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To the ominously increasing antilibrary and the waning summer reading bookpiles:

Counterinsurgency by David Kilcullen

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire by Edward Luttwak

Spook Country by William Gibson

Hope to start  a couple of these by the end of the month. A number of other books to be finished first.

I have a new decentralized reading strategy that seems to be helping me wad through books faster. Books that I am reading are distributed to be read in different places – one in my gym bag for the treadmill; one in my car in case there’s time to kill at an appointment or at a restaurant; one or two books downstairs to read on the couch or outside on the deck; one to take to the pool with the kids and four of five on my bedstand. There are also a store of books on my iPad, “just in case”.

The strategy allows me to concentrate on finishing several books – my “primary” reads – even as I steadily chip away at the rest and there are enough choices available to suit my mood on any given day so it doesn’t feel like I am doing a literary marathon. Books that I am focusing on, usually histories, strategic studies and social science works, I will mark up with marginalia and the others are just read without recourse to notation.

How do you handle your reading time?

Earlier today, my friend and sometime co–author Shane Deichman, who blogs at Wizards of Oz,  passed through the area as part of his “OldSkool 2010“ tour. Mrs. Zenpundit and I were treated to lunch by the Deichmans and it was a pleasure to see them and their children, including their adorable youngest member of the family, who was not yet born the last time we got together.

Food was good, the company was better!

Shameless Self-Promotion Department:

In an unusual turn of events, I was the subject of an interview by novelist and historian Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire and The War of Art.

Steve has an interview section on his newly redesigned site and I join a series of bloggers and authors like Instapundit  Glenn Reynolds, Tim O’Brien and Seth Godin who have sat down, in a virtual sense, with Steve for a discussion about writing and creativity. Having done such interviews of others in the past, it was a good experience to be on the receiving end of questions, for which I thank Steve:

The Creative Process: Mark Safranski

SP: Mark, what is the ZenPundit philosophy? Howdo you decide which stories or posts (or even guest bloggers) you want to include? What criteria do you use?

MS: Good question. My philosophy is something I also try to impart in my teaching.

Marcus Aurelius said “Look beneath the surface; let not the several qualities of a thing nor its worth escape you.” Most phenomena have many dimensions, multiple causes and second and third order effects. To deal with all of this complexity, we simplify matters by looking at life through an organizing frame, which we might call a worldview, a schema, a paradigm or a discipline. Whatever we call our mental model, we tend to become wedded to it because it “works.” It helps us understand some of what we are looking at-and in getting good at applying our model, advances us professionally and brings prestige or material rewards. So we will defend it to the death, from all challengers!

That’s getting carried away. Our mental model is just a tool or, more precisely, a cognitive lens. We need to be less attached to our habitual and lazy ways of looking at the world, put down our magnifying glass and pick up a telescope. Or, bifocals. Or, a microscope. Stepping back and applying different perspectives to a problem or an issue will give us new information, help us extrapolate, identify unintended consequences or spot connections and opportunities. When I do analytical pieces, I try to take that approach….

Read the rest here.

To those who have written in – I am way behind in my email and will be trrying to catch-up in the next few days.

I found this interesting. It is science and technology journalist Micheal Specter at TED where he is blasting “science denial”:

I may be wrong, but I suspect that Specter’s political and perhaps, economic, views, are to the left of my own. That’s ok – he has a scientific-empirical-rational epistemology, which means there’s an intellectual common ground where debates can actually be resolved or final conclusions arrived at that can be recognized as sensible, even if disagreement based on value choices remained.

More and more, I run across people on the Left and Right using magical, tribalistic, emotionally atavistic or other variations of irrational thinking to justify their positions. Worse, this intellectual equivalent of grunting tends to be coupled with a churlishly defiant refusal to honestly consider the costs (monetary or opportunity) involved or the logical, and still less, the unintended, consequences. Am I just getting old, or is this social phenomena getting rapidly worse?

Ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of because we are all, in varying degrees, ignorant about many things. The important choice as individuals and as a society is adopting an epistemology of rational-scientific-empiricism that, if steadily applied, allows us to chip away at our ignorance and become aware of our errors and solve problems.  On the other hand, adopting a posture of belligerent, stubborn, defense of our own ignorance by evading facts, logic and the conclusions drawn from the evidence of experience is the road to certain disaster.

Our epistemic worldview matters.