In November, I read very broadly, with fiction, history, philosophy and a collection of short stories. As always, please do reach out with all your suggestions. I'd like to say a special thanks for the recommendations of The Righteous Mind and also On Tyranny, both were excellent reads.
Without further ado, I present the November Reading List.
I particularly enjoyed the tale of the chap who decided he wanted to upload himself into a computer and live forever, sure... this isn't particularly original but it did look at some of the moral questions surrounding such a decision. By far the most disturbing story was the one of the "Lost Souls", where newborn babies were born as lifeless beings as the number of available "souls" for earth had been exceeded, leading to all kinds of crazed attempts by wannabe parents to secure their child's soul.
Not all the stories are quite so dark, the story to give its title to the book "Why Visit America" was about a town which decided to secede from the rest of the USA. In reality, everybody ignored this small town since it didn't change any of the rules so it had "seceded" in name only, and actually had no legal right to do so. It was more just like a commune of people who had decided to live alone.
On the whole, I highly enjoyed this book, it's quite witty and some of the stories are very poignant and can prompt some serious thinking about what would happen in these rather perverse situations. It's definitely a good read, and if you don't like long books, this is for you since they are all short stories.
What I particularly like about The Righteous Mind is the author's complete honesty about his own wrestlings with his political views - starting off as a typical university liberal, and then having to cede some ground to conservative viewpoints in certain areas. My favourite quote from the book is below:
"I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject "intelligent design" as the explanation for design and adaption in the natural world, but they don't embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaption in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the "intelligent design" of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster..."
The key takeaway from the book for me is that I now at least have some understanding of why Republican voters in the USA (and increasingly the "New" Conservative voters in the UK) continuously vote for politicians who pursue policies which hurt them. It's not because they are failing to reason, it's because they are a) prioritising more than just economic welfare and b) their views of "morality" and "righteousness" are probably different to yours.
Haidt delights in dilemmas like whether it is morally wrong for a woman to cut up an American flag nobody sees or flies and use it as toilet paper. This is where we find the difference between the liberals and conservatives.
All-in-all, this is wlel worth a read. Buy the Kahneman, then read this. The two link beautifully together.
I bought this book almost a year ago and I've only just got around to reading it now... and it's well worth a read. Snyder draws extensively on the tyrannical rules of the twentieth century - namely under Hitler and Stalin - to illustrate the key places where we can help to stop the rise of future tyrants.
For me the biggest lesson was on institutions. There was often a false belief in these societies that because institutions had been the way Hitler climbed to power, they could also be the way that power was taken away. Obviously, when institutions are weak and subject to reform, this can be a very dangerous society indeed. Likewise, when leaders try to use "extreme circumstances" to justify "temporary" extreme measures, these should be treated with great suspicion. The COVID-19 pandemic leaps to mind as an area where we have had an unprecedented expansion of powers of the state. The key is to ensure these measures are simply temporary.
This one is short and well worth a read. It's also going on my regular reader list (the only other book to get that honour is Galbraith's The Great Crash).
Regular readers will remember that in the September Reading List I read "The Return of a King" by the same author, and I lauded huge praise on it as a fantastic work of non-fiction. I am going to say that this book on the EIC is even better. This is simply fantastically written, it's gripping, and the characters of this rather complex story are always portrayed with great fairness and clarity. Often, I have found it difficult to keep track of key "characters" in history literature, but this is clear-cut and understandable.
Dalrymple's narrative of the EIC is simply addictive and riveting and he takes us through all aspects of the story, from the initial conquesting, to battles with the French, and later to the atrocities such as at the catastrophic famines which occurred under EIC supervision. For anyone remotely interested in this period of history, or the making and breaking of the British Empire, this is critical reading.
The story is simple, a man flees from his home after Kristallnacht and takes train after train trying to hide his Jewish identity and flee Germany. This book is absolutely gripping and equally terrifying. All of his previous friends and colleagues abandon Otto in the central story, and he is left to fend for himself with only a few marks in his pocket, I won't give any spoilers, but I ploughed through this book in no time at all.
I highly recommend this to anyone, and if you read On Tyranny before reading, it becomes all the more prescient and frightening. For anyone interested, the actual story of Boschwitz himself is rather interesting too, and although he was lucky enough to get out of Germany in 1936, he was unlucky enough to be on a ship which was torpedoed by Germans in 1942. Nonetheless, the story of Otto in The Passenger is compelling, and please don't fall into the trap that this is no longer relevant, because I assure you, it is. Definitely in my top 5 fiction reads of the year!
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And so we reach the end of this month's reading list. In December, I am going to be reading very widely once more. It is Christmas, so there will be a few less serious books in there (like the latest Jack Reacher book) and also the usual array of history and academia.
I'll be reading Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, the latest Jack Reacher, The Human Swarm by Mark Moffett, The British are Coming by Rick Atkinson, and, perhaps the most nerdy of the month, The Federation Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay.
Please do keep your recommendations coming, I know I'm a bit behind on them, but I promise I will get to them all in the end :)
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