a slave to content, so I resent the mindless haste and vitiating freedom of Pollock and Co's anti-painting, born of the macho belief in chaos (cf. Hunter Thompson, Jim Morrison, Debord). But Pollock's not empty nor, really, chaotic. Apart from anything else, he makes Picasso look smooth and Mannered, a useful service. Apart from anything else, nothing made or viewed by humans can be non-representational. I like Full Fathom Five & The Deep (1953). |
| Celebrity Culture (2006) by Ellis Cashmore | Kinda lightweight sociology. Picked it because it asks the right questions in its Contents table ("What part did consumer society play in making us dote on celebrities? When did the paparazzi appear and how do they pedestalise and destroy people? How are cosmetic surgery and the preoccupation with physical perfection linked to celebrity culture? Why have black celebrities been used as living proof of the end of racism? How have disgrace and sexual indignity helped some celebrities climb onto the A-list?"). But while chatty, he's critical in an uncritical way, high on anecdote, low on data - and there are no citations. Cashmore's answers are thus suspect, trendy. The big contrarian move in sociology is to view fans as active & canny manipulators of the 'culture' but I don't care either way. |
| My Shit Life So Far (2009) by Frankie Boyle | He is more than he'd have us think he is – but that isn't saying much, since his core gag is wanking over inappropriate objects and taunting the weak. Book is tolerable when he's busy liking things – Chomsky's politics, Grant Morrison's comics, Moorcock, old Clydeside socialism – and hating on the powerful (his portrayal of the civil service is great fun). Includes a cursory rant against PC, a phenomenon he bizarrely (satirically?) blames on the Mail. Humane islands in an insincere sea. On marriage: "Fuck it, I tried"; "we struggled along like badly set bones". Makes Gill look like Tolstoy. Higher humour's about laughing at yourself. |
| The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google (2017) by Scott Galloway | Not the book I thought it was: I wanted searching political / macroeconomic expose of the costs of monopoly, but this is shallow and glib work on a topic of great importance. Galloway's a marketing professor / entrepreneur, and so this is a weird mix of polemical and fawning. (OK, I should've guessed its genre from the thoughtless use of institutional "DNA" in the subtitle.) There's basically no politics in this: it's a primer for worried and pious businessmen more than consumers or citizens or engineers. It also uses "relevant" unironically as a quantity of ultimate importance ("Google had a market cap that topped $200 billion. But the Times was enormously relevant". I enjoyed this
and this (though his counterproposal wouldn't change much either):
He presents himself as a critical outsider, and a moralist, but in between his rants he is scarcely less fawning about a set of overpriced electronics:
And often his barbs are just glib. His full argument against Bezos' support for basic income:
Besides the hollowness, there are dozens of minor errors or infelicities:
(That's not what "externality" means.)
("Ionospheric" rather)
(1) "compass" makes for a really poor adjective, please don't do that; 2) that's a ludicrous reading, though less silly than the usual macho triumph one.)
(Sure, for a pejorative sense of "opinion".)
(1) this is the "n=all" dogma and, though very popular among people with bridges to sell, it is just not true - because no one ever has the full data set, because even if they did have a synchronous snapshot then we'd still need predictions to future data; 2) even if that were so, it certainly would not be the end of statistics, since sampling theory is a tiny subset of statistics.)
Search was not a new tool: Knowbot (1989), Archie (1990), Wandex (1993), Mosaic...
In what way are those two angles entirely different? This was unintentionally revealing:
And this:
There's the rub, I think. This is a business book, and since I haven't read any "business books" in years I was unprepared for its fawning, glibness, and applause lights. Galloway is no doubt in the right lane; it was I that drifted. Skip it. The subject - this tiny set of untouchable, market-breaking corporations with large fanbases and financial carte blanche - is important to understand, too important to leave it to Galloway. Read Gibney, Levy, Stone, Mezrich, or Taplin instead. |
1/5: False, ugly, evil, or vapid. 1st percentile.
| The Night Soil Salvagers (2020) by Gregory Norman Bossert | None yet |
| If You Take My Meaning (2020) by Charlie Jane Anders | None yet |
| To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Purdue University Series in the History of Philosophy) (1993) by Adriaan T. Peperzak | None yet |
| The Gift of Death (1992) by Jacques Derrida | Not as metal as it sounds. Though come to think of it, it does coin the word "hostipitality". |
| Andromache () by Jean Racine, Douglas Dunn | Epic verse always sounds too pat to me, and doubly so when forced to fit dialogue: mumming couples expositing couplets. ("I'll kill myself. That final ploy shall save / My honour. Then I'll give back from the grave / What I owe Pyrrhus.") Not Dunn's fault – the pentameter's solid. And he agrees: "It was a bloody hard piece of work… and I think it was universally agreed that I didn't fully succeed." |
| The Alexandria Quartet (1960) by Lawrence Durrell | Intolerable Sadean pondering about the sssensuality and yet! also Spirituality of the Orient. (The only way to make de Sade more boring is to add in kabbalah and the new age.) Durrell's prose is good, even - just the lightest touch of experimentality over classicism - but the sighing Art of it all made it impossible to go further than a hundred pages. Suddenly I see wholesomeness, wit and concision in The Magus. So Durrell is the real magician. I liked the gag at the end of Justine - there's a sentence regarding everything, man, but the footnote for that sentence points at a completely and intentionally blank page. Oh but it wasn't a gag, it was a deep reflection of being and nonbeing. Fuck it then. This was the only book I had on me for several hours and I still couldn't hack it. I rather stared at the wall. |
| Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power (2013) by Dan Hurley | I still did not understand why they have taken such a stand against the large and growing body of evidence showing that working memory and fluid intelligence can be increased through training. (Because it mostly wasn't very good evidence, Dan.) Gladwellian (i.e. chatty overinterpretation of immature social science) with a side dose of uninteresting self-experimentation. More than half of this is about brain training, which has unfortunately lost most of its scientific veneer in the five years since it was published. (Here are some large negative meta-analyses.) To some extent this is not his fault - I did n-back for a while myself in 2013, and he cites all the top people (he's in love with credentials and committee memberships). But the crisis made a mockery of many top people. They crowed about lifting the 'curse of learning specificity' (that no training regime seems to produce a general increase in fluid intelligence). The curse has since reasserted its gloom. He makes dozens of errors of interpretation (for instance, the Abecedarian preschool programme which he enthuses about made no long-term intelligence gains; for instance not distinguishing active and passive controls). And he gives no attention to the biggest interventions, quality sleep (-6 points per hour lost) and education (3 points per year(!)). Also, music instruction for cognition didn't replicate. Serves me right for reading a journalist on any topic but journalism, I suppose. He gives, I think, only one effect size, despite citing hundreds of studies in prose. There's only one moment where he does actual journalism and pushes back against the hasty commercialisation of immature science. Useful as an example of how not to write about science; about the spurious omnicausal implications of low-power psychology studies; as a reminder that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (and anything nonmedical to do with Gf gains is extraordinary); and maybe if you're interested in verbatim conference backbiting. His self-experiment is invalidated before it starts (even as an n-of-one thing) because he decides to wake up early (again, the cognitive penalty of 2 fewer hours of sleep dwarfs the boosters' estimates of brain training + exercise + nicotine): I... wrote out my training schedule. I would wake up at 6:00 a.m. instead of my usual 8:00 a.m. His lowest moment: Trying to understand the balance of evidence about brain training and g, Hurley's meta-analytic method is to literally count the studies that found, or didn't find, a significant effect: In the years following publication [of the original n-back study], a grand total of four randomized, controlled studies have been published finding no benefit of cognitive training... Yet in contrast, by my count, seventy-five other randomized, controlled studies have now been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals confirming that cognitive training substantially improves. He tries to critique the 2013 meta-analysis, but is unable to, because he doesn't know how to estimate study quality, and crapness matters far more than quantity. How to avoid finding ourselves in Hurley's position? Well, first off avoid writing a book about any young social science (n-back was 11 years old when he wrote this so the rule might have to be "more than a couple of decades old"). The lack of consensus (in a relatively nonpoliticised field) is another warning sign: not because science is quick at resolving bullshit disagreements, but because it means the effects can't be very large, are hiding in the background noise. The surprisingly large amounts of money the findings spurred probably didn't help with confirmation bias and hostility. Listen to the grumpy bastards (Randy Engle, mocked as a "defender of the [specificity] faith" in this, was right all along). Lastly, read the methodologists: Paul Meehl and others were warning us of the general statistical shoddiness of psychology more than forty years ago. It's an important topic and he actually navigates the tricky nicotine vs tobacco literature well (spoiler: it's really good). But read Gwern and Examine instead. (I don't know of a good book on the matter.) |
| Diamonds Are Forever (James Bond, #4) (1956) by Ian Fleming | None yet |
| Sniper (2002) by Pavel Hak | I think this is the worst book I've ever read. Houllebecq without dark insight, Noë without style, de Sade without wit, philosophy, or desire. It is not possible to blame the translation. |
| Hite Report on Male Sexuality (1981) by Shere Hite | Just bad science. You can read about some of the deep, invalidating methodological problems here and here. Not sure if it's bad enough to go on my "Actively Harmful" shelf. |
| The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (1976) by Shere Hite | Just bad science. You can read about some of the deep, invalidating methodological problems here and here. Not sure if it's bad enough to go on my "Actively Harmful" shelf. |
| The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1960) by R.D. Laing | Dreadful bloody pseudoscience in the abscessed vein of Freud. Blames schizophrenia on strict parenting and then celebrates its completely disabling horror. See here for an illustrative anecdote about what this attitude did to patients in the 60s; see here and here for the actual long-term effect of parenting. One good thing though: his idea of "ontological insecurity" as a distinctive debilitating state. I've met someone with a real case of this (a philosophical case) and it was as bad as you'd expect. But I doubt Laing ever did. |
| The Secret (The Secret, #1) (2006) by Rhonda Byrne | Vile egotism wearing spirituality's flayed skin. Jesus [and the others] were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of. |
| How to Be an Existentialist: or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses (2009) by Gary Cox | Chatty, trite, and pretentious. ("Young people are stupid", "disabled people should stop moping".) It is at least trying to process the philosophy's thick and styleless abstractions into an accessible intro, but ends up being childish, macho, and uncritical. He's a tenured academic, too! Taken as systematic description of the real world, Existentialism is a fruitless neo-Kantian mess. Taken as extreme postwar poetry or stoic-fictionalist cognitive stance, it is perhaps beautiful in a way. |
| The Data Science Handbook (2015) by Carl Shan | I had been holding out hope that data science (or mining plus statistical programming, as it used to be called) could be an intellectual, rarefied place within the private sector, where the practical and the abstract are wed sweetly. It might be, but this book gives you little sense of that. Even the demonstrably brilliant (DJ Patil) talk like third-rate vice-presidents-of-munging. (You might shrug because you expected no better of computer people, but you are ill-informed: some of the great stylists of the age are programmers first of all.) In one sentence: Data is Innovation for incentivising proactive momentum-based cultural synthesis change |
| User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development (2004) by Mike Cohn | I recently learned a fundamental dichotomy in expressing oneself: you use either the 'esoteric' or the 'exoteric' mode. (The exoteric writer says exactly what she means, minimises ambiguity and tries to do everything with explicit reasoning, for the largest audience they can, with imagery and irony only as decoration. The esoteric writer – distinct from, but often coextensive with the woo-woo mystical metaphysics fans also called esoteric – does the converse. Most ancient writers wrote esoterically, which is one reason that undergrads and other fools, like me, think that ancient writers are vague and low on content. Up to now, I have been confusing the rhetorical stance - see Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Caputo - with the magickal crap. But so much of the Analytic / Continental divide can be explained in this single distinction! [The revival of the distinction is due to that lionized demon Leo Strauss.] Maths is an interesting border case, but its clarity and attempt to destroy ambiguity make it exoteric, I think.) The exoteric intention strikes me as firstly just good manners and important for intellectual honesty (accountability, critical clarity). But one thing I dislike about studying computer science is that all the materials are utterly exoteric. I crave art and irreverence in formal contexts, and those are always at least somewhat esoteric. The 'Agile' software thing strikes me as good, a way of making the hag-ridden and monstrously expensive dev process work. But all the material around Agile, LEAN (and the wider business-marketing-HR-systems theory blah that represents most employed adults' only engagement with passably academic work) is so exoteric that something in me rebels. |
| Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (2001) by Slavoj Žižek | Žižek may be the most high-variance writer since Nietzsche. Very occasionally he writes beautiful, thoughtful pieces and I am shocked and bewildered to find myself agreeing. The rest of the time he writes 1) edgy shit about how liberals are the real enemy and 2) complete nonsense about already dubious writers, leaking film theory and psychoanalysis into journalism, like raw sewage pouring into a ditch. There is some value in mere provocation. It is easily eclipsed. This one includes a sadly memorable passage likening an intentional plane crash to a dildo with a camera on the end. |
| Social Identity (1996) by Richard Jenkins | Was drawn in by the cute epigrams ("Everybody needs somebody"), but this is turgid. A sociology/anthropology mix, and an airless, evidence-poor circle-jerk of citations. Identity is confusing because it means so many completely contradictory things, it is what individuates or what generalises, equation or inequation, label or being. This is not the book to clear up this mess. |
| The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003) by Mitch Albom | None yet |
| Superman: True Brit (2004) by Kim Howard Johnson | Superman the Englishman and Jonah Murdoch. I don't much care for the core commercial thing Marvel and DC do where they reboot series over and over with one new gimmick – Commie Hulk, Zombie Hulk, Nihilist Hulk. One good joke: "We should have taught him to control himself, like a true Brit". |
| Prey (2002) by Michael Crichton | None yet |
| The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2) (2003) by Dan Brown | None yet |
| The Prophet (1923) by Kahlil Gibran | One of the more pompous books I've ever read. Read Taleb's Bed of Procrustes instead; he's actually from a couple villages over. |
| The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Martin Beck, #2) (1966) by Maj Sjöwall | Acclaimed yet somehow awful pioneers of Scandinoir. I couldn't stand the prose – uniformly banal, full of aimlessly detailed descriptions of rooms never returned to, and, the weirdest thing, they're in the habit of repeating the protagonist Martin Beck's full name, eight times a page, which reminds me of nothing but preschool stories. Maybe this translation is just terrible. |
| Gender: Key Concepts in Philosophy (2006) by Tina Chanter | Annoying: conventionally unconventional. I've been looking for a good introduction; this is not that. (Is it a coincidence that the best popularisers - Paglia, Greer, Moran - are all highly problematic?) Chanter manages to make exciting parts of feminism - e.g. Calhoun's post-deconstruction stuff - sound dull, dense and theoretically empty, as if it were the same kind of navel-gazing theorism as the hyperinflated Althusserian-Foucauldian stuff. (To be fair, any overview has to cover French theory, because that's what our counter-gender people have actually been up to for decades. But not blind acceptance.) You get the impression, here, that progress in feminist thought consists in calling your predecessors bigoted - JS Mill calls out the Victorians, Okin calls out JS Mill, Butler calls out Okin, Wittig calls out Butler, and then Calhoun calls Wittig heteronormative. |
| Questioning Identity: Gender, Class, Nation (1999) by Kath Woodward | Bleh. I gave radical sociologists a few chances to show me they had something to say, because - although the evidence is not good that they do - the consequences of ignoring them wrongly were awful. |
| Night of the Living Trekkies (2010) by Kevin David Anderson | Unremitting. The worst book I can remember. (I only know it's crap even as fan service because I read this to a lifelong fan.) Plot brought to you by a cursory study of Resident Evil spin-offs, and prose by soap operas. |
| The Serpent's Promise: The Bible Interpreted Through Modern Science (2013) by Steve Jones | Interesting idea: take Bible literalists literally; see how much of the book's many empirical claims are anywhere near right, re: cosmogony, hygiene, heredity, migration. Couple cool results – Today, each [Amish] mother has, on average, half a dozen children, and the community is growing at almost 10 per cent a year… At that rate the Amish could, by the middle of the next century, have a population equivalent to the whole of today's United States... – but unstructured, often unclear, and tiring, in the main. Minus a half for having no citations for any of its thousand claims. |
| Authorship and the Films of David Lynch: Aesthetic Receptions in Contemporary Hollywood (2012) by Antony Todd | Pompous and shallow, with less intellectual content than the Rotten Tomato summaries of the films, let alone the films. ("Chapter One: Towards a Textual Historicity.") Wields critical-theory Freudian shite to justify writing a book without any real discussion of the films, or the films' themes, or even any real biographical aspersion of Lynch-as-seen-in-his-films. Instead there is second-hand gossip dressed up as historical context and post-structuralist intertextuality ("Jaussian reception theory": the discussion of reviews, ad campaigns, corporate manoeuvring). Materialism (in critical theory) is the position that both artwork and authors are irrelevant to the study of the artwork.Let us, then, register modern auteurism in a reception practice whereby the authored film can compete for the reader's attention in a coming together of inter- and extra-textual determinations through which the modern film spectator composes the aesthetic text for herself or himself... I'm not suggesting Todd is dishonest, or intentionally vague: instead, I think film studies has convinced him that shuffling these words around is intellectual work. Note for your calibration of my opinion: I was very much looking forward to this book (because I find Lynch watchable but confusing), and so I fell far. Also it's been a while since I read any academic Arts work that didn't strike me as hollow and fatally decoupled from the work at hand. Let alone its coupling to the world. I will strive to cherry-pick in future. |
| The Art of Thinking Clearly (2011) by Rolf Dobelli | Shonky list of cognitive biases / love letter to Taleb. It has occasioned raging critique rather than reciprocation. At first I was very taken by Dobelli's article 'Why you shouldn't read news', and still think there's something to it (particularly as goes news' inevitable over-dramatisation of reality via availability bias and our inbuilt credulity), but it's all Taleb's work, except unjustified and not actually good. (Consider that one is to free-ride and, in the hypothetical aggregate of a trend of people quitting news, suppress journalism's deterrent effects on governmental and business malfeasance.) Anyway his Art is neither well-organised or well-conceptualised – he stretches the perhaps 20 reputable cognitive biases of Kahneman et al into 99 anecdotal smirks. (Redundancies: he splits illusion of control and action bias, the paradox of choice and decision fatigue...) Consider the 'It's-gotta-get-worse-before-it-gets-better effect'. The big problem for the heuristics and biases program is when you get contradictory pairs of biases – how can people be both ? The actual researchers have done well in synthesising these and providing base-rates for effect sizes (without which, the programme is little more than a new way for intellectuals to insult each other). Dobelli offers no classification, effect sizes, or even citations (they're hidden online), just clomping informational candy. Taleb for dummies. (Where Taleb is already Kahneman for drama queens.) |
| Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction (2009) by Christopher Goto-Jones | Terribly written, with the glib say-what-you're-going-to-say structure, cod psychology and thoughtless overreach common in social theory.
No and no they don't. But he gives a brief and clear sketch from Edo to their World Cup; still helpful if you are a total novice like me. (Never knew the shogunate were the internationalists in the Meiji struggle!) Needless to say Goto-Jones is unable to step beyond C20th stereotypes - to note, for instance, that by time of writing Japan had likely stopped being the place the future happens first. |
| The Bald Prima Donna: A Pseudo-Play in One Act (1950) by Eugène Ionesco | Almost unmitigated shite. I suppose it might be just a satire of hollow, SO RANDOM surrealism? But apparently not - and either way it is not a good play. Plus a half for its structure (a continuous loop with new characters substituted in, taking on the same mannerisms and follies); plus a virtual half for maybe losing its wit in translation. I cannot remember the last time I binned a book (rather than risk anyone else wasting their time). |
Which of the Following Vitamins Is Important in a Woman's Diet Before She Conceives a Baby?
Source: https://www.gleech.org/books
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