Category: Books
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The Revolt of the Public
and the crisis of authority in the new millennium By Martin Gurri A great read. It posed a new theory and one that seems to be aging well: “The information technologies of the 21st century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the…
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Brave New World
As seems to happen each time I come to recounting a book I’ve read, I don’t like to do it very much because, I’m sorry to say, it requires me to think about it, comprehensively, and I think I’m so ‘of my time’ that thinking this way is uncomfortable. It’s much easy to just read…
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Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
Interesting enough. Got just over half way through and sort of became uninterested, or perhaps I felt like I had a sense of what it was saying/about. Core things that stood out:
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Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life
Liked the book. Definitely gives useful frameworks by naming desire and then trying to move away from bad models of it or transform it into good desire. I want what I want because I want it. Intrinsic vs. extrinsic. Don’t feel the need to do a full write out of my thoughts. I think the…
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Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Enjoyed this biography on Ben and ended up reading about 4/5ths. Got bored at the end when Isaacson is detailing his life in Paris. Seems important, especially considering he was America’s representative in securing important aid from the French to take on the Revolutionary War, but it was incredibly detailed in a way I no…
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The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
Really enjoyed this book! ChatGPT suggested it for me and I bought it at Mr. K’s in Asheville for $5. It’s interesting that I was drawn to this book because math was my hardest, and least favorite, subject in school. It was also the source of tense struggle between my father and I as he…
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1984
This is the second time I’ve read 1984, both since graduating college. I got what I think is a different sense of it this second time. Mainly, the typical meme of, “Hey man the government (Big Brother) man, going after the jokes I’m trying to tell about __ group man!” feels childish and undervalues the…
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Man this book was strange. And really enjoyable. “Dream-like” is a great description of it. I was talking to Sadie about what I think it was “about” and in some ways I’ve sort of landed on that it doesn’t really seem to have a particular about-ness to it, other than being another story about the…
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A Secular Age
by Charles Taylor A friend, who is a philosopher, told me about Charles Taylor a few years ago. His thinking on communitarianism have stuck with me. Picked this up from the library recently, read the intro, and flipped around through the rest. It’s pretty dense and a bit too academic for my constitution, so I…