2016 Reading by Category:
History, as usual, gets the lion's share -- still, not as much as last year's 37%. My reading was intentionally more diverse this year, and accordingly science made a strong showing -- with more reads last year than in the previous two yeas combined. When I began the year I wanted to model it after 2013, which was terrific in both terms of quality of books and in the variety of topics I considered. Just look at the spread!
2013
Back to 2016: my Digital World theme became mostly about cyber security, but I made a lot of progress in reading books about middle-east histoy and am building on that this year to look at the history of east Asia. I also kept three of my five resolutions, the two failures being (1) buying fewer books and (2) reviewing books that I loved but never shared here.
Inspired by the diversity of your reading [grin] I have a China 'triple' coming up later this year (with a European angle of course). I'll see if I can do that for some other regions too - The Far East and Africa seems like good possibilities. I will definitely be *trying* to read more science/technology this year.
ReplyDelete...and with the Brexit process about to start maybe I should look at Britain's relationship with the Continent a bit more closely to see what went wrong?
3rd China book has just arrived (well, around lunch time today) from Amazon! Hurrah!
ReplyDeleteStrangely enough, I also received a China book today from Amazon. It will be a while yet before I read it, though -- it's called "This Brave New World: China, India, and the United States".
DeleteRegarding Brexit, will you be reading any literature from their side? I ask because I used to have the impression that Farage was a racist or something until I heard him being interviewed. The points he made about treaties being sent to the people of France and this-or-that country, democratically rejected, and then imposed anyway via treaties, sounded like a legitimate grievance. I read your Brexit posts but don't comment on them because I don't live in Britain (or Europe, heheh) and so am not exposed to a lot of the facts. I listen to speeches and interviews from time to times.
I was planning on reading histories/political tomes about Britain's relationship with the Continent rather than pro-anti Brexit books themselves (though there are now quite a few out there). Some of that will be about the history of the EU but I don't think that anything written about Brexit itself will have enough perspective to be of much use right now. Maybe in 5-10 years when a lot of the dust has settled.
DeleteMy Brexit posts are inevitably one sided. I voted Remain and believe that Brexit was the stupidest thing this country has *ever* done. Plus the excerpts are all from the BBC. Essentially what I'm doing is showing what some people are saying about it and then looking back to see who was right.
Oh, and I think you're right about Farage. He's what a call a 'Little Englander' who has some kind of fantasy England in his head and who thinks we can achieve that through the simple act of leaving the EU. All quite delusional....
I'm happy to provide something to other readers, and grateful to count you among them, sir!
ReplyDeleteI like the BBC, but I certainly don't regard it as neutral -- ditto for the Economist, which I read devotedly. The Economist is all for the Clinton-Bush-Blair world of corporate trade and transnational organizations running everything. I'm strongly sympathetic toward little America sentimentalism myself -- and little England, and provincial France, and parochial Italy and kleiner Deutschland. It's people's folk songs and regional architecture that make me enraptured, not the reign of McWorld. But I also am suspicion of this corporate mega-order from rational grounds: people cannot handle that much centralized power, centralized power doesn't work well in many respects, democracy means nothing on a mass scale, etc. I think all these big corrupt things always do themselves in, though -- Rome, Persia, Bonaparte. Once they crash to the ground it's the little places, the poleis and communes, that grow and prosper again. So I'm hopeful, regardless of what comes. :)
ReplyDelete