Results for “"Ryan Holiday"”
7 found

What I’ve been reading

1. Leonard Mlodinow, Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics.  One man’s version of “the real Stephen Hawking story,” including the marital arrangements and rearrangements, told by a former good friend.  I am not sure that books such as this should be written (or read), but…this one is pretty good.  It also gives Hawking’s account of why he did not win a Nobel prize (“radiation must be observed”), among other tidbits.

2. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody.  The authors serve up many on-target criticisms of current academic nonsense, but somehow it is not how I would proceed.  Given the ridiculousness of so much of what is going on, I say there are new intellectual profit opportunities to mine the best insights from critical theory, postmodernism, intersectionality and the like.  I would rather read a book that did that.  Start with Foucault, and steelman everything as you go along.

3. Ed Douglas, Himalaya: A Human History.  Truly an excellent book covering the history, politics, and culture of…the Himalayan region.  Full of substance, lovely cover too.  The USA link here has a worse cover, no surprise.  But you’ll get the British version quicker, with the preferred cover, and at a lower price.  Arbitrage!

4. The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, edited by Frederick C. Beiser, but basically Novalis, Schlegel, and a bit of Schleiermacher.  In particular I was surprised how well the Novalis has held up: insightful, to the point, and laying out the aesthetic approach to politics (and more) with a stark and memorable clarity.  If you are looking for something to read that is non-liberal, but not the tiresome version of non-liberal being beat to death these days, maybe try this book.

5. George Prochnik, Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution.  Heine has aged very well, circa 2020, and he is an appropriate liberal but also satiric counterpart to the writers mentioned immediately above, plus he was more historically prescient, and for all the talk about culture from the Romantics, it was Heine who was the perceptive observer of other people’s cultures.  This is a good book for additional historical background once you already know Heine, though not at all an introduction to his charm and import, available only from the man himself.

And I have just received my copy of Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius.

What is the classic book of the 80s and 90s?

That’s Ryan Holiday’s query.  This is not about quality, this is about "representing a literary era" or perhaps just representing the era itself.  I’ll cite Bonfire of the Vanities and Fight Club as the obvious picks.  Loyal MR reader Jeff Ritze is thinking of Easton Ellis ("though not American Psycho").  How about you?  Dare I mention John Grisham’s The Firm as embodying the blockbuster trend of King, Steele, Clancy and others?  There’s always Harry Potter and graphic novels.

Readsplat

The Economist has a new travel blog, the new Fuchsia Dunlop book is only "good," the first issue of Reason magazine under new editor Matt Welch is out (so far I like it; it’s less cultural, less left-wing and more current affairsy than before), finally I am into Wilco, Vishnu’s Crowded Temple is an interesting account of the blend between Indian politics and religion, Arthur Brooks’s Gross National Happiness argues that the traditional conservative recipe makes people happy, Ramon Llull is a much underrated medieval thinker, here’s a blog on giving away your rebate, and here’s Ryan Holiday on how to master what you read; his technique is the opposite of mine which is simply to read and move on.  And here is why congestion pricing died in New York.

View quake reading

Ryan Holiday blogs my email to him:

My reading was much different when I was younger. I would more likely
intensively engage with some important book totally full of new ideas.
Hayek. Parfit. Plato. And so on. There just aren’t books like that left
for me anymore. So I read many more, to learn bits, but haven’t in
years experienced a "view quake." That is sad, to me at least, but I
don’t know how to avoid how that has turned out. So enjoy your best
reading years while you can!

Quine should be on that list as well.  Nietzsche was a view quake in high school, though I find him oddly uninteresting upon rereading.  Here is Ryan’s post on Marcus Aurelius.; the Stoics collectively were a view quake for me, in economics there was Anthony Downs and Thomas Schelling and Albert Hirschmann.  David Hume.  Maybe Rene Girard was the last "view quake" author I read.  On the upside, greater context means that many more books are interesting than was the case before.

Many of you are asking me about Amazon Kindle, the new ebook (sort of); Jason Kottke offers a round-up of opinion.