Though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty.
– Moby Dick
I read some amazing books this year (full list). The most substantial recurring theme was “historical travelogues, focused on the early modern era.”
Table of contents
Book of the Year: Arabia Felix
Arabia Felix, by Thorkild Hansen
Before the Tower of Babel fell – before knowledge was scattered and separated, before it was professionalized, before the search for truth was disemboweled and bled dry and ground up into a fine powder and bureaucratized – back in 1761 when you could just do things – the King of Denmark commissioned an expedition to Yemen.
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Its goal was simply to catalog and understand everything it saw along the way – phosphorescent algae, the alleged Muslim practice of female circumcision, ancient hieroglyphic engravings at a monastery near Sinai and so much more. Part of the stated motivation was to collate these observations with the Bible, attempting to separate historical fact from religious myth. But the quest clearly goes deeper: these were men for whom the world was full of mysteries and wonder but is ultimately explainable. This was the time of the Enlightenment, when Roger Bacon’s call to adventure was heard most strongly. At least by some.
The villain of the story, Friedrich von Haven, is a respectable, well-credentialed mediocrity who is the nominal leader of the voyage, “for whom academic studies were more of a pleasant pastime than a serious calling”. His foil is Carsten Neibuhr, a bright farm boy with a talent for mathematics and astronomy who starts out as the expedition’s cartographer. Von Haven wastes time and money, makes no meaningful contributions, gets seasick immediately and has to travel part of the way overland, and ultimately seems scared of doing any real work that might put his reputation at stake; Neibuhr blossoms into a keenly observant polymath motivated solely by joy and curiosity about the world and the manifold forms it contains. His friend Peter Forsskål, a student of Linnaeus and the expedition’s biologist, also comes off well, diligently collecting and taxonomizing untold specimens of flora and fauna from the first moment the voyage departs. The pair of them – unlike the inflexible and uptight Von Haven – are constantly gathering information from locals, delicately navigating complicated cultural and political situations, doing more with less, and generally exhibiting astonishing grace under extreme pressure.
(Von Haven’s Wikipedia page claims that this book is an unfair hatchet job, but that section seems to be lifted straight from the work of one minor contemporary scholar with an axe to grind.)
To take one example: as the voyage nears Malta, it encounters some possibly-hostile warships and the sailors are preparing for battle:
In the midst of these exciting events another incident occurred which, while it lasted, held Carsten Niebuhr’s attention completely. On 6th June, 1761, the planet Venus appeared in its orbit in front of the sun. In order to observe and measure this rare phenomenon, Niebuhr set up his astrolabe and telescope on deck while all the sailors were rushing round getting the ship ready for battle. Unfortunately he had to complain that, despite the calm weather, the shaking of the boat prevented him from taking his readings with the desired accuracy. Nevertheless, there is something very engaging in the picture of the earnest astronomer standing on the foredeck busy with his instruments while the sailors make ready for battle all around him and the English warships lie waiting a little way off on the shining sea. One of the reasons why the world has not yet gone under is perhaps that even at the most dramatic moments there is always somebody who unconcernedly looks the other way. At circles in the sand. At a gable in Delft. So on the ship on which guns are being got ready for their murderous debate, a man is completely absorbed in observing the path of Venus.
Meanwhile, as another member of the expedition writes of Von Haven: “What is one to think of the kind of man who is completely lacking in courage and yet possessed of an enormous desire to dominate?”
The expedition gets through the Mediterranean, tarries in Egypt, and makes its painstaking way through part of the Arabian Peninsula. They face internal dissent, attacks of disease and violence, harsh and inhospitable terrain. They are delayed, time and again, by the need to seek the permission of local petty tyrants before they can travel, to stay, to take measurements. But the logic of the quest pulls them forward. Eventually, some of their findings, but only one of the six men, returned home to Denmark. The expedition was famous in its day, but nearly forgotten until, in the 1950s, a previously unknown journal emerged and caught the eye of the novelist Thorkild Hansen, who wrote this astonishing book.
This book is a marvel. On one level, it’s a galloping adventure story full of larger-than-life characters in dramatic settings. It is also a reminder of a time long gone: not simpler than ours but grander in its ambitions, its risk-taking, and its zest for knowledge, truth and for life itself.
This is my book of the year: I loved it and have been recommending it non-stop since before I finished it. It also inspired me to read other historical travelogues by and about early modern Europeans.
(The NYRB is incredible. If you’d like to read more, an adapted version of the introduction to this edition is available here.)
Runners-up
Orality and Literacy, Walter J Ong
The invention of writing, and then later of print, fundamentally changed human consciousness. It is impossible for us to truly understand the inner life, or social world, of primary orality. Orality is redundant, conservative, close to the human lifeworld, agonistic, empathetic and participatory, homeostatic, situational and communal; literacy is solitary, analytic, abstract. Speech has a communal audience, writing has an atomized “readership”.
For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at the center….only after print…would human beings when they thought about the cosmos or universe or ‘world’, think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface (vision presents surfaces).
Highly, highly thought-provoking and recommended.
Related:
- The Uses of Literacy, Richard Hoggart. Thick description of working-class British life in the early-to-mid 20th century, and the effect of mass media on it. Moderately recommended. (Fun fact: Because of libel laws, Hoggart can’t mention by name some of the trashy books he’s criticizing, so he makes up representative lists of titles. One of these eventually ended up as the title of the band Death Cab for Cutie.)
- Cognitive Development, A.R. Luria. Ong cites this heavily. It has lots of fun case studies and examples but is skippable.
The Structures of Everyday Life, Fernand Braudel
Every plant of civilization creates a state of strict bondage.
In a remarkable incident in 1636, three Portuguese cannon, hauled up on the Great Wall of China, put the Manchurian army to flight, thus procuring an extra ten years or so of life for Ming rule in China.
As early as 1572 thousands of Dutch cheeses were unlawfully reaching Spanish America.
Extraordinary. An enormous work of history spanning four centuries in length, the entire world in breadth, and every single human activity in depth. Do not be dissuaded by the boring first chapter on historical population statistics. Reminiscent of Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization in its love of details and attempt to systemative, quantify and compare, but broader and less totalizing: energy is just one of the many topics Braudel covers. Every page contains dozens of delightful facts that collectively hammer home that the early modern world was more connected, sophisticated, varied, and foreign than we typically imagine.
This is book one of a trilogy which was also followed by a brief epilogue, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism that clearly outlines the overall project – I think I got more out of the main work because I had read the epilogue first. See also a good NYRB review of Book 1.
Related: Lynn White Jr’s Medieval Technology and Social Change, which I also enjoyed very much. Technology evolves slowly through continuous adaptation to economic and material realities; when a particular technology and the practices for making it “click” with the resources and needs that surround it, it can then spread remarkably quickly and change the course of history.
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words and books.
Probably my favorite book of all. Much funnier than I remembered it, endlessly quotable, Ishmael a relatable, bumbling narrator – at least until the sudden, shocking slip into omniscient narration. The spiritual passages of this novel will move you to transcendent reflection and enlarge your soul; other bits will teach you a lot about whaling.
Related but not recommended:
- Call Me Ishmael, an influential 1950s work of criticism on Moby Dick. It’s written in a strange, powerful, captivating style, but I found the actual critical arguments both unclear and uncompelling.
- I did not care for Billy Budd: short but oddly full of fluff emphasizing only how handsome the protagonist is.
Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography, William Lee Miller
Anecdotes about [Abraham Lincoln, as a child] rescuing animals and birds abound in the memories of people who knew him.
A remarkable book about a remarkable man. Much of Lincoln’s absurdly rich inner life consisted, Miller demonstrates, of moral reflection. His vast reading combined with the varied circumstances and colorful characters of his outer life, provided resources that he could draw on – illustrating complex reasoning with obscure citations and folksy stories – for the many challenges of his life which he, significantly, chose to construe as moral issues and address accordingly.
Mating, Norman Rush
Denoon loved a book by James Joyce’s brother in which their father is described as someone it was impossible to imagine as a happy, productive member of any society the mind of man has yet to come up with. I immediately thought of myself, of course.
An American PhD student, a bit adrift, goes to Botswana and then ventures into the desert in search of a utopian matriarchal society and the captivating but bizarre man who runs it. This won the National Book Award, but I had never heard of it. Incredibly well-written, very funny and smart, full of interesting vocabulary. A precise, cutting, loving depiction of relationships where the boundaries of wit, love, lust, mutual admiration, and intellectual self-gratification are a bit blurry.
Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish, is also a great, funny novel putatively about expats in Africa but in fact mostly about a deep love of words: A similar constraint to Perec’s A Void: the first chapter only contains words starting with A, the second with only A and B, and so on until all letters are allowed, then the constraint runs in reverse. An incredible accomplishment.
How Life Works, Philip Ball
Life is a hierarchical process, and each level has its own rules and principles: there are those that apply to genes, and to proteins, to cells and tissues and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system. All are essential; none can claim primacy.
Life is an extraordinary physical phenomenon and what you learned in high school biology is mostly wrong. In particular, the view that “DNA is the blueprint of life” is extremely misleading. This book synthesizes a wide range of research over the last few decades that all points at a vastly different view. Biological processes are bewilderingly complex. Reductionism and abstraction fail to explain very much: to a first approximation everything affects everything else, everything has multiple purposes or ways of working, everything co-evolved and cannot be understood in isolation. The alternative would be fragility. (This SSC piece explains a similar idea – we shouldn’t expect to find simple drugs that affect cognitive functions because those same mechanisms, if they existed, would have been easy for parasites to exploit and hence would have conveyed negative evolutionary fitness.)
Honorable Mentions
The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
A willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and water spouts of god.
[Spiritual change, like falling in love, is] a latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done.
Single words, and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea, odors and musical sounds, all bring [this sense of deeper significance] when the mind is tuned aright. Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.
James is a philosophical pragmatist and approaches the study of religion by ignoring the question of whether religious beliefs are true and instead examining what people actually feel (or report to feel): “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots”. He’s a beautiful stylist and keen observer of inner life, but the endless case studies get very repetitive and can safely be skipped. Worthwhile just to watch James’s mind at work even if the topic itself is not of interest.
Assorted Works of Jim Harrison
A Really Big Lunch (memoir/essays), Dalva (novel), Legends of the Fall (novel)
It is still possible to live a substantial part of your life beyond the stultifying effect of the mass culture, a culture whose main achievement, it might be said, is to steal from us the sense of who we are.
I’m hoping in the future to travel around Mexico and hire housewives to cook me their favorite bean dishes.
A friend recommended A Really Big Lunch and I loved it so much that I immediately sought out another two Harrison works and read all three back-to-back-to-back in about a week. Harrison’s personal life was rambunctious, outdoorsy, spiritual, deeply intellectual and literary, intensely productive, gluttonous and bibulous, both solitary and garrulous, and very funny. His novels are much the same.
Part of A Really Big Lunch was excerpted in the New Yorker if you want to try him out, but the novels are better.
Revolutionary Temper, Robert Darnton
Characterizes pre-Revolution Paris (1748-1789) as an “information society”, where news and rumours spread fast. Darnton looks at the role of information (mainly pamphlets and gossip as recorded in diaries) in shaping Parisian public sentiment in reaction to, and as a driver of, the political news of this turbulent period.
The Everything Store, Brad Stone
Don’t let Bezos’s tawdry retirement or failures in spaceflight distract you from the incredible feats he achieved in building Amazon. Silicon Valley is profoundly ahistorical in vibe but it is ultimately a myth-driven scene whose culture and economic structure have deep historical roots – the rise and dominance of Amazon is one of its most important myths and is worth knowing. (For much more on this, see Steve Blank’s Secret History of Silicon Valley.)
Related and also recommended: History of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Alfred Lief. The first half is fascinating -- the rubber industry is the unsung counterpart to the auto industry in the early 20th century in terms of economic, technological, and geopolitical importance. And Firestone himself is a business tycoon in Bezos’s mold. Didn’t finish this: The later part of the book slows down dramatically into a boring corporate history.
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
The frontier calls to some men and war shapes them. What happens when the war ends and the frontier closes? This novel is capacious in all the best ways and a joy to read.
The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.
We have not even to rush the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.
Very, very different than I expected. The first half was what I came for: a brilliant well-read analysis of the common structure of myths from around the world and corresponding Jungian symbolism. The rest of it was weirder, more Buddhist, more mystical, and less intellectually fulfilling, though still an interesting read.
I also started, but didn’t finish, The King and the Corpse, which is similar to the second half of Campbell. Didn’t love it, but:
A cupped handful of the fresh waters of life is sweeter than a whole reservoir of dogma, piped and guaranteed.
Historical Travelogues
The Travels of Olearius in 17th century Russia, translated by Samuel Baron.
When you observe the spirit, the mores, and the way of life of the Russians, you are bound to number them among the barbarians.
Olearius, aka Adam Ölschläger, was sent by the Baron of Holstein to Moscow in 1633 to negotiate a trade deal. The Age of Exploration had been bringing great wealth and glory to the Atlantic-facing nations (England, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands); envious eyes in Eastern Europe started looking for an overland trade route to the treasures of the Orient. Olearius’s journey was ultimately successful: he secured free passage for Holsteiner merchants to trade silks with Persia.
The retelling of the voyage itself and the trade negotiations I found a little dull, but this is worth reading for his thick description of Russian culture and some of the political machinations.
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They break a glass at weddings just like contemporary Jews, but…for different reasons (167):
> Then the groom throws the glass to the ground and he and the bride trample it into little bits, saying, “Thus let any who wish to arouse enmity and hatred between us fall under our feet and be trampled.”
On honesty in business (133):
> When buying and selling for profit, they resort to any expedient they can think of to cheat a neighbor. And anyone who wants to deceive them has to have a good head. For they shun truth and are so given to lying that they themselves rarely believe anyone else. Anyone who succeeds in deceiving them, they praise and consider a master.
Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Virtues, these are not! Compare also to Peddlers and Princes below.
Politics, too, was rife with deception and intrigue. You are probably unfamiliar, for example, with the tale of False Dimitry.
In 1581 Ivan the Terrible killed his heir Ivan Ivanovich in a fit of rage, so the crown passed to an idiot younger son, Feodor: in Olearius’s tactful description, “his wit [was] not as quick and active as was needed, given the then troubled condition of the country (his chief pleasure and vocation was to ring the bell before and after the worship services)”. Real power was held by the formidable regent Boris Godunov, Feodor’s brother-in-law, who immediately:
- Hired assassins to kill Feodor’s 8 year old son and heir Dimitry to ensure there was no rival claim to the throne;
- Had the assassins killed so they couldn’t tell tales;
- Set fire to Moscow to distract everyone.
Some years later a Russian monk went to Lithuania and told everyone that he was really Dimitry, and that the plot to murder him had killed the wrong child. (Why did they believe him? He “accompanied the tale with winning facial expressions”.) Continuing on to Poland, he convinced the Prince of Sandomierz to support his efforts to gain his rightful throne by promising, if victorious, to marry the Prince’s daughter and to establish Catholicism in Russia. (I should briefly digress here to mention that the Russians hated Catholics. Non-Orthodox Christians were considered apostates, were forced to dress differently from Russians, and were not allowed in Orthodox churches.) False Dimitry (as he became known to history), backed by the Polish nobility, marches on Moscow. Godunov, seeing this, promptly dies of shock.
The nobility convinced themselves that this is the real Dimitry (maybe it was the winning facial expressions again) and handed over the throne. His first act as Tsar, of course, was to have Godunov’s son and wife killed. He also – and this was truly a work of genius – called for “his mother” (the real Dimitry’s mother) to join him at the court in Moscow. She knew, of course, that her son is dead, but this is as good as it’s going to get for her, so she went along with it.
False Dimitry, having gained control of an empire through a series of complex maneuverings, proceeds to immediately blow his cover. He sends a bunch of money to his patrons in Poland, plans an elaborate and expensive Polish-style wedding with his Polish wife, doesn’t take any baths, brings dogs to church, and prays to the ikons wrong.
Have I mentioned the ikons? It turns out that Russian Orthodoxy is essentially idol worship. The ikons are little oil paintings of saints. When you pray, you pray to the ikon “and, accordingly, they must be present not only in churches and public processions, but also in everyone’s house, apartment, or chamber as well, so that when he is praying he may have it before his eyes.” Apparently Russians in this time are constantly setting their houses on fire by setting up candles in front of their ikons to pray, and then forgetting about them. When Germans showed up in Russia in the 16th century, first they weren’t allowed to have any ikons in their houses – but then Russians wouldn’t dare to be servants in a house with no ikons. So the church added a leniency: Germans can have ikons in their houses, but not in their bedrooms, “for in [the opinion of the Patriarch], the[ Germans] are unworthy of this honor.” The religious status of the ikons persisted in Russia through the 19th century. So you see why it’s such a big deal that False Dimitry messes this up.
Russian prince Vasily Shuisky spots these obvious tells and organizes a conspiracy against the imposter. It is promptly discovered. Shuisky’s co-conspirators are burned alive, and Shuisky himself is tortured and sentenced to death. Dimitry pardons him at the last minute, hoping thereby to gain a reputation for mercy. But like every Bond villain knows – you cannot show mercy. A few months later, Shuisky regathers the conspiracy, kills Dimitry and 1700 others on the night of his wedding, and is himself crowned Tsar. (Later on, a guy named Timoshka Ankudinov pretends to be named Johannes Simensis, passes himself off as Shuisky’s son, and travels all around Europe defrauding people. He also at some point locks his wife in their house and burns her to death when she threatens to give him up.)
By the way – something here doesn’t add up. The “tells” that Olearius described above are all about behaviors that are not Russian. But the consensus (both at the time and among modern scholars) is that False Dimitry was really a Russian monk named Grigory Otrepyev, who wouldn’t make these kinds of mistakes. Most likely, he was found out through some more nuanced set of evidence. But it’s understandable that the official narrative which eventually percolates out to Olearius is more focused on Russian nationalism and anti-Polish sentiment – after all, even though Otrepyev himself is Russian, the whole episode is essentially a Polish-sponsored coup.
But this is not the only False Dimitry. Wikipedia has a beautiful page about the various imposters, collectively known as the False Dimitrys, who tried to claim the throne. There were at least three – known as False Dimitry I, II, and III. Also maybe a fourth, IV. There is also the son of False Dimitry II, who was also known as False Dimitry IV, although clearly a different person as the other False Dimitry IV, who might in turn have been the same person as False Dimitry III, although “citation needed” on that last claim.
Anyhow! There’s a lot of lying in Russia. I liked this book a lot, but the parts about the journey itself are a bit slow. (“We heard there were 500 Cossacks ahead. That night, we thought we saw 10 Cossacks, but then nothing happened. The next night, we thought we saw 8 Cossacks, but nothing happened.” And so on.) It is at its best in the long middle section, relaying historical episodes, and deep descriptions of Russian culture.
I am also very frustrated by Baron’s choice to abridge the work so heavily: he only translated about half of Olearius’s original, excising the entire Persia section of the trip, and various sections that he deemed “irrelevant” but that I want to read – like a digression on Greenland and its people. The full English translation by John Davies of Kidwelly in the 1660s is available online in full scan, but I cannot find a clean epub or text version of it. A contemporary, complete English translation would be a good project for an ambitious and otherwise unoccupied German-speaking Russian scholar, or anyone with patience and LLM skills.
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, by Jonathan Spence
We go further backwards in time and travel further east. Neibuhr and Forskall set off from Denmark for Yemen in the 1760s, Olearius from Germany to Moscow in 1633, and Matteo Ricci, our next traveller, from Italy to China in the 1580s.
Ricci is an extraordinary figure – a Jesuit priest who spent the last 30 years of his life in China, mastering the language and culture, collaborating with Chinese scholars, and attempting to run a mission in the presence of spasmodic anti-Christian sentiment that sometimes spilled over into official prohibitions and violence.
This book, written by a Yale historian in 1984, is structured around four themes, each represented by both a Chinese ideogram and a Biblical image printed and disseminated by Ricci. The four themes, loosely, are: war, faith/understanding, commerce/purity, and goodness. Spence uses these themes to tell Ricci’s biography which in turn serves as a prism through which to explore the intellectual, political, and social history of both Europe and China in this period.
Interesting and worth reading! If you’re on the fence, this contemporary NYT review captures some of the spirit and might be useful.
The Travels, Marco Polo
The grand-daddy of the genre. Polo’s reputation as a great adventurer seems undeserved: he is 17 years old when he tags along with his father and uncle on their second journey from Venice to China. The descriptions of the many cities they pass through are formulaic. Overall interesting, but much less so than the three above.
From a South Seas Diary, by Sir Harry Luke
This is the daily journal of Harry Luke from 1938 to 1942, when he served as High Commissioner of the British Western Pacific Territories and Fiji. These were pivotal moments in the history of the Pacific, and in the British Empire, but Luke spends most of his time just flying from island to island having very repetitive interactions: meeting the local governors, hearing slight variations on the same song/dance performances, etc.
Overall not highly recommended, but there are interesting tidbits like the saga of Apolosi:
Since his return from Rotuma to Fiji in March the conduct of Apolosi, the Fijian agitator, has been exactly what it was before his two periods of banishment: intrigue, sedition, and lechery and debauchery on an heroic scale, ranging from drunken orgies to rape and incest. He is an absolutely hopeless case and we had no option but to decide to-day in Executive Council to banish him to Rotuma for the third time, for another ten years.
This man, by reason of his genius for subversive intrigue, his quasi-religious influence over his dupes, his utter lack of scruple, his abnormally developed and sustained sexual appetite and the ease with which he secures the victims of his lust, his real eloquence, his faith in himself, and his irrepressible persistence in all sorts of evil-doing, may well be described as the Rasputin of the Pacific.
The Adventures of Johnny Walker, Tramp, by WH Davies
Davies was a wildly popular poet who lived much of his life as a “tramp” with no fixed address, asking for money or food at people’s doors, sleeping outside or in boarding houses with other tramps, living free and unencumbered. This was a fun read. Modern homelessness is so different from the poverty of the past. It’s hard, now, to imagine any dignity in knocking at a door and asking for a meal or a bed, or that such a request would be granted.
Worth reading for a glimpse into a very different world. However, this is the lesser-known of his two autobiographies. The other, Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, looks to cover much the same ground and is probably easier to find.
Moby Dick Quotes
For my part I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials and tribulations of any kind whatsoever.
Yes, there is death in this business of whaling -- a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into eternity.
In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport, whereas virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
See how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them!
Though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty.
It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological system standing thus unfinished, even as the great cathedral of cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught -- nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, time, strength, cash and patience!
The chick that’s in him pecks the shell.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.
Besides now and then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers.
Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
Herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh man! Admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator, keep thy blood fluid at the pole. Like the great dome of St Peters, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
Lord, think of having half an acre of stomachache! Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys.
Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.
My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all.
Silent, slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it was. Most miserable!
Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.
His brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers
Whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words and books.
The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser
Oh God! That man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through
Other Quotes
Jim Harrison:
It was a huge cuckoo in an already full emotional nest and at times I hated its voracity and its assumption that it had to be served first.
There is a spine of goofiness in America that has never been deterred by literacy.
Bears are made of the same dust as we and breathe the same winds and drink the same waters, his life not long, not short, knows no beginning, no ending, to him life unstinted, unplanned, is above the accident of time, and his years, markless, boundless, equal eternity.
Glimpses of Creatures in their Physical Worlds:
We devote about 6.5 percent of our body volume to blood and expend about 11 percent of our resting metabolic power pushing it around.
Rabbit, Run:
His feeling that there is an unseen world is instinctive, and more of his actions than anyone suspects constitute transactions with it.
Varieties of Religious Experience:
The axis of reality runs solely through the egoistic places,–they are strung upon it like so many beads. The intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect.
Mrs McGinty’s Dead:
What a wonderful dispensation it is of Nature’s that every man, however superficially unattractive, should be some woman’s choice.
Proofs and Refutations:
I abhor your pretentious ‘insight’. I respect conscious guessing, because it comes from the best human qualities: courage and modesty.
All Books
| Title | Author | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Travels | Polo, Marco | c. 1300 | Review |
| The Travels of Olearius in 17th Century Russia | Baron, Samuel (trans. 1967) | 1647 | Review |
| Moby Dick | Melville, Herman | 1851 | Review |
| The Varieties of Religious Experience | James, William | 1902 | Review |
| Billy Budd | Melville, Herman | 1924 | Review |
| The Adventures of Johnny Walker, Tramp | Davies, W.H. | 1926 | Review |
| From a South Seas Diary | Luke, Sir Harry | 1945 | Review |
| Call Me Ishmael | Olson, Charles | 1947 | Review |
| Caucasian Chalk Circle | Brecht, Bertolt | 1948 | Would love to see this performed. |
| The King and the Corpse (didn’t finish) | Zimmer, Heinrich | 1948 | Review |
| The Hero With a Thousand Faces | Campbell, Joseph | 1949 | Review |
| History of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company (didn’t finish) | Lief, Alfred | 1951 | Review |
| Mrs McGinty’s Dead | Christie, Agatha | 1952 | If you like mysteries, this is a solid one. |
| The Uses of Literacy | Hoggart, Richard | 1957 | Review |
| Billy Liar | Waterhouse, Keith | 1959 | A slice of postwar British adolescent life. Quite fun. |
| Rabbit, Run | Updike, John | 1960 | Pathos and interiority about a shithead. Not as great as I expected. |
| An Introduction to Information Theory (2nd ed) | Pierce, John R. | 1980 | Good intro to an important topic. |
| Five of a Kind | Stout, Rex | 1961 | I like the Nero Wolfe detective stories. |
| Arabia Felix | Hansen, Thorkild | 1962 | Review |
| Medieval Technology and Social Change | White Jr., Lynn | 1962 | Review |
| Peddlers and Princes | Geertz, Clifford | 1963 | Comparative anthropology between two Indonesian villages. Interesting. |
| Ice | Kavan, Anna | 1967 | All atmosphere. Somewhat beautiful, I wanted to like it more than I did. |
| Alphabetical Africa | Abish, Walter | 1974 | Review |
| Legs | Kennedy, William | 1975 | Fine. |
| The Chain of Chance | Lem, Stanislaw | 1975 | Lem is known for scifi, but this is just a somewhat philosophical detective novel. |
| Cognitive Development | Luria, A.R. | 1976 | Review |
| Proofs and Refutations (didn’t finish) | Lakatos, Imre | 1976 | Got bogged down a bit, but found the first two-thirds interesting. |
| Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism | Braudel, Fernand | 1977 | Review |
| Legends of the Fall | Harrison, Jim | 1979 | Review |
| The Structures of Everyday Life | Braudel, Fernand | 1979 | Review |
| Orality and Literacy | Ong, Walter J. | 1982 | Review |
| The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci | Spence, Jonathan D. | 1984 | Review |
| Lonesome Dove | McMurtry, Larry | 1985 | Review |
| Dalva | Harrison, Jim | 1988 | Review |
| Moon Palace | Auster, Paul | 1989 | I like Paul Auster and enjoyed this one. |
| Mating | Rush, Norman | 1991 | Review |
| Virtual Light | Gibson, William | 1993 | I like Gibson. This one is fine but forgettable. |
| Notes from a Small Island | Bryson, Bill | 1995 | Funny. |
| The Elusive Quest for Growth | Easterly, Bill | 2001 | There are better books on the topic. |
| Lincoln’s Virtues | Miller, William Lee | 2002 | Review |
| Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World | Weatherford, Jack | 2004 | Pretty interesting. |
| Rabid | Wasik & Murphy | 2012 | Mediocre pop science about an interesting topic. |
| The Courage to Be Disliked | Kishimi, Ichiro & Koga, Fumitake | 2013 | Philosophically oriented self-help. Didn’t change my life, but a useful framework. |
| The Everything Store | Stone, Brad | 2013 | Review |
| The Factory | Oyamada, Hiroko | 2013 | Weird! Fractured, mysterious, intensely Japanese. |
| All the Light We Cannot See | Doerr, Anthony | 2014 | I had assumed it would be terrible, but I liked it a lot. A bit schlocky. |
| Mislaid | Zink, Nell | 2015 | Fine, wouldn’t recommend. |
| A Really Big Lunch | Harrison, Jim | 2017 | Review |
| Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories | qntm | 2022 | Wonderful. |
| How Life Works | Ball, Philip | 2023 | Review |
| Old God’s Time | Barry, Sebastian | 2023 | Gorgeous, and so so sad. |
| Revolutionary Temper | Darnton, Robert | 2023 | Review |
| Martyr | Akbar, Kaveh | 2024 | A decent read, probably overrated. |
| The Scaling Era | Patel, Dwarkesh & Leech, Gavin | 2025 | I didn’t find it too much new in here, but a valuable part of the historical record (in the good timelines). |