Today’s TTT is posts that most exemplify ourselves, which is…er, quite the challenge when I have over 3500 posts from the last seventeen years available here. I’m just going to try to think of ten characteristics of this blog in general.

But first, a tease!

“Margery Benson,” Margery said out loud. “You have delivered a baby. Now where is your gumption? Drive a car.” (Miss Benson’s Beetle, Rachel Joyce)

A few, who had happened to be looking that way, saw the mushroom cloud climb over Hiroshima. But they had then been in the mad camp at Omuta, where an insane Japanese captain with a mania for baseball kept the diarrhea patients running bases in a lavatory league of his own.(First into Nagasaki. George Weller; edited by his son Anthony Weller.)

In Java, the prison enclosure at Bandoeng had two sets of captives: 5,000 men, Allied military, and 1,200 ducks, Javanese. By a system of ruses the Allied prisoners, who were always hungry, found a way of stealing the eggs laid in captivity by their fellow prisoners. Egg production went down 50%. The commandant blamed the ducks. He studied their lives and reached the conclusion that they were dissolute and frivolous. One day he ordered all the ducks to be driven off their ponds and arranged before him in as orderly a fashion as frightened ducks could be. Then, roaring at the top of his voice, he delivered them a lecture. “Your egg production is down, do you understand?” he shouted. “And why has it fallen? It is not for lack of food. Do not tell me you are starving. You eat well. But you are not like Japanese ducks. You are lazy. You simply do not wish to lay. You are insubordinate ducks, obstructionist ducks. Well, I have a cure for that. For two days you will go on half rations.” (Ibid)

And now, the content.

(1) Cities. I’m fascinated by cities. I began playing city-sims in 1997, from historical likes like Pharaoh to modern builders like SimCity 3000 and Cities Skylines. I’ve read a lot about cities over the years, not just because they interest me from an academic point of view, but because I believe strongly that the built environment has a huge impact on the quality of our lives. Happy City by Charles Montgomery was written to that effect.

(2) Human flourishing. Relatedly, a consistent theme in this blog has been the study and pursuit of Eudaimonia. It’s not simply ‘happiness’, because happiness is fleeting and can be artificially induced with drugs. By human flourishing, I mean a state wherein we are not only not miserable, but one in which we’re both fully alive and growing — growing in virtue, growing as people. To that end I read a lot of books, sometimes analyzing things that diminish flourishing (consumerism, addiction, etc), or studying works like The Meditations that have offer tools for moving towards flourishing. Alain de Botton is a frequent source of insight, as not only has he done philosophical reviews himself, but he writes wonderfully meditative pieces on the meaning of work, of travel, even of architecture. One of the most impactful books I’ve read in this vein has been E.F. Schumacher’s small is beautiful.

(3) Relatedly, tech-wariness has also been a running theme on this blog, as far back as ’08 when I read Al Gore’s Assault on Reason, followed by Neil Postman’s works: Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows was not long afterward, and of course last year I did several books on social media’s shape on our mental health and society in general. People who know me IRL may be surprised at this, because I’m generally considered a ‘techie’: I do IT work at the library, I constantly take IT classes via Coursera, I used to mod my computer, that sort of thing. I don’t want to dive into the deep end here, but suffice it to say I’m aware of how technological use shapes us, and not necessarily in good ways. We get phones and suddenly subscribe to the notion that everyone should always been available; we get used to the internet and AI and begin losing our ability to engage in deep, focused mental work; we get on social media and transform into nasty, vile versions of ourselves. That’s not to say that they can’t help the cause of flourishing, but people have to fight to make that happen — aggressively, persistently. All of the inertia is in the opposite direction, I think.

(4) Annnd in a completely different vein, Star Trek. I’ve been a Trekkie since I was seven, when I caught an episode of the original series in a hospital bedroom. The 1990s and very early 2000s were a great time to get into Trek, because TNG, DS9, and VOY all shared the same design language. There were obvious differents in sets, of course, but there was consistency and continuity with the uniforms, ships, LCARs system. etc . As a kid I’m pretty sure I was mostly attracted to the cool tech, but by high school had begun to appreciate the series for their exploration of serious questions, and the complex moral dramas of Deep Space Nine . I will never forget the episode “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges” in which Dr. Bashir, furious over actions Starfleet Intelligence was taking to help the war effort, asked if it were possible to defend values through means that undermined them. That question would become more important to me after the terror war began a few years later. I’m currently doing a rewach of The Original Series that will become a rewatch of All of Star Trek, as time & such allow.

(5) History, of course, has been my passion since I was a kid. I enjoy both serious, critical histories as well as the more fun narrative histories like La Belle France Among my favorite histories are those by Frances and Joseph Gies, who did social histories of the medieval era. I stumbled upon their The Medieval City and have since read nearly everything they’ve written. Their Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel prompted a sea-change in my thinking, breaking me out of the William Manchester view that the medieval period was just a thousand years of peasants pushing around mud. One of the most monumental things I’ve read during the tenure of this blog has been the Story of Civilization series, over ten thousand pages exploring every aspect of Western (and adjacent) civilization. I say adjacent, because the series begins in Mesopotamia, and Persia is explored deeply in The Age of Faith despite the focus shifting to Europe.

(6) I’ve been reading science nonstop since 2006: when I began, it was to establish a scientifically literature worldview, because I’d departed from a Pentecostal sect that embraced Young Earth Creationism, that sort of thing. I was still deep into that project in 2007, when I began this blog: I believe it remains the only year in which Science beat out history. These days my science reading is organized via the Science Survey, structured to maintain a broad general knowledge. Sone of my favorite science reads have been V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain, Carl Sagan’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World, and The Hidden Life of Trees.

(7) Historical fiction is a mainstay here, and this may one of its strongest years to date, becaue in addition to my ususal shooty-stabby stuff, I’ve been reading other books that are HF, like The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club. Bernard Cornwell is king there, though in recent years I’ve really been enjoying Ben Kane and Max Hennessey.

(8) Science fiction is another persistently strong presence here, and that would be the case even outside of Star Trek, which I generally don’t count in my SF reads. That probably ties to my frequent thinking about technology and science. Easily my favorite SF book in recent years has been Daniel Suarez’s DAEMON, but Blake Crouch knocked me off my feet last year.

(9) Transportation. As mentioned last week or the week before, I love transportation. That sounds weird, but — well, I generally qualify as weird. Not only do I read books about planes, trains, and automobiles — and horses and shipping and bicycles — but I play games like American Truck Simulator and Cities in Motion which are transport-oriented.

(10) And finally, the unexpected. Reading Freely has always been a topic-diverse blog, and I often roar off on unexpected tangents like my presidential obsession last year, my “books set in coffeeshops and bookstories” series earlier this year, and then the wholly inexplicable appearance of romances (or “love stories”) this year.