The lure of good books
Bookworm on Apr 07 2009 at 7:34 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
I was a lousy blogger yesterday, but I have a good excuse: a bonanza of good books from the library. When my work day ended, I simply couldn’t tear myself away from the books. Since I believe in keeping an open book in most every room in which I do more than just pass through, I’m currently reading these four books:
1. Reagan: The Hollywood Years
2. Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered
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Bookworm:
A lovely way to spend the day.
In the meantime, the NY District Attorney, was busy. I had read about the fines levied on Lloyds in January but the initial story did not give away all the details. $350 million – no prosecution, no jail and after reading this article no peace of mind either.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009/04/07/2009-04-07_iranian_nuke_plot_vaporized_in_the_city_-2.html
Bookworm –
I am totally intrigued by the Barbarians to Angels recommendation! I’m going to the library to see if I can check it out today.
I also am reading a wonderful story that I’ve heard nothing about in the media. It is:
Mao’s Last Dancer by Li Cunxin
It is an amazing true story of a young man who grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution and became a ballet dancer who ultimately defected to the U.S.
It is a riveting fast-read that frankly has scared me in ways I did not expect for the following reasons:
- It is painful to see how just one family suffered (out of millions) because of a government that intervened in every single aspect of economic and political life. So much needless sorrow. So why are we heading down the same path these people traveled?
- The cult of personality that surrounded Mao is just breath-taking. The author talks about how they had to learned to write by copying phrases of adoration to Chairman Mao and how they would sing songs and dance in praise of Mao . . . all I could think about was that video of young black men doing a step dance in praise of Obama prior to the election.
I am not suggesting that we live under the same conditions the Chinese did – we don’t.
But the similarities are unmistakable.
Anyway – it’s a great book. Highly recommended!
Deana
With politicians like Dodd, Frank, and Obama for sale, you don’t need to worry about any such thing so long as you have the cash.
Like you, I usually have several books going on at once. Now that you mention it, “From Barbarians to Angels” is beckoning me from the shelf. (Just finished “The Influencer”; working on “The Art of Strategy”; reading “The Ruin of the Roman Empire”; “Gut Feelings”; “Earthly Powers”; ruminating on a few of Pascal’s “Pensees”; want to read Buckley’s “Boomsday”; and Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny” is in the queue). Talk to me in a month to see how many I’ve actually finished — all superb books, but based on past performance I don’t dare give the over/under.
Anyway. Some people have a primal fear of starving and so hoard food in various caches; I must be deathly afraid of being caught alone with the prospect of nothing to do except, God forbid, actually having to think–which I naturally avoid like the plague. Much better to convert pages into carapaces. So in the course of my multiple daily errands I habitually carry 2 or 3 weeks worth of reading material with me at all times, from internet printouts, news items, scholarly monographs, to a couple of the aforementioned books. The running joke in my family is that on vacations I pack one bag for me and one for the books…last time I was inordinately proud of myself for my “realism” in only bringing 4 books for a 3 day weekend. Finished two, but really, lugging around an unread Gibbon’s Decline and Fall? — wtf???
And yet, I never learn. The foolishness is too deep and goes too far back. The signature memory of my college graduation is of watching the taillights of my Dad’s car recede as he pulled away in his lowrider — the trunk of his stolid, rotarian Ford LTD weighed down by books. That was a lot of penguin classics.
You could call it bookbuying as a cargo cult of true erudition. I periodically re-arrange my stack of partially read books to give the illusion of progress. There’s got to be some correct configuration of piles that will increase my comprehension. Nothing seems to work.
Until last week: Love opened my eyes to the answer. It began innocently enough. Haunted by the hydra-headed piles, I absentmindedly borrowed the ipod touch that I had given to my son for Christmas. Yeah, it’s cool, I thought, some games, incredible graphics — granted, it’s not pong, but what is? — and of course the music. I’m over my gadget addiction. The ipod touch is nice, but I can take it or leave it.
And then I discovered the amazon kindle app. Ooooohh….
Books, downloaded instantly — hey, now I can get ‘em faster than Harold Bloom can write ‘em. Free books. Cheap books. All of Summa Theologica for 99 cents (no way in hell I’ll ever read it, but nice to know it’s there), great books for 9.99. No more piles, goodbye to my bag lady habit of hauling books around. My kids can sit in the front seat of the minivan again.
Truly, the best part was the reading experience. I read three books this weekend and was consumed by the thing. Easy to start and stop, pick up where I left off, and regain the flow anywhere, anytime. The itouch kindle display was a pleasure to read.
In the meantime, my son is out of luck
I’ve been seriously debating the Kindle for precisely the practical reasons you recommend: drowning in books. I too take more books on vacation than anything else. My concern about the Kindle is the expense, not of buying it, but of stocking it. Most of my books come from the library (pre-paid, courtesy of mandatory property taxes) and Goodwill, which has a lovely smorgasbord quality. I get lots of cheap books, some of which are wonderful, and some of which are disposa-books.
I know that Kindle can give me free or cheap books, but I find the volume of available books so overwhelming I don’t know if I’d be able to utilize the system. It’s one thing to scan a few shelves at Goodwill every few weeks. It’s another thing to deal with 10,000 free books on Amazon.
Still, the temptation is there, and I’ll eventually have a birthday….
I am not suggesting that we live under the same conditions the Chinese did – we don’t.
That’s what the change is for. Obama will transform America.
Did you check out any of David Weber’s novels from the library, Book?
Btw, the way I deal with not finishing non-fiction books is very simple. I read fiction stories instead.
Book,
I thought of two reasons to justify my addiction, or why a kindle or itouch is worth it. One is a rationalization, the other an arbitrage.
The rationalization is that if I buy a book for $15-25 and don’t read it, then what good does it do me? Money down the drain. On the other hand, if I pay $9.99 or less and actually read it on kindle, then….I think that’s called the sunk cost fallacy, but I’m willing to go with it.
The arbitrage is to sell some of my old books and use part of the proceeds to buy new ebooks on kindle.
Of course the third alternative is ask myself, WWBD? (You know, the annointed Won) I’ve got it! I can act like the nanny state and appropriate my son’s property — for his own good, of course! Then I can amortize the phantom savings (from not having to purchase a new itouch) and apply that bookkeeping entry to use my credit card to buy a future stream of books from Amazon — do you think that Mastercard will go for that?
Cheers.
correction to the above — “expropriate”
gpc31: I’m getting very tempted now….
Sigh, more titles to add to my “to read” list.
I just started The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet, by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I love it! Informative and entertaining. The other books I am reading are children’s books. I’m mostly skimming them so I can tell my students about them after spring break. Maybelle in the Soup, by Katie Speck and Paul Ratz de Tagyos is a great story about a cockroach looking to eat off of a plate rather than crumbs from the floor and her ensuing adventures if you are interested…
I sincerely apologize for running on and on in this thread, but I just came across a fascinating book that connects with one of the great themes of our day, namely, the dangerous growth of statism. (Naturally, I haven’t finished it yet; only just started.)
It’s titled “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed” by a Yale professor named James C. Scott.
The blurb on the back cover reads:
“Why have large-scale schemes to improve the human condition in the 20th century gone awry? James C. Scott analyzes diverse failures in high-modern, authoritarian state planning — collectivization in Russia, the building of Brasilia, compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, and others — and uncovers conditions common to all such planning disasters.”
From the introduction:
“How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environment?….I aim, in what follows, to provide a convincing account of the logic behind the failure of some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the 20th century.”
He goes on to say that four elements are necessary to combine for a full-fledged disaster:
1) the “administrative ordering of nature and society” from above
2) “high modernist ideology…a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress…and, above all, the rational design of the social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”
Here he is criticizing scientism, not scientific practice itself. And like Jonah Goldberg in his study of liberal fascism, Scott notes that “World War I seem[s] to mark its high tide…its most fertile soil was to be found among planners, engineers, architects, scientists, and technicians whose skills and status it celebrated as the designers of the new order. High modernist faith was no respecter of traditional political boundaries; it could be found across the political spectrum from left to right but particularly among those who wanted to use state power to bring about huge, utopian changes in people’s work habits, living patterns, moral conduct, and world view.” FULL STOP.
His next two elements are worth quoting almost in full. Please pardon my indulgence:
3) “Only when these first two elements are joined to a third does the combination become potentially lethal. The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being. The most fertile soil for this element has typically been times of war; revolution, depression, and struggles for national liberation. In such situations, emergency conditions foster the seizure of emergency powers and frequently delegitimize the previous regime. They also tend to give rise to elites who repudiate the past and who have revolutionary designs for their people.” Sounds like the Obama administration to me, folks. [Editorial Comment]
4) “A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist those plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make its populace more receptive to a new dispensation….the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.”
I understand that the second part of his purpose is to explain how such plans fail, or are thwarted. Details, at this juncture, seem to be lacking; however, I gather that they all come down to various forms of work stoppages. Perhaps to this resistance we can also add the rise of the internet, the blogosphere, and “influential nobodies”:
“Blogs have been around for everyone to understand the ways they have changed mainstream news gathering, but few politicians and bureaucrats − except perhaps those in authoritarian states like China and Myanmar − have really grasped how dangerous the blogosphere has become to the centralized power that determines their status. Glenn Reynolds, better known to his readers as legendary author of Instapundit.com, memorably described the corps of ordinary netizens keeping public figures honest as “an army of Davids.” Linked, with increasing ease, by the ability to share and sift through large amounts of data, this new tribe of anonymous warriors has started to decentralize political power as radically as any seventeenth century English pamphleteer.”
Excerpted from http://www.stabroeknews.com/2009/editorial/04/04/influential-nobodies/, hat tip to Instapundit.
To me, “Seeing Like a State” reads like an historical and anthropological verification of the theories of Burke and Hayek, despite the author’s disclaimer. Fascinating stuff — the book seems to provide a rich context for those insights, especially given Obama’s grab for increased state power on whatever pretext, be it the financial crisis, alleged anthropogenic global warming, etc. However, on the negative side, I’m not sure that it proposes any practical solutions. And perhaps that is the point; because aside from the value of pure scholarship, Scott notes that “throughout the book I make the case for the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability” — a claim that would seem to mitigate against a formulaic approach to solving problems. It’s up to us as citizens to exercise our duty to defend our rights.
If you are still awake, let alone interested after this long-winded post, I would encourage you to read the quite intelligent comments and reviews at Amazon. And speaking personally, despite my earlier love-sick paean to the ipod touch, “Seeing Like a State” is not yet available via kindle, so it’s going to the top of one of my piles!
>>few politicians and bureaucrats − except perhaps those in authoritarian states like China and Myanmar − have really grasped how dangerous the blogosphere has become to the centralized power that determines their status.>>
This is especially critical considering that Obama is now able to take control of the internet, and turn it off, effectively.
As a result of this, I’ve been thinking about the various blogs I comment on, and the connections I feel I’ve made and wondered – what if access to the internet is shut down? What then? I feel I know many of you through your comments – but I don’t really know who you are or where you live. There’s good reason for that, but what if? For that reason, I intend to send Book my name, address and phone number (and I’ll explain why in case she misses this and thinks I’m nuts) and will do the same on several other blogs, as well as contacting the blog owner to suggest that s/he offers the opportunity to regular readers/commenters to send actual contact information to him/her. I’d also urge blog owners to connect with other blog owners of similar political orientation and do the same. In other words, network with actual information – not available on the net – so that if it becomes necessary, there’s the nub of organization.
My tinfoil hat may be a little tight, but I’m concerned.
I’m hoping Obama won’t go that far, suek. He’d get push back from both sides of the political aisle. However, if it does come to that, we’ll just keep going through email lists and whatever else ingenuity allows us to create. In a worst case scenario, he can turn down the volume, but he can’t sever the deep and strong networks we’ve created throughout the blogosphere.
Check this out. They can say “oh we’d never do that – we just need to _safeguard_ the nation” but if you build it, they will come. Even if Obama and the present administration doesn’t use this, what’s to say someone won’t in the future? The government should _not_ have the means to clontrol the internet in way shape or form. “Hoping” is not a plan. The republicans don’t have that much mass to push back with.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Bill-Grants-President-Unprecedented-Cyber-Security-Powers-504520/
You got my attention – antenna ears are up!
I have in recent months, been thinking about the overload of news and events and how quickly things can and do turn on a dime in a matter of days. I don’t think any of us can begin to project the ‘what ifs’ at this juncture in history. The internet has been a pivotal force and tool, both good and bad, depending upon your views and values.
The idea of another czar – another department and the continuing growth of central government is threatening. What happened to States Rights? Is it any wonder there is a shortage of guns and ammo throughout the country.
By the way…I received all three emails related to this topic directly into my inbox. Was this a test Bookworm? I have always received follow ups to spam (which is how I separate most blog posts from general mail).