* * *
The noted Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti has taken this idea one step further and pointed out that through history, well before the car, humans have sought to keep their commute at about one hour. This "cave instinct," as he calls it, reflects a balance between our desires for mobility (the more territory, the more resources one can acquire, the more mates one can meet, etc.) and domesticity (we tend to feel safer and more comfortable at home than on the road).
Tom Vanderbilt
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)
One may wonder why I would read a book about automotive transport. I say I'm getting to know my enemy better. Really I'm simply interested in driving even if I don't care much for doing it myself. There's something about its perceived anonymity and its resulting effect on people's behavior that makes driving like a window into the soul of an individual. I'm also fascinated by traffic engineering and novelties to us Americans such as roundabouts and shared space. This book covers both areas well, and I enjoyed it a lot. And furthermore I'm now equipped with statistics that correlate the use of traffic-speed cameras with a reduction in fatal automobile accidents.
* * *
He liked Bernard; he was grateful to him for being the only man of his acquaintance with whom he could talk about the subjects he felt to be important. Nevertheless, there were things in Bernard which he hated. This boasting, for example. And the outbursts of an abject self-pity with which it alternated. And his deplorable habit of being bold after the event, and full, in absence, of the most extraordinary presence of mind. He hated these things--just because he liked Bernard. The seconds passed. Helmholtz continued to stare at the floor. And suddenly Bernard blushed and turned away.
Aldous Huxley
Brave New World
I regret reading as little as I did growing up, but there is a benefit in having missed out on so many of the classics: I'm allowed to read them for the first time as an adult.
I have a soft spot for books about utopia, dystopia, and end-of-days scenarios, so of course I liked Brave New World -- as if by default. But I really, really liked it. It's now an old book, and its story has been retold with variation countless times, but I found it fresh and every bit relevant. I also really liked the writing style and am once again reminded that my favorites generally come from the first half of the 20th century. This one gets a big thumbs up.
* * *
Twenty minutes later I walked out the doors of Los Angeles County Women's Prison, otherwise known as Sybil Brand Correctional Facility, into the bright sunlight. I wondered who exactly Sybil Brand was and who she had pissed off in order to have an entire women's prison named after her. I made a mental note to google her later.
Chelsea Handler
Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea
I don't believe speed-reading exists. I think the comprehension analysis tests miss the point and that reading is a very active cognitive process, not a passive information dump from page to brain. Yet Are You There Vodka? challenges this opinion of mine. It certainly challenges my assumption that getting through a book as fast as possible shouldn't ever be the goal.
Are You There Vodka? was this month's Book Club selection. The good thing we got out of this month's selection was a unified desire to avoid ever again making a similar mistake. Sometimes you must hit rock bottom before making improvements.
The highlight of the book for me was the above quote and spotting its little factual error. The quote was written about an event that supposedly happened in 1996, which was when the word google was merely a misspelling for a very large number. Google the company wouldn't be started until two years later.
* * *
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. ... You take that book Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham, though. I read it last summer. It's a pretty good book and all, but I wouldn't want to call Somerset Maugham up. I don't know. He just isn't the kind of a guy I'd want to call up, that's all.
J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
I'm for blasphemy and all, but for Chrissake what a phony.
I felt obligated to read The Catcher in the Rye before fellow Book Club members caught on that I hadn't read it and gave me the boot. Jamie shows up to Wednesday soccer wearing his crumby Catcher in the Rye T-shirt -- he's a real prince, I tell ya -- which served as a weekly reminder of my precarious position. But no more. It's checked off the list.
What I didn't expect from reading this one was further confirmation that my stratospheric opinion of W. Somerset Maugham is not shared by the rest of the world. But I don't have any desire to call up J.D., so we'll call it even. And all.
* * *
Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.
René Descartes
A Discourse on Method
I remember disliking Descartes's writing when I read him in college. Excessively dry and hopelessly obsolete, I thought. Yet I own a copy of some of his writing. This is significant considering that I own no more than six books in all, and one I keep forgetting to donate to the library and another I'm keeping for use as a doorstop. So when Laura sent me a list of books she recommended I read and one of them was A Discourse on Method, I decided it was finally time to read it. Now I have two books to donate to the library.
Descartes is much more enjoyable outside the classroom. I read A Discourse on Method in a sardonic tone as if its author were a closet atheist who was poking fun at the church. This works. Go back and reread the above quote, which happens to be the opening of the first part. Tell me Descartes wasn't ribbing.
Why do college philosophy classes take these works so seriously? How much real philosophy is the writing of some punk who was trying to get a rise out of people but who became to be revered? Philosophy in the classroom is a necessity for getting one's existential bearings but is otherwise a hopeless pursuit. I wouldn't say I enjoyed A Discourse on Method, but at least I got something out of it.
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