At the moment I’m reading “Eden’s Outcasts” about Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) and her father.  I can’t remember where I bought the book, but it won a Pulitzer Prize and it quite compelling.  At one point I thought I’d read at least all the winners of the big prizes every year, but that plan soon floundered.  It is probably about time to read Little Women (but I’ve either read it before long ago (I think so) or I’ve a really long movie version).  And there are also many references to “Pilgrim’s Progress”, so I thought I might give that a try.  But after reading the Wikipedia plot description, I think there may be other ways to entertain myself.

(By the way, the older pictures on this new installation are still broken.  Will fix that over the weekend.)

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freigthed with truth and beauty.
Theodore Parker

Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.  They are engines of change, windows on the world, “lighthouses” (as a poet said) “erect in the sea of time.”  They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
Barbara W. Tuchman

A man is known by the books he reads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
Mark Twain

I am reading “She stoops to conquer”. (Somewhere in the background “Moby Dick” is also waiting to be finished.) It has made me think of how some plays are so easy to read as fiction, while others are so hard. There seems to be a scale: at one end is material that can only be appreciated on stage, at the other end is material that cannot be dramatized.

I have also been working on an implementation for research. One of the stumbling blocks has been communication between different processes. There are two kinds. Synchronous communication is like a telephone call, where both parties have to be available for the communication to succeed. Asynchronous communication is like email, where the message can be send without the other party being available to read it immediately. In some sense, they are really the same. The important distinction is that nothing “significant” can happen between exchanges.

These concepts carry over to literature. Live theatre is essentially synchronous communication: like a telephone call, nothing happens if either the audience or the actors are missing. Books, novels, are asynchronous: like an email message, they are sent without the author ever knowing if the addressee will ever read it and without even expecting a direct response.

The strange thing about a book is that the author imagines the reader, and the reader imagines the author. And this act of mutual imagination goes further. The reader conjures up a fantasy world in his mind to fit the story. Everyone’s world is unique, differing in the small or perhaps large detailsfrom everyone else’s. The author himself/herself has performed this exercise, putting down what they saw in their mind’s eye. Some authors write detailed prose (e.g., Tolkien), others are quite high-level in their descriptions (e.g., Chesterton). I wonder if the most successful books are the ones that constrain the readers’ imagination a lot (creating a full and complete world) or barely enough? Probably neither; there is a whole another sense in which the “message” of a book comes across.

I am way behind on my reading. My modest purpose is to finish all the unread books on my shelf. My readling list is somewhat of a barometer of how busy I am. And I do like to take breaks after reading a lot. But then, returning after a month or two or three, there is all that excitement as I remember how much fun it is to read.  The joy of lying in bed with a book…  I think I’ll do a little reading now.

The topic, however, is interesting and important. Why should society support pie-in-the-sky research when we have no way of knowing that it will someday be useful? It is, of course, a gamble, but one worth taking if we consider the benefits we now reap from such investment in the past. One of several nice examples they talk about in the book is Frederick Hopkins who investigated the pigments in butterfly wings. It turns out that the chemistry of the pigments are related to folic acids, and that it now forms the basis of research on vitamins and metabolism. It took 60 years before Hopkins’s work became useful. Modern society is driven by a technology explosion, and it would be very foolish not to invest in fundamental research. We might just run out of fuel. We need to train and support scientists as well as the engineers who apply the science, and that means that we need to support universities.

On a related note, there are rumours that the NRF (National Research Foundation) of South Africa is having a little financial trouble.  If so, it is hopefully only temporary. But it might just perhaps be a good thing if they cease to exist. According to their annual report, they received R1112 million from the government and oher sources in 2008, and paid R482 million (=43.3%) in grants and bursaries. Salaries amounted to R243 million (=21.9%) and “other expenses” to R246 million (=22.1%). I’m not sure if an agency whose task it is to distribute research money should operate with an overhead of 44%! The spent more money on non-research and on research!  I don’t know what happend to the remaining 12.7%: I don’t think it went towards their various properties or their fleet of vehicles, but it might have. But at least we can all be grateful that they doubled the NRF president’s salary from R742,000 (2007) to R1.5 million (2008). How the poor man survived on that meagre amount I don’t know.

I was looking for a particular book that has been on my reading list, but I found three. The first is about postgraduate supervision (what I was looking for, but the book is useless), another deals with the management of student research project (about just as useless), and then the treasure: “What Students Really Think of Professors” by Jackson and Murray. What an excellent little book! Most of it (roughly 90%) simply quotes classroom evaluation forms filled out by students. But this has been organized into topics, and it is interspersed with short introductions and conneting text. The result is a wonderful insight into almost all aspects of teaching a course. I am very impressed.

I do not want to quote much of it, but the chapter on humour in the classroom is irresistible. It has been a long time since I laughed this hard. Just a couple of my favourites follow below, but the text introducing the feedback is often just as funny. So, everything from here on down comes straight from the book.

This opened my eyes to trees, forests and other things that go along with forestry.

Lectures frequently drearied off of topic.

An excellent professor. In fact he is the most favorite professor I ever had.

This course and instructor were exceptional. I enjoyed this class more than any class. A lot of it had to do with the professor’s enthusiasm. The only bad part was when he broke his collar bone!!

I really enjoyed the course and it made me think about things – curious about why things happen. Having the woman come in to talk about birth control was helpful. I also learned a lot that I never knew before such as reproduction. I never knew women ovulated only one egg per month. I never knew the vagina wasn’t the opening for the removal of urine. Overall it was very educational and fun. Lab really helped understand concepts.

Please do your hair differently – at least periodically. The barrete/ponytail inversion is quite unbecoming.

I still have about 150 pages to go and at this stage I understand or have seen very little of the fabled deeper meanings.  Perhaps the search for deeper meaning in the text is exactly what the whole story is about.

I read for pleasure and I’m always struck by the striking quotations that other people pick up from the books they read.  I wonder if they read with the fixed goal of finding quotations, or whether they are simply more observant.  Perhaps they can read at many different levels at the same time.  I’m not that clever and I’m far to greedy, so I just read read read.  But I did try this other style for one chapter.  It is difficult to find a sentence without the word “whale” or “Leviathan” or some reference to whale anatomy.  But I *did* come across the following (very generic) but useful phrase:

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

Somehow very fitting for much of my life.

I do not necessarily agree with Bloom’s opinions, but he is worth listening to.  At least he is sincere and passionate about what he is saying.  Is it easier to learn from someone with whom you disagree but respect?  I feel like an empty vessel.  I’m not sure that I shall like this book, but I have a sense that I can learn from it.  Reading is not all entertainment:  it used to be about education, but I think it is difficult not to find pleasure in book learning.  Is even that wrong?

In any case, his chapter about music and the significance of music is worth reading.  If you are prepared to abandon the doctrine of relative and easy truth, this chapter explains why music is at the centre of Plato’s and Aristotle’s writings on politics, and its role today.

Promises to be more regular sound so empty…  In any case, this is record that I finished “This is your Brain on Music” by Daniel Levitin.  Such an excellent book excepts for the (relatively infrequent, but greatly annoying) parts where the author seems unable to stop from telling a story about his illustrious career, or to make it clear exactly how inferior other scientists are because they have developed music theory to “separate” the common man from music.  This happens mostly in the early chapters and later on he seems to get back on the rails a little.  It really spoiled the whole of the book for me though.

Having said that,  it is well-written, contains fascinating information and I enjoyed a lot of the book tremendously.  I probably won’t want to read it again, but it was good while it lasted. 

The writing is “Break no bones” (nr 9 in the series) is a little smoother than in “Death du jour ” (nr 2), but it still had traces of the staccato style that I did not warm to immediately.  I have somehow grown a little more used to it, and it is not so strong in this book.  But I like it here.  Perhaps it does keep the pace going, which in both books is pretty fast.  Once again, there is a lot of coincidence in the plot.  Too much.  I find it hard to believe that every single body that a single pathologist (sorry, anthropologist) discovers is connected in some way.

But apart from that, the book is exciting, interesting, sensible, not perfect but highly enjoyable. 

The book is excellent.  At the start it seems unlikely that the author can write anything new or interesting about the topic he proposes.  In fact, several times throughout the four parts I thought to myself that this is one subject about which nothing could be said.  Yet somehow Diamond makes his argument in a clear and original way.  His writing is excellent and easy to read, and his arguments are strong.  (I’m sure that somewhere on the internet you can find lots of refutations and certainly there are stronger and weaker claims, but all in all the book is very convincing.)  It seems to me that a blind spot in my view of history has been filled in, and it has cast new light on many other aspects of the subject.

I probably won’t read this book again.  It’s not that kind of book.  But I’m glad I finally succumbed to Beatrice’s suggestion.