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What are you reading these days?
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
Recently finished reading house of leaves with my friend; we've now started reading The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. It's about a scientist from an anarchist moon world that visits the capitalist planet his world orbits. I think it's quite fascinating how weird many capitalist practices sound when they're described from the perspective of an outsider -- and I love being able to see a vision of a functioning anarchist society.
That comparison between the two worlds, and a careful uncovering (from different perspectives) of much that we take for granted, and the constant back-and-forth/evolution in the protagonists mind as they keep learning more is something I really enjoyed!
Just finished reading Robert Pirsig’s Lila (follow up to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). I came to it after pondering about art, beauty and quality as applied to life (a snippet of which I posted recently). Really enjoyed the book, especially the philosophical aspects in the second half (even though I don’t necessarily agree with every observation). Very reminiscent of themes from Robert Kegan’s The Evolving Self (on adult cognitive development) and James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.
Currently in the early parts of Free Play by Nachmanovitch; seems fun but mostly descriptive so far... I don’t have a sense of how to adapt/operationalize those ideas yet.
It's the end of the year and I had a tough semester, so I'm "comfort reading" James Herriot. It's been a while since I last read them, and I loaded them up on my Kindle as, for the first time, I don't have access to our decades-old copies.
I’m reading Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times which is quite good. There is little new that can be said about Lincoln himself but the strength of this biography is giving context about American culture during that era.
As usual, reading history is a good way of learning how much better off we are now.
It seems there was a strong culture of self-reliance back then, based on actually being self-reliant. (Not individually though, but in family groups, on farms.) The Amish are the closest thing now.
Now we have only the ghost of this. We say “self-reliant” when we really mean “earn enough money to buy things ourselves” and I think the only widespread exceptions are cooking, housework, and childcare. Which, probably not coincidentally, have traditionally been considered women’s work.
People talk about “unpaid labor” as if it were a bizarre exception. At one time it was most labor.
But the myth of self-reliance still has a strong pull in our culture, even if the material circumstances are mostly gone, and good riddance.
Oof, that hits the spot on something I’ve been discussing with friends recently (comparing with an anecdote from a few decades ago). I’m amazed how “consumption” is now pitched as the thing to do, and “frictionless” “convenience” as the value to aspire for. I’m constantly struck that most people around me don’t seem to notice or mind the resulting infantilization.
The deeper problem is also a conflation of “capital” from the capability to do things to the ability to pay for it. This substitution only works in shallow and narrow regimes in stable situations, whereas the loss of ability and agency is both deep and broad. To emphasize with a topical example, it doesn’t matter how many billions in your account if your community has run out of PPE/masks and doesn’t know how to make more (EDIT: I guess markets have replaced communities, so there’s no rootedness anymore). Capabilities are the truest measure of “wealth”, and their enhancement is the truest measure of progress.
At the same time if you look at the material basis for our standard of living, most of our wealth is based on specialization and on collaboration and trade between specialists. There's no such thing as a homemade computer chip. At best you might make a fairly primitive circuit board, using supplies you bought, provided that you're comfortable with working with hazardous chemicals. It's a hobby.
I don't think this can or should be reversed. I think it's better to properly acknowledge our interconnectedness as the way things are and the way we want them to be. We are truly all in this together, at global scale, and it is almost impossible to disconnect, or at least not without settling for a pretty primitive and precarious existence.
Lincoln's time was before electrification and, on the frontier anyway, before hospitals. Sometimes we talk about going off the grid, but it's more like camping. It might be pretty serious camping, but supplies will run out. It's still part of the same economy.
Of course disaster preparedness and learning first aid are great things, but these are temporary measures, about getting by until you can get connected back to civilization.
The smallest independent unit of civilization might be a large group of nations. Maybe the US and its allies could disconnect from China and its allies, but not without an enormous amount of effort and suffering.
I do not have qualms per se with a degree of global connectedness (ignoring geopolitics for the moment) and functional specialization. My observation is simply that there is a cultural change that devalues capabilities (even at the collective level, if not the individual level) in favor of consumption & fungible money, and I think the latter is much more fragile.
I’m reading Bigger, Leaner, Stronger. It’s kinda overwhelming so far. I do wanna get strong, but I wonder if I really need all that information beforehand. It also have a lot of motivational talk that seemed useful in the first chapters, but not so much after that. I tend to skip those parts. I get the impression that this book contain loads of valuable information, but it is overextended to fill some expected length. Recommended for those that like to geek out about fitness or have a goal that is very hard to achieve. For some, Information itself is a great way to improve discipline, change habits, etc . I’ll keep reading because the author clearly knows his stuff.
I just finished "Solaris" by Stanisław Lem.
A worthwhile read for SF enthusiasts. The world the author created, is very thorough and the only flaw I did not understand was one instance, where the protagonist completely changed his point of view from one sentence to the next.
Next up is "Kindred", by Octavia Butler.
I read her Xenogenesis series, which completley blew my mind (her description of the ooloi as completely foreign to humanity, gives this series its charm) and is now one of my favourite books.
As for popular scientific books (I usually read one scientific book and one book with story at the same time).
I finished "This is how democracies die" by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
Currently I am reading "The victory of capital" by Ulrike Herrmann. I did not read anything about capitalism before and I was told this book captures its essence very well.
My First Summer in The Sierra ~ Standard Ebooks
It's the journal and experience of John Muir during time spent in the Sierra Nevada Mountain range while accompanying some shepherds. He gives his account and impressions of their trek and landscape with an engaging style of "storytelling".
About halfway through Seveneves / Neal Stephenson, which I'm quite enjoying. It is very much unlike his previous works and is very reminiscent of The Martian. It discusses a near future in which the moon was somehow hit by an unknown force and broke into 7 pieces, the implications it has on society and how humanity decides to tackle that challenge. This book is giving me so much existential anxiety, though - I keep thinking if this is how our children are going to feel when climate change finally kicks into full gear.
Great book. Read it recently as I’m re-reading all the (good) Stephenson books again. It’s such a random and wild ride. I’d love to see it done as a movie/mini-series done to Expanse levels of production.
I am in the final few pages of Jodi Taylor's Just One Damned Thing After Another which I've really enjoyed. It's short and simple but the characters are well-drawn and engaging, and the plot is well paced and exciting and it's managed to make me both laugh out loud and cry a bit as well. It's the first in a surprisingly long series which I'm not entirely sure the concept will support but I'm going to read a few more and see how it goes.
With the Kid we are mostly reading Stuck, by Oliver Jeffers which is great. The best children's books stand up to repeated readings and I'm not tired of this one yet. Jeffers' books are always a pleasure.
I just started Anna Karenina and also Eve Babitz's Slow Days, Fast Company. Both of these books are excellent.
Babitz is often compared to Didion -- and it's clear why. However, at least so far, it doesn't have the looming sadness that I've always felt with Didion's writing.
Just finished Babylon's Ashes, and then Strange Dogs from The Expanse series.
Despite being a much shorter novella, Strange Dogs is the book I've been left thinking about. It left me feeling a bit unsettled, and raised a lot of questions. I'm looking forward to reading more in hopes of seeing those questions answered.
I tend to jump between books, depending on what I feel I need to get out of it.
Currently bouncing between:
Getting Things Done by David Allen
Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom by Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap
Traditional Wing Chun: The Branch of Great Master Yip Man by Igor Dudukchan
Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson (Book 5 of A Tale of Malazan Book of the Fallen)