Some formatting issues occurred in the original 2025 Readings post and I don't know html so I can't fix it. So I'm gonna make this post the place where I try and start again. Stuff will follow ...
I read most of This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress.
The first few essays all pretty much said the same thing: there is no Theory of Everything. After reading the first essay, the following essays fell flat-- the point had already been made. ... And the redundancy of essay topics truly blunted the edginess of any attempt at a novel argument. ... I will spare you my frustration about the jargon-filled and ego-laden, pseudo-arguments made in most of the essays – at least for now. On a positive note, a few of the essays did teach us something new, and made us think deeper, drawing us to lines of thought far-removed from our typical work and interests. Like Infinity by Max Tegmark! Who knew there is more than one type of infinity?! The essay on Entropy by Bruce Parker was similarly notable. It tackled a complex problem and was able to put in words the typical confusion many have when grappling with the concept of entropy, which measures the amount of disorder in a system. The idea also actually seems radical, and it is one of which I have never before heard. ... Notice that you don't need to own the book to read the essays, they are all freely available on edge.org.
The book had some good stuff. Apparently there's nothing to the idea that the language you speak molds your brain differently from people who speak a different language. I'm going to have to dig deeper into the ideas presented in Ross Anderson's "Some Questions Are Too Hard For Young Scientists To Tackle." But this is the sort of book you read when you have a lot of time to sit and think and read further. At least some of the essays, the interesting ones.
2025/07/01
I got 500 pages into The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson. Somebody else requested it from the library so I had to return it.
Wilson really knows how to convey a mass of information clearly and eloquently. Great book.
From the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, brutal warfare swept across Europe. In his monumental study of the causes and the consequences of the Thirty Years War, Wilson, a professor of history at the University of Hull in England, challenges traditional interpretations of the war as primarily religious. He explores instead the political, social, economic as well as religious forces behind the conflict—for example, an Ottoman incursion left the Hapsburg Empire considerably weakened and overshadowed by the Spanish empire. ... Wilson's scholarship and attention to both the details and the larger picture make his the definitive history of the Thirty Years War.
Next I hope to insert a quote from a Reddit review that I saw a couple of days ago:
One of the tricky things that bedevil the social sciences in pop culture is that a little knowledge about a topic can often be worse than no knowledge at all. Humans and the societies they build are mind-bogglingly complex; surface-level understandings are inherently reductive. OK, that’s by necessity. But then you throw in human tendencies to pattern-match, or frame things through their own ideological lens, or replace a foreign context with their own, and things get warped even further.
This isn’t just a problem with laymen: Wilson himself notes that much of the history of the 30 Years War was written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an age of nationalism and centralized nation-states, in which a multi-ethnic/linguistic/confessional entity that looked to have been vomited onto a map of Central Europe seemed hopelessly obsolete to historians. German historians in particular blamed the Holy Roman Empire for all the then-current ills of Germany at the time of writing.
The great success of this book is the way it unravels the overarching narratives and simplifications of popular memory of the 30 Years War. Principally this is done through very liberal doses of context; the book takes up more than a quarter of its massive length in addressing both its causes (while stressing its non-inevitability), as well as investing time in the periphery (if you would like to know more about the metallurgy and export of Dutch cannons, this is the book for you). Thanks to engaging writing it rarely drags though, and the drama is compelling.
There you go.
2025-07-19
I read The Three Musketeers by Aleandre Dumas.
This book (or stories based on it, including a cartoon series) had been a big part of my childhood. Also, when I got around to watching "Django Unchained" and being surprised to find out that Dumas was Black. So, when I saw a copy of it for sale at BMV I picked it up. I glanced at the back cover. "All for one! And one for all!" I remember hearing that pretty frequently as a kid.
It was funny how my last book about the Thirty Years War included events mentioned in Dumas' book. I hadn't planned that.
Anyway, I agreed pretty much with the sentiments expressed in the review I linked to. I was surprised to read how much Dumas celebrated the aristocratic ethos of violent braggarts who thought nothing of not paying for what they took if they had no money, of killing someone over an insult, fucking other men's wives, and etcetera.
I was kind of hoping that Milady DeWinter would have a reconciliation with Athos. But when she poisoned D'Artagnan's girlfriend I knew it was all over.
2025-08-03
Yesterday afternoon I finished Tom Drury's 1994 novel The End of Vandalism.
I bought some t-shirts at "National Thrift" on Lawrence Avenue East and then I went to the Goodlife Fitness gym in the same plaza and I put on one of the t-shirts (a "large") and found that the neck was unacceptably tight. So after my workout I went back to the thrift store and exchanged it for another shirt. But the new shirt was one dollar less in price so they forced me to buy something else for a dollar. They said paperback books were a dollar. So The End of Vandalism looked like the best thing for me and that's how I ended up with it.
Anyway, the novel is about some people living in a fictional, midwest rural county. The three main characters are Louise (the independent-minded beauty), Tiny, her ne'er do well husband, and Dan Norman, the laid-back county sherrif. Louise breaks up with Tiny and eventually marries Dan.
It was apparently Drury's debut novel. I thought it was okay. I think that he described lots of interesting characters and their stories. The guy at Kirkus Reviews says it needed more of a plot. But that wasn't the problem that I had with it. For me, it was how Drury would introduce a LOT of other characters without much of a description and almost everybody in the novel is a person of few words. So, you don't really remember them and then three or four new ones are introduced and then an old one returns and I was like: "Wait. Who is this again?"
I came to know Louise's mother, Mary, because she popped-up quite frequently. I eventually remembered that Albert Robeshaw was the youngest child of the Robeshaw's and that he had a touching love-affair with the Taiwanese exchange student Lu Chiang. (I always remembered who Lu Chiang was for some reason.) I remembered Dr. Pickett the ob-gyn doctor from the get-go. I guess it was because she had a commanding personality in her introductory scene.
I liked how it meandered and the reviewer does mention something pretty clever that went right over my head. The different experiences of the infant Quinn and Dan and Louise's daughter Iris.
I might as well also admit that I read Derf Backderf's Trashed.
It's a pretty good portrayal of the disgusting job of trash collection that also serves as an indictment of our wasteful, throw-away culture.
And at last Sunday's Comic Jam, I won a copy of Marc Bell's Stroppy.
It was as enjoyable as all Marc Bell's books. I'm glad that I once got to shake his hand say "Big fan! Big fan!"
In reading his comics, one almost sees Bell as less an artist crafting a narrative than as an anthropologist dutifully observing and recording the goings-on of the cultures that happen to inhabit his brain. Another influence seems to be Will Elder in terms of the incredible detail and many "eye pops" (or "chicken fat", as Elder called) that can be found in every panel of Bell's work. Bell piles joke upon joke upon joke, providing callbacks to his own comics as well as references to the wider culture (pop and otherwise). Despite the frenzied energy of each panel, Bell counteracts that mania with languid, casual interactions. Conversations between characters can go on for pages. There's a sense of the characters just hanging out as Bell observes them doing their thing.
There.
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