This week’s TTT …books we read, loved, but didn’t review.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs. This book completely revolutionized my worldview before I made halfway through. One day I’ll make some meager attempt at reviewing it, but it won’t be sufficient.
Unnatural Selection: How We are Changing Life, Gene By Gene, Emily Monosson. Captivating survey of how nature is adapting to some of humanity’s worst behaviors. Cautious grounds for optimism that nature will continue to survive despite its badly-behaving tenants.
The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy, Michael Foley. I was introduced to this by Cyberkitten, and read it in 2011 It’s at my bedside. I’ve read it three times over the years and am no closer to finding an approach to reviewing it that I like — and I like the book too much to simply dismiss it with an also-read mention.
The Once and Future King, F.H. Buckley. On the rebirth of one-man rule in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the commonwealth countries. Fascinating comparative legal review. I have a review of it long-written, but I keep meaning to re-read the book to fine-tune my thoughts about it.
Brave New World: India, China, and the United States, Anja Manuel. I often cite it but have yet to re-read it for a review. Manuel evaluates the progress and growing influence of India and China in the 21st century, and argues that the US should chart a course that favors neither power over the other.
The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk. My first encounter with Kirk was his The Conservative Mind, which I found thought provoking — I’ve since read several of Kirk’s work, Order among them, but this is the most memorable. Kirk examines the philosophical and moral underpinnings of American governance; Judaism and Stoicism were two of the sources considered, as I remember.
The Way of Men, Jack Donovan. Imagine if Tyler Durden wrote a book …
The Evolution of Everything, Matt Ridley. On emergent order. It’s a deep-topic, and I don’t know that I could do it justice.
The Mind of the Market, Michael Shermer. I read this in 2018, but I must have been distracted — I didn’t even remember to add it to that year’s “What I Read” list!
The Tell Tale Brain, V.S. Ramachandran. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain (read 2006) was one of the first science books to blow my mind, and I was eager to read this one. Despite finishing it soon after release, though, I never got around to reviewing it!
There is hope for these books to be reviewed: over the years, Happy City, Surprised by Joy, and The Cult of the Presidency are all titles which languished unreviewed for years until I did right by them.
I haven’t read any of these! Interesting list you have here.
Happy TTT, here’s mine TTT
I try to keep things mixed up! 😀
Great list!
My Top Ten Tuesday
Heavy-sounding books. I would be cautious about reviewing them, too. Sometimes I just can’t seem to make myself write a review about a book that I love. I wonder now if it is that I am afraid that my review won’t live up to the book itself. Here is my TTT list
That’s exactly my problem with some of these!
Some *really* nice ones there……….. I might add ‘Unnatural Selection’ to my List [grin]
The Way of Men sounds very interesting.
My TTT .
Interesting, scary…Donovan is hard author to settle my opinion on.
I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed non-fiction and I’m not entirely sure why… 😀
It’s more challenging to review than fiction, I think — I can almost always do a quick and easy summary for fiction, but with a lot of these I’m still mulling them over weeks after my first read.
Yes, that’s very true!
I haven’t read these. Several of them sound like pretty heavy topics! Here is my Top Ten Tuesday.
Some heavy reading here, the one by Buckley is timely. https://pmprescott.blogspot.com/2020/08/ttt-081120.html
You know, I didn’t even think about WHY I might not have reviewed certain books. It’s definitely tough to capture some books in a review, especially if they’re complex or hard to describe. I get why you would hesitate to write a review if you felt like there was no way to do a book justice. Makes total sense to me.
Happy TTT!
Susan
http://www.blogginboutbooks.com
What a great list, I really like the look of the Age of Absurdity!
I’m loving these lists! Every one of them is so different. I hadn’t heard of many of these before, so thanks for the recommendations.
My TTT.