NRO Summer Reading List:
National Review Online asked a bunch of us to name two or three books we would be reading this summer. As usual, much of my summer will be spent on reading work-related books and articles — and I wouldn't subject NRO or VC readers to those recommendations. With that in mind, here was my contribution to the NRO symposium:
An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths by Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds. I admit I’m already half-way through this book, and it’s great — an exhilarating and provocative exploration of how technological change is empowering individuals and spurring the creation of a new, dispersed entrepreneurial class. Given Glenn’s own pioneering efforts as a blogger extraordinaire, the insights of this book should be no surprise.The full symposium is here. What books are VC readers planning to read this summer?
A Scanner Darkly by Phillip K. Dick. This novel by the ground-breaking, proto-cyberpunk sci-fi author will soon find its way to the silver screen. Given I’m a big fan of Dick’s work (including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book upon which Blade Runner was based), and that Hollywood is quite good at making a hash of his stories (see, e.g., Paycheck), I want to read the book before seeing the movie.
In Defense of Freedom: And Related Essays by Frank S. Meyer. This collection by former National Review senior editor Frank Meyer is a must read — and worth re-reading (as I plan to do this summer). It sets forth the uniquely American brand of conservatism, labeled “fusionism,” that helped define the modern American conservative movement and makes a powerful case for informing conservative politics with a more libertarian view of government.
Collected Poems 1951-1975 by Charles Causley
and I need to finish Postwar by Tony Judt
Intuition, by Allegra Goodman
Don't I Know You? by Karen Shepard
Kandel is a Nobel-prize winning neurobiologist. There was a very entertaining interview with him on Charlie Rose earlier this year...it was while Rose was out with health problems, and the substitute host was fellow Nobel prize winner, former NIH director, and Sloan Kettering President Harold Varmus.
At some point I'll try to read some WWII histories that are currently on my wife's bedside table.
Otherwise, I plan on recreational reading being entertaining if often insubstantial fiction picked up on a whim in bookstores...sometimes in airports.
Strong candidates for further reading this summer are G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, Thomas More's Utopia, more Dostoevsky, something by G.K. Chesterton, and maybe some Nietzsche.
Some reading in law or economics is also a strong possibility, but I don't have any titles or authors presently in mind.
Aeon J Skoble, and thanks for the tip on Liberty, I will pick up a copy.
Currently I'm reading Political Thought, From Gerson to Grotius:1414-1625, by J N Figgis. Also, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, by Otto Gierke. In the hopper is Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, by Robert Michels.
Enjoy your reading.
The most interesting story in the book is how this (with a few exceptions) didn't happen in the 19th century, even when crises occured. Higgs says this was because the dominant ideology of those times was reflexive (classical) liberalism, whereas in the 20th century it was reflexive statism. The message I take from it is the only hope we have of cutting modern government is to have people (however crudely) become reflexively anti-government. Kind of depressing, but unsurprising at the same time.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
When you are almost 40 and have read as much as I have, you tend to think that no matter how good a book is it isn't going to alter your worldview - There are no longer any books that are going to "change your life" at this point. Gatto's book really did - it lays bare so many facts about the history and hidden purposes of our educational system, and how they inter-relate with other political phenomena that this book radically altered my view of many things. Be that as it may, Gatto frequently gets things wrong when he discusses things not in his area of expertise (education) - His view of science is pretty off-base.
I have to say that I'm horrified by this new trend of symposiums where writers list "intended" reading. We used to have symposiums where writers would recommend books that they have read, but apparently, many are now so busy reading blogs and writing blog posts that they just write what they intend to read. Since they haven't read the book, they don't have anything meaningful to say except that they heard from others it was a good book. Many writers understandably just ignore the rules and list books they're already reading or have already read and intend to re-read. Adler does this with two out of three of his books, and who can blame him - the whole exercise is just silly.
I just finished A Dry Season by Peter Robinson and
Radicals in Robes by Cass Sunstein
ursula k le guin - left hand of darkness
thomas m disch - 334
alfred bester - demolished man
thomas m disch - camp concentration
marge piercy - woman on the edge of time
I have so many books that I've collected over the years that I haven't read that I basically just put them all on a shelf and then just read them from one end of the shelf to the other. So it looks like the next few up are:
Just So Stories and The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
The Aeneid by Virgil
The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Odyssey by Homer
To The Divagator - I read Nostromo around this time last year and really enjoyed it, further raising Joseph Conrad up my list of favorite authors.
2: "How to hit .400" by Ted Williams
3: "A walk to remember" by Nicholas Sparks
Another good book I recently read is Peter Augustine Lawler's 'Aliens In America, The Strange Truth about Our Souls'. The book is a spirited attack on the therapeutic culture, and argues - shades of Allan Bloom - that a sense of longing and incompleteness is essential to a fully human life. The book is also a good source for readers who don't have the time or inclination to read all the primary works of modern political and social philosophers, and gives a good overview of the thought of thinkers like Francis Fukuyama and Richard Rorty.
Richard Lowry's book 'Legacy, Paying the Price for the Clinton Years' is a good book about one of the most dysfunctional administrations in American history.
I recently re-read James Bovard's classic 'Lost Rights, The Destruction of American Liberty'. For people who think libertarians are too worked up about things, this is THE book that you should give them. A book that in the words of Shakespeare,
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined licks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine"
Except that Bovard's book was written in 1994, and many of the things he describes (such as the militarization of our police forces) have gotten drastically worse since he wrote.
I am currently reading The 48 Law of Power by Robert Greene and The Bill of Rights by Akhil Reed Amar
As a tangential comment - After doing it both ways numerous times, I've come to the conclusion that I like to see the movie *before* I read the book. That way I can appreciate it without constantly being jarred by the minor (And sometimes major) edits made to fit it into the visual, time-constrained realm... or the whim of the director. I find it easier to mentally accept the differences while reading. Of course, in some cases, it's hopeless. Even if I hadn't read Starship Troopers long before seeing the movie, I'm pretty sure that I would have thought that it was, is, and always will be a dog.
email is human readable - aloud
For non-fiction, now I'm reading "The Elusive Quest for Growth" by William Easterly. There's also that award winning biography of Kruschev on my bookshelf staring at me, and "The Rationality of Emotion."
Dante's Vita Nuova and Thomas More's Utopia are reproaching me from a nearby shelf for their unreadness. How do you explain to a book that some things just aren't suitable for being read on an exercise bike, or walking to the grocery store?
Now, Sara Paretsky's Fire Sale, OTOH . . . I've been waiting a year for that to come out in paperback (which it does next month). I don't have the shelf space for hardcover mysteries. Unless, of course, they're by Elizabeth George, in which case I really can't wait that long.
Thanks to JGR for the John Taylor Gatto recommendation — I'll check that out.
Of course, I recently acquired the first 80 years of The New Yorker on DVD. Between that, current magazines, blogs, and the web, I may never read a book again.
Durkheim Suicide
Maraniss They Marched into Sunlight
I might re-read Russo Straight Man to remind me of how happy I am to be out of academia
Next up is "Warlord" by Ilario Pantano.
On the pile as well, is "From Dawn to Decadence" by Jacques Barzun, but that really feels more like a fall vs. summer book to me.
Finishing Vanity Fair and next is Austen's Northanger Abbey. Both are book group selections.
I've read 6 Greek tragedies so far this year, and plan to read the rest over the summer and fall.
Read "Misquoting Jesus" by Bart Ehrman, which details has the Bible is full of errors made by scribes over the centuries, and The End of Faith by Harris, a book about the destructive power of religion today.
All a little dark, of course. So for light reading ahead, I have The Zookeeper, a novel by a young gay author. I run a gay author's book club here in Washington, DC. I get local gay authors to read from their books and sell them during an afternoon in my house. Cocktails all around, of course. Makes for a lovely civilized afternoon. So I have a number of these novels that I have to read thus summer. Another author is Alex Sanchez, who writes novels geared towards gay teenagers, and I have to read his latest.
Beyond that, I have to keep up with the Sunday NY Times and the Washington Post, and numerous magazines.
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I just finished the novel War Trash by Ha Jin and liked it very much—the Korean War from a Chinese POW's perspective.
This summer mostly I'm going to be reading various recursion theory tomes and papers. Really don't have too much time for alternative reading if I want to get something done on my thesis. Though if I stopped spending so much time on the web...
If I can get my hands on it though I think greg egan has another book out (or at least there is a book on amazon I haven't read). I can't recommend him for the characther development but I love his plots/ideas.
Other than that though I can't say I'm much into reading fiction anymore. I grew out of most badly written genre junk a while ago but find that most good writers insist on writing in a certain high literary style that I find unappealing. Unfortunatly there seems to be a certain tendency in the literary world to avoid elements which might be too exciting or otherwise appealing to the general public or light reader (rather than just requiring there to be more). I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions and I have read and liked some of them but it makes it more difficult to find good things to read.
I'm currently reading Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine.
When I'm done with that, I will go back to Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, which the World Cup prompted me to pick up.
And then I'll go back to Stanley Elkins' The Dick Gibson Show, a wonderful novel I've had a hard time reading while watching soccer.
I blog about books I've read at http://wordsthrice.blogspot.com.
Anthony Sanders wrote:
This reminded me of something I read recently, but this thread doesn't seem like the place to start a substantive discussion, so I've posted about it here.
Regarding the Baroque cycle, I liked them very much. When I read Quicksilver, however, I stalled out just a few pages before King of the Vagabonds started. Whether is was the writing style, or something else, I just found much of the first part hard going.