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Better angels of our nature, Steven Pinker
I generally find Pinker frustrating but worthwhile, and this book had less of the frustrating than The Blank Slate, but still irritated me from time to time. I enjoyed the book - it had an awful lot of detailed exploration of ideas, but they were nearly all ideas that I already knew the outline of and agreed with, so a) I learned a limited amount of new stuff, and b) I worry that I was viewing it through a huge lens of confirmation bias. In particular, in the later chapters, there was discussion of psychology experiments, at least some of which I know have since been undermined. There were some insights that were new to me though, in particular about why people think violence is getting worse even though it’s getting better, and a deeper appreciation of how capitalism can act to prevent wars.
Les Jeux de la Faim trilogie - Suzanne Collins
A big part of the takeaway from this was “reading in French is hard and slow, but getting easier and quicker.” Despite the language hurdle I enjoyed it a lot. I loved Battle Royale, so it was quite fun seeing a very similar story through the lens of YA, and Katniss is all kinds of awesome. I also really like that they have a love triangle story where you’re not clearly given one person to root for. I preferred the second and third books, as they got more political and less action based, although I felt that there was an awful lot of plot stuffed into third book, which left it feeling a bit rushed and messy. I’ve watched the first two films (in English), and was relieved to find that if I’d managed to miss big chunks of exposition through language then they were bits that weren’t felt important enough to make it into the films. I’m looking forward to seeing the remaining two, and hoping that splitting the third book will address the rushedness.
Economics in one lesson, Henry Hazlitt
The lesson is that you can’t look at an economic decision only in terms of the short term effects on a particular group of people, you have to look at both short and long term effects on everyone. This is all well and good, and the examples he goes through do clearly highlight some flaws in Keynesian economics which fall into that trap, but there were definitely examples where I felt he was making exactly the same mistake, just ignoring a different subset of actors.
The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger
This was lent to me by my spiritual director, as something that might help me redirect my thoughts onto God when I’m being distracted by whether the other servers and clergy are performing the liturgy correctly. I found the first section quite difficult, as it seemed to have an assumed level of knowledge (of theology, art, history, music) that I was missing, but the later sections were more explicit, and I after reading them the earlier bits felt like they slotted into place a bit better. More importantly, I definitely feel as though some of the ideas and ways of thinking that I encountered in the later chapters will be practically helpful to me in keeping my focus on God, although I’ll see how that works in practice over the coming weeks.
I generally find Pinker frustrating but worthwhile, and this book had less of the frustrating than The Blank Slate, but still irritated me from time to time. I enjoyed the book - it had an awful lot of detailed exploration of ideas, but they were nearly all ideas that I already knew the outline of and agreed with, so a) I learned a limited amount of new stuff, and b) I worry that I was viewing it through a huge lens of confirmation bias. In particular, in the later chapters, there was discussion of psychology experiments, at least some of which I know have since been undermined. There were some insights that were new to me though, in particular about why people think violence is getting worse even though it’s getting better, and a deeper appreciation of how capitalism can act to prevent wars.
Les Jeux de la Faim trilogie - Suzanne Collins
A big part of the takeaway from this was “reading in French is hard and slow, but getting easier and quicker.” Despite the language hurdle I enjoyed it a lot. I loved Battle Royale, so it was quite fun seeing a very similar story through the lens of YA, and Katniss is all kinds of awesome. I also really like that they have a love triangle story where you’re not clearly given one person to root for. I preferred the second and third books, as they got more political and less action based, although I felt that there was an awful lot of plot stuffed into third book, which left it feeling a bit rushed and messy. I’ve watched the first two films (in English), and was relieved to find that if I’d managed to miss big chunks of exposition through language then they were bits that weren’t felt important enough to make it into the films. I’m looking forward to seeing the remaining two, and hoping that splitting the third book will address the rushedness.
Economics in one lesson, Henry Hazlitt
The lesson is that you can’t look at an economic decision only in terms of the short term effects on a particular group of people, you have to look at both short and long term effects on everyone. This is all well and good, and the examples he goes through do clearly highlight some flaws in Keynesian economics which fall into that trap, but there were definitely examples where I felt he was making exactly the same mistake, just ignoring a different subset of actors.
The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger
This was lent to me by my spiritual director, as something that might help me redirect my thoughts onto God when I’m being distracted by whether the other servers and clergy are performing the liturgy correctly. I found the first section quite difficult, as it seemed to have an assumed level of knowledge (of theology, art, history, music) that I was missing, but the later sections were more explicit, and I after reading them the earlier bits felt like they slotted into place a bit better. More importantly, I definitely feel as though some of the ideas and ways of thinking that I encountered in the later chapters will be practically helpful to me in keeping my focus on God, although I’ll see how that works in practice over the coming weeks.
