From a 2006 post (by Bert Webb) that has stood the test of time.
A new — or new looking — book is a treasure. In my experience, however, I have found that a well-marked book, becomes more like a treasured friend — one that you enjoy seeing again and again. It becomes much more enjoyable than a sterile copy that comes straight from the bookstore. Don’t be afraid to mark up the books that you love.
John Keller is the title character in Lawrence Block’s Hit Man series. Killing people is his profession…but stamp collecting is his passion.
“When he was working with his stamps, he was always entirely absorbed in what he was doing. He was expending considerable concentration on what was essentially an unimportant task, and that seemed to be something his spirit required.”
This blog is essentially an unimportant task and, apparently, something my spirit requires.
“I recently gave Claude the task of selecting a seed library: the best set of books for rebooting civilization from scratch. It curated 200 books across fields as diverse as medicine, metallurgy, and mathematics. It did a remarkably great job. Many of its choices were classics, ones I would have chosen myself. It also pulled in obscure tomes that only a real student of do-it-yourself would be familiar with, and hauled in from far corners some very informative books of practical knowledge I had never heard of. Overall, it accumulated a strong list, among the best I have seen.”
Recently watched an interview with Neil Howe, the author of The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End. The interviewer begins by quoting Howe’s prediction that “In the coming year, the country will undergo a crises that will fundamentally reset society.”
I asked Perplexity for a synopsis of the book:
Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning Is Here argues that the United States has already entered a long, cyclical “Crisis” phase that will upend existing institutions and values and culminate in a new civic order sometime in the early 2030s. It extends his earlier generational theory to explain how today’s Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z each play distinct roles in driving and resolving this upheaval.
The book updates the Strauss–Howe generational theory, which sees history moving in 80–100 year cycles composed of four “turnings” (High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis), analogous to seasons. Howe contends that the current Fourth Turning (Crisis) began around the 2008 financial crash and will likely end in the early 2030s with a decisive reshaping of American political, economic, and social life.
And a counter view:
Many historians and social scientists see Howe’s framework as pattern‑spotting on noisy data rather than a testable theory, arguing that the “turnings” are cherry‑picked after the fact and stretched to fit events. Critics also note that the generational archetypes are so broad and fuzzy that they can explain almost anything, which makes the predictions more like narrative prophecy than falsifiable social science.
The interviewer asked Howe for if he was at all optimistic and he said the current crises is a good thing because the alternative is more of what we have now. I’m down with that.
But you should not beat yourself up if you find yourself reading fewer books than you used to. It could be that, at the margin, reading essays or having conversations with AI is a better use of your time.
— Arnold Kling [Substack so you’ll have to provide email to read full post]