so i was trying to decide what book to read next, and i thought about it and realized i have probably about 20 cubic feet of books that i haven't read.
it's sad when you start reckoning by cubic feet instead of numbers of books.
anyhow, since the last time i wrote about what i was reading, i've read these books:
we never make mistakes by solzhenitsyn
man vs. the state by mayer
reason in history by hegel
shippensburg township in 1800: a portrait by barner
buffalo bill's wild west by kasson
armageddon averted by kutkin
the story of language by pei
the lucifer principle by bloom
where's dan quayle? by becker
guns, germs, and steel by diamond
the metamorphosis, the penal colony, and other stories by kafka
the meditations of marcus aurelius by (suprise) marcus aurelius
man and number by smeltzer
i really should update my reading list on here more often so i don't have vast lists. i'd like to summarize each of them (which means this is going to be a long post. and i don't know how to do the cut-link or whatever it's called. so all of it is going to appear here. HA!)
solzhenitsyn, as usual, is good. short stories, these, and good portraits of 1930s/1940s life in the USSR. man vs. the state is rather boring. interesting dialog at the end between youth radicals in the 1960s/1970s and older just-plain-libertarians. as expected, the latter group makes the former group look like a bunch of morons. reason in history is VERY difficult to understand i think it's fascinating, but i only got about half or so of it, and i'm not sure that some of what i got was what hegel intended. then again, this being hegel, i suppose that's fairly good.
shippensburg township in 1800 (as you may be able to tell by the author's name) was my dad's master's thesis. it's not really a coffeetable book, but if you're interested in the history of shippensburg, it is an interesting portrait (as you may have gathered from the title as well). buffalo bill's wild west was… um… about what you'd expect from a book entitled 'buffalo bill's wild west.' after reading it i knew more than i ever wanted to know about buffalo bill and… er… his wild west. this was for my 'west in american history' class. armageddon averted is about the soviet collapse. it provides a background from about 1970, covers the collapse in detail (the author talked to many of the high ranking officials before and after the collapse) and the slow move towards recovery of Russia and the CIS after the dissolution of the union. this book was kinda dry, but really interesting to me as a poli sci major (and yes, i got an A on the 8 page paper i had to write about this book.)
the story of language is a VERY detailed book on linguistics. although it was written in the late '40s, much of it is still more or less current (most of what is dated is his predictions about the future of languages, which is kinda amusing in spots). i now know quite a bit about all kinds of languages all over the place.
the lucifer principle gets it's own paragraph. basically, it's an analysis of evil from an evolutionary biologist's perspective. it goes into great detail on evolutionary purposes behind such things as societies, cultures, religions, states, and so on and so forth. there are a number of assumptions that are made that i disagree with, but on the whole the book is fascinating. it uses short stories from history all over the globe to illustrate points, and really gives the reader a new perspective on society. however, one drawback to the book is that i don't believe that it fully defines 'evil.' bender and i were talking about this, and discussing evil that is committed by individuals as compared to 'evil' (which i'm not quite convinced is actually evil, agreeing as i do with spinoza) that is perpetrated on humans by nature (there are official philosophical terms for these two types of evil, but i've forgotten what). in any event, it's a good book. reading it has made me even more bull-headed about fuzzy, mushy liberalism as taught in schools. you know, the kind that wants to assign random things as values and such. anyhow, this paragraph is long enough.
where's dan quayle? isn't really on a par with the previous books. it's like 'where's waldo' but you're looking for dan quayle in cartoons of places like the senate, aspen colorado, and the golf courses. more amusing for those of us who follow politics, however (the vultures staring at a sleeping strom thurmond really cracked me up, personally). guns, germs, and steel is an interesting history book. well, interesting is debatable. some of the material it discusses is fascinating, but unfortunately it exceeded my attention span a bit. as in, it took me about three weeks to read, and it's only about 450 pages. admittedly, those three weeks were over finals, but with my easy finals schedule, that was a bit much. quite a worthwhile book, but not as fascinating as the lucifer principle.
the metamorphosis, the penal colony, and other stories was an absolutely incredible book. kafka immediately became one of my very favourite writers after that one. i really like his short fragments of stories more than the long ones (like the metamorphosis), and i think that a lot of my writing from now on will reflect kafka a good deal. there's something absolutely incredible how he can take a simple narrative, give it a good twist, and make a realistic sounding story turn bizarre and surreal — almost threatening, sometimes. the characters take these occurrances as being completely natural (like in the metamorphosis when the main character is transformed into a giant bug) and just deal with them as they continue on with their lives.
the meditations of marcus aurelius was allright. interesting how many of the things he discussed advocated christian values, even the one that disparaged christians. it really makes one wonder just how much of stoicism snuck into christianity, and just when it did it. man and number is the last one on this list (yes, yes, i know you're quite pleased to hear that). it's like the story of language, only it's about numbers instead. while some of the ideas that the author has conflict strongly with other things i've read lately (guns, germs, and steel in particular), it's still fairly informative about when and how numbers arose. and as it was written in 1958, i can see how he'd think that the society he was living in was vastly superior to those morons banging rocks together (after all, by this point the USSR had launched a beeping chunk of tinfoil into SPACE! amazing technology.)
allright. now that i've subjected you to all of that, i'm going to go read some more. so later i'll have more to torture you with.
-evil laugh-