The Grand Failure of my Summer Reading List
Ah, I am over a month late on a promised follow up post!
Back in early June, I composed a hyper-ambitious Summer Reading list that I wanted to plough through on those hazy, lazy, dog day afternoons. Here was my list:
THE SUMMER READING LIST:
Military History and Strategy
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
– PW Singer (Finish, currently reading)
The Anabasis of Cyrus (Agora)– Xenophon
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One– David Kilcullen
The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity– Antoine Bousquet
The Culture of War– Martin van Creveld
Certain to Win–Chet Richards
Science, Futurism, Networks, Economics and Technology
How the Mind Works– Steven Pinker
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software– Steven Johnson
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology– Ray Kurzweil
The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age (The New Media World)– Lokman Tsui
Biography
Ho Chi Minh: A Life
– William J. Duiker
Philosophy and Intellectual History
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx– Karl Popper
The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason– Charles Freeman
Fiction
Pattern Recognition
– William Gibson
On the Road (Penguin Classics)– Jack Kerouac
Pretty impressive, eh? It would be more so if I had actually done it. While I have all of these books on my shelf, I did not get to most of them and was frequently sidetracked by books that were never on the list in the first place. Here’s what I actually read this summer between Memorial Day and Labor Day:
The Books I Really Read Last Summer:
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia
This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13, America’s Most Violent Gang
Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
The Anabasis of Cyrus (Agora)
How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower
The Books I Partially Read Last Summer but Have Yet to Finish:
The Culture of War
The Conquest of Gaul 
Why didn’t I stick to my reading list ? Looking back, there’s a number of reasons.
Foremost would be a lack of discipline on my part to put in several hours plugging away, each day, without fail. While I can legitimately say that professional and family commitments were not inconsequential last summer, I’m sure if I counted up the time I frittered away online reading blogs, social media sites, PDFs, etc. it most likely exceeded the clock hours spent reading books.
A second reason was review copies. When a publisher or PR firm sends me a review copy, I feel an obligation to read the book in a timely fashion. The authors count on that during the roll-out phase and most recipients of review copies never bother to write two words. I tend to write reviews only for the books I feel confident recommending to ZP readers; I’m not a professional critic nor do I get paid to blog, so I’m not going to waste my limited blogging time slamming an author or nitpicking unless his views come across as nutty or dangerous. Review copies that are not at a level to merit a positive review ( I probably get sent 3 books for every review that you see posted here, and I refuse to accept books outside my core areas of interest. I also get embargoed drafts still in the writing process but cannot, for legal reasons, blog about them) are read and then are shelved or given away.
The final reason probably comes down to age. It’s much harder now to read four or five hours at a stretch; whether that is because the internet is re-wiring my brain, as Nick Carr argues, or that the hectic pace and noisy environment of my life lacks any such extended blocs of quiet time that I enjoyed at age 20, I’m not sure. Regardless, for me, books are now read in brief snatches of time these days, with an uninterrupted hour of book reading being uncommon, unless it is done after everyone else in the house is asleep. Over time, that means reading fewer books.
A shame.
October 10th, 2009 at 6:49 am
That’s still a good haul for a summer. My problem is that I tend to get really distracted by books and have a hard time sticking to one. But recently I’ve gotten better at reading fast. Also, posting my reading lists on FB allows me to track progress in an convenient place.
October 10th, 2009 at 10:04 am
Zen,
I feel your pain, bro. Hope that is the right thing to say in this age of BHO.
Seriously I think you are doing reasonably well. As a father in the same age group with an 11+ hr working day I can sympathize. My solution: giving up a weekly 2 hr teaching committment which I did like, no more than 2 hrs TV per week, cutting down most severely on blog reading and internet time generally.
The discipline part is difficult, of course: I did stay up late yesterday to read all those vituperative comments on the idiocy of the NP committee, BHOs errors and omissions etc. That is what AAs and weight watchers call a relapse I think.
This weekend I feel obliged to tackle a lawbook which just came in from the UK and set my employer back a cool 550 Euros (excl. of shipping) for about 500 pages – a record I think.
October 10th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Yeah, I’ve noticed the same thing as A.E – I seem to want to read so many books, and pick so many books, that sometimes I have trouble sticking to one. I never had this problem in the past, likely because I would buy one book of fiction, finish it, and then move on.
If I were an op-ed columnist, here is where I would lament that blog reading is causing me to jump around and lose focus!
*Jack Keraouc, eh? I’m a bit surprised at myself, I tend toward the Brontes and Dickens and 70-80s British female writers, all Margaret Drabble and Anita Brookner and Elizabeth Taylor (yes, the writer), but lately, I’ve been drawn to those rebellious sorts.
Ah, there is always something interesting to read…..
October 10th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Oh, I mean lately drawn toward reading Kerouac and, oddly enough, a lot of diaries like the Cheever diaries. It’s humbling to note that the great writers can dash of a quick impressionistic sentence in a diary that is more vivid, more real, more genuinely creative and moving, than many of the carefully cultivated and polished sentences of the M.F.A. fiction types that seem to make up contemporary American fiction these days. Dullsville, imo.
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No wonder some of us have moved onto non-fiction.
October 10th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
"This weekend I feel obliged to tackle a lawbook which just came in from the UK and set my employer back a cool 550 Euros (excl. of shipping) for about 500 pages – a record I think."
.
Good freaking Lord, is that a proprietary legal strategy text of some kind where they only sell it to clients?
October 10th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
"…the M.F.A. fiction types…"
.
For fiction, I apply a roughly forty year rule. Read no novel that has not survived at least a couple of literary generations with its reputation intact. The sole and rare exception is a very high recommendation by a very reliable source of a more contemporary novel. In my case, a third exception is an occasional return to my first fictional love and reading a science fiction novel that is very well-regarded or considered the state of the art. That happens once a year or so.
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I never plan my non-professional reading. I have found it to be a waste of time, since I never stick to any plan. And, worse, it gives an unpleasant whiff of duty to one of the few free choices I have in life. So I prefer to be guided by what is on my shelf that grabs my attention.
October 10th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Zen,
No, unfortuantely not. Just a Brit lawbook dealing with a fairly arcane area of int`l commercial law, written for a small professional audience. These books are often in the 350 GBP range or more which is twice as much as comparable German or French books which I also need.
I buy certain books of professional interest for my own library as well even if I have them at my office but I have to draw a line somewhere.
Talking of which, Jane`s is even worse – a simple Police Yearbook sets you back 635 USD. That s about the cheapest you can get. However, I need general Risk Management stuff. A DVD can cost in excess of 3 K – arghhh.
Now I really do not object to paying good money for good books. In fact books rank above whisky, cigars and ammo in my prio list which is saying a lot, really, but there is a limit. 1 EUR per page does feel bizarre, and the book doesn t even look like much although binding and printing quality seem good.
October 11th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
I’m in the same boat. My problem is that the books that I chose were each way too long. It would be one thing if I had chosen 5 books that could each be read in a few days. But I opted for Ghost Wars, The Persian Puzzle, and A Savage War of Peace, among others. Each is a tome almost as long as War and Peace. I have gone cold turkey on any more purchases from Borders and Barnes & Noble until I make some significant progress on my current bookshelf.
October 11th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Hi Schmedlap,
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I’m now 63 books behind. I may have to join your pledge or go 12 step 😉
October 16th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I thought it was adualt onset A.D.D. I was fighting when it came to books on the shelf partly read as i was driven to distraction via references and recommendations from others and the internet. Glad to see i am not alone.
October 19th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
ZP–Don’t worry about not getting to "Horse Soldiers"–it’s not worth it and below caliber for a Times writer (e.g. Dexter Filkins, Elain Sciolino). I read it purely because I needed info about the presence or absence of horseback-riding skills for a project, but didn’t finish it because it was so badly written. You probably know the stuff in "Emergence" already so you could drop that one further down the list. …–PK
December 28th, 2009 at 4:06 am
It was a nice movie thats for sure 🙂 watched for fre3 on WikiBlast . n e t
January 7th, 2010 at 3:50 am
@polak thats not how it works 🙂