Marcus
Rothbard is the man. His brutally methodical and rational approach to what money is, and what it should be, make his case for a gold standard seem obvious, despite the majority of economists supporting government controlled, fiat currencies and condescendingly mocking ‘goldbugs.'
After reading from various sources on inflation, deflation, the gold standard, the merits and evils of saving (aka hoarding) and the role of government in creating and regulating money I am convinced that this is the book to go to. Any argument against a gold standard will have to answer Rothbard to remain credible.
After reading Lolita, I knew that I'd need another book to feed my new addiction to Nabokov. Something I could read over and over. Something with his deliciously clever writing, minus the pedophilia. I had high hopes for The Defense and I enjoyed the book, but didn't quite find what I was looking for. I'm not sure if some of his writing genius was lost in translation, it was written in Russian then translated to English, or if it was simply that in the 25 years spanning the works he became a better author. Either way, while some of his talent for word smithing is there, it holds only a pale fire to Lolita.
The theme of the book adds to the stereotype that Russians are obsessed with chess. To it's credit though, The Defense makes a solid case for why such an obsession might be rational. Despite the game being the protagonist Luzhin's demise, it is presented as such a fascinating contest that I couldn't help but to break out a chess set and see if I didn't have the potential for grandmastery myself. I got a little ego boost by cleanly drubbing my 7 year old, but it came with the distinct feeling that I should confine my forays into chess to the literary realm.
For Luzhin, a guy who probably organizes his closet chronologically by purchase date, chess is more than a game. It becomes his life, it consumes him to the point where not even his devoted, Middlemarchian wife can rescue him from the obsession. Some of the best writing in the book describes his complete absorption in the game:
Luzhin, preparing an attack for which it was first necessary to explore a maze of variations, where his every step aroused a perilous echo, began a long meditation: he needed, it seemed, to make one last prodigious effort and he would find the secret move leading to victory. Suddenly, something occurred outside his being, a scorching pain — and he let out a loud cry, shaking his hand stung by the flame of a match, which he had lit and forgotten to apply to his cigarette. The pain immediately passed, but in the fiery gap he had seen something unbearably awesome, the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess. He glanced at the chessboard and his brain wilted from hitherto unprecedented weariness. But the chessmen were pitiless, they held and absorbed him. There was horror in this, but in this also was the sole harmony, for what else exists in the world besides chess? Fog, the unknown, non-being...
The Defense
Lolita
But the next move was prepared very slowly. The lull continued for two or three days; Luzhin was photographed for his passport, and the photographer took him by the chin, turned his face slightly to one side, asked him to open his mouth wide and drilled his tooth with a tense buzzing. The buzzing ceased, the dentist looked for something on a glass shelf, found it, rubber-stamped Luzhin's passport and wrote with lightning-quick movements of the pen. ‘There,' he said, handing over a document on which two rows of teeth were drawn, and two teeth bore inked-in little crosses. There was nothing suspicious in all this and the cunning lull continued until Thursday. And on Thursday, Luzhin understood everything.
Wow. I'm going to let this one sit for awhile before giving it a full review, but this was my first book on prophetic leaders as a genre and it was a very, very interesting read.
Max (8) REAAAALLLLY wanted me to read this, a first for him, so I did. What can I say? It got a few lols which is more credit than I can give 9 out of the last 10 books I've read. There's time travel, Eastern philosophy, science, math, business and of course there's a baby dino that pukes into the mouth of the antagonist. All the elements of good high brow lit.
At about 1/10th of the way in I'm still not 100% committed to it... I get enough gossip and drama without having to read about it too, but we'll see how it goes.
... A little better than half way through and...
It's too much for me. There is just so much gratuitous in this book. I don't get it. I'm embarrassed to have read this far and have no desire to go further.
Meh. I though it was okay. It's Harry Potter with Greek Gods instead of Witches and Warlocks and minus the complex plot and fantastically creative mind of J.K. Rowling. I read it out loud to Max (age 8) and he loved it so, success.
I like some of the ideas and suggestions but McGonigal, as much as she tries not to be, is heavily biased in favor of video games. The title idea, that reality is broken and people are seeking to escape it in the world of video games, is spot on. Her suggestions for what to do about it left me scratching my head.
The whole wolf / dog pack thing just never spoke to me. The idea was interesting for a few minutes then got boring fast.
I'm not sure how I ended up reading an autobiography of Steve Martin, probably because the cover caught my eye and I think it's cool that he picks a mean banjo. I'm not a huge fan, but despite that, it was a pretty fascinating glimpse into a world and career I knew almost nothing about.
Show business is rough and stand-up seems like the roughest of it. Traveling alone, at the mercy of the crowd, constantly having to come up with new material (jokes don't age like songs)... Steve Martin is tenacious and introspective and that combination makes for an interesting read.
Even though it is written by a different author, this book reads like a sequel to David Allen's über-famous Getting Things Done (GTD), only this time geared specifically toward the broad category of anyone who creates, a.k.a. creative people. Like GTD, the concepts here aren't particularly exciting but I'm hoping that like GTD, they'll be life-changing.
Since reading GTD several years ago the concepts of “what's the next action” and having a trusted system for tracking projects have become firmly engrained in my life and work. They work. Even so, I still find that I have a ton of projects that are started, and despite having clear “next-actions,” for whatever reason I haven't finished them. That's where Making Ideas Happen comes in. This book begins by explaining a similar system to GTD. Belsky calls his version “The Action Method” (with a nod to David Allen). The basic components are:
-Projects organized by actions (your own and delegated), references and backburner items
-Minimal note taking
-Designed materials (nice paper, software, etc. to make you want to use your system)
There's, of course, a flowchart:
So far, all very familiar, all very GTD. The other 2/3rds or 3/4ths of the book begin to get interesting and contain new and interesting information that builds on familiar GTD concepts.
Belsky discusses prioritizing projects by energy levels.
Getting past the lulls excitement in projects:
Other topics are: How to kill ideas that lack potential. How creativity is about shipping more than ideas. How to focus meetings and meeting follow-ups toward creative goals. How constraints beget greater creativity. How to form rituals around productivity. How to harness the strengths of those around you to successfully complete projects. The benefit of sharing ideas (great section). How to get and give constructive feedback. How to organize groups and spaces to maximize creative productivity. How to self-market tastefully. How to manage creative teams and be a leader of creative people (there is quite a bit on this).
Definitely worth reading, probably multiple times. There is a lot to digest.
The whole time I was reading this I kept thinking, “this was written in the mid 1700's, really?!” Tristram Shandy is a testament to the fact that body humor was alive and well a couple hundred years ago. But even without the body humor, it's a bizarre book. I can't tell if Sterne was a genius or an imbecile who wrote in one continuous stream, never editing or reading what he'd already written, or both.
There are chapters with no content. Chapters with almost no content. Chapters with songs and scribbles and lots of dots and not much else. There are so many tangents and musings and minute details about the movement of an arm or leg or the position of the speaker that if it were't for these frequent deviations the book would probably only be about 10 pages long. It's an autobiography where the subject of the book isn't born for about 200 pages and once he is, is rarely the main character.
I laughed out loud throughout the book, but I have to admit that almost as often I found my thoughts wandering for pages. It goes from incredibly funny to inane and rambling to almost serious and back again over and over. Sometimes it was an test of patience to slog through it, more often I could hardly put it down.
This is by far the most disturbing book I have ever read. I almost stopped reading several times in the beginning and I'm still not sure that I should have finished it, I did though, and found a book that I, like many others I'm sure, hate to love.
The writing is amazing. It is a perfectly told story. A disgusting story, but told so flawlessly, with such suspense, such humor and details as to make it feel almost luxurious to read.
Here's a bit of dialog from one of my favorite scenes:
“Down!” I said — apparently much louder than I intended.
“You need not roar at me,” he complained in his strange feminine manner. “I just wanted a smoke. I'm dying for a smoke.”
“You're dying anyway.”
“Oh, shucks,” he said. “You begin to bore me. What do you want? Are you French, mister? Wooly-woo-boo-are? Let's go to the barroomette and have a stiff —”
He saw the little dark weapon lying in my palm as if I were offering it to him.
“Say!” he drawled (now imitating the underworld numskull of movies), “that's a swell little gun you've got there. What d'you want for her?”
I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to knock over a box on a low table near him. It ejected a handful of cigarettes.
“Here they are,” he said cheerfully. “You recall Kipling: une femme est une femme, mais un Caporal est une cigarette? Now we need matches.”
“Quilty,” I said. “I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you.”
He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it.
Portrait of the Artist was good; good at putting me to sleep! Actually that's only partially true. The beginning, when Daedalus was a child just wasn't particularly compelling to me to me. My long-time suspicion that I'm not a fan of coming-of-age books (Bildungsroman's according to Wikipedia) was confirmed as I read in detail of incidents on the playground and discussions between 10 year old's. I slept through my bus stop during one such discussion. I ended up having to take another bus (the 44) and got home 30 minutes late, but I digress.
As Stephen grew older, the book became more interesting. Quite a bit of the plot is centered around his feelings (and actions) in regard to truth, religion and women. The writing, as I fully expected from an author as celebrated as Joyce, is great. There are some interesting philosophical dialogs on art and beauty. Stephen's internal dialogs also often sounded familiar. Thoughts on guilt. On change. On family, etc.
Really though, it's just not my kind of book. It's too internal, too dreary and depressing. I occasionally I enjoy that in a book, but this time I don't feel like I am coming away with any major insights into human nature. I'm glad I read it, but mostly just because now I know.
If you read and liked [b:Brave New World 5129 Brave New World Aldous Huxley https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327865608s/5129.jpg 3204877], this is a great non-fiction companion book.
It's hard to write good fiction when you have an agenda that is so close to the surface. It seems usually either the fiction suffers or the philosophy suffers. Breakfast With Buddha does a pretty good job though. The story is plausible and engaging and the ideas from Eastern Philosophy are nicely woven in.
This is a strange book. It's an intellectual speaking out against his profession. Sowell defines intellectuals as a people for whom ideas are the beginning and ending of their work. Tenured professors are the most ready example, but intellectuals can also be found outside academia. For example authors, commentators and public speakers who are paid to continue producing ideas. The key is that intellectuals need only continue to attract an audience for their ideas in order to remain relevant.
This reliance on ideas insulates intellectuals in a way that is uncommon in almost any other profession, they are relieved of accountability. Intellectuals can be, and often are, completely wrong and, as long as they can maintain their audience, they are insulated from the negative consequences of their ideas. Intellectuals and Society is about the sources and rationalization of the ideas of intellectuals, the way their ideas are propagated, why they are so often wrong, and the effects of the ideas on the world.
Sowell is a conservative and, not unexpectedly, his targets are liberals like Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky, Edmund Wilson, George Bernard Shaw, John Dewey and others. It may seem like an arbitrary or biased selection, but the reason for the focus on liberals comes down to a fundamental difference between liberalism and conservatism. Despite the popular assumption that conservatives only want the status quo, both conservatives and liberals want change. The difference lies in the types of change each wants. Liberals favor change that centralizes and idealizes decision making and power while conservatives seek the type of change that distributes power and that values tradition over ideology.
Liberals often assume that an individual or small group, knows better than the masses. First-hand experiences succumbs to prevailing notions. A concentration of knowledge is seen as being superior to distributed knowledge. Reason trumps experience. One-day-at-a-time rationalization wins over long-term and big picture thinking. Mundane knowledge is shunned for the specialized knowledge of elites. Sowell calls this the vision of the anointed.
Historically, Sowell argues, that type of reform has a bad track record. There are undeniable successes, civil rights, for example, but the failures of mistaken intellectuals, as seen in the section on intellectuals and war, were often catastrophic. Sowell is thorough, insightful and, while nobody will accuse him of having a great sense of humor, he is convincing.
Wow. Brandon Sanderson is incredibly creative. The world he builds in The Way of Kings is phenomenal. This is the first book I've read by him and if it's any indication of his work, he has a fabulous talent for creating conflict in imaginary worlds. I love how he gradually weaves his characters and plots together in ways that raise interesting moral and philosophical issues but still move the story along in intricate and unexpected directions. In that way, The Way of Kings is excellent.
My only qualm with the book is that Sanderson, like most other novelists I've read whose name is printed larger than the title of the book, doesn't shine as a stylist. There are too many long, and sometimes boring, flashbacks. Everything is shown explicitly. An example that stands out in my mind is that when someone is killed by shard, their eyes burn out. We're told this every time someone is killed by shard. Sanderson doesn't trust the reader to visualize what's happening. The same is true of the “spren” that appear every time someone is in pain or sick or excited or experiencing any strong emotion. It's not enough to show a character sitting on the ground panting in exhaustion, we have to see the fatigue fairies emerging just to drive home the point that yep, the character is really tired. Also, people aren't kind, they're “kindly.” And in a fantasy world you can't really say what's an anachronism and what isn't, but there are many times where the language feels like it's from Earth, year 2010 then in the next sentence back to the old-style used throughout the rest of the book.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the book. A lot. I devoured the 1000+ pages and looked forward to reading it at every opportunity. It just seemed like such a shame that what could have been an excellent book with some additional editing was instead just a good book.
[Edited to tone down my whining.]
I see the appeal to this book. Youthful exuberance, a lust for life, the excitement of finding “it” in conversation and music. The freedom of the road and life expanding as wide as the American countryside, ready to be consumed and explored. The pseudo spiritual, all-accepting opening up to experiencing fully whatever comes and not giving a damn about what happens tomorrow. The desire to define your new rules for life while willfully breaking all the old ones. On the Road has its moments of contagious transcendence.
And yet, it remains a story about a bunch of aimless kids recklessly ripping back and forth across the country leaving a trail of missing property, misplaced trust, broken hearts and ruined lives in their wake. It's told in an unrepentant way that sacrifices social responsibility at the alter of youthful pleasures. Despite Kerouac's portrayal of this dichotomy, life doesn't have to be that way. Freedom and virtue aren't mutually exclusive. Let On the Road wake you up and get you out the door. Enjoy the story, appreciate its place in American history. Then put Kerouac the shelf and head out in search of a more substantive guide to take along the way.
This book should have been called Christianity: A Speculative History from a Somewhat Antagonistic Viewpoint. I only read the first 150 pages, plenty far enough to understand how MacCulloch feels about Christianity. Most of the book is, by nature, extrapolation based on a very fragmented set of documents and conflicting histories, but MacCulloch is always overanxious to undermine Christianity by taking huge leaps of speculation and is never, at least that I saw in the first 150 pages, willing to remain neutral or actually go the other direction.
I found his writing style to be good and the idea for the book is fantastic. I'm fully prepared to deal with problems in history and with the faults of Christians throughout history, but I'm not willing to read a book by an author I feel I can't trust or have to constantly second guess. Because of that, the bits of information I gleaned are all mentally footnoted as being something to go back and verify from a less biased source.
Here are a few examples:
“Yet at the heart of the Egypt and Exodus story is something which no subsequent Israelite fantasist would have wished to make up, because it is an embarrassment: the hero and leader of the Exodus, the man presented as writing the Pentateuch itself, has a name which is not only non-Jewish but actually Egyptian: Moses.” My response is that if the Israelites lived in Egypt for 430 years is it so surprising and embarrassing that they'd eventually adopt Egyptian names? If the implication is that Moses was actually Egyptian, why doesn't MacCulloch just say that. It wouldn't be the longest logical jump he makes in the book.
Later, this is what MacCulloch concludes about the Beatitudes. “There is nothing gentle, meek or mild about the driving force behind these stabbing inversions of normal expectations. They form a code of life which is a chorus of love directed to the loveless or unlovable, of painful honesty expressing itself with embarrassing directness, of joyful rejection of any counsel suggesting careful self-regard or prudence. That, apparently, is what the Kingdom of God is like.” Really? Only the most literalistic reading of such a poetic passage could lead to such an imbecilic interpretation. MacCulloch makes similar mistakes of interpretation of various other passages in the New Testament, notably in the Lord's Prayer and the command to “leave the dead to bury their dead.”
When writing about the resurrected Christ (note, resurrected) he says, “He repeatedly appeared to those who had known him, in ways which confused and contradicted the laws of physics.” Again, we are talking about a ressurected being. Why is physics even relevant?
When he refers to Paul and his desire to teach of salvation through Christ alone, MacCulloch phrases it this way: “Paul managed to find a proper in the Tanakh to sum up what he wanted to say:..” This comes across as incredibly condescending, to take for granted that Paul was just manipulating the Tanakh to justify his message. If MacCulloch had left out “managed to find” and replaced it with “found” it would have made all the difference. It is maybe a small infraction on its own, but it was, for me, the last straw.
In a way, I'm really disappointed to stop reading this. The parts of the book that talk about the origins of the Old Testament and the influence of Socrates and Aristotle on Christianity are great. The discussion of differing ideas of Satan, comparisons of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, ideas on prophecy and life after death in the Old Testament and the obsession with the virginity of Mary are all fascinating. For now though, I'm done. I don't have time to verify every reference and I don't trust MacCulloch to give it to me straight.
I got bored of it and stopped with 50 or 60 pages left. The Possessed is only marginally about adventures or Russian books. Instead it consists mostly of travelogue and a series of Elif's personal stories about her experiences in grad school, with a vague thread of Russianness connecting them all. Some are interesting, some are funny and a few possibly even poignant, but as a cohesive work, the book feel flat with me.
The best part of the book, and by telling you this, I am not really giving anything away, at least nothing that is pertinent to the plot of the book, is that there is a man-made black sand desert in Ohio, near Caldwell, Ohio, the Great Ohio Desert, where people go wandering, hiking, hiding, resolving existential crises, sunbathing and fishing in the desert's lake. It is “a blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of. A place without malls.” It is often crowded and the best time to get there is early in the morning before the crowds gather. Once you come to terms with the G.O.D.,everything else falls into place.
The desert is the great jest in The Broom of the System and the existence of the desert sums up Wallace's sense of humor. You might, as you're reading, be tempted to identify with Wallace's view of the human condition that is so perfectly characterized by the G.O.D., but find your mind resistant to identifying, either for fear of where identifying with Wallace and his desert will take you, or because the strangeness of it all is simply too strange. This temptation to identify with the G.O.D. and the mental resistance to said temptation can be mentally taxing and exhausting and not something that you will find yourself wanting to put yourself through for very long periods of time. If you give in though, and allow yourself to accept the desert and what it implies, reading The Broom of the System and DFW in general can actually be, if not enjoyable, humorous and something you can appreciate very much at an intellectual and philosophical level.
This is a ridiculous book. It is the letters exchanged between a poor old man and a poor young woman who live in the same housing complex but who rarely see each other for the sake of propriety. It's basically something like this:
“Oh Makar this week I lost my job and I'm running out of cash and I'm feeling so sick that I just might die! Whatever shall I do!”
“Oh Varvara, you poor child. Let me, as a father figure, send you some flowers and linens even though I have no money and will probably get drunk this weekend and I am only half a man!”
“Oh Makar, stop sending me things you can't afford. You're so poor and you never come visit me and you have terrible taste in books and when I was a child I was once in love with a boy who died!”
“Oh Varvara, my taste in books isn't that bad. True, I can't write and I have no style and everything I write is so deliberate and forced that it's painful to read, except when I declare my love to you, in those instances where I'm passionate my writing improves slightly. Vavara you know that I like sending you things I can't afford but this week my horrible landlady needs money and I have none, and whatever shall I do! I am a broken man!”
This plot driven book fell pretty flat with me. The writing wasn't bad, and there were some tense moments, but it felt like a bunch of paper dolls (ironic since some are based on real people) running around with the occasional deus ex machina moment to get them out of a fix. So, I wasn't a fan of the book, but It'd probably make a good movie.
This book definitely wasn't what I expected it to be. Before I read knew anything but the title, I thought maybe it would be on non-procrastination or [b:getting things done 1633 Getting Things Done The Art of Stress-Free Productivity David Allen http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1158299716s/1633.jpg 5759] or maybe even a business book. Once I found out that Oprah recommended it and that Dr. Phil recommended it I almost decided not to read it–I'm not a fan of either. It turns out that it probably could be considered new-age (I haven't read any other new-age books so I'm not sure) but at the same time it is a simple and straightforward book that has powerful concepts that I think could be life changing if they're applied.It's about the accepting the present moment for what it is, becoming non-resistant and fully conscious. I've read about this concept in association with Christianity (“take no thought for the morrow”) and in Buddhism (mindfulness) and as the basis for meditation in general but never with the clarity that I found in The Power of Now. I think that some of the ideas could easily be misinterpreted–at times it sounds as if he's saying there is no place for history or planning or ambition or pain or pleasure, but especially in the latter chapters he clarifies how those things are all important, but in context of the present and not the other way around.So far I haven't reached the enlightened state he describes but I think I've felt glimpses of it. It seems worth pursuing.