Reading Newsletter

Taking a page out of Ryan Holiday's playbook, I'm writing a Reading Newsletter, a list of books I've read  in the last two months. The goals of sharing this are to a) encourage myself to read more b) hear feedback + book recommendations and c) encourage others to read the same books if they're interested.

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War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace follows the main character, Pierre, through the good, the bad, and the ugly. Tolstoy makes painstaking efforts to show how Pierre is miserable + complacent when comfortable, but happy + heroic when suffering. By displaying how social norms and expectations are imposed on Pierre, the author makes it easy for us to identify with Pierre, and with, I believe, Tolstoy himself. This work of historical fiction also aims to challenge how we view history: History is not the work of individual great men; it is the inexplicable force that causes thousands of men to give up their lives. This book could have been half as long for my liking, but the moments of beauty make the long-read well worth it. Makes me want to read more Russian Literature; what would you recommend next?


Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Reading Kahneman's book sparked a column and an essay for me. This 500 page book is, unfortunately, as my professor summarized nicely "heavy on minutia, short on policy recommendation." It has everything to do with self-knowledge, and little, if anything, to do with self-betterment. Jonah Lehrer called such self knowledge surprisingly useless -- even if you know about your flaws, you can't change them. I don't believe this makes self-knowledge useless, though. I compare it to studying baseball without hitting or pitching. Sure, you won't get that much better till you actually hit or pitch, but when you do, you'll improve faster because you'll have a better idea of what's imortant, what to avoid, what it looks like when you're doing it well, etc. To be fair, I'm evaluating Kahneman on something he never set out to do -- improve human nature. All in all, his book is enjoyable, easily readable, and provided me with new things to think about -- halo effects, base rates, representative biasess, the narrative fallacy, just to name a few -- in daily life.

Upheaval of Thought, by Martha Naussbaum


There are some great thoughts here. Having been a big fan of Seneca, who encourages us, more or less, to get over our emotions, this was a comforting -- or justifying, depending on how you look at it --insight into the value of emotions. Naussbuam states that emotions are expressions of appraisal -- they evaluate the progress of our our personal projects and desires. Kahneman would agree but add the caveat that they -- that is, system 1 + 2 -- need to be trained to understand statistics. our emotions can change when the situation is shown in new light (i.e. your mad at someone but then realize his mom is suffering from a disease and now you're sympathetic and ready to help).  I found her descriptions of erotic love interesting too, seeking explanations and justifications in works of fiction. While Naussbaum has some fantastic insights, this book is a bit hard to get into. To learn about love and the emotions, I'd rather read the works of fiction she analyzes. And i think that's what's next for this month: Proust. Bronte. Dante. Lolita.

To thank Ryan for the idea, i'll close my first newsletter the same way he closes his:

"Like I've said before, I hope that you'll get around to reading whichever of these books catch your eye and that you'll learn as much as I did. Whether you buy them on Amazon today or or at a store six months from now makes no difference to me. You're welcome to email me questions or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of a good book on a related topic, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these books comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.

I promised myself a long time ago that if I saw a book that interested me I'd never let time or money or anything else prevent me from having it. This means that I treat reading with a certain amount of respect. All I ask, if you decide to email me back, is that you're not just thinking aloud. Enjoy these books, treat your education like the job that it is, and let me know if you ever need anything."