Being Interested: Amateur Reports on Books and Ideas

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