What Are You Perusing?
Aaaaahh, books. How would we introverts enjoy life without them? From reading in the tub or in bed to listening to audiobooks during the commute or while gardening there’s always a handful of books floating through my mind.
A Word About Airpods: While these look silly, like stringless tampons hanging out of your ears, they are an audible lover’s delight. I can tuck my phone into the inside pocket of a gardening vest and spend all day outdoors listening to a good book while weeding (it’s spring; weeding is all I do right now) and they do not ever fall out. Nor am I constanty tucking wires out of the way, accidentally snipping them with pruning shears or yanking them loose on stray branches.
Best of all I can easily pause the narration by tapping twice on the right airpod, or I can ask Siri a question about what I’m reading by tapping twice on the left airpod, all without the necessity of removing gardening gloves. Or when your hands are muddy or dirty and you don’t want to touch your phone or fiddle with wires this is another huge bonus.
Current Bathtub Book and social history, as well as something fun for the daily soak: A Colorful History of Popular Delusions by Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall.
My favorite topic of all time is Collective behavior and the weird things people get up to in groups. Delusions, fads, crazes and rumors all take turns swaying the popular imagination.
We have some good examples taking place recently right here on the collective entity that is Daily Kos in the number of comments you’ll find in the Hiddens calling other users (even long-established ones!) Russian bots or Russian trolls, or challenging them with queries as to the weather in St. Petersburg. Such responses are based on exaggerated fears, just as back in 2014 a surprising number of government officials (*cough* Chris Christie) severely over-reacted to the negligible possibility of a major Ebola crisis breaking out in this country. Our ostensibly “reality-based community” is not immune, as evidenced by breathless diaries reporting the latest wish-fulfillment CT by Louise Mensch and other relentless rumor-mongers.
Recently Finished:
Audible Memoir: Educated by Tara Westover
This is one of those books I ran around telling everyone about the moment I finished it (and after replaying the last few pages twice). A girl raised by a fundamentalist and survivalist family, without benefit of public schools or even rudimentary home schooling, finds a way to get herself educated right up to graduate school in Oxford and Cambridge, earning a PhD. Her greatest education, however, comes from learning how to gradually overcome being violently gaslighted by her own family.
I listened to this book because I’d just finished the book below and was looking for more by the same narrator, Julia Whelan, who did a fantastic job on both books which involved a troubled, mentally unstable father.
Recently Finished:
Audible Fiction: The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah, also read by the wonderful Julia Whelan.
Based on a true story. A 1970’s Vietnam veteran who suffers from PTSD and can’t hold a job takes his wife and daughter to live in an inherited cabin in a remote area of Alaska, where they are woefully unprepared for the long dark winter ahead. It’s a hair-raising tale that showcases a beautiful but harshly unforgiving landscape.
Current Listen
Audible History: Polio, An American Story by David M. Oshinsky. I love medical histories and was curious about this book as my dad survived polio. Now, listening to the history of outbreaks, I realize I don’t know if he contracted it in New York during the 1916 or 1921 epidemics, when he would have been 11 or 16, or if this happened to him later as an adult. There’s no one left who would know.
Dad’s case was mild, leaving him with one slightly withered foot, so that he had to have his dress shoes specially made by a Korean company, Lee Kee Boots. (Yes, we giggled endlessly over Dad’s leaky boots.) This is one of those books that provides a history of an era along with a suspenseful detective story, complete with the fabled rivalry between Salk and Sabin who created the first competing polio vaccines.
Cued up Next:
Audible Hope: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress by Steven Pinker.
I’ve found Steven Pinker brilliant, of course, but tough going on the printed page. A patient just assured me that the audible version is riveting, inspiring, and the antidote for slogging through the current political environment and the rejection of all things factual and reality-based. Here’s a sample from the publisher’s summary to cheer you up, as well:
Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.
Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation.
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