What books to a desert island?

Ever considered that question? If you were to be abandoned on a desert island, what books would you want with you? One of my favorite historians was faced with exactly that choice.

I came away with no more than half a dozen books in my suitcase -- not knowing, when I left Ganthorpe in August, whether it was for three days or three years, and not packing a heavier load than I could carry myself at a pinch. As it turned out, it may, I suppose, be three years. Among what I did bring were Saint Augustine's Confessions, Pilgrim's Progress, Saint Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Imitatio Christi.

Arnold J. Toynbee to Father Columba Cary-Elwes, monk of Ampleforth. 19 October 1939, shortly after he left his home to do war work at the start of World War II.

Neither he nor anyone else knew how long the war would last nor how destructive it would be. He and his correspondent judged the war would be a disaster for Western society if it lasted for as long as three years. It lasted for twice three years.

You might wonder why he didn't just take the Bible. He'd memorized it when a kid. I am listening to Confessions on my commute. It's complex on many levels. Don't share his enthusiasm for Pilgrim's Progress though I once listened to a recorded version by John Gilgud which by itself was almost a religious experience. Toynbee was, of course, absolutely right about the Book of Common Prayer. I should start reading it again daily.

or maybe not. I am already reading 4-6 pages of Study of History almost every day.

The news as Sci-Fi

I have always enjoyed Science Fiction stories because it is like reading historical fiction where all the facts are made up.

Sometimes it is worthwhile to attempt that since all prediction is essentially an exercise in science fiction, or counter-history fiction. I have dipped into The Next Decade by George Friedman where he attempts to do that for the next 10 years. I may not go any further into it, but the attempt at least looks interesting.

And then there is this wonderful bit of prediction as 'history' in today's Washington Post by Jeff Greenfield entitled "What Happens to American Politics if We Default? Hello, Third Party." I think he may be right, if not immediately than in the long run.

If Sentenciae has a theme, it is that all American elites have disgraced themselves in the first decade of the 21rst century. The nutters in the Tea Party have gotten that part right and they are the first clear reaction to it. I think that essentially we are experiencing the birth pangs of a new civilization which is never easy. Western civilization is trying to give birth to a new syncretic civilization the same way Hellenic civilization gave birth to Hellenistic civilization.

We live in interesting times.

Westernistic? Occidentalistic?

Why students sometimes don't get it

Increasingly we encounter students who can read perfectly well, but they can't "read" in any real sense. Here is a sample on Amazon from a bored student reviewing Ostler's first rate Empires of the Word.

this book is really boring I bought it for a class and I totally hate reading it. I'm half way through and I'm only on ch.5! The chapters are soooooooooo!!!! long! its riddiculous! this is a pretty thick book and it has really small writting! The author just talks over and over again about the same thing! Don't recommend it to read just for fun but if it is for a class then goodluck!

That's it. In its entirety. Another review said it read like "a textbook." Many books on Amazon get that tag. As near as I can make out what they really mean by "reads like a textbook" is that it is not a simple narrative, a story. And the chapters "are soooooooooo!!!! long!" Probably has big words too.

reminds me of the history grad student who told me he didn't like reading "whole books."

Ex libris

I have been doing a lot of reading this summer in between taking long naps and walking the silly dog. I keep meaning to leave posts on all the books that I have read or listened to but this is the first one. First, what I read last semester, that is from January to May.

For school I read the usual stuff on Medieval Warfare, all done before.

For the Migrations in history class the only book I assigned was Man and Microbes: Disease and Plagues in History and Modern Times by Arno Karlen. I found the book packed with lots of scary information. In fact after reading it you wonder why any humans managed to survive the Neolithic Revolution, much less the Bubonic Plague of the 14th century. The plague, btw, gets only passing mention because there are so many other diseases fighting for attention in Karlen's pages. The class Aryan supremacist found it delightful. I may not assign it again.

I listened to The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. A staggering work to keep straight with one battle and disaster after another. Yet Thucydides always interlaces his narrative with well considered assessments of the politics and emotions involved. Perhaps he does this too much. Since he is the only source for so much of this era we have nothing to check him against. He started the practice of making up speeches for the main actors feeling this was the best way to summarize what they thought - or probably thought - in the author's opinion. At bottom though it is a tale of a society tearing itself apart for reasons that are still hard to fathom. I lost a lot of respect for V D Hanson who has an expert's knowledge of this era (I read his War Like No Other last semester) and yet found only reinforcement for his view that we should go into Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran. Thucydides paints a horrifying portrait of the original and never to be forgotten case of 'imperial over reach' and Hanson doesn't even see the irony.

Also read Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran by Parvaneh Pourshariati. It is rare for a book to really impress me but this one knocked my socks off. It is simply brilliant. It is a major piece of revisionist history covering the entire make-up, meaning, and fate of the Sasanian Empire. It sees the empire as a condominium of the Persian ruling family and the great Parthian dynasts that has been poorly understood. When that condominium fell apart under the pressure of both the Long War with the Roman Empire and the centralizing efforts of the Persian emperor the empire fell apart. And then the Arabs showed up. One of the major points of revisionism that Pourshariati pushes is that Muhammad was still alive when the Muslim conquest of Iraq began. I'll deal with that in a later post on Crone and Cook's Hagarism. The two books are both brilliant, show a masterful command of languages and sources, and call for major readjustments to our understanding of Near Eastern history. Both may also be completely wrong. Scholarly books intended for specialists they are a challenge but if you can handle them you will be a better person for having read them.

Soldiers and Ghosts by J E Lendon is another book on warfare during the Greek and Roman periods but one that totally rethinks the subject. Some parts of it, like his theory that most Hellenic warfare was based squarely on attitudes inculcated by the Iliad, I found unconvincing, but other parts of it helped me to revisualize the ancient battlefield in ways that will be useful.

I followed that up with a quick read on Gutenberg.org of Xenophon's The Cavalry General. It is a manual for how to recruit, train and lead a force of cavalry back in the days when it all seemed to be so new, the late 5th century BC. A fascinating and helpful view of the cavalry commander and his men and mounts.

That's all for the moment. More when I come back.

E-Reader Wars kindled

(I know - bad pun. What can I say? It's genetic)


Here is the WaPo's comparison between the new Nook from Barnes and Nobles and the old Kindle from Amazon. I put it up because I am fascinated by e-books, but also the first sentence of it is, how shall I put this, misleading.

Amazon.com's Kindle is no longer the only e-book story out there.

It never was. There were several e-books out there, including a very nice Sony reader that was sold at Borders. But, that is what passes for journalism. It's not really untrue, but it is an intellectually lazy and distorting way to present the frame of your article. It has to be a contest, a struggle. Pledge your support here.

I know because this is the way I write my lectures.

Carmen is scandalized: "You just make things up!"

Pick up the book and READ!

So the little kids outside the garden where a perplexed Augustine of Hippo was dithering are supposed to have chanted. In light of our last post and ensuing comments, it sounds like sound advice. The Old Man sent me this little news item from "Mom's Homeroom" that makes clear why:

In a paper called "What Reading Does for the Mind," Anne E. Cunningham, associate professor of cognition and development at the University of California, Berkeley, makes the case that reading:
-increases vocabulary more than talking or direct teaching
- substantially boosts general knowledge while decreasing the likelihood that misinformation will be absorbed; and
- helps keep our memory and reasoning abilities intact as we age.

Thus J.K. Rawlings saves Western Civilization! You hear that Máeráed? Mr Miggs? Read.

and remember, this isn't just any old article - it's a paper. Written by an associate professor! From Berkeley!

Odd. Suddenly I have the strangest craving to start reading Wuthering Heights.

Kindle 2: Love and Loathing

Slate.com has a good review of the Kindle 2 by Farhad Manjoo (via Sullivan btw). He loves it.

For starters, it's gorgeous. Unlike its bulky predecessor, the redesigned $359 Kindle, which came out this week, is light, thin, and disappears in your hands. If you think there's no way you could ever get used to curling up with an electronic reader, you haven't given the Kindle a chance. Load up a good book and you'll soon forget you're reading plastic rather than paper. You'll also wonder how you ever did without it.

And he fears it.

Amazon's reader is a brilliant device that shanghais book buyers and the book industry into accepting a radically diminished marketplace for published works. If the Kindle succeeds on its current terms, and all signs suggest it'll be a blockbuster (thanks Oprah!), Amazon will make a bundle. But everyone else with a stake in a vibrant book industry—authors, publishers, libraries, chain bookstores, indie bookstores, and, not least, readers—stands to lose out.

I don't think I've yet seen such a comprehensive take on the Kindle and how it might effect the book industry. Since, dear reader, you are reading Sententiae, it is a foregone conclusion that you are a reader of books, you might want to take a look at this article.

For me, the biggest drawback to the Kindle is that its cheap books are NYTs' best sellers. Anything I really want to read costs 15% less than the cover price, which for academic books can reach well over $100. For an e-book?

but then, I'm still using fountain pens, so you can't accuse me of being technologically "adventuresome."

The Kindle - electronic readers again

A friend showed me her new Kindle a few weeks ago. I am still tempted to get one, but Clovis, my computer adviser, told me to wait until the second version of it with a lower price comes out. Sounds good. My chief hesitation is that it would encourage me to buy and read books because they are available rather than because I really wanted to read them. If I spend 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, reading this summer I will barely make a dent in the books I want, need, or in some cases, have to read.

So what about the Kindle? It may not replace books, but there are all kinds of things that could be exploited that neither books nor newspapers can do. Here's Ezra Klien in the Columbia Journalism Review explaining.

Since I blew my $300 economic stimulus package on two cases of local wine, I'll have to come up with the $399 for the Kindle some other way.

Reading and e-books

I haven't made up my mind to actually spend money on one, but I am fascinated by e-book readers like the one from Sony. Just throw it in my backpack and - 160 books on tap. Of course, I don't go backpacking, but you get the idea.

Today the Wall Street Journal has a rather snide, though interesting, article by Daniel Henninger about the new Amazon Kindle. He seems to find this ironic:

It was hard not to notice that Kindle was born unto us about the same moment the National Endowment for the Arts released a report on reading's sad lot in our time. Amid much other horrifying data, it revealed that the average 15- to 24-year-old spends seven minutes daily on "voluntary" reading. Cheerfully, this number rises to 10 minutes on weekends.

He professes to be alarmed:

The NEA authors posit "greater academic, professional and civic benefits" with high levels of leisure reading. In other words, readers profit, at least in their souls, from time spent with works of the imagination or with books that explain the past. I agree.

Though he seems to be a bit ironic about this. After a tough day trying to discuss a book I assigned to class on Genghis Khan, I take the report at face value. We are in effect watching the demise of a literate culture based on a common data base encoded in literature and history. His following observation I do not find encouraging.

One criticism of the NEA studies is that they don't capture the "new" ways people read away from work. This means the Endowment doesn't validate new pastimes, such as reading text messages on cell-phone screens. Add the input-output of text messaging to the data base of readers and the daily voluntary reading time likely rises from seven minutes to six or seven hours.

Anybody want to read 900 pages of, say, War and Peace, as written in text message English?

Read 'em and weep...

... or not. The state of book reading in this country is pathetic. Here are some stats from the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop:

1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.

42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.

80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

57 percent of new books are not read to completion.

70 percent of books published do not earn back their advance.

70 percent of the books published do not make a profit.

(Source: Jerold Jenkins, www.JenkinsGroupInc.com)

Now I don't feel so bad about the paltry number of copies my book has sold. In fact, a nonfiction book is considered "successful" if it sells 7,500 copies. Only 7,200 to go!

This means that the idiotic reviews that appall me so over at Amazon.com come from the top 20% of the population in terms of reading. But more on that some other time.