(no subject)

[degringolade]

 
Oregon Skies

 

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Trying to restore good habits at my age is tricky.  Especially when what I consider to be bad habits are so easy to fall into.

I made the decision to stop buying e-books from  those greedy bastards at Amazon due to the simple fact that they don’t let you purchase your book, they sell you a “license” to the right to read the book and appear to be working toward a system where you will only be able to read them on devices approved by them or on a windows application that they control.  Simply put, fuck them and the horses they rode in on.

So I am attempting a reversion to my reading habits from the long-ago.  I currently have five paper-based books sitting on the table that serves as my desk.

1.   Isaac Asimov:  Foundation and Empire

2.  Mortimer Adler:  Aristotle for Everyone

3.  Graham Greene:  The Quiet American

4.  Isaiah Berlin:  The Proper Study of Mankind.

5.  Samuel P. Huntington:  Political Order in Changing Societies

The reading habits I am attempting to revive are based around when I was in school long ago and was taking three or four different courses and had assigned reading in each course (when I first got out of the army and was taking courses in Poli Sci, this was a real deal.  I would read a chapter from one course, then take a break and then read a chapter from another course and continue the round until I was caught up.  

When I realized that jobs using poli sci are reserved for rich kids from elite schools, I went back, talked my way into grad school, and started taking science courses seriously so the cycling reading had to be dropped because I actually had to understand what I was reading and not just prepare myself to parrot back my better’s opinions.  This required long stretches staring at a page, not understanding, then going back to figure out just what I needed that I missed. 

So my reading habits are now more complicated.  By  trying to understand where we are as a society, the best that I can figure, the answers aren’t here on the internet, but probably back in the discarded and ignored warnings of the past.  So I am heading (with considerable trepidation) back to an amalgam of prior reading habits.  I think that I need to work on the process of melding the lessons learned in the different books by the different perspectives drawn from the different books and create a whole.

But then again, creation of such an amalgam of thought is not what I need to do.  I suspect that the ability to have multiple perspectives might well be more important to sanity and understanding that a theory cobbled together from inputs that an inharmonious.