Re-Reading

I've been re-reading a lot of old books, in part to save money and in part because i've begun to realize how poorly i can recall books that i remember liking the first time. It's a strange feeling to read a book that you read twenty years earlier and to find how little of the plot seems familiar. For example, i've been re-reading Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift. I remember most of the characters, even the names, but the plot is completely fresh. I'm about half way through and i honestly don't know how it's going to unfold (ironically, memory was a common theme in Bellow's later works).

What's even stranger is that i have a vivid memory of the circumstances surrounding my purchase of this book. While still in college my wife (then girlfriend) and i made a trip to Chicago while visiting my family in Indiana. We went to Stuart Brent's bookstore on Michigan Avenue and i picked up a pamphlet that listed 100 books that Brent considered essential. One was Humboldt's Gift. I had not even heard of Bellow at that point, but there was something about the title that appealed to me. I ended up buying it in mass-market paperback form at a chain bookstore in the mall in Fort Wayne, near where my parents lived.

I know that i liked the book and i ended up reading most of Bellow's novels at various points through my life. On re-reading it, it seems much more appropriate for someone my current age. The main character, Charlie Citrine, is a 50-something author in the middle of a nasty divorce and with a couple of young daughters. He is clinging to illusions of youth, what's left of his money and fame, and what dreams a middle-aged man can have. To my 20-ish self he must have seemed almost foreign; but now i see a character who, although he has had more success than most, has problems familiar to most middle-aged men.

That, i guess, is the benefit of re-reading. It's a bit like sampling a case of wine as it ages in that it's a different experience each time, but you're never sure until you're done with it which point was the best.

10 Most Influential Books

There's a meme floating around about listing the 10 most influential books on a personal level (rather than in a historical sense). Nobody asked me to, but i made my list anyway.

Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

Kind of a cliche, but like many people i found LotR very comforting during my high school years when i felt like a bit of a freak. I even had a "I'd rather be a hobbit" t-shirt.

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

I read this the first time when i was 18 and i was spending the summer with my grandparents in Tucson. There's nowhere in the world less like St. Petersburg than the Sonoran desert, but for some reason the oppressive heat in my grandparent's double-wide mobile home seemed appropriate to the story. I read it again in college while studying Russian literature, after i had learned some Russian and i had visited St. Petersburg (Leningrad). I'm not sure i would have done either of those things had i not read the book.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb -Richard Rhodes

I probably could not name my favorite work of fiction, but this is easily my favorite work of non-fiction. It's an amazing story, amazingly told, of events that profoundly affected the course of events during my lifetime and history in general. This book had an interesting effect on my personal politics. On one hand there's an inspiring story of science and engineering and how the virtually impossible can be accomplished with will and money; and on the other hand is a great cautionary tale about how Pandora's box can be pried open with enough will and money.

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

I read this book originally as part of a college English class. I don't think there is any other book that i have spent so much time thinking about. I still think occasionally in terms that i learned from the book (like "vertical search" vs. "horizontal search"). This book made me seek out (and become a fan of) The Third Man because of the "kitten and the carbine" section.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera

I also read this in college. Blew my freakin' mind. Completely changed my idea of what fiction can be. It's hard to say "this book is about such and such" since it's not just some thinly-veiled political allegory. It's not even really a narrative so much as a sort of exploration, like many impressions of the same place and time that build to a single effect.

1984 - George Orwell

I read this in high school and it quite literally scared me. At that time, people of my age and culture would equate Big Brother with the totalitarian Soviet Union. My thinking about that has grown more sophisticated over the years (i presume), but after visiting the Soviet Union, i still had that in the back of my mind. No book has had more influence on my political beliefs, or at least my attitude about privacy and personal freedom. I once read a criticism of 1984 by Isaac Asimov in which he stated that it was overrated because Orwell had so badly predicted the mileu of future times (in other words, it was bad science fiction). On the contrary, what scares me about this book is its plausibility. Today, 25 years after Orwell's setting, it feels more possible than ever.

The Republic - Plato

I think these lists are supposed to be filled with profound works of philosophy that change lives and minds. This is clearly one of the great works of history and it did definitely make me think differently about certain things. But the notable thing about this book is how readable it is, even in translation. With a few exceptions, the topics still seem relevant and it's possible to imagine having a serious conversation about them with a few smart friends. This book really drew me to read other classics and look for similar connections between my time and ancient times.

The Bible

This might seem odd here if you know my personal beliefs, but again this is about the books that had the most influence on my life. When i was growing up we'd go to church and there would be "Bible readings", passages from the Old and New Testament that would often form the basis of the day's sermon. Similarly, in my Lutheran school we'd have "devotions" built around a few verses. One summer I said to myself "you know, i should really read this thing", so i sat down with the revised standard version that my grandmother gave me for confirmation and i began to read from beginning to end. Soon i realized why we never did that in church and school. Wow. If you read the Bible in it's entirety, and you really absorb what it's saying, there are really only two possible outcomes: zealot or atheist. Still not quite sure which i'll become.

The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen

I read Matthiessen's Wildlife In America not long before this (it would be 11 on this list), and it was so eye-opening that i read everything Matthiessen has published. The Snow Leopard is ostensibly a recapitulation of Matthiessen and George Schaller looking for snow leopards in the Himalayas. So it may seem strange for me to say that this is the best book i've ever read about Eastern philosophy. I don't know that a book can be spiritually enlightening in the way that personal experience is, but this about as close as any has come for me.

History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russel

It might sound glib to say that this is one of the funniest books i've ever read. I still remember laughing at Russel's description of Spinoza:

Spinoza (1634–77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme. As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness

Opinions vary radically on how good of a book this really is, but it made me seek out the full works of these philosophers, so it served a great purpose.

Good Stuff 2008

So, this wasn't a very good year personally, but other than the global financial meltdown, it wasn't really that bad. The election of Barack Obama was probably not the triumph of reason that i wish it to be, but at least i don't have to worry about President Palin for another four years. I think some decent music was made this year, i read several good books, and there were two good movies about superheroes. My kids both entered new phases of their education and have succeeded so far. I learned some stuff, both academically and wisdom-wise.

I listen to music almost entirely via some radio-like delivery mechanism these days, so it's tough to determine what's new and what's just new to me. There were a few times this year when i heard something that i thought was new and it turned out to be a band that broke up years ago (eg, The Promise Ring). Stranger still, several favorite artists put out albums this year that i never really got a chance to listen to thoroughly (Ben Folds, Drive By Truckers, R.E.M.). Still, there was stuff i really liked. Here's my list:

• Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes
• The Stand Ins by Okkervil River
• April by Sun Kil Moon
• When Life Gives You Lemons, Paint That Shit Gold by Atmosphere
• And You Were A Crow by The Parlor Mob
• Nortec Collective Presents Bostich & Fussible

Really though, most of the music that i enjoyed this year was done in previous years, and i just discovered it. I listened to a lot of Damien Rice, Richard Shindell, Grace Potter, A Fine Frenzy, and various ska bands that my son introduced me to.

Again this year i didn't see most of the "serious" movies that will be nominated for Oscars. However, i thought Iron Man and The Dark Knight were the two best comic-derived movies i've seen. I thought the first half of Wall-E was absolutely brilliant. I saw No Country For Old Men on video, but i thought it was an excellent rendition of McCarthy's book.

I read quite a few books this year, but not many that were published in 2008. The most memorable non-fiction i read was Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. I'm not sure that i read a single fiction book that was published this year. The most recently published novel i can remember was The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt, which is brilliant. My favorite books this year were all by Cormac McCarthy. I read No Country For Old Men, The Road, and the first book of the border trilogy, All The Pretty Horses. Amazing.

My nomination for concept of the year: attention. I think the idea of an attention economy and the almost evolutionary change happening in our culture due to the incessant demand for our attention will be the meme of the decade.

Novel vs. Novel

Due to a unique set of circumstances i find myself reading two novels at the same time. It's not unusual for me to interleave the reading of multiple books, but i try not to overlap novels if only because it's easy to confuse plot lines and characters. The two books are Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

Both are contemporary American novels written by well-respected authors. Both won the National Book Award in their respective years of publication. Both are pretty damn good books. And there ends the similarities.

Franzen's novel is about the Midwest and East, and the (sub)-urban inhabits thereof. It focuses primarily on two generations of the same family, an elderly midwestern couple and their children. Much of the conflict in the novel comes from the difference between these two generations. The parents need to see their children as successful even if that means a certain degree of willful reinterpretion of reality. The children (all now adult) seem to practically define their lives in contrast to their parents, to the extent that merely being in their parents' presence has become a burden.

I identify easily with the characters in Franzen's novel, even occasionally being reminded of members of my own family. The book covers a good span of both time and space, and includes some esoteric material that i assume required research on the part of the author. Yet it all strikes me as very familiar, very real for lack of a better term.

McCarthy's novel is very western, both in terms of geography and content. It starts in Texas, and proceeds southward to Mexico. The characters are ranch dwellers, comfortable riding horses and shooting guns. Other than several years spent in the desert Southwest and a general appreciation of ruralness engendered by my own youth on a farm, i don't have much in common with the people in the novel.

Still, i enjoy McCarthy's novel more. Perhaps it is just escapist fantasy for a middle-aged, middle-class, suburb dweller. The brilliance of The Corrections for me is that sometimes it cuts so close to the bone that it's painful. On the other hand, All The Pretty Horses makes me want to live in its world.

However both of these are uniquely American novels. The Corrections could be more easily compared to a European novel (Buddenbrooks comes to mind for me), but there is the pervasive theme in both novels of individuals trying to transform themselves rather than being transformed by the exigencies of history.

David Foster Wallace

I know it's peculiar to mourn a complete stranger, but i find myself very sad today at the news of David Foster Wallace's suicide. If you're not familiar with his writing, you should be. But it's not just that he was a significant writer. To me he was a symbol of success for a way of thinking that was intelligent, broadly curious, and never intellectually satisfied. He was funny and human but never simple. He was the sort of person i would like to be. To think that even he could not cope is profoundly depressing.

If you don't know his work, start with A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's one of my favorite non-fiction books, and probably my favorite book title ever. This is a collection of essays, but the title essay is the real payoff.

The Brothers, The Brothers

One of my favorite novels is Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. It's one of the few books i've read multiple times, and back in my college days i read portions of it in the original Russian. I love Russian literature in general, and over the years I’ve read everything from Lermontov to Tolstoy to Bulgakov. But for some reason, I never read The Brothers Karamazov. I’m not sure why—maybe it’s because they made a movie out of it that had William Shatner playing one of the brothers.

Despite that I had high expectations for the book, and I really wanted to love it the way I love Crime and Punishment. When I started to read it a couple of months ago, I assumed that I’d eventually be drawn into it, even if the beginning was a bit slow. In theory, this is exactly the sort of book I like: deep, philosophical themes couched in a murder mystery/courtroom drama. But, Jesus, the most interesting thing that happens in the first 300 pages is the death of a monk ('cause he's really old -- no mystery here).

It's an incredibly complex novel. The structure, the characters, and the subject matter all serve to explore themes of faith vs. rationalism and what is morally permitted if there is no God. And of course, there are the Freudian overtones in the story of a son killing his father over a woman. The three (or four) brothers cover a spectrum of different personalities and represent the paths you can take in life and the dilemma in the fact that you can't choose all of the paths. But i just didn't feel it, like with Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment is not a happy book. In fact, it's a bit oppressive at times. But what always struck me about the book is that you feel this oppressiveness in the writing, you feel Raskolnikov's fear and guilt. I never really felt sympathetic at all with the characters in The Brothers Karamazov. It may be that i read it too late in life-- all of the brothers are still young men and it's hard for me to relate to any of them. If there's a character in the book to whom i most closely correspond it would be the father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, who is an ... um ... i forget the Russian word for "asshole".

Crime and Punishment also works better as a crime story. Even though you know the murderer from the outset, there's a fascination in the way the detective in the story hounds Raskolnikov (this is the basis for the television show Columbo). In The Brothers Karamazov you know that the accused is not the murderer, and furthermore the actual murderer is revealed before the trial starts. There is "drama" in the trial, but no real suspense. It must have been incredibly frustrating to the people reading it in the original serialization.

Like all Russian realism, everything in the book is supposed to be significant, but i'm still scratching my head over certain characters, like Ilyusha, a boy who is at first tormented by his peers and then becomes their friend just in time to die. I'm still not sure about the significance of the Elder Zosima (the aforementioned dead monk) either. His death involves one of the strangest episodes in the book. Although i suppose it's yet another illustration of the boundaries of faith, it's really surreal. The one thing that this book has over Crime and Punishment is a sense of humor. However, it's not the sort of humor that will have you laughing out loud. It comes out more in absurd contrasts or gentle pokes at a character's foibles.

I regret that i no longer have the ability to read the book in Russian. Although i read what seems to be regarded as the best current English translation, the language still didn't ring true. From what i understand Dostoevsky's prose in this book is a bit unorthodox to begin with, so a translation is bound to seem odd no matter how skillful.

Breakfast of Champions

When i was a high-school kid i picked up the book Breakfast of Champions in our high-school library. I retrospect, i know that if any of the librarians had ever read the book, it would not have been on the shelf (this is a community where an editorial in the local newspaper referred to Grapes of Wrath as 'smut'). For me the book was nothing short of a revelation. The most controversial thing i had read before that was maybe Catcher in the Rye, and so BoC broke convention in every way imaginable. It was funny and fantastic and sexual and by the standards of my previous experience, very strange. I loved it. I sort of felt that it was my own personal secret. I had originally chosen it as a novel on which to write a report, but i decided to do another book because i wanted to keep BoC to myself.

I never became a rabid fan of Vonnegut the writer, though i admired Vonnegut the human being. He was a fellow Hoosier and a fellow chemist and i thought his outspoken humanism was brave in a world where celebrity opinion is inevitably condemned as either vapid or elitist. Mostly, i admire how he took the difficult experiences in his life and transformed them into something amazing and enduring.

A Song of Fire and Ice on HBO

A coworker told me this past weekend that HBO has bought the rights to George R.R Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice so that they can turn it into a series. I've never had HBO, so i've missed out on Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Deadwood with nary a regret. This, however, will probably get me to subscribe. This could be for TV what the Lord of the Rings movies were for cinema, which i regard to be a good thing. It'll be interesting to see what they can get away with in the show, since there are some fairly taboo subjects in the books, even by HBO standards. Incest, for example, figures significantly into the plot, and one of the main characters is a girl who is wed (and impregnated) at age 14. But, hey, they handled Rome well enough, or so i've heard.

Coincidence

Not long ago i finished Michael Chabon's book The Final Solution. I picked it up on the bargain table at the Barnes and Noble for $4.99. I had no idea what it was about, but i like Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay so much that i bought it based on the author alone. It turns out that the story is about an elderly detective's final case (and yes there is a connection to the Nazis). The detective, though never named, is clearly meant to be Sherlock Holmes.

Upon finishing the book i decided to put it in the bookcase next to Kavalier and Clay. When i looked for that book, here's where i found it:

















I love coincidences like this. They remind me of why human beings tend to believe so strongly in things that are so unlikely. I haven't really analyzed what the probability is that i would have put Chabon's novel on the shelf next to Conan Doyle. I've got maybe 1500 books, but there are also conditions to consider such as that the books are roughly the same size and both are fiction. I don't follow any conventional filing system so the fact that the authors' names end in 'C' is not relevant (notice that the book next to Chabon is Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, so filed because it also has a comic-book related theme).

The Voynich Manuscript

[Note: This is a post i originally had on my Yahoo 360 page, which i'm dumping here]

I recently finished The Friar and the Cipher, a book whose title and dust jacket suggest it is about medieval monk/scientist Roger Bacon and the mysterious Voynich manuscript. Actually about 20% of the book covers those topics and the rest is a recap of ancient and medieval philosophy, the conflict between logic (Aristotle, Aquinas) and empiricism (Roger and Francis Bacon), lots of stuff about the University of Paris, various popes, Frederick the Great, John Dee, Emperor Rudolph, blah, blah, blah. In other words, if you're interested in either Roger Bacon and/or mysterious cryptic texts like the Voynich manuscript, i'd recommend you look elsewhere.

Anyway, the Voynich manuscript. Like most geeks, I'm a total sucker for undecipherable texts and languages. In fact, there might be nothing more intellectually appealing than the idea of a manuscript that's almost certainly trying to say something significant, but which has remained impenetrable. I'm a total nerd for codes, riddles, and ancient languages like Linear B and Mayan hieroglyphs (i actually had my picture taken next to the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum once). The Voynich manuscript is like all of these things rolled into one. Its provenance is uncertain, but its first definite appearance in the historical record dates to the court of Emperor Rudolph in the early 17th century (it was apparently in the possession of royal gardener Jacobus de Tepenec around 1608). The manuscript was purchased in 1912 by Wilfrid Voynich, hence the name.

The manuscript consists of many illustrations, mostly botanical, but also pictures of tiny naked people and other mysterious things. It is assumed by many to be encrypted, although the original language is uncertain (Bacon was an enthusiast of cryptography). The really cool thing though, is that unlike other mysterious texts (like, say, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili), the Voynich manuscript is written in a completely original, invented text.

An apparent postscript at the end of the book is written in Latin characters, although still apparently in code. Many think that this postscript supplies the key to decoding the text. In the 1920s, William Newbold claimed to have deciphered this postscript and then used it to decrypt parts of the manuscript. He determined not only that Roger Bacon was the creator of the manuscript, but that it explained how he had built early telescopes and other devices. He even claimed that one of the illustrations was of a nebula that Bacon could only have seen with a telescope.

This explanation of the manuscript was accepted (Newbold had solid academic credentials), and briefly made celebrities of both Newbold and Bacon's legacy. Unfortunately, his ideas were thoroughly debunked by William Manly, which ruined Newbold's reputation and returned Bacon to the status of medieval crackpot.

The great cryptanalysts William and Elizebeth Friedman took a crack at the Voynich too (in fact they had a group dedicated to it during the second World War when they were also going 24/7 to crack enemy codes). Although they did not decipher the document, they made the first serious effort at cataloging the symbols used in the text and attempting to do a frequency analysis. William Friedman's analysis of the structure and entropy of the language lead him to believe that it was an attempt at pasigraphy, or the creation of a universal symbolic language.

The Voynich now resides in the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale, where it is known as MS 408. There are numerous websites devoted to its presentation and study, just go Yahoo for them.

Fantasy Fiction

I read Tolkien in high school and i was completely absorbed into Middle Earth for a while. Although i was a bit too much of a jock to qualify for premier nerd status, i did have a "I'd Rather Be a Hobbit" t-shirt, and a modest command of Elvish runes. Although i read the Ring trilogy a few times through (and i loved the movies), i found the books harder to read as i got older. In my opinion, i think that Tolkien could spin a great yarn but that he wasn't a great writer.

Every other fantasy book i've read since Tolkien has disappointed me. They're so predictable and similar that i imagine it would be easy to write a program to automatically generate fantasy fiction. The problem of course is that most fantasy fiction is an imitation of Tolkien, but rarely does it reach the same level. Many of the cliches of fantasy fiction were not only invented by Tolkien, but he really set the standard. Because of his academic credentials in linguistics and philology, Tolkien's invented words and languages had a satisfying verisimilitude. The races and creatures that he created for his Middle Earth had deep ties to mythologies of western culture and just enough mystery around the edges to keep them fascinating. Every other fantasy author i've tried seems like they're either making stuff up thoughtlessly, or making simple substitutions of their creatures for Tolkien's. I can sort of imagine an author at his or her keyboard thinking "i'll name this guy Baradon. No, Barderon. Maybe Bardon. Yeah, Bardon, that'll work".

There are some fantasy writers i've tried who i think write pretty well (Anne McAffrey comes to mind), but i could never get through a series. Recently though i've heard so many recommendations for George R.R. Martin that i finally broke down and bought one of his books (A Game of Thrones). Martin certainly did not dispense with many of the fantasy cliches: he's got kings and castles and dragons and swords and knights, bastard sons, a warrior order, and there's even a map drawn on the front and back cover pages. He's really gone back beyond Tolkien and borrowed from the traditions of classic romantic fiction (knights and squires and tournaments and maidens in distress).

But to my surprise, it really works. On occasion there's some of that fantasy fiction prose that drops with a thud (" 'Ice' that sword was called... It was Valyrian steel, spell-forged and dark as smoke. Nothing held an edge like Valyrian steel"). But overall the writing is at a very high level, the plotting and pacing is great, and the characters are imbued with complexity and humanity. Most important i think is that Martin isn't just employing all of the fantasy fiction elements as props. Clearly, he loves this stuff and it comes through in the words.

Martin also seems to be a bit more mature than some of his peers. The political intrigues in the book are realistic and speak of someone who's seen a bit of life, as do some of the sexual themes and scenarios (i don't recall whores ever receiving mention in LotR). Also, people die. Characters are badly injured and characters that don't deserve to die are killed. This is not simple good vs. evil stuff, though there is clear good and unremorseful evil. Though this is clearly fantasy fiction, it also shares motifs with classic tragedy.

Which is not to say that this is soporific "serious" literature. Martin has not invented a new art form or stretched the boundaries of the novel, or any of that other stuff that lit critics get all hot over. He's not trying to be ironic or postmodern or to deconstruct anything. The musician Arnold Schonberg, a pioneer of avant garde music, once remarked that "there's still plenty of good music to write in C major". The same is true of literature; there are still a lot of damn fine stories to be told that are only trying to be enjoyable, meaningful, and exciting. Like my favorite genre fiction authors (Patrick O'Brian, Alan Furst), George R.R. Martin has achieved that on a significant scale.

O'Brian Quote

I've mentioned here before my fondness for the late Patrick O'Brian's sea-faring novels. I came across this quote in the first of the Aubrey/Maturin series (Master and Commander). I think it should be etched on the inside of the eyelids of every commentator on Fox news:

...patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either 'my country, right or wrong', which is infamous, or 'my country is always right', which is imbecile.

My Reading Addiction

The professor for one of my lit classes back in my college days had this saying that i liked, though i'm sure he got it from somebody else. It went something like this: "Show me somebody who reads and i'll show you somebody who's depressed; show me somebody who writes and i'll show you somebody who's miserable". By the transitive property of sweeping generalizations, it follows that somebody who writes about what they're reading must be freakin' suicidal.

Anyway, i've always been a fairly avid reader, at least by the standards of our post-literate culture. I don't really read for edification or education so much as just to experience things, however vicariously, that i probably won't experience otherwise. I also think reading has for me some of the same qualities as meditation. Under normal circumstances my brain multitasks pathologically. I think i have what Rands calls Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder (NADD), which is useful for people in my profession but which generates stress. When i read i'm able (sometimes) to focus on the text, maybe because the acts of parsing, interpreting, imagining, inferring that are required to read critically occupy most of the brain. Writing software and other intellectually absorbing activities often have a similar effect for me, but reading is the only one of these that relaxes me.

Lately though i've been combining my reading habit with my NADD. I used to be fairly strict about reading sequentially, one book at a time, but recently i've started reading multiple books. Not literally concurrently, but time-sliced. This began a couple of years ago when i got the idea of leaving a book in my car so that i'd have something to read while waiting for someone or while having lunch alone. That seemed fairly reasonable, and i'd usually have one fiction and one non-fiction book going so there'd be a clear distinction. But i couldn't leave well enough alone. At present, i'm in the middle of four different books. One is Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty, which a friend loaned me. Another is Pain: The Science of Suffering by Patrick Wall. The third is Blink by Malcom Gladwell, and the fourth is The Day of the Bees by Thomas Sanchez. That's if you don't count Bob Roll's Bobke II, which i have in the bathroom along with Apollodorus's Library.

This might sound like pseudo-intellectual bragging. Oooh, look at all of the clever books that i'm reading. But really, i'm not at all proud of this. I don't have an orderly process for managing the books, or a method for keeping them mentally compartmentalized. The books occupy various physical places that shift a bit, though they tend to remain separated: the office, the car, my family room, my nightstand. I don't attempt to read a set amount or at a specific time. I just slip into them when it's convenient. Sure, it's not exactly like mainlining heroin, but i think it's perilously close to crossing the line between purposeful and compulsive behavior.

I'm tempted to attribute these new reading habits to the Internet. Obviously i've developed a taste for rapid context changing and bursts of monotone information. It's mood altering. I can get my blood pressure up by reading something that pisses me off, and then bring it back down by cruising over to RudePundit. More likely though i'm just undisciplined.

Imperial Hubris

I finally finished reading Michael Scheuer's book Imperial Hubris: Why The West Is Losing The War On Terror. A bit of background: the book was originally published anonymously because Scheuer was a veteran of the CIA and that was the condition demanded by his employer. Scheuer left the CIA not long after the book came out. Although he says it was voluntary, i've seen claims on the Internet ranging from a) his departure was CIA grandstanding intended to draw attention to agency concerns over lack of funding and influence to b) he was incompetent and needed to be purged along with all of the other chaff that Porter Goss so wisely swept away. I'm taking the content of the book and Scheuer's claims at face value, meaning that i think the facts could certainly be interpreted differently but i believe the sources from which the author draws (which are supposedly all publicly available) are factual and not hoaxes, speculation, or flights of fancy.

The book repeats several themes throughout the book. The first is that our government has failed to understand that Al Qaeda is not a terrorist organization, but rather a global insurgency. The distinction, the author claims, is that we treat terrorist organizations with a law enforcement approach, using the special forces and intelligence agencies to go after the perceived terrorist leaders, while we should instead treat the enemy as a well-trained military force that needs to be confronted with forces sufficient to overwhelm and decimate it. Scheuer cites evidence showing that the so-called terrorist training camps that we've all heard about did in fact provide more general military training with the intention of developing a conventional military force.

A second point that Scheuer repeatedly emphasizes is that bin Laden is not a murderous thug using radical Islam to justify his attempts to destroy Western culture. Rather he argues that bin Laden and Al Qaeda oppose specific US policies toward the Muslim world and not Western freedoms and individuality per se. The Islamists oppose US support for Israel, the US presence in Islamic countries, and US support of oppressive regimes in the middle east (e.g., Saudi Arabia). These policies, Scheuer argues, have enabled bin Laden to frame his actions in terms of a defensive jihad, and idea that has legitimacy in Islamic teachings and growing support in the Islamic world.

Scheuer's assessment of bin Laden is probably the most unsettling part of the book, and also probably the reason why it has not been given the attention that i would have expected. Scheuer casts bin Laden as not only a pious Muslim and a highly capable leader, but also as a classic Islamic hero who is admired even by those who disagree with his actions. At one point in the book he refers to bin Laden as a "great man", though he takes care to note that he means this in the sense of a person who has changed history. However, he also says that "there is no reason, based on the information at hand, to believe that bin Laden is anything other than what he appears: a pious, charismatic, gentle, generous, talented, and personally courageous Muslim who is blessed with sound strategic and tactical judgement..., a reluctant but indispensable bloody-mindedness, and extraordinary patience". Given that Susan Sontag was excoriated for suggesting that the 9/11 terrorists were not cowards, i'm surprised that Scheuer hasn't been dragged through the Fox News muck for such an assertion.

Scheuer opposes the war in Iraq, though it would be a stretch to say that this is an anti-war book. His opposition to the Iraq war is based in part on the concern that it's costing us people and resources, but more so on the idea that it's bolstering the claims of bin Laden and other Islamists that the US is systematically pursuing policies to destroy Islamic cultures (he calls the war a "Christmas gift" for bin Laden). Although those sound like the same arguments used by anti-war liberals, Scheuer is no pacifist. He rails against the Bush administration more for not prosecuting the war in Afghanistan quickly enough; for waiting to establish some sort of global alliance rather than going into Afghanistan immediately after September 11 when there was still an opportunity to do some damage to bin Laden's forces. (He spends large sections of the book on the failure of our government to understand the realities of fighting a war in Afghanistan and to learn from the experiences of the Soviet Union and others). But Scheuer concedes that we probably will not change our policies toward the Islamic world, and so he contends that our remaining option is to fight the war more aggressively and to accept that we must kill many people, lose many soldiers, and spend many years and much treasure in the attempt (he especially likes drawing parallels to the US Civil War). He also states that we must temporarily set aside concerns about the environment so that we can reduce our dependence on middle-eastern oil, which is to say that he thinks we should extract oil from ANWR and develop nuclear energy.

One of the scarier and more controversial claims in the book is that bin Laden has sought and received sanction from Islamic scholars to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States as part of his defensive jihad (i will resist the temptation to point out the irony of Al Qaeda attempting to use WMD as a preemptive strike in a defensive conflict. Or maybe i won't). The book claims that bin Laden needed "Islamic grounding" for the idea of using WMD against the US, and he found it in a treatise written by a Saudi cleric named Shaykh Nasir bin Hamid al Fahd. Basically, this document posits the notion that Western cultures could be held responsible for the deaths of millions of Muslims, and so the use of WMD against the US would be justified by principles in the Koran. I found one internet pundit who derides this claim-- stating that it's absurd to think that bin Laden could be given "permission" to use WMD against the US-- though i think he misses the point.

My favorite section of the book deals with the idea of the US attempting to transplant democracy into occupied countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, which Scheuer regards as tremendously misguided. I've heard arguments against the notion before, but they've tended to be either patronizing assertions that the countries in question lack the necessary cultural maturity, or "Prime Directive"-style arguments that insist that we should leave other countries alone to develop in their own time. Scheuer's argument is an extension of these ideas but is more sophisticated and persuasive. Roughly he argues that the democracy-in-a-box advocates ignore the long and bloody history that lead to the democracy in the US. Our democracy, he contends, doesn't just go back to the US Civil War or the American Revolution; but to conflicts that unfolded centuries before in the countries of our ancestors, to the influences that set the stage for philosophical arguments in favor of individual liberty and self-government that eventually manifested themselves in the actions of our country's founders. I prefer this argument because it doesn't assume that democracy is a predestined conclusion, an instinctive human desire, or even the highest form of social organization. It explains why countries in Eastern Europe were able and willing to move toward democratic structures, while other areas of the world with radically different cultural histories are resistant to it.

The book contrasts starkly with what we see, hear, and read on a daily basis in the various media. I regard this to be valuable, others will no doubt view it as evidence that Scheuer lacks objectivity or has simply failed to make his point. If you watch C-SPAN or CNN or Fox, if you read the newspaper or political blogs, if you listen to conservative radio or NPR you will come away with the idea that we've succeeded in Afghanistan, that Al Qaeda and bin Laden are extreme fringe elements within Islam bent on destroying our way of life, and that our goals in Iraq will be achieved if we can simply make it to democratic elections. According to Scheuer we have failed miserably in Afghanistan, allowing Al Qaeda and the Taleban to escape essentially unscathed and able to reestablish authority in the country as soon as we remove our forces. He says that despite the successes we've had against the Al Qaeda leadership, that it's actually a flourishing organization that we've helped to flourish by virtue of the policies we continue to pursue in the Islamic world. Democracy will not survive in these places he says, unless we are committed to an essentially permanent and expanding occupation of the countries, which places in question whether it's democracy at all.

There's much in this book that makes me uncomfortable. I don't like the idea that to win the war against the insurgency we must essentially kill enough of the enemy to remove their capacity or will to fight; though i have no argument against it other than Scheuer's own: change our policies in the Middle East so that the conflict has no basis. I don't know how we could meaningfully change the US stance toward Israel as Scheuer suggests, since the Al Qaeda position is that it must be destroyed. I don't agree with Scheuer that we must stop being so squeamish about losing US soldiers because they are, as he says, professional soldiers who know the consequences of their profession of choice. I don't agree that we need to exhibit more "manliness" in our execution of war.

On balance though i find myself persuaded by many of Scheuer's arguments. Probably my favorite quote that the author uses in the book is this gem from John Adams:

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her own example. She well knows that by once enlisting under banners other than her own, were they even banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, ambition, which assumed the colors and usurped the standards of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.

This neatly sums up why i personally oppose our actions in the Middle East. More evidence that the founding fathers were simply smarter than we.

Robinson on Mars

I've been reading Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Blue Mars, the third book in the Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy. It's been several years since i read the first two books, and i'd forgotten how exceptional this series is.

I'm not a big fan of science fiction in general; a good percentage of the genre spends so much time on elaborate plots and scientific extrapolations that it doesn't have time for character. Robinson spends plenty of time speculating about near future developments in technology and society, in fact the detail and the obvious research that went into it is incredible. But he's also managed to create interesting characters whose behavior is sometimes all too human (whether Terran or Martian-- my personal favorite is Sax Russell, the terraforming genius who's still slightly obtuse with regard to the emotions of people). I'm constantly impressed by how plausible his fictional milieu seems, even though it spans multiple planets by the third book.

Plus which, the dude can write. I came across this passage today, describing late 22nd century earth, which now has a population of 18 billion:

Steaming, clotted, infectious, a human anthill stuck with a stick; the panic pullulation ongoing in the dreadful mash of history; the hypermalthusian nightmare at its worst; hot, humid, and heavy; and yet still, or perhaps because of all that, a great place to visit.

Definitely one of those rare series of books that you wish could continue indefinitely.