WWW Wednesday

WHAT have you finished reading recently? The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South, which was fairly mixed. Some interesting Civil War content that I’m still fact-checking, bookended by fluff.

WHAT are you reading now? Double Star, Bob Heinlein. It’s a quickie so I will probably be done before this post is scheduled, actually. Also 33% through For Cause and Comrades, on what can be gleaned from Civil War combatants’ letters.

WHAT are you reading next? Will continue with For Cause and Comrades, and then more SF.

SciFi Prompt 19: Lost in Translation

If everybody’s answer for this isn’t Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, they’re wrong. I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s just the way it is.

Also on the subject of SF, I watched Source Code last night and really enjoyed it. I can’t say much for fear of spoilers, but let’s say that Jake Gyllenhaal keeps reliving the same eight minutes on a doomed commuter train over and over, and in each attempt is trying to figure out where a bomb is, how to disrupt it, and who planted it. I also watched the 2002 version of The Time Machine, which is so loose an adaptation that all we can say is “There was a guy and he met some people who called themselves Eloi and Morlocks, but Jeremy Irons is the villain so it was ok.” The music was quite nice, though.

Long and Short Reviews Prompt: Books That Shaped Me

This is a subject I have written about before, in a post on authors who have shaped me. Nearly ten years on I suppose it’s nearly time for a considered update, but this prompt is about specific books. Most of these will be familiar if you’ve been around RF for a while, but I’m going to try to throw in less intense/less serious options, too.

1. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs. This book, which I literally announced an annual theme for just to prompt me to re-read it, had completely altered my thinking about everything before I was even a third of the way through. I should note that it will not have that effect on other readers: I’d been reading and thinking about things that this book had a catalytic effect on, making me think about emergent order and the morality of intervention. For most people, this is merely a fascinating book about how cities develop and function.
   
2. Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, Frances and Joseph Gies. This book overturned the snobby Victorian dismissal of the medieval era that my schoolbooks had given me by looking at how technological and intellectual arts flourished in that oft-libeled epoch.
   
3. Building a Bridge to the 18th Century, Neil Postman. I found this book in my local library while looking for books on the Enlightenment, and portions of it led me to Postman’s other works, Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death, which explored the effects of technology on society and people ourselves. I had never thought about this before, beyond reading Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason, and found Postman fascinating. I later read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, and these two men are why I didn’t buy a smartphone until 2018 and why I’m constantly analyzing my engagement with social media, the internet, etc. I keep my open tabs to four or under, when I’m reading an ebook I actively restrain myself from checking email or checking the facebook feed, and so on.
   
4. The Airman’s War, Albert Marrin. I had an interest in WW2 history in high school, but after Marrin made the war come ALIVE in this book and his other WW2 titles (Operation Overlord and Victory in the Pacific), I was obsessive. Marrin made me especially nuts about WW2 aviation, leading to my writing multiple papers in college on WW1 and WW2 aerial warfare, and many museum visits. I am not a car guy, but I’m pretty darn OK at spotting WW2 fighters.
   
5. The Geography of Nowhere by Jim Kunstler was a complete sea change for me, giving me vocabulary to think about issues that had troubled me in a murky way for years. Kunstler’s history of American urbanism — and its death by sprawl in the postwar period — made me start thinking about the importance of the built environment on human flourishing.
   
6. Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam. It’s hard to articulate this book’s effect on me, but I read it during a transitional year and I think it’s an important part of the mix.
   
7. small is beautiful, E.F. Schumacher. Ditto.
   
8. The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis. The book that made me a Lewis fan. I read it, or at least read from it, every Advent.
   
9. The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius. I found this book during a hard moment of life, nearly twenty years ago now, and Stoicism is a vital part of my philosophical & religious biography.
   
10. The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton. I believe a search for Seneca led me to this, and ever since then de Botton has remained one of my favorite authors.