I try to read a lot of books. Mostly nonfiction. Mostly in my interests, so I tend to finish them. But some I never get through, because of time or it doesn’t hit me at the right time.
I still often get a few takeaways from what i start. Here are a few of those.
A few notes:
- Life Ascending by Nick Lane (2010): The Anthropic principle, by Fred Hoyle snd Francis Crick, suggests that life may have landed on earth; Christian deDuve, life is chemistry and chemical reactions must happen fast so life should evolve fast or not at all
- 21st Century Monetary Policy by Ben Bernanke (2022): I appreciated his influence on how much more transparent the Federal Reserve Bank has become since the 1990s.
- The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present by Phillip Lotate (2020): I didn’t read all the essays in this 900-page collection of 100 essays from American writers but I sure liked the concept. I got it from the library and extended it the maximum three times but couldn’t quite do it. I didn’t read it linearly but kept bouncing between thinkers — Cotten Mather and Alexander Hamilton, Frederick Douglass and Lincoln’s second inaugural, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde and Nora Ephron, David Foster Wallace (9/11 piece). Likely the line that sticks with me most is Audre Lorde’s chilling: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the masters house.”
- “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman (1988): This is so important and so relevant that I must finish it. It’s on my bookshelf, and I’ve picked it up several times over many years. I will finish it someday. Until then, it does read as very focused on big national and global mass media, and not quite the bit players of local and community media, but there’s overlap. As they write: “The larger the mass audience, the less freedom the journalist has.”