What Are You Currently Reading? 2013

[Backwards Observer]

The Silence of Animals, the new offering by international man of misery, John Gray.

When Conrad used his experiences of the Congo in Heart of Darkness (1899), he was not telling a story of barbarism in faraway places. The narrator tells the tale on a yacht moored in the Thames estuary: barbarism is not a primitive form of life, Conrad is intimating, but a pathological development of civilization. The same thought recurs in The Secret Agent (1907), Conrad’s novel of terrorism and conspiracy, which is set in London. The anarchist Professor, who travels everywhere with a bomb in his coat that he intends to detonate if arrested, wants to believe that humanity has been corrupted by government, an essentially criminal institution. But, as Conrad understood, it is not only government that is tainted by criminality. All human institutions - families and churches, police forces and anarchists - are stained by crime. Explaining human nastiness by reference to corrupt institutions leaves a question: why are humans so attached to corruption? Clearly, the answer is the human animal itself. (from The Silence of Animals by John Gray)

The Silence of Animals - John Gray - Amazon

Interview with a writer: John Gray - spectator - 2.22.2013

The Silence of Animals - review - guardian - 2.15.2013

The Silence of Animals - review - telegraph - 2.19.2013

***
Also,

Conrad in the Nineteenth Century by Ian Watt - amazon

Born March 9, 1917, in Windermere, Westmorland in England, Watt was educated at the Dover County School for Boys and at St John's College, Cambridge, where he earned first-class honors in English.

Watt joined the British Army at the age of 22 and served with distinction in World War II as an infantry lieutenant from 1939 to 1946. He was wounded in the Battle of Singapore in February 1942 and listed as "missing, presumed killed in action."

In fact, he had been taken prisoner by the Japanese and remained a prisoner of war at the Changi Prison until 1945, working on the construction of the Burma Railway which crossed Thailand, a feat that inspired the Pierre Boulle book 'Bridge Over the River Kwai', and the film adaptation by David Lean. He criticized both the book and the film for the liberties they took with the historical details of his imprisonment and, more subtly, their refusal to acknowledge the moral complexities of the situation.

More than 12,000 prisoners died during the building of the railroad, most of them from disease, and Watt was critically ill from malnutrition for several years.

"There was a period when I expected to die," Watt told the San Francisco Examiner in a 1979 interview. "But I didn't know how sick I was until they gave me some of the vitamin pills that had just come into the camp. I remember being very surprised that I was considered sick enough to receive vitamins."

Professor Watt died in Menlo Park, California, USA. (from wikipedia)

Ian Watt (Literary Critic) - wikipedia

***

Gratuitous film clip:

Lord Jim (1965) - youtube

Lord Jim - wikipedia

[ganulv]

Kattekoppen, a piece in the latest number of The New Yorker set in Logar Province and narrated by a DEVGRU member. I really admire how the author has managed to create a narrator who is detached and incredibly observant at the same time. And there is a great bit about sleep deprivation and fingernails.

[carl]

Ganulv:

The most interesting part of that New Yorker story were these lines spoken by the narrator:

As SEAL Team Six, we were at the top of that scheme. Our ideas about the war were the war.

To me that sort of encapsulates in two sentences the supreme and invincible arrogance of the big military, a supreme confidence even though what is being done hasn't worked and isn't working. The stats are good though.

[Firn]

The Signal and the Noise.

A great book. The Baseball chapter was a bit long for my European taste, the poker one maybe too and I have some slight ceveats in other areas. However the positives dominate. Coming from a somewhat different angle it gels well with Kahnemans studies and surprisingly enough with aspects of the works of Ben Graham and Buffet. He ends with the words:

The more eagerly we commit to scrutinising and testing our theories, the more readily we accept that our knowledge of the world is uncertain, the more willingly we acknowledge that perfect prediction is impossible, the less we will live in fear of our failures, and the more freedom we will have to let our minds flow freely. By knowing more about what we don't know, we may get a few more predictions right

Should work well most of the time for investors...

[ganulv]

The Baseball chapter was a bit long for my European taste

I assure you that you don't have to be European to be bored by baseball.

[Backwards Observer]

Modern Strategy by Colin S. Gray. Straightforward and readable so far. A useful mainstream foundational primer for the layperson.

The moral of this chapter, perhaps, is that we learn from history both that we cannot learn from history and that human beings continue to be literally capable of anything. The sadness of strategic history that sparks sentimental popular songs with rhetorical lines such as 'when will they ever learn?' promotes the hard-nosed question, 'learn what?' The horror of war has been known to mankind for ever. If full recognition of that horror were all that we humans had to learn, then the social institution of war might have been long banished. Unfortunately, things are not quite that elementally simple. (from Modern Strategy by Colin Gray)

Modern Strategy by Colin Gray - amazon

[Old Eagle]

Using Gray as a text next term.

[Firn]

I assure you that you don't have to be European to be bored by baseball.

I`m actually hard to bore if the matter is discussed with some intelligence but that chapter was a bit much...

In any case I gave Common stocks a read.

I enjoyed it even if pretty nothing was new, but Fisher did a superb job when he wrote it and forcefully states many an important point.

[ganulv]

albeit only a few pages, chapter 35 of Roland Huntford’s Two planks and a passion. The book is a very well done history of skiing up to 1945. (There is a final chapter with a post-War history of skiing that feels a little tacked-on, but that period has already been covered by a number of books, in any case.)