Febuary 2025 reading recap

Curtis McHale

by

Curtis McHale

Feb 2025 Reading Recap

This month you’ll note no fiction books were finished. That dang Brandon Sanderson guy wrote a 1300 page tome so I’ve made progress on Wind and Truth but not finished it. In fact I’ve made enough progress that it would equal 2 fiction books worth of pages read if it was a normal sized book.

Thinking in Systems

We read this book for book club. Join us next month in reading A System for Writing by Bob Doto.

If you’ve been interested in Systems Thinking then this book is a good primer. Meadows has managed to write an easy to read book explaining a complex topic without taking readers so far into the weeds that they get lost.

It was hard to look at this book as it talked about how systems are built and how different parts of systems are used to balance others out and not look at the political landscape in the US right now. Here we see co-equal parts of government that are supposed to keep each other in check being broken down so that there is no balancing affect to power. As Meadows says, resilience systems work until enough strain has been put on them that the suddenly collapse and entirely fall apart.

I can’t help but wonder if that’s what we’re watching.

Outside of that sombre note, I liked the Systems Theory idea of locating responsibility for the consequences of a decision with the decision maker. This would have a business owner cutting 20% of the workforce to save money on pay also cutting their own pay by 20% or having a city be required to pull their drinking water from downstream of where they dump their treated waste water. Unfortunately in most scenarios powerful decision makers are insulated from the consequences of their decisions, and in the case of someone cutting staff they are often rewarded with more money when they reduced head count.

This was a good an accessible book as an introduction to Systems Theory.

The Language of the Night

In this book celebrated science fiction author weighs in on topics ranging from the commercialization of art to what reading means to the reader, in addition to covering many ideas on what makes a decent science fiction novel.

What stuck out to me the most was her comments on how art is is judged by it’s commercial success. Outside of the value of the work from an artistic perspective, when you can make “real” money doing it then the only metric anyone looks at is how much money you made. Then the consumers of the art also view it from the same standpoint, how will they be improved by the art in question? This is how we get many people who are unwilling to read any type of fiction, it can’t be justified for self improvement or work so it’s not worth doing, which is classic Protestant Work Ethic in action.

As I read through her thoughts on art and money I couldn’t help but think back to Against Creativity which talked about how the market censors art so that the only art we see is stuff that’s tame enough to make money. The really wild stuff is not available because it doesn’t pay. This is one way a basic income could expand what it means to be human in our current economic climate, by giving people the opportunity to pursue art that doesn’t pay according to the market.

I’m sure there are many amazing artists out there now that we don’t know about because they haven’t been lucky enough to make a connection to the “right” person that brings them the commercial success needed to break out.

The Courage to Be Disliked

This is a discussion between a philosopher and a young man. Here the young man has shown up to challenge the philosopher because just like all young men, he knows more about life and is going to prove the philosopher wrong. I found the dialogue to be odd at times, and entirely unbelievable at other times. This may be due to the translation from Japanese for the English edition I read. Still, I had to look past the dialogue to get into the book.

The biggest takeaway I have is locating responsibility for a decision and action with the decision maker which is called the separation of tasks. That means you only worry about the tasks you’re responsible for and let others worry about their own tasks. As a parent that would mean you don’t bother your child to study, you let them decide to study on their own and if they fail that’s the natural consequence of their decision so you don’t worry about it.

This echoes You Are Awesome which talked about turning people into porcelain dolls by never allowing them to experience hardship in their youth. When parents take away all of the bumps in the road, children don’t experience small issues and learn to overcome them with the support of parents close by. Thus when they get to be adults and suffer the setbacks of life, they have built no resilience to setbacks.

The Black Swan

I’ve heard so much about this book and how amazing it was, but The Black Swan was a dud. Taleb spends more time talking about how fancy he is and putting down other people he sees for not realizing how fancy they’re not than he does making a good point. I only made it 20% of the way through before I had to start skimming through the writing because it was peppered with huge words and fluffy language that only seemed to serve the authors goal of showing how smart he is.

Evidently the point of the book is to show readers that random events dominate the world, think 9/11, and while they look obvious in hindsight there really isn’t a way we could predict them.

I wouldn’t recommend this book.