Here is a picture of 61 books I hope to read, have already started reading, or plan to re-read in the year ahead.
Some are already in progress:
Game of Thrones Book 5.
Jon Meacham's biography of Thomas Jefferson.
Civilization by Niall Ferguson.
And at least three books by Hannah Arendt.
Happy New Year!
In 2021 I read fourteen books under the vast category of fiction. The oldest of the books was written in the 14th Century. The newest were published this year. The authors as close as my own family and as far away as Russia. The setting of one novel is more than two thousand years ago, another is in the near future.
In an earlier post I listed the non-fiction books I read in 2021.
In another post I said that my favorite book of 2021 was a work of fiction I did not finish: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. But having a favorite does not mean there were any books on the list I did not like. They are so different. But The Decameron was very much in my mind in our pandemic world.
Just the list for now. The highlighted links connect to my reviews of the book.
In 2021, I read fifty books. But the first and best book of the year for me is the book I have not yet finished. It's a book I first read in 2015 and went back to last year: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Also known as The Human Comedy in contrast to Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy, The Decameron inspired Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales among hundreds of other writers and their works over the past eight hundred yers.
For me and many others, these tales written and published during the worst years of the Black Death in Florence have been a source of fun and inspiration during the current pandemic.
I have loved the Divine Comedy for decades, but had not read Boccaccio nor Francesco Petrarch. The lives of these three Florentines overlapped in the early thirteen hundreds. Dante died in 1321 when Petrarch was 17 years old and Boccaccio was eight. The two younger poets became friends after Boccaccio published The Decameron in 1352. Together the three poets are known as The Three Crowns of Florence.
After reading and re-reading Dante for 35 years, I read Boccaccio and Petrarch in 2015 in class on Medieval Italian Literature taught by Chelsea Pomponio at Franklin and Marshall College. I was delighted by Boccaccio, less so by Petrarch. In 2020 as the pandemic sent the world into crisis, I went back to Boccaccio and to the sonnets of Petrarch. Now I read both regularly, thinking about how they survived the terrible plague of their time and created stories and poems that inspired and delighted people ever since.
My favorite book of 2021 is the book I have not yet finished: The Decameron.
In 2013, Joan Acocella reviewed the translation of The Decameron by Wayne A. Rebhorn in a long review in the New Yorker. It's a good review and gives a lot of background on the book. Here is the link.
My top three in this category are (in publication order)
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says geography is the reason western culture came to dominate the world in the past half millennium.
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, who charts the history of the species Sapiens including highs like civilization and medicine and lows like all the misery that ensued when we left hunter gatherer lives to settle down and become the servants of wheat.
These Truths by Jill Lepore traces the history of America from its discovery to the present with a focus on women and minorities. Her stories of the lives of slaves and native Americans and the first abolitionists are amazing.
I am currently becoming a fan of Niall Ferguson. He was a guest on the "Honestly" podcast by Bari Weiss. The discussion was centered on Ferguson's latest book Doom but ranged across his long ouevre. I picked Civilization because it has a half millennial timeline form 1,500AD to the present, tracing the way western civilization came to dominate the world and why.
The chapters are the reasons why the west dominated the rest. At the beginning of the second chapter, Science, Ferguson quotes Jesus saying "Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and give to God the things that are God's." Ferguson said the separation of Church and state is fundamental to Christian faith.
It took the Reformation and the Renaissance to break the hold of the Catholic Church on western culture and allow science to flourish freely. Ferguson then lists 29 great innovations in science between 1530 and 1789 that happened after two millennia of relative stagnation.
He also charts in detail the reasons China and the Ottoman Empire, both much stronger than Europe in the 1,400s, fell under European dominance by the 19th Century. Tyrants who allowed the suppression of science and innovation are the reason both empires went from dominance to decline.
I am barely into the second chapter and love the book. If I get obsessed there are 14 more to go!
His most famous, a book I have read and re-read, is Amusing Ourselves to Death. That book covered the rise in communications technology in our lives and how it corroded our ability to think. It was published in 1985, before the internet rotted our brains more than ever. Before social media, Postman was worried about a divided nation.
His advice was to resist the worst of Technolopoly, but with a goal of preserving what is good about America. At the end of Technopoly, Postman tells his readers to become "Loving Resistance Fighters."
(I am transcribing a very long passage because it is so good.)
Postman says, "I can, however, offer a Talmudic principle that seems to me an effective guide for those who wish to defend themselves against the worst effects of American Technolpoly. It is this: You must try to become a loving resistance fighter. That is the doctrine, as Hillel might say. Here is the commentary: By "loving" I mean that in spite of the confusion, errors and stupidities you see around you, you must always keep close to your heart the narratives and symbols that once made the United States the hope of the world and that may yet have enough vitality to do so again. You may find it helpful to remember that, when the Chinese students in Tianamen Square gave expression to their impulse to democracy, they fashioned a papier-mache model, for the whole world to see, of the Statue of Liberty. Not a statue of Karl Marx, not the Eiffel Tower, not Buckingham Palace. The Statue of Liberty. It is impossible to say how moved Americans were by this event. But if one is compelled to ask, Is there an American soul so shrouded in cynicism and malaise created by Technopoly's emptiness that it failed to be stirred by the students reading aloud from the works of Thomas Jefferson in the streets of Prague in 1989? Americans may forget, but others do not, that dissent and protest during the Vietnam War may be the only case in history where public opinion forced a government to change its foreign policy. Americans may forget, but others do not, that Americans invented the idea of public education for all citizens and have never abandoned it. And everyone knows, including Americans, that each day, to this hour, immigrants still come to America in hopes of finding relief from one kind of deprivation or another."
When I finished reading Technopoly a couple of weeks ago, I began reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson and reading the Federalist Papers. Jefferson was 32 years old in 1776 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Alexander Hamilton was either 30 or 32 years old (his birth date is either January 11, 1755 or 1757) when he wrote most of the Federalist Papers. The brilliant young men who led America in the greatest and one of the only successful revolutions in history gave us something worth preserving.
I want to be a Loving Resistance Fighter.
One afternoon in Iraq in 2009, I decided to ride to supper from the motor pool on a day with a howling wind out of the west. I rode two miles in a crosswind then had to make a left and ride a half mile straight into that 30-mph wind. Ten feet after the intersection I stopped. I could not make my single-speed bike move another foot.
A couple of Special Forces soldiers in an SUV saw me. They gave me and the bike a ride to the mess hall. I assured them the ride back would be a "breeze." I thanked them and went to dinner. That sandstorm was the only time the wind completely stopped my ride.
In the last week I was paying attention to air speed versus ground speed on my bike. The group that I ride with has not gotten together because of rain and detours on the route. I did my usual 25-mile solo ride that is 12.5 miles south ending in a 3-mile uphill, followed by 12.5 miles north beginning with a series of downhills covering three miles.
The second of the four hills is the steepest. Last Saturday Strava my top speed (ground speed) was 49mph. Sunday it was 52mph. Today it was 48mph. As I was riding home today, I was thinking about my air speed.
On Saturday, the wind was out of the northwest at 10 mph. The north component of the wind was 7mph so my air speed was 56mph. On Sunday the air was calm. Ground and air speed equal. Today the wind was 5mph out of the north northeast. That put the headwind a 4mph and my air speed at 52mph. So Saturday was clearly the fastest ride down the 12 percent grade on Route 272 North.
Air is always apparent on a bike.
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