Tag: Books

2020 Holiday reading and beyond

Posted on by Razib Khan

Over at Substack someone asked if L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s works from the 1990’s are worth reading. I had to say, sadly, that probably not. It’s 2020, and they’re just too out of date.

If you haven’t, you should read David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. It’s already a little out of date, partly due to work from his own lab, but it’s mostly on-point. If you haven’t read it, do so. I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to read this book, because you can “hum” through the statistical genetics parts if that’s not your cup of tea. If you aren’t into history, the statistical genetics is still interesting unless you are deeply involved in this field.

Adam Rutherford’s A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes is also pretty good and relatively up-to-date.

In 2017 I posted about books you should read. I began to think about stuff I’ve read since then that has stuck with me. First and foremost, Imperial China, 900–1800. This is an excellent big-think book that will stay with you, and covers the period that really helps you understand modern China today.

An older book that I always recommend people, When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the “Riches of the East”. I think this book is relevant since we increasingly live in a multipolar world that’s recentering on Asia.

Another book that is essential reading is The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. It’s an excellent environmental history that illuminates a topic most of us are interested in. Additionally, there are facts that are important to know. The author claims that pandemics are really a feature of the broad empires that arose around 0 A.D., while the Neolithic was characterized by endemic local outbreaks.

Outside of my usual domains, John Keay’s Midnight’s Descendents is a quick and readable history of India after 1947. Key is a writer who produces pretty good histories for laypeople, so I recommend most of his books

The First Farmers of Europe is a good academic book for non-academics. I found it via Peter Turchin. No fancy man, lots of facts. Just go slow is what I suggest.

Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not is another book I’d recommend to people despite it being academic. This work changed my priors a bit on the importance of ideology (perhaps more important than I’d thought).

I haven’t read many “dinosaur books” since I was a kid. But The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World is one of those I have. I highly recommend it despite its academic perspective.

Walter Scheidel is one of those scholars where I would recommend being a completist. He has a lot to say, and it’s novel. I can’t recommend Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity enough.

I don’t plan on reading much about the Reformation in the future, as I’ve read a lot in the past. But Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World was worth reading.

If you haven’t read Joe Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, do so. It’s not necessarily going to convince you. But, it’s a place where you need to be to start a discussion about all things “Great Divergence.” Even if you think it’s full of crap, it’s something you’re going to have to engage. On the whole, I think your mileage will vary based on the portions of the book you agree or disagree with.

Of the fathers of population genetics, J. B. S. Haldane had the most interesting biography. So if that interests you, I would check out A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane.

Stuart Ritchie is always worth reading. So check out Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth if you get a chance.

Richard Eaton’s India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 is important to read even if you aren’t interested in India. It illustrates global and cosmopolitan culture in a non-Western context. As the European West becomes less of the universal culture of the modern age, it will be useful to know about the past when it wasn’t as well.

Then, there is One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Why am I recommending this? I think some of you should “hate-read” this. At some point, it is quite likely in the next decade that the “woke” wave will break, and we’ll be back to dealing with neoliberal shills like Matt Yglesias as the “Left” party. Instead of language games, there will be real policy direct from on high.

This is useful in the same way reading theology is useful. You may think it’s nonsense, but people take nonsense seriously. Honestly, I’m not sure if this is the best book to read if you already agree broadly with neoliberalism. But then again, I don’t read books for personal validation.

As a bonus, my favorite book from the 1980s. And from the 1990s. And 2000s. Not a surprise to long-time readers…perhaps.

And finally, I’m no longer the youngest obsessive reader in my line, so here are a few recommendations from the elementary-aged Khans for your own younger kids or grandkids.

My eldest raced through Sayantani DasGupta’s The Serpent’s Secret and Game of Stars when she found them (no ethnocentrism here… she picked them up based on the cover) and was proud to be the first on the waiting list at the library when the Chaos Curse released this spring.

She has also adored the Mysterious Benedict Society series.

Her highest recommendation though is for linguist and prolific author Donna Jo Napoli‘s mythology series. The National Geographic editions are oversized, beautifully produced and lushly illustrated by Christina Balit. Napoli comes at each project with a scholar’s delight in small details. There are frequent sidebars about the geographical settings depicted, historical and biological references and the linguistic considerations Napoli made in translating. So far, my restless child who won’t even so much as look at an ordinary book she’s already read has circled back and reread these editions cover-to-cover as many as five times each. Her favorites in order are Tales from the Arabian Nights, Treasury of Greek Mythology, Treasury of Egyptian Mythology, Treasury of Norse Mythology. The only one she has left is Treasury of Bible Stories.

One of her siblings meanwhile is dabbling in the deep-thinking currents of our time, with all the subtlety of early elementary school. His simplistic pronouncements, alas, are almost indistinguishable from what that great eminence of 2020 gifts us with here.

Ten books to read on the island

Posted on by Razib Khan

I mentioned offhand earlier today that Jacques Gernet’s A History of Chinese Civilization is one of the top ten books I’d read. I’ve read this book three or four times that I recall. It’s incredible, and I obviously I’ve only read it in translation.

But this prompted a question: what are the other nine books?

OK, so I’ve given it some thought. I’ll try and balance it out in a disciplinary sense, but I’ll list them now.

Obviously, A History of Chinese Civilization is first. But second? Most of you will not be surprised that I would put Principles of Population Genetics on the list. I still remember reading the third edition front to back the first time in 2004. Yes, I had some knowledge of population genetics before then, but only in fragments. This is the text that opened up a whole new world. Genomics has changed things since the last edition, but the basic principles are the same.

What next? At around the same time that I was diving deeply into the Hartl & Clark book, I read Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. The first time I tried to read this book, in 2003, I felt it was incredibly pretentious and dense. The second time, in 2004, I made my way through it, albeit slowly. It’s not an easy book to read because there are a lot of concepts the author throws at you.

On the whole, I think In Gods We Trust is essential reading to understanding religion, but I’ve also moved a bit further than this, in large part because of the field of cultural evolution. But you need to get the cognitive foundations first, and this book does that.

While we’re on cognitive science, of all Steven Pinker’s books, I think The Language Instinct is the most important. He hadn’t gotten quite so famous, and this book is also close to his core area of research. But his fluid style clarity of exposition shines through. Though The Blank Slate is the Pinker book I’ve enjoyed the most, I believe it is more dated than The Language Instinct.

Again, most readers will not be surprised that I’ll put Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization on this list. Ward-Perkins changed my view of Late Antiquity with his powerful materialist treatment. I’ve read this book three or four times. It’s a fast read.

What next? I want to say The Selfish Gene, but I have to admit that I read that later than The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins is criticized as derivative, but he is also an excellent expositor. His books are works of art in relation to scientific communication. They’re worth the time.

I say scientific communication because the further Dawkins veers from science, the less interesting he is. Though I was already an atheist when I read The Blind Watchmaker in the early 1990s, I found the parts relating to religion far less interesting and persuasive than when he focused on science.

So far I’ve listed nonfiction. There’s a reason for that: I almost never reread fiction. Unlike many people, I didn’t have much interest in fiction as a child. I read prose translations of the Iliad and the Oddessy, as well as Clan of the Cave Bear. That’s about it before puberty. When I was 13 I noticed Isaac Asimov had some science fiction books. I picked up Prelude to the Foundation, and the rest is history.

Of the various works of science fiction and fantasy I’ve read, if there is one I would select out of this ten, I would choose George R. R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords. This is book three, but it’s the best of the bunch. Marginally better than book two, A Clash of Kings, and definitely better than book one, A Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, Martin’s books declined with book four and book five. I don’t have high hopes for the sixth book, assuming it ever comes out.

From Dawn to Decadence, by Jaques Barzun. Is there anything I need to say here?

Well, what I will say is that this work was Barzun’s last great distillation of a lifetime of observation and scholarship. It’s an enjoyable “core dump,” and allows one to look into the workings of a brilliant mind. Despite its length, I felt it was a quick read. There isn’t great conceptual depth here, it’s the narrative density of information that drags you along.

Coming down the wire, I’m going to have to put down A History of Byzantine State and Society.

This is a massive book, and it is true to its title, interleaving military and diplomatic history with intellectual and social currents. Because Byzantium was placed between the West and the world of Islam, a book like this necessarily touches upon developments further west and east. It’s not simply singularly focused on Byzantium. Additionally, it’s time horizon is not narrow, but sweeps across various epochs, from the end of the Classical period, all the way to the conquest by the Turks.

The final entry is hard, but I’ll give it to Empires of the Silk Road. This is a strange book, but important one. The author shines a light on a different perspective, and ends the work with a peculiar rant against modernism. But imagine a world where the view of the nomad was privileged. That is what Empires of the Silk Road does, giving you a “steppe-eye-view.”

I could list more. And probably five out of these ten would switch if I made a new list six months from now. But, I am pretty convinced Principles of Population Genetics and The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization would be on any list. All are equal, but some are more equal…

Let’s read!

Posted on by Razib Khan

Anyone who has read this weblog over the last few years has sensed my hopelessness and despair about the fallen world and in particular the American republic and Western civilization. I have told Rod Dreher many times privately that we irreligious also need our “Benedict option” in a “darkening world.” But while the Roman Empire fell due to the exogenous shocks of barbarian invasions, as well as internal decay, I feel the exogenous shock of coronavirus just exposed our societal ills, and we’re committing suicide all by ourselves.

My wife is reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. When I first heard the author, Nicholas Carr, talk about his book in 2010 on a podcast I was walking up Cedar street in Berkeley. I remember this moment so well because I laughed loudly. I scoffed. I almost dropped my iPod shuffle. Those were the days.

Unfortunately, though Carr’s book is dated, and some of the research seems tenuous, I am beginning to accept more and more of his conclusions. A few years ago I expressed some alarm at the rise of YouTube commentators. They are fine as far as it goes, but they are extremely popular and often informationally vapid.

Today, we have TikTok, where some of my younger friends admit to me that they spend hours and hours watching sequences of videos such as this.

But despair isn’t the point of this post. I’m almost done with The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century. The question then is, what do I read next? But then I thought, why just me? I haven’t done anything like a “book club” in many years. But why not? There isn’t a reason I have to march alone through the TikTok world.

So here’s the plan: I will pick a book, and read one chapter a week, and write a blog post about it. And those of you who also want to read the book can comment (if you have a blog or something you can post and I will link to that post; but who has blogs now?).

Here are some options, and I’ll let readers in the comments help choose:

The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society

Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution

Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution

Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity

Champlain’s Dream

Against Fairness

I’m open to selections outside of this list…but I would prefer something on this list unless you have an awesome idea. These are books I already own and are in my “stack” of to-reads. Also, obviously remember that books written by academics are going to be much more dense than those written by journalists and commentators, which will be “quick reads.”

Recommendations of books for “Prime Day”

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Since many of you will be taking advantage of “Prime Day” sales, I thought I might as well put some recommendations of books you might be interested in as well, and if you buy other stuff after the initial click I’ll get a cut!

First, thematically here are three books on ancient Rome that you probably should read: The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe.

For stuff on religion and culture, I think Atran’s In Gods We Trust is still the best treatment. It’s dated, and probably doesn’t take cultural evolution into account enough. Therefore, read Henrich’s The Secret of our Success.

For population genetics, Gillespie’s introductory book and Hartl and Clark’s more thorough one suffice. Also, Falconer’s Introduction to Quantitative Genetics is an excellent resource.

David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here is a must-read. In part, because the author’s lab might publish stuff soon requiring major revisions. This is a fast-changing field, and Reich gives you a good window upon that.

Haier’s The Neuroscience of Intelligence and Ritchie’s short book are both useful.

The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China, is an excellent book.

Soft spot for Cameron Rondo’s A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present by Cameron Rondo.

And of course, Beckwith’s eccentric Empires of the Silk Road.

The long now library?

Posted on by Razib Khan

Violet Moller’s The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found is written for a non-academic audience, and relays the story of how Classical knowledge was passed down to the West, which eventually leads to the Renaissance. This is a well-known story, and iut is written engagingly (at least so far). I do get a sense that the author writes intending to suggest the importance of a liberal open society to the public. But these moral lessons can be ignored if you are aware.

For a work attempting to resurrect the importance of non-European societies, in particular, that of the Islamic civilization, it is to this point strangely Eurocentric, in particular, Western European centric. The importance of Al-Andalus is particularly important, from what I recall, to the intellectuals of Paris and Oxford, who are the forebears in many ways of the Anglo intellectual tradition. In contrast, Italians were just as much influenced by the emigration of Byzantine scholars west to the peninsula during the medieval period. And though the Muslim societies did an excel at transmitting the philosophy of the ancient world, it is to the Byzantines that we owe the humanistic worlds. The great Greek playwrights would be names in encyclopedias without the efforts of men such as Constantine VII.

If you want to read a book that covers the lacunae in The Map of Knowledge, I’d suggest Sailing to Byzantium, which is also written at a popular level. Additionally, the end point of the book is the efflorescence of Western Europe. But it might be interesting to write a book at some point how Galenic medical philosophy became a basis for Tibetan traditional medicine! (a fact mentioned in The Map of Knowledge)

All that being said, one of the points brought home in this book is the importance of institutions in copying and maintaining knowledge. Aside from exceptional conditions (e.g., papyrus in the Egyptian desert!), ancient texts simply will not survive into the present. It turns out that this sort of information is actually less robust than DNA. Papyrus scrolls, parchment, and paper, all have half-lives on the order of a century or so. Our current digital formats are even more tenuous. Though I’m not necessarily an alarmist, is it that unlikely that in the next few thousand years technological civilization won’t go through a major shock and regression?

Then what? What if there are no physical books around, and the electronic cloud disappears? What I propose is a massive Rosetta Stone project to make copies of books in hyper-durable materials, translated into hundreds of languages, and deposited in safe caches all across the world. A literary version of the Millennium Seed Bank Project.

Making Sense of Roman History: A Reading List

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Inspired by Tanner Greer, I’ve decided to put together a list of books that I think will useful to understanding the Romans from the perspective of a non-specialist without a background in Latin, or Classics more broadly (I am in this category obviously).

First, I’m a big fan of Michael Grant’s History of Rome. Grant was a historian who wrote a great many books for the popular audience, and his History of Rome is a comprehensive survey. I’ve read it multiple times. Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome is a more contemporary take which covers a similar period. But I’m not sure it’s as useful if you have less background than Grant’s more traditional sequence.

Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World: From Homer to Hadrian covers a lot more than Rome, but what it does cover that is Greek is essential to understanding Rome.

Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265-146 BC is a good read on a classic topic. Goldsworthy is a military historian, and it shows. To be frank I haven’t read many treatments of the republican period since so much of it is back-loaded to the decades before the principate. But Goldsworthy’s Caesar: Life of a Colossus illuminates this critical juncture in Roman history well enough.

There are so many nearly novel-like treatments of figures from the Second Triumvirate and the Julio-Claudians that I’m not going with anything conventional: try Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire. Colin Wells’ The Roman Empire focuses on the imperial apogee and the early years of the 3rd-century troubles. It’s a bit pedestrian but has interesting quantitative data like the decline in the proportion of soldiers of Italian origin over the centuries. If you’ve read the survey above then you know why Gwyn Morgan’s 69 A.D.: Year of Four Emperors is important to read.

I think biography is a pretty good way to get a sense of particular periods. With that in mind, Frank McLynn’s Marcus Aurelius: A Life and David Potter’s Constantine the Emperor are useful if a bit plodding and overmuch for the casual student.

The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, and The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians are all critical contemporary analyses of the end the Roman polity. Written from an archaeological, environmental scientific, and narrative historical angles, they give different viewpoints on the same questions. These are all more or less responses to the sort of work written by Peter Brown a generation earlier, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000, which argues against the idea of the fall. From a different perspective (the barbarian), The End of Empire: Attila the Hun & the Fall of Rome, though to be frank this book is as much about Aetius as it is about Attila.

Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome is one of the many books on the topic of “daily life” during this period and place. You should read at least one of these.

I’m not a humanist in Tanner’s league, so you won’t get poetry recommendations from me, but Aupelius’ The Golden Ass is the only complete surviving Latin novel. It’s rather weird. You surely know the list of eminences of the Latin poets, but Ovid’s Metamorphoses induced less labor than Virgil’s Aeneid. I recall thinking Virgil was a bit too “try hard.” Unlike The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization and History of Rome, both of which I’ve read more than half a dozen times front to back, with literature I usually read once, and don’t retain too much. I’m a Philistine!

Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires and Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations are interesting comparative analyses. If you had to pick between the two, go with the first. But that’s because purely intellectual histories are not as interesting to me.

Historical fiction isn’t always accurate, but it really brings the dramatis personae alive. Colleen McCoullough’s First Man in Rome series is excellent, especially the first few novels. Everyone knows Robert Graves’ I, Claudius. But my teenage-self really enjoyed Allan Massie’s Let the Emperor Speak, about Augustus, and Tiberius: The Memoirs of the Emperor. Gore Vidal’s Julian: A Novel is well written and engaging, though a little light on history (not surprisingly there is a lot of editorializing by Vidal through Julian).

You have in some way read the works of Seutonius,Tacitus, and Livy because they are the foundation for so much of the narrative works written today. They are also the source material for fiction and dramatizations. If you want to “go back to the sources”, give Ammianus Marcellinus a try. He’s overlooked, and he’s excellent.

Rodney Stark wrote The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries back when he was a scholar and not a polemicist. I’m skeptical of some of his conclusions, but his thinking here is rigorous. It’s not the long scream that his last few books have been. Robin Lane Fox’s Pagans and Christians is complementary to The Rise of Christianity. Michelle Salzman’s The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire is worth a very deep read, as it synthesizes textual analysis with some quantitative work.

Some of the New Testament is interesting too. I especially think that the material attributed to St. Paul, a Roman citizen, is worth reading closely.

And finally, St. Augustine is worth a read. City of God is interminably long, but Confessions is more compact, and the beginning of a whole genre which eventually culminated in James Frey.

Books you look at but don’t buy

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A little while ago I was curious about the books people looked at through my links which they nevertheless did not buy. More precisely I was looking at a 90 day interval. The top book people clicked but did not buy was Introduction to Quantitative Genetics. I know this is an expensive book, but if you can afford it you should buy and it read it. The reasoning is that quantitative genetics is no longer an abstruse topic, as I’m seeing economists conflate correlation of traits between relatives and narrow sense heritability. People have opinions on this topic. Loads.

If you talk about regression to the mean, but barely understand how it works, perhaps you should read Introduction to Quantitative Genetics.

Here the remaining of the top 15 (in order from most clicked to least):

The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey
The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible
Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate. This is a good book. I’ve read it three times.
The History and Geography of Human Genes
George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones 5-Book Boxed Set
Principles of Population Genetics. Really readers? This is why more of you are not HWE aware….
Adaptation and Natural Selection
The Nurture Assumption
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
In Gods We Trust
Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology

Also, I can go back to 2014. Looking over 90 days from 2014, 2015 and 2016, here are the top 15:

201420152016
Principles of Population GeneticsFreedom at MidnightThe Great Ordeal
In Gods We TrustPower and PlentySex Segregation in Sports
The Bible with Sources RevealedWhy Sex MattersThe Dialectical Imagination
Why Sex MattersThe Origins of Theoretical Population GeneticsThe History and Geography of Human Genes
The Transparent SocietyThe Mating MindPython for Data Analysis
The First Man in RomeMutantsPlagues and Peoples
The Barbarian ConversionIn Gods We TrustGrooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
Nature’s God1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Introduction to Quantitative GeneticsA History of the Byzantine State and SocietyWhy Sex Matters
The Rise of Western ChristendomPrinciples of Population GeneticsTaboo
The Great Arab ConquestsThe Journey of Man: A Genetic OdysseyDesign Patterns
Religion ExplainedA Concise Economic History of the WorldA Beautiful Math 
The Nurture AssumptionThe Man Who Would Be King and Other StoriesThe Great Human Diasporas
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before ColumbusThe Genetics of Human PopulationsThe Seven Daughters of Eve
The Invisible GorillaA Beautiful Math  Calculus Made Easy

Why Sex Matters has always been a book that gets a lot of clicks. I think it is the title. But it’s rather old now, and on an old fashioned topic: sex differences. Totally milquetoast in the 2000s, but probably very problematic today….

The survivorship bias in book ratings

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Just finished The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor by Martin Meredith, and gave it 4 out of 5 stars on GoodReads. At nearly 700 pages of narrative text The Fortunes of Africa is not a small book, but it’s pretty dense with fact and a “quick read”. The author is good at balancing narrative flow with packing a lot of information into any given page.

But as I rated the book I realized that the vast majority of my ratings are 4 out of 5. I reserve 5’s for really good books. But why so few ratings less than 4? Obviously, this is due to survivorship bias: in general, I’m not going to finish a book that I don’t like, and I won’t rate books that I don’t finish.

Additionally, the longer a book is, the better it probably has to be for me to finish it. If it is a short book (less than 200 pages) I may just push all the way through, but in general anything longer and I won’t read “cover-to-cover.” When I was younger I would sample chapters and such, but for whatever reason as I’ve gotten older I generally adhere to the sequential structure as envisioned by the author.

Of course there are exceptions. Stephen Jay Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is very long. In general I did not really enjoy reading it (though it has its moments, in particular when it comes to history of science), but finish it I did. I read The Structure of Evolutionary Theory in full because it was Gould’s magnum opus, and the best place to get a sense of his thought without ploughing through his whole oeuvre. Though I did not think much of Gould’s ideas personally (few people with an evolutionary genetics orientation do), he was objectively an intellectual of some standing and influence, so it is useful to understand his thought. He mattered, for better or worse.

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory was Stephen Jay Gould’s last book (he died two months after it was published). He had become such an enormous public intellectual that he was clearly beyond the power of any editors to control his prose flourishes. It’s a prolix repetitious work (I read Wonderful Life more recently, and it benefited from being more tightly written).

In contrast when I read The Twilight of Atheism Alister McGrath I thought it was a decently well written book, but totally unpersuasive on the merits of the substance. But after ten years I think descriptively McGrath was right in some deep ways. So I’d probably change my rating of this book between then and now.

So categories of books I read all the way through:

  • Books I enjoy. I’ve read The Fall of Rome three times. I’ve only read The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection front to back a few times, but some chapters (especially the earlier ones) I’ve read many times.
  • Books which are important. I’ve read probably two dozen translations of Genesis in my life (it’s a short book when standalone, so not a big achievement). A lot of the religious stuff I read is because religion is so important to people, even if it isn’t important to me. Honestly, the same with a lot of philosophy.
  • Books which challenge my viewpoints in a substantive sense. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory and The Twilight of Atheism fall into these categories. I was a much more doctrinaire libertarian when I read Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds, which engaged some apologia for Marxist-Leninism.

The Warlord Chronicles

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The Winter is Coming website has a post up, What books should you read as you wait for The Winds of Winter? (The Winds of Winter is the next Song of Ice and Fire book).

I don’t have much time for fiction at this point, but the first entry that they suggested was Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles. This is a very dark, gritty, and realistic, retelling of the Arthurian legend, written in a fashion more reminiscent of historical fiction than fantasy. I read this series perhaps a year after first reading Game of Thrones, and was struck by similarities of tone.

As it happened this was before George R. R. Martin was quite as famous, and I emailed him at some point in 2000 about various issues relating to his works and inspirations, and asked him about Cornwell’s series. Martin admitted that he was a huge fan, and appreciated that there were similarities of style and tone.

In any case, I second this recommendation. Warlord Chronicles is not the most easy read…but worth it.