Various books - November 2023 to January 2024

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Over the holidays I have been reading over the second brain concept and this blog does go in that direction, but it is a bit too unorganized. I still do not want to drop it, but it has to be recognized that it is write-only - it just helps me remembering things, but it is not an useful catalogue. Another step is necessary to make the notes accessible. Meanwhile, this imperfect solution is better than nothing at all - again I will just post a list of small notes.

The fourth turning is here - N. Howe

This is one of few books with a genuine idea behind it - something you might disagree with, but original and fresh and new. They are very rare, so they need to be treasured, and they are useful even if the theory ends up being wrong - the same way a theorem might become with time useless, but the techniques used to prove it useful somewhere else.

The basic idea here is the following: if you take a human culture and let it develop freely (without neighbours attacking it, without a natural catastrophe wiping it out), it will spontaneously spawn cyclical generations. There is a cycle of four archetypes that occur one after the other, as an example of such culture the author takes primarily the U.S.A., which developed as the most powerful nation in a continent without menacing neighbours.

I am not sure how much of it really holds, and I do not really think there is anything scientific about it - if this is anything, it is like Galileo trying to measure the speed of light by shouting when he saw light coming from a hill nearby - too rudimental and inappropriate (the whole story is: a friend of Galileo goes to a hill far away with a covered lantern; then uncovers the lantern; then wait for Galileo’s shout; the time between uncovering the lantern and the shout should have been an estimate for the speed of light. I do not remember the source for the story and certainly I will not list all the reasons why the experiment is absurd. But it’s the best he could do and warrants respect for trying and registering the attempt). I like that both this book and Nate Silver’s The signal and the noise use the same quote “The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” and then proceed to explain that clearly one of the two animals is better. They of course did not select the same animal.

The fifth sun - C. Townsend

I read this some time ago and did not mark one single page. I found it now again going through the books I read recently. What I do remember is that it taught me that something I thought true was wrong - that the natives thought the Spanish were gods. This is apparently something the Spanish themselves taught them, rewriting history at its best - and it worked! I also remember the chapter about Montezuma and his character. It is a good book but I am not sure why one would want to read it. I mean, I would also surely learn a lot from a book about lettuce.

Le formiche tagliafoglie - B. Hölldobbler, E. O. Wilson

I was very happy about this book, because it is from the same author of The Superorganism and it deals with the same species of ants dealt with in detail in The Superorganism. It looked familiar, and at the end I discovered from a note that this book is in fact a somewhat extended version of a chapter in The Superorganism, which I thus now read in two languages. Still very interesting, did not mark any page mostly because the paper is so nice and I did not want to ruin it.

Feline philosophy - J. Gray

In the end this is not markedly about cats but still a pleasant read (I still shudder remembering that book about philosophy of birds that went like “birds fly, this teaches us that we should take things lightly” or stuff like that). I just went through the pages I marked and they are interesting and well written, but there is not much worth retyping.

The goldfinch - D. Tartt

I waited a while before buying another book by Donna Tartt because I was in awe with The secret history and I did not want to spoil the experience of reading a new book. And this is also an excellent read, EXCEPT it is essentially the same book. It’s like seeing twice the same magic trick - I do not know how it’s done and I could not make it myself, but I know that at the end there’s going to be a rabbit pulled out of the hat.

Pages I marked:

La giornata d’uno scrutatore - I. Calvino

Not much to say about this one except that I do not think it aged well. There is also something in the way it is written - every word is heavy, as if it were poetry, but it is prose, so it just does not flow. I liked how some characters are perfectly defined by THREE WORDS perfectly picked, but this is more admirable than enjoyable.

A wrinkle in time - M. L’Engle

The incipit “It was a dark and stormy night”, which is reason enough to read it (it isn’t). The other interesting thing is that this is sci-fi from 1962, and it is per se interesting to see what people thought fantascientific (?) meant. The clearest example of this - or rather, the limits that appears only in hindsight - are all the sci-fi books where incredible things happen but invariably women are relegated to the kitchen. I liked the quote “we can’t take any credit for our talents”. One of the things foreseen from the author is an e-bike, one of the things not (as of now) foreseen are the pegasus shaped aliens singing hymns to the Lord. I hope this will not happen during my lifetime.

The turn of the screw - H. James

I must have bought this book fifteenish years ago, I found it again at home during the holidays. The only thing I remembered about it is that it was in its times the first example of a psychological horror. Now I think the term “horror” would not really apply nowadays, but it is interesting that (spoiler?) it is a ghost story where it is never clear if the ghosts are real or just in the head of the narrator, which is of course quite a modern thing. The book was published in 1898 a puntate, which could also be deducted from the gratuitous cliffhangers at the end of every chapter. There was this one sentence which really aged like milk, where the narrator (a woman) praises the character of a boy by observing at how he behaves with his own sister: “What surpassed everything was that there was a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior age, sex and intelligence so fine a consideration”. What is somehow depressing is that one could write a sentence like this in a story and nobody would bat an eye, but well.

The black tulip - A. Dumas

This title is quoted in the (excellent) Botany of desire by M. Pollan, and I quite liked it reading it, and halfway through it I thought it was incredible that a real story could have so much of a novel, at which point I got suspicious - but I still waited until the very end to check that it was all in fact completely made up (starting from a real historical basis). I think this is the kind of literature that was killed by cinema first and portable screens afterwards - somebody making up an entertaining story. Okay, but then I would rather watch the events than reading somebody telling them. It is missing in depth, is my impression, not because of incapacity of the author, but because it would be out of place. Strong “okay but I could live without” vibes - from today’s perspective.

Abel - A. Baricco

I listened to Wild Baricco and Baricco was going on about this book, I ended up buying it (to the marketing team: it worked!). Also here, a bit of Donna Tartt’s feeling that I am looking again at the same trick - with Baricco it takes ten books to realize instead of two and it is not so easy to describe it, but you read and then just feel that it is the same thing going on again. And not in a Ken Follett, tongue-in-cheek kind of way where the fact that it is always the same is essentially the selling point of the book. I liked the description of one of the characters: “geometrica nel pensare e visionaria nel credere”.

La morte della Pizia - F. Dürrenmatt

I have it (now) also in German but I’m thankful I did not start off with the German version. It is a beautiful story because it has a twist - something Borgesian to it, now that I think about it. And it is a reflection about the meaning and substance of truth. I looked up a quote in the German version, here goes: Die Wahrheit ist nur insofern, als wir sie in Ruhe lassen. The final pages are worth rereading again and again.

The Odissey - Homer

I do not really want to write notes about the Odissey. The only thing I want to note down is that I really like this translation, by Emily Wilson. I am looking forward to the Iliad!