10-19: Books about Books

Turns out 10-19 is all booklists. Uh-oh! "750 Books for Middle Readers," that sort of thing. Not at all something I can curl up with. But I did find these two:
  and
 They both look more like collections of short essays than lists, and they both have the additional virtue of including many books I have already read. Obviously, with my current project, unless there is a list of "Best Non-Fiction by Dewey Decimal Number," which I'm sure there is but not at my library, the last thing I need is more reading ideas! But it's always interesting to see what someone else is saying about books I have loved (Kristen Lavransdatter, filed under Strong Women in Book Smart), hated ("Holden Caufield, That Little Brat," filed under "Violence and Loss" in Practical Classics) or successfully avoided so far ("The Scarlet Letter: I Don't Like It Either," filed under "Love and Pain," also in Practical Classics). I'm looking forward to reading about this great literature, if not actually reading it!

How to Succeed in Business, Given That Nobody Knows Anything: The Black Swan

Just finished my first book! The Black Swan went fast, since I had it on audio and Kindle. I kept debating whether it was in the right place in the DD system, since it was trying to be a book on epistemology (do we know anything, and if so, how?) but kept ending up being a book on investment strategies. My biggest takeaway was an investment strategy (broadly defined): We don't know much. Weird things can happen. They can be bad or good. If you can make a small risk that puts you in a position to profit from a good weird thing happening, do so, but don't stake much on the risk that a bad weird thing WON'T happen, because there is no meaningful way to assess the possibilities. Tomorrow I go back to the library; I am excited to see what's in 010-019.

0-9: What Do We Know, and How Do We Know It? (The Black Swan)

I am about halfway through The Black Swan. I keep thinking about these verses of Scripture:
"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.' Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.' But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil." (James 4: 13-16, NASB) Taleb's book seems like an exposition of this passage, even more so because one of his main applications is to critique those who build their business models on the confidence that they know something about the future.

 If you want to know Taleb's point, you could save a lot of time by reading just the first chapter here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/chapters/0422-1st-tale.html?pagewanted=all. If you want to know what kind of fellow the author is, he'll be happy to tell you here: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com. If you want a sound critical overview of the book, The New York Times has provided it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/review/Easterbrook.t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, but I rather like this analysis from a Berkeley prof, here: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Books/taleb.html.

One thing neither reviewer mentioned was that Taleb has an odd habit of including sentences that don't make any sense or that are very badly composed, and sometimes whole paragraphs that seem completely irrelevant, at various moments in the book. I don't have an example to hand, but it gives me the same feeling that I have when I'm watching a 2.5 hour movie and a scene drags. Come on, you could have saved 45 seconds right there!

One very interesting point Taleb makes in the course of stressing how we don't know anything is this: We are very bad at estimating how long something will take. Sometimes, the further you travel towards a goal, the farther away it may recede. For example, a person who is out of work is more likely to remain out of work the longer he has been looking. Taleb presents this phenomenon as a certainty, which is an example of how statistics lie, but being aware that it is a possibility is useful information. Sometimes there is an external reason for this phenomenon-- employers get nervous about hiring people who have been out of work for a long time. Sometimes it is more psychological; the longer I am out of work, the more discouraged I might get about finding work, and the more comfortable with surviving some other way. But just knowing that the longer you let a project --like finding work or painting a room or writing a novel or going to war-- go, the more likely it is that it will go even longer, is useful information.

Let's Read All the Books!

I started thinking about this project a few weeks ago, and I just decided to start and figure out the details later. Easier to steer a moving ship and all that. So I took the first book from the first nonfiction shelf from the Chester County Library main branch. (I go there every three weeks to get audiobooks to mitigate my annoying commute) The book was:
 

The title is pretty comprehensive, right? And that's what it was about: a chapter on what scientist do wrong, a chapter on how journalists make it worse, and so on. It seemed to me to fall into the category of epistemology (can we know anything, and if so, how?), and therefore be a logical fit for the very beginning of the very first decade of the first century of the Dewey system, "Generalities." It was interesting enough, and certainly has changed the way I read magazines, which are full of "Scientists discovered this week that…" articles. However, it did seem to have the same flaw from which many non-fiction books suffer: they would have made great chapters. Meanwhile, as I was forcing myself to finish it (a task from which I eventually excused myself, grateful to the author for making me more skeptical, but not feeling the need to take his journey all the way to the end), I was doing some back of the envelope calculations and realizing that I was unlikely to live long enough to read every book in the library or even one book for every number in the system. That's when I decided to go decade by decade.

This approach has a number of benefits: it gives me more control over what I try to read-- in fact, it gives me the option of bringing home a selection of volumes. It gives me the fun of "shopping" along the whole decade-- although some seem to be much more full than others, and a few are not used at all. It also gives me a bit more of a picture of the flow-- or lack thereof-- of the categories. 0-9, for example, seems to start right in with consulting and go from there through paranormal theories to bibliophilia before landing squarely in technical manuals for various computer languages, which occupy about 3/4 of the decade's shelf space. These were my selections:


I got The Black Swan in audio and text versions, so I started with that. I am finding the style by turns engaging and mildly annoying, as if I sense that the author might not be somebody I would like very much if I knew him in person, but that as long as he is safely confined to the pages of a book, he's quite entertaining. He, too, has only one big idea, which has been extensively described elsewhere, and which nicely compliments the big idea of my first selection. He too believes that we don't know nearly as much as we think we do, a thesis I am more and more prepared to accept the longer I live! He makes this point through a number of personal and historical anecdotes, which are both intrinsically rewarding and thought-provoking-- for example, would I rather risk being broke on a chance of being a millionaire, or just plod along in the certainty of earning an income between known parameters? (Well, that one's easy-- the latter. Turns out I'm financially highly risk-averse.) He also is making me wonder whether there is any action point: how to prepare for events that can't at all be predicted but yet will completely disrupt your life?

And so, we're off to the races: 0-999! Have you ever done a Dewey Decimal challenge?

(Full disclosure: I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. If this arrangement actually makes any money, I'll donate it to my church's bookstore. But mainly I just wanted you to be able to click through and learn more about the books if you wanted to.)