Originally Posted by
Drewbacca
I've been upping my reading game lately. Two books I've read lately are bugging me, and two were great.
I finally got around to finishing 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan Peterson. The first half of the book was a chore to get through so I stopped reading it regularly. I found the themes unengaging and the constant references to God and Being and Him in uppercase distracting. I must not be the target audience, because I know several guys who swore this increased their self worth and I felt nothing for anything he stated in the first half. The latter rules (after 8?) started to become more nuanced and interesting, behaviourally-focused and measured. His takes on social progress are far more liberal than the "alt-right" sabre rattlers on the left would like to admit (he believes inequality is a very real and dangerous social issue, for example). The book's writing style remains poor, choppy and meandered throughout. Wouldn't recommend it (his youtube lectures on personality are great though—he's a voluble speaker and I think that's the medium he's best enjoyed in).
To offset Peterson I also read Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power by Noam Chomsky. An interesting take that didn't clarify fundamental issues I normally find confusing about socialism-centric ideas. In fact, Chomsky fails or refuses to outright set the parameters of his socialism in such a way that coming to any conclusions at all is very fuzzy. Money = greed = bad is largely the takeaway. He never explores the positives indicators of capitalism: income and money generation seems to be one of the quickest ways societies improve their citizens quality of life (in different flavours, US-style rich-tides-will-raise-us-all to more distribution-based Scandinavian models). His most interesting and useful ideas are about Media Control and propaganda. He has an entire book on that I'll read next, I think. His writing style is also very... meandering. These thinker-types always brag about over editing their shit. Maybe that's to blame?
To offset the negativity of these books I managed to read two books that were immensely enjoyable:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which was a joy to read and an interesting and engaging book from beginning to end. Time and pages breezed on by while I read this. I highly recommend this book, especially if you're going on a flight or something like that where you need to speed up time. Its narrative about maintaining life, understanding, the pursuit of quiality are much better and more relevant than either of the two books above by the actual professional sociologists. I think it's because he simply explores the underlying metaphysics of Western culture honestly without caring much about where people end up or what they think. There's no real agenda. He has another book I intend to read about the development of values and morals.
The last book is Death by Meeting. It's short and about how to run effective meetings. If you hate meetings this is a good book to read. I've slowly been practicing the tactics presented in this book over the last 5 weeks at work and they are legitimately useful. It comes from the perspective that meetings should be valuable.
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