How to Make Use of the Books You Don't Read

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Here’s a game you can play if you have neglected books on your shelf:

1. Make a stack of 10 to 15 books you haven’t gotten around to and partly regret acquiring. Imagine you are preparing to move and must decide which are worth bringing along.

2. Take the non-reference page count of the largest book in your stack. Use a random number generator to find a starting point for each book in your stack. (Obviously too big numbers can be regenerated until it’s easy to do rough modular arithmetic)

3. Read 10 pages of each book in your stack, beginning from its starting point. Write down each starting page in order beforehand, so you can move fluidly through the stack.

I thought I’d share excerpts from my own stack this week, with a few general reflections at the end.

The Stack

Disclaimer: I will not in general make much effort to provide context. Part of the purpose of the game is to divorce content from context that has impeded you from appreciating these books in the past.

The Cave and the Light by Arthur Herman

Born around 1474, Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas had two lives. The first was as a Spanish planter on a freshly conquered Cuba, where he received a royal grant of land tenure (encomienda) in 1513. Las Casas proceeded to rule over his Indian serfs with a brutality that was not unusual in the early years of the Spanish conquest of the New World but was unusual for a man of the Church -in fact, a Dominican friar.

All that ended one Sunday in 1514, when a fellow Dominican priest refused to give Las Casas communion because of his sadistic treatment of his Indians. The refusal plunged Las Casas into a severe emotional crisis, after which he gave up his encomienda and began his second life: as the devoted protector of the Indians in Cuba, dedicated to altering their servile status under the Spanish Empire.

This section is not much about the title figures (Plato and Aristotle).

The Birth (and Death) of the Cool by Ted Gioia

[My parents] never worried about their lifestyle. Never spoke about it. Never thought about it, as far as I could tell. For them, living itself was hard enough. Trying to do it with some style and panache was outside their scope of understanding. If I had forced the issue with them, tried to get them to talk about trendy fashions or how one projected the image of a cool lifestyle, they would have dismissed such matters as shallow. Or (if they had thought of the word) as decadent.

My parents were not unusual in this regard. America was mostly ignorant of lifestyles until the 1960s—but then things changed rapidly. The term lifestyle appeared in the Chicago Tribune only seven times during the year 1967, but five years later that same newspaper used the word 3,300 times! Today many newspapers even have lifestyle editors.

The media not only uses (and overuses) the term lifestyle… but to a great extent they build their coverage of day-to-day events around it.

And later in Chapter 2,

Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of the second half the 1960s of the twentieth century was the growing overlap and blurring between lifestyle categories and aesthetic categories. Starting in the fifties and gaining momentum over the next two decades, average people wanted to lead their lives as though they were works of art, songs or movies or novels. At the same time, people now judged songs or movies or novels as lifestyle accessories, not as aesthetic products. In some strange way, this became the epitome of the cool—to externalize your life as though it were one more entertainment product.

During my college years, I spent much of my free time studying music and developing my skills as a jazz pianist. Because of this obvious obsession on my part, many classmates would come up to me when they wanted to talk about their favorite records or radio stations or bands. But I soon learned that what they really wanted to talk about when they talked music was their own emerging lifestyles. When my roommate announced to me that the Sex Pistols were the greatest band in the world, he didn’t mean that Johnny Rotten had a wider vocal range than Luciano Pavarotti or that Sid Vicious was a greater virtuoso than Andrés Segovia. What he really meant, even if he couldn’t articulate it clearly, was that the Sex Pistols enthralled him as an extension of his own attitudes and ways of being in the world…

When I later started writing music criticism and books on music, I frequently ran into the same confusion. I would get caught up in puzzling and unsettling dialogues with other critics, and I would struggle to even understand what points they were trying to make. Only gradually did I discover that they were no different from my punk rock friends from college. Even music criticism had stopped being about the music and was increasingly written from the lifestyle perspective of the critic. I heard one critic boast that he took pride in recommending music to people that he knew they would never enjoy.

The Fractured Republic by Yuval Levin

BECAUSE WE TEND TO SEE the second half of the twentieth century through the eyes of the baby boomers, especially those who came of age in the 1960s, we often implicitly assume that the cultural transformation of that era did not begin until that decade. But, in fact, it began almost immediately after World War II.

The turn began with an outburst of liberationist pop psychology and philosophy that enjoined Americans to set aside the culture of sacrifice and focus instead on their own individual desires and ambitions.

Pediatrician Benjamin Spock published Baby and Child Care, which advised American parents to relax and raise their young children in less regimented ways that showed more regard for each child’s individuality. The book was a runaway best-seller. The best-selling nonfiction book the following year was a kind of self-help manual entitled Peace of Mind, written by Rabbi Joshua Lieb-man. It assured Americans that it was okay to “love thyself.” In 1949, the pop-psychology book The Mature Mind, by Harry Overstreet, topped the New York Times best-seller list for sixteen weeks. It called on Americans to pursue “self-affirmation,” rather than submerging their own identities beneath vast cultural codes of behavior rooted in guilt.”

Ironically, we think of the culture of the 1950s as being dominated by conformity and uniformity even though that was when these cultural tendencies began to be aggressively challenged—and perhaps in large part because of such challenges, for it was the challengers who identified and emphasized conformity as a defining characteristic of their generation.

Confessions of a Reluctant Optimist: Poems by Phyllis McGinley

I opened to “Saturday Storm”,

Give thought to, wish them well
Who must this day
On customary errands take their way:

The glistening policemen in the street,
For instance, blowing their whistles through the welter
And stamping their wet feet;
And grocery boys flung in and out of shelter
But faithful to their loads;
And people changing tires beside the roads;
Doormen with colds and doctors in damp suits;
And milkmen on their routes,
Scuttling like squirrels; and men with cleated boots
Aloft on telephone poles in the rough gale;
But chiefly trudging men with sacks of mail
Slung over shoulder,
Who slog from door to door and cannot rest
Till they’ve delivered the last government folder,
The final scribbled postcard, misaddressed.

Oh, all at ease
Should say a prayer for these—
That they come, healthy, homeward before night,
Safer than beasts or birds,
To no dark welcome but an earned delight
Of pleasant words,
Known walls, accustomed love, fires burning steady,

And a good dinner ready.

Full poem here, New Yorker 1953.

Illustrated by Peter Lippmann (Amazon link)

The Next Convergence by Michael Spence

Or is it A. Michael Spence?

In Italy, where I live part of the time, nominal returns on bonds were high prior to the arrival of the euro, because inflation was relatively high. Italy periodically devalued to remain internationally competitive, and as a growth strategy it worked quite well. It did take away some of the pressure for structural change in the economy, and the price for that is now being paid. Individual investors liked the high nominal returns and got used to them. The run-up to the euro forced inflation down, resulting in [low] nominal returns.

So financial institutions, mainly banks responding to investor desires, went looking for higher-return fixed-income assets. And they found them, in Argentina and in a few companies like Cirio and Parmalat, both of which were indicted for fraud and resulted in spectacular bankruptcies. These are examples of chasing yield or return while paying insufficient attention to risk.

The Great Degeneration by Niall Ferguson

On “the rule of lawyers”,

Once-verdant landscapes can become desiccated through natural processes, too. Mancur Olson used to argue that, over time, all political systems are likely to succumb to sclerosis, mainly because of rent-seeking activities by organized interest groups. Perhaps that is what we see at work in the United States today. Americans could once boast proudly that their system set the benchmark for the world; the United States was the rule of law. But now what we see is the rule of lawyers, which is something different. It is surely no coincidence that lawyers are so over-represented in the US Congress. The share of senators who are lawyers is admittedly below its peak of 51 per cent in the early 1970s but it is still 37 percent. Similarly, lawyers no longer account for 43 per cent of representatives in the House, as in the early 1960s, but at 24 percent their share is still much larger than the equivalent figure for the House of Commons (14 per cent).

Not sure where the numbers stand now, but this made me inclined to think that lawyer share is not a major issue.

Change Your Brain, Change Your Life by Daniel Amen

Parts of Amen I hear are possibly debunked? This though is surely true.

People often spend their days worrying about what other people think of them. To help them with this problem, I teach them the “18/40/60 Rule”:

When you’re eighteen, you worry about what everybody is thinking of you;

When you’re forty, you don’t give a damn about what anybody thinks of you;

When you’re sixty, you realize nobody’s been thinking about you at all.

A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors by David Thomson

The chapter I landed on was about a director I had never heard of that has directed no films I have ever heard of (Stephen Frears). What’s more, the author does not seem to think any of his films rise to the level of truly great. (There are only 15 chapters in the book)

Paging Hollis Robbins: does your advice re: poetry apply to film?

My Startup Life by Ben Casnocha

Brain Trust: Life Is a Sales Call

BY JEFF PARKER

When I started Technical Data in 1980, I raised a total of $100,000 to start the business. It became cash-flow positive in forty-five days and was sold six years later for $24 million.

One reason we were successful is that our organizational culture was focused on sales and marketing from the start. There is nothing more important in your organization than a great sales and marketing team. Revenues produce cash, which is the lifeblood of the organization. Everyone in the organization is important, but no one in the organization is more important than your salespeople.

Create a sales culture throughout your organization. Get everyone interested in how sales are going. A sales-oriented company has momentum, attracts great people, and is an exciting place to work.

Good salespeople have much in common: laser focus, an emphasis on executing strategy, clear goals, and an understanding of customer needs.

Although most entrepreneurs realize the importance of sales to business, some forget its crossover to other life challenges. I often tell entrepreneurs, “Life’s a sales call.” Every day we have to persuade someone-maybe our spouse, boss, or professor—on our idea or plan, no matter how important or how trivial.

The sales techniques and philosophies that Ben and all good businesspeople employ are fundamental to forging your own life path and controlling your destiny. There will be many obstacles in your business and personal life. There will be skeptics and opponents. Your job is to persuade them to your side, or like a good salesperson, ignore the bad opportunities and bounce back and move on. If you have the philosophy that “life’s a sales call,” I think you will be pleasantly surprised at the results.

The Ruling Class by Angelo Codevilla

For the Country Class, winning elections will be the easy part. Avoiding bitter partisan government on the one hand, and co-option into the Ruling Class on the other, will be harder. Harder yet will be sweeping away a half century’s accretions of bad habits. Taking care to preserve the good among them is hard enough; establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder.

The Country Class’ greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been imposed on enough.

I was puzzled by my initial draw from the RNG because I could find nothing that seemed like commentary. A full quarter of this 100 page populist precursor to the MAGA movement was a reprinting of The Constitution and The Declaration of Independence.

Conclusions

I hit 17 books in an afternoon. Of these, five will clearly not be making the move while several others are dangerously close to being redundant thanks to ChatGPT. Only one, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, is a definite keep.

If nothing else I unburdened myself from the guilt of buyer’s remorse: I now feel I have given each book a fair shot. And in sum (if not always in isolation) I feel I have gotten some return on investment.

For a few hours my stack held my close attention, to the point where it pained me to be pulled elsewhere. Though I love many of the titles on my shelf, this is not always the case.

I learned that sometimes it is mainly the framing or marketing of a book that has not held up over time, and more generally what impedes us can be bypassed with the aid of serendipity.

Remember Meno’s paradox: you do not always know where to find what you are looking for.