Two for You: Mini-Recommended Reading
In my first major package of books of that deployment (thanks, Mum!), I received the last Harry Potter, Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, Mill, Kateb, Dickens, Hobbes, Thucydides, Dante, de Tocqueville, Hiaasen, Adam Smith, Arendt, Huxley, Bryson, Isaacson’s biography of Einstein, a few non-fiction adventure books (I recommend from these Rounding the Horn by Dallas Murphy and The Last Expedition by Daniel Liebowitz and Charles Pearson), and most prominently Joyce’s Ulysses. These were the books I felt necessary to begin a study of the human condition beyond war (except the adventure books, which were wisely the purview of my mother, and the Harry Potter, which I merely enjoyed). Except for the Joyce, which I read every day and still took the entire deployment to finish, this was 6 months of reading material. When this package of knowledge was delivered to me during duty in my brigade’s operations center south of Baghdad, another captain on the staff expressed to me, “I love books!” Meanly, I thought, “Of course you do; who doesn’t?” At the time, I thought it a stupid thing to say.
In retrospect, I disagree with my moderately younger self and declare that I, too, love books. It is not obvious. Not everyone does. And while I may love books in a different way than our maligned captain (my agape vice her philia, if you will excuse both the probably unnecessary distinction and probable blasphemy), her sentiment is one which I have come to embrace entirely and tirelessly. I do not just love reading, I love books. I love to hold a book in my hands, to feel the binding and the paper, to smell the ink. I love the plates and pictures. I love the font and the layout of the pages, even if they include irregularities (such as my nth-hand copy of Joyce’s Dubliners, where the printing is partially smudged throughout the middle third). I suspect that many of you do as well, the military scholar being a peculiar subset of the bibliophile that tends towards bookishness and book collecting, even if said collecting extends beyond the typical cast of characters that have contributed to the art of war and warfare. My personal interactions indicate that you are a well-read and erudite community that reads compulsively on topics for which we are paid to read and topics for which we enjoy and topics we read because we believe that it makes us a better person. [….]
Read the rest here.
I share Jason’s love of books, as probably does everyone reading this blog or Ink Spots. However there is no shortage of people in this country for whom books are as irrelevant as an Irish linen doily or a whole horizon sextant, who are not technically illiterate, but meander through the post-literate life of cultural primitives.
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Lexington Green:
January 7th, 2013 at 5:23 am
I love books the same way. People who do not will never understand us.
Michael Robinson:
January 7th, 2013 at 6:19 am
Perhaps the glass is only half empty and there are more book lovers who are not aesthetic fetishists emotionally invested in ‘artists’ books’ or the ‘book arts’ than one might realize; an article by Nicholas Carr’s in the Journal yesterday, “Don’t Burn Your Books — Print Is Here to Stay”
“How attached are Americans to old-fashioned books? Just look at the results of a Pew Research Center survey released last month. The report showed that the percentage of adults who have read an e-book rose modestly over the past year, from 16% to 23%. But it also revealed that fully 89% of regular book readers said that they had read at least one printed book during the preceding 12 months. Only 30% reported reading even a single e-book in the past year.
What’s more, the Association of American Publishers reported that the annual growth rate for e-book sales fell abruptly during 2012, to about 34%. That’s still a healthy clip, but it is a sharp decline from the triple-digit growth rates of the preceding four years.
The initial e-book explosion is starting to look like an aberration. The technology’s early adopters, a small but enthusiastic bunch, made the move to e-books quickly and in a concentrated period. Further converts will be harder to come by. ”
As Carr points out on his own blog in a related post, “The headline writer is a bit more definitive in his assessment than I am, but that’s not unusual.”
seydlitz89:
January 8th, 2013 at 11:33 am
Thanks zen . . . concluding points to be added soon . . .
Soft Power, A Strategic Theory Perspective | The Image:
January 8th, 2013 at 6:35 pm
[…] H/T Zenpundit […]