Today’s TTT is reasons we’re thankful for books, so I’m just going to go with books I’m thankful for for random reasons. But first, a tease. And yes, there are books reviews coming. Maybe in short round form, but they’re a-comin’.

Excessive perspiration was seen not as a sign of impending dehydration but as a social gaffe; ruling over all hot-weather activity was the dictum that horses-sweat–men-perspire–ladies-glow.

Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything

The most potent theories, though, involve religion. This is as it should be because, at the deepest level, every human culture is religious—defined by what its inhabitants believe about some ultimate reality, and what they think that reality demands of them. The reality doesn’t have to be a personal God: It can be the iron laws of Marxism, the religion of blood and soil, the Gaia hypothesis, the church of the free market, the cult of the imperial self. But Bob Dylan had it right: You gotta serve somebody, and every culture does.

Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, Ross Douhat

This marketisation of sexual desire has been under way now since the 1960s. And digital culture has accelerated those ways we’re able to buy sexual stimulation, or sell ourselves as commodities. The resulting hellscape of sexual anomie is the true face of what calls itself ‘sex-positive’ feminism, a movement that doesn’t seem to have prevented Gen Z from slumping into a ‘sex recession’.

Feminism against Progress

And now, thanking!

(1) Isaac Asimov’s Black Widower series, a source of not only fun mysteries to muddle through, but vicarious dinner debate and discussion that I never grow tired of.

(2) P.G. Wodehouse, for his exquisitely playful use of the English language, and his stories which never fail to buoy my spirits.

(3) Bill “Fossicking about in Tramontane Sinkholes ” Kauffman, one of the very few authors who makes me consult a dictionary. This week I’ve extra reasons to be grateful — I spotted a used copy of his last book I’ve not read listed for sale and picked it up. Took ten years to find one that wasn’t priced beyond reasonable limits!

(4) For science writers like V.S. Ramachandran, Carl Sagan, Rob Dunn, and Ed Yong, whose gift for describing and explaining the natural world fills my mind with wonder and awe.

(5) For authors like J.K. Rowling, whose stories filled with charm and courage arrayed against darkness and fear have cheered me for nearly twenty years now.

(6) For authors like Michael Connelly, whose character details frequently lead me to try new music and movies. I only know “”Harlem Nocturne” because of Harry Bosch.

(7) For authors like Daniel Suarez, William Gibson, and Blake Crouch who can take a science or technical concept and expand it into a story that makes me believe for a few moments as though I’m experiencing the future.

(8) For authors like Alain de Botton and Anthony Esolen, who can articulate and express with eloquence feelings I have and can almost see, darting around in my psyche like some ocean fish, but never focus on.

I explained — with the excessive exposition of a man spending a lonely week at the airport — that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.
Manishankar wondered if I might like a magazine instead.”

Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport

(9) For authors like Michael Korda, Albert Marrin, Bernard Cornwell, and Robert Harris — whose nonfictional or fictional offerings make the past come alive again.

And finally,
(10) For authors from Buddha to Wendell Berry whose insights help me understand myself and society better.