A new year, and a tiny formatting change, but still the same idea - my monthly summary of some reading that won't quite make it into a full reading review.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed (December 2021)
Despite this being a reread, I still wasn't quite expecting my main observation from Wild - it's an excellent book, which I determined based on how quickly I zipped through it. This isn't meant to imply that I thought it wouldn't be any good (I did decide to reread it), I just wasn't anticipating putting all my other reading on hold in order to get through this as fast as possible. (For context, I write this on a morning where I have six books "in progress", and in general I think it's relevant when I stop my other reading to focus on one book.) If you need a book to absorb your attention for a few days, I'd say this is as good of a bet as anything.
Wild has a rhythm that mirrors the daily pattern of Strayed's solo journey along the Pacific Coast Trail - the book maintains a steady progress like one would expect of any thru-hiker, yet regularly finds opportunities to stop and recharge the narrative in the manner of the same hiker making camp each night. I related to quite a few of the thoughts I collected from this memoir: the reckless invincibility you can feel after a loved one's death, the acknowledgment that the purpose of certain solo journeys is to make it alone, and - as I noted in life-altering fashion on that first read a few years ago - the unmistakable signs that it's time to abandon a decision, whether that be as momentous as certain lifelong commitments or as trivial as a shoe size.
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (November 2021)
A collection of short stories and essays, I found the overall reading experience to be mostly positive with the occasional piece being a bit of a slog. I reread "The Shape of the Sword", "The Library of Babel", and "The Garden of Forking Paths", though I imagine readers will present a wide range of their own favorites from this 1962 publication. The works in this book, particularly the stories, would likely be categorized among today's new releases as something between Harry Potter and science fiction, though I would discourage such a strict categorization - these are more like essay-length ideas. Not all of the ideas work out, with some simply not being good enough while others are ambitiously crammed into the ill-fitting short form. It strikes me that the first line of my notes is something of a reflection on the task undertaken by Labyrinths - intellectual ideas are doomed to a useless conclusion, and all lines in a philosophy book start as an attempt to explain everything. Perhaps it's more uplifting to leave on another note - despite the sensation that the days run together, there are always surprises in the day's unfolding, and I suppose Labyrinths contains a few of them.
Why Don't We Learn From History by B.H. Liddell Hart (December 2019)
I read this book over two years ago, which has left me with little sense of this work's pattern or rhythm. My notes suggest Hart makes an honest effort to answer his own question, though I worry he undercut his own point toward the end - by acknowledging that, historically speaking, "factual" statements based on history generally lose their value as more knowledge becomes available, Hart seems to explain why one might prefer to learn from other sources. Why bother with history if new knowledge will soon dilute the strength of today's lessons? But as he notes elsewhere, history is perhaps most valuable in its examples of what not to do - that we should never filter events through the "imagined" interests of national or military morale, that we should not expect unification to create progress if preserving unity becomes a priority ahead of producing ideas, or that we should never expect the ends to justify bad means. The idea that seems most valuable to me at the moment is that the best way to push a new idea is to frame it as a return to forgotten wisdom or principles.
