"The best way to absorb the contents of the book is to copy it manually." - Jorge Carrión
Instead of focusing on the best books published in 2018, my tradition is to revisit the best books I read in 2018. To do this I pull out a year's worth of scribbling on notecards that have been repurposed from a variety of sources. These might include promotional postcards from restaurants, travel postcards, etc.
Moreover, if I add a page number to my notes, it works as an index, does it not? Upon completion, I either stick the card in the book for future reference or place it in a card file.
This method looks better than using a highlighter or a pen to mark up the book and when I revisit the cards, it’s like getting a brief refresher on what I read. (The complete list of what I read, examined, skimmed and studied can be found in the right margin of The Book Shopper home page. ) I like to think of it as an eclectic list, but I did discover some shared themes. Here are some topics that emerged. I have embedded some links to relevant earlier postings as well.
Slow-reads. Last year, Doublethink/Doubletalk: Naturalizing Second Thoughts & Twofold Speech (2016) by Eva Brann made the list. This year I am moseying through her earlier and similar book Open Secrets/Inward Prospects: Reflections on World and Soul (2003). This book of aphorisms ranging from travel to ethics to conduct to passion to kookiness breaks the postcard model, so I enter my favorites into a Mead bound notebook. In an ever maddening world (note my worrisome facial expression) Brann offers a seamless mix of wisdom, humor, and philosophy.
A little less demanding but equally entertaining and thought provoking was Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (2016) by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, which I wrote about here. What makes this book doubly appealing is that it uses computer science as a launching point to discuss how the logic of computing can assist our human thought processes as we try to manage daily problems.
Vietnam Books (plus). In 2017, the toughest book to read in length and just general sadness on the destruction and waste in Vietnam was Neil Sheehan’s: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988), which I wrote an essay about for the Tropics of Meta blog. This year, I followed up the experience via two books: Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer (2016), and David Halberstam's The Longest Winter: America and the Korean War (2008). Admittedly, I am not much of a fiction reader, but as I wrote earlier the Nguyen book is "cutting, emotional, funny and relevant." In the case of the latter, the Korean War was a precursor to the Vietnam war in some respect. The need to stop Communism (North Korea backed by China) from overrunning South Korea and threatening Japan, troops had to be sent in immediately. In Vietnam - though this was the same rationale -- the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in the beginning were more interested in ridding their homeland of colonialists (the French and the United States ) than adhering to Communist doctrine. Like all wars, there was such a waste of lives of combatants and noncombatants alike, but somehow Vietnam when compared to Korea was much worse. A complete essay about the Halberstam book appears in the Tropics of Meta blog as well.
Books about Books. Several books that I read in 2018 fall into this broad category. One of the more obvious is Jorge Carrión's Bookshops A Reader's History (2017), which received a blog shout out last month and another is Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), which I read in part after revisiting some books about World War I in remembrance of Armistice Day. Fusssell deep dives into the literature and poetry of The Great War, which is the first major war where the combatants were somewhat educated. And finally, an honorable mention goes Nicholson Baker's The Way the World Works: Essays (2012) which includes his musings on how he keeps track of his favorite passages using his dot method, which I am including below. (Click on the photo to improve readability)
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.