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.)
No comments:
Post a Comment