Being Interested: Amateur Reports on Books and Ideas

Philosopher and intellectual-of-quite-a-few trades Joseph Heath hasn’t found the time recently to post anything to his blog In Due Course (well, not his blog as such, but a blog he regularly contributes to). I’m not paranoid enough to think that this is because I left a very ill-tempered comment on his most recent post all the way back in May. But still...anything is possible. But luckily he hasn’t been completely off the radar, giving this keynote speaker address at a Canadian college in the beginning of October and in the process dropping the real reason for his absence from his blog (he's writing a book on climate change):  It’s only been viewed about a hundred times, and the one comment amusingly notes that Heath is a much better writer than a speaker. It is true that Heath talks a lot like a highly enthusiastic IT service officer, and he did drop the interesting biographical detail that he was interested in AI design when he was still in his “anarchist phase”. (Th

There are some books where even getting through the publisher’s blurb is a chore. Others you discover in the first ten or twenty pages are not worth reading. Within the category of books that you end up having a good relationship with, however, it is possible to create sub-categories and/or rankings. This is because while you get to read many interesting books in a lifetime, there are a select few that are unusually stimulating and pleasurable all the way through . It's been possible for me over the years to extract many great ideas, insights, observations, facts and general information from books that nonetheless had dull, forgettable and even disagreeable passages. As an example, recently I’ve been reading quite a bit about the welfare-state capitalist model favoured by social democratic parties in the twentieth century. While there’s a lot of great stuff in these books – stuff that allows me to call myself a social democrat with some understanding of what that means – I can’t

It's a frustratingly apt cliche that there’s too much out there for us to consume, and this is no less true with the realm of books. With the kind of books I tend to read – semi-serious non-fiction (history, politics, sociology, philosophy and economics) – the paradoxical evolution is that the more you read the more ignorant you feel. This sounds counter-intuitive because learning what you previously did not know should justifiably eradicate any ignorance you had. But this almost never works out when reading books in the social sciences and history. Books tend to reference other books, which are themselves dependent upon the research of other books, and so on. Never do you feel that you have a complete grasp of any branch of knowledge when you’re constantly being referred to other branches of knowledge that you feel you should know by now.  What most of the books I've given up have in common is that they are very long. Reading long books is exactly the same as reading short b