{"id":15784,"date":"2017-12-31T16:50:48","date_gmt":"2017-12-31T21:50:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=15784"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:42:55","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:42:55","slug":"2018-reading-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2017\/12\/2018-reading-list\/","title":{"rendered":"2018 Reading List"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The new calendar year means that it is time for me to update my reading list.\u00a0 There is some irony in my writing about or even maintaining a reading list, when the number of books I actually finish each year is pretty low.\u00a0 (According to Pew Research<\/a>,\u00a0the typical American reads four books a year.\u00a0 That makes me sub-typical.)<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, I do consume page-based material now and again and, as has been my habit, I will share a few thoughts about what I have read since my last update, and what I intend to read in the coming year.\u00a0 Let’s start with…<\/p>\n

The Books I Abandoned<\/em><\/h2>\n

These forsaken texts included The Best Writing on Mathematics 2013, <\/i>edited by Micrea Pitici, and Everybody Lies<\/em> by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.\u00a0 With respect to the former title, the innocent preposition\u00a0on<\/em> threw me off:\u00a0 I was expecting to read a book of <\/em>mathematics but instead discovered that it was about<\/em> mathematics, especially its teaching and practice.\u00a0 That’s different.\u00a0 And not very interesting.<\/p>\n

Conversely, everything you need to know about Everybody Lies<\/em> is contained in its title.\u00a0 One-third of the way through, I decided that there was enough meat here for perhaps a long essay in The Atlantic<\/em>, but not a book.\u00a0 I become impatient with high-filler writings and I feel no guilt when I quit them.<\/p>\n

One item of interest:<\/p>\n

“More than half of citizens who don’t vote tell surveys immediately before an election that they intend to, skewing our estimation of turnout.”\u00a0 (Stephens-Davidowitz)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The Books I Finished<\/em><\/h2>\n

I finished Giant of The Senate<\/i> (2017) by Al Franken.\u00a0 Now, Al Franken himself is finished.\u00a0 That said, his book was amusing.\u00a0 He discussed some of the poor-taste comedy writing he did before he became a Senator.\u00a0 He expressed his admiration for the late Paul Wellstone.\u00a0 He had little to say on the topic of being a jerk.<\/p>\n

I also finished Gaming the Vote<\/i> by William Poundstone (2008).\u00a0 He devoted most of the book to illustrating flaws in voting systems, after which he asserted that no voting system is perfect.\u00a0 But Poundstone could not hold himself back from proposing his own imperfect system, one which will never see the light of day.\u00a0 Way back when, I read another of his books, Prisoner’s Dilemma<\/em> (1992).\u00a0 His earlier work was far more coherent, content-rich and informative than Gaming the Vote<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I finished Arguably<\/i> by Christopher Hitchens.\u00a0 Readers of this blog know that Hitchens is one of my favorite writers.\u00a0 I admire his vocabulary, his literary background, his incisive remarks, and many of his arguments and viewpoints.\u00a0 One of the most compelling stories was of Hitchens subjecting himself (voluntarily) to waterboarding by U.S. Special Forces.\u00a0 I had thought Arguably<\/em> (2011) was his final book, but no, that would be Mortality <\/em>(2012), which I have yet to read.\u00a0 Being that Mortality<\/em> comprises essays that Hitchens wrote of his own fatal illness, I think I will wait a while to take on that volume.<\/p>\n

I finished The Visual Display of Quantitative Information<\/i> (1983) by Edward Tufte, a work I first learned of decades ago via a full-page advertisement<\/a> in Scientific American<\/em>.\u00a0 It was\u00a0 too expensive for me at the time, else I would have ordered it.\u00a0 I forgot all about this book until last year, when I was helping my friend Eric clean out his office and we found a copy.\u00a0 Eric generously regifted it to me instead of tossing it in the dumpster.\u00a0 I enjoyed reading it, but this edition seemed dated in terms of how charts are prepared in the digital age.\u00a0 And I would have appreciated more guidance from Tufte on ways to present multi-dimensional data.\u00a0 However, as others have noted, this work was intended to be more of a style manual than an idea book, and I will have to be satisfied with that.<\/p>\n

Finally, I finished (in two days, no less) Between the World and Me <\/em>by Ta-Nehisi Coates.\u00a0 This 2015 work was written as a letter to his 15-year-old son in the wake of the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and the choking death of Eric Garner.\u00a0 To say it is powerful is clich\u00e9 — it is Coates’ unfiltered view of the stark realities that non-white people face as they navigate the streets of America.\u00a0 His work brought the ongoing oppression of non-whites into sharper focus for me, but it left me wanting (or despairing) for ways we might effectively address it.<\/p>\n

Here are a few highlight-worthy excerpts from the books I finished:<\/p>\n

“Most principles of design should be greeted with some skepticism, for word authority can dominate our vision, and we may come to see only through the lenses of word authority rather than with our own eyes.” (Tufte)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

“In Vietnam, [Roy] Moore … <\/em>was so unpopular that he slept with sandbags around his bunk to protect him from fragmentation grenades.\u00a0 At the University of Alabama law school, a professor tagged him ‘Fruit Salad’ because he was always coming up with crazy ideas.\u00a0 One of his crazier ideas was to become a professional karate fighter.\u00a0 He tried this in the early 1980s, after he resigned an assistant D.A. post and before he moved to Australia to become an outback cowboy.”\u00a0 (Poundstone)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

‘<\/em><\/span>“Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps ten keywords:\u00a0 Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together.\u00a0 Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators.”\u00a0 (Hitchens)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

“The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beatdown, a shooting, or a pregnancy.” (Coates)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The Books I’m Reading (or Intend to Read)<\/em><\/h2>\n

I am two-thirds of the way through my re-reading of Labyrinths<\/i>, the collection of short stories and essays by the Argentine fantastist-absurdist Jorge Luis Borges.\u00a0 My second reading has made a difference in how I interpreted and appreciated several of the stories, but for others it was like watching reruns of The Twilight Zone<\/em> when you know the ending. If I don’t finish re-reading the entire collection, that will be okay.<\/p>\n

And I am still reading New<\/em> and Collected Poems: 1934-84<\/i> by Roy Fuller, a British writer admired by Christopher Hitchens.\u00a0 Fuller is not a light read.\u00a0 I pick up the book when I am on the elliptical — it keeps me from glancing at my workout time every three minutes.<\/p>\n

On the bottom shelf of my end table, waiting their turn, are the titles\u00a0The Elegance of the Hedgehog<\/em> by Muriel Barbery, Freedom<\/em> by Jonathan Franzen, Horizon’s Lens<\/em> by Elizabeth Dodd,\u00a0Racisms<\/em> by Francisco Bethencourt,\u00a0The People Yes<\/em> by Carl Sandburg, Them Birds Are in Your Garden and Other Vignettes<\/em> by John Bush (my seventh-grade history teacher) and three issues of Topics in Recreational Mathematics<\/em> edited by Charles Ashbacher.\u00a0 Most of these works are fiction, which I rarely read, so it should be an interesting year.<\/p>\n

Standing upright on the bottom shelf of our bedroom bookcase is The Autobiography of Mark Twain<\/em>.<\/em>\u00a0 I embarked on this read many years ago but set it aside when the ponderous volume began to feel more scholarly than fun.\u00a0 I doubt that Clemens himself would have cared for such a heavy (and heavily-annotated) book, but I have not quite given up on it.\u00a0 This brings to mind a line from\u00a0The Shape of the Sword<\/em> by Jorge Luis Borges:<\/p>\n

“…For a gentleman, only lost causes are attractive.” (Borges)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Happy New Year to all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new calendar year means that it is time for me to update my reading list.\u00a0 There is some irony in my writing about or even maintaining a reading list, when the number of books I actually finish each year … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15784"}],"version-history":[{"count":62,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16859,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15784\/revisions\/16859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

After a long and arduous battle, I finished Sleepwalkers <\/em>(2012), a dense account of the causes for World War I by Christopher Clark.\u00a0 This book first appeared<\/a> on my reading list in 2015.\u00a0 It was an exhaustive (and often exhausting) narrative.\u00a0 Spoiler alert: the cause for war was equal parts Russian paranoia, French insecurity, Austria-Hungary disintegration, and ineffective signaling of intentions among pompous European leaders.<\/p>\n