Learning to Read

Here are some of the titles I've been reading since the end of September. I've chosen to exclude most of the photo and art books from this list, which was initially written for a different venue.

• Japan at Nature’s Edge which is a collection of essays by mostly Western scholars about the history and current state of Japanese environmental practices and policies, and mostly written slightly before the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Picked it up to read just one of the essays that had been referenced elsewhere, about Japan’s “pelagic empire,” but have found the others to all be worthwhile.
• Selected Essays of John Berger is getting a revisit, spurred I suppose by his essay included there (originally from 1972’s The Look of Things, out of print) titled * The Nature of Mass Demonstrations. His essay here Why Look at Animals? was also cited in Japan at Nature's Edge.
• Learning to See: Inside the World’s Leading Art and Design Schools is something of a nostalgic journey, since I attended one of the schools cited, but for anyone it's an interesting overview of how most A&D schools have similar curricula over the course of an art degree, regardless of media – and asks how, exactly, does one become an art professor, which is a very different track from say, learning to teach literature, medicine, or economics? What are the qualifications, what are you actually teaching?
• Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence is very much about Assembly Theory and contains some great thought experiments as well as some news of developments in the concrete study and comparison of biotic and abiotic minerals (the latter almost exclusively need to come from space, since life processes have thoroughly spread nearly everywhere down here on Earth). This feels like an attempt to make a popular-audience A.T. book, but it’s still kind of nerdy. In a breathtaking way, if you like that sort of thing. I think the author * Sara Amari Walker would be a good Knowledge Project podcast guest.
• Shopkeeping: Stories, Advice, and Observations is a slender book that makes a fine gift: everyone who reads very much probably also enjoys a good bookshop. By accident I had the pleasure of a chat with the author during a recent trip that landed me only a few blocks from his shop. The shopkeeping advocated here is one that valorizes quality curation over scale, and explains how it’s near-impossible to have both. I was reminded of Shane’s Parrish's comments about his favorite tennis shop, where they know his playing, and where he feels like a part of the club. The author here also prominently mentions one of my favorite books: In Praise of Shadows which is another good-as-a-gift choice.
• Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century has a blazing good opening and a groovy premise but it sort of bogs down, for me. I eventually found myself skipping. Maybe that's the point.
• Photography, Bearing Witness and the Yugoslav Wars, 1988-2021: Testimonies of Light is about the Yugoslav Wars themselves obviously, but also about the desperate frustration of journalists covering it to get anyone to actually pay attention and alter course on it. Too much profit in continuing it, too much * oh-dearism in the news-watching audience? The same author also co-wrote the textbook (?) Understanding Photojournalism which also deals with some of the same topics around covering stories versus feeding the Infotainment-Industrial complex.
• Founder vs Investor: The Honest Truth About Venture Capital from Startup to IPO is a book I appreciate very much. Maybe because I have heard this song of cross-purpose chaos so many times, up close. It reminds me a little of the great 1970’s book about Hollywood business Breaking Through, Selling Out, Dropping Dead. Was this book recommended to me by a founder CEO who was feeling a big squeeze? Yes. That perspective doesn’t invalidate it.
• Spring Castle is a large book about the Shimabara Rebellion of the 1600’s, “The Christian Uprising that Changed Japanese History” as the book blurb has it. It just came out in English. I previously attempted to read it in Japanese (San Francisco library had it, go figure) but I was easily defeated. I expect to be reading and browsing this one for a while, now that I can do so without requiring a large notebook, dictionary, and Google Translate at hand.
• Travellers in the Third Reich is a collection of impressions from (mostly Yank & Brit) tourists, business people, and journalists who visited the clean and officially-optimistic pre-war Reich – and through the war too. A few English women were married to powerful Germans and remained there. This snip of a letter to husband Count Hugo von Bernstorff, a German officer stationed in Norway: “Please, darling, do come home at once. All these air raids are beyond a joke. I am so miserable, bombs crashing all around us and now they say that the troops in Norway will go to England. I’m so bored with this silly war.”

I’ve also had a tall stack of new-to-me and old-to-me photo- and art-related books open. Next post!