Perusing someone else’s book list

A friend forwarded me the page called Books I’ve read by Derek Sivers, which is a long, long list of books. I perused it with the default ordering, from highest-rated to lowest-rated.[1] I didn’t see a lot of overlap with my own reading interests. We’d read only one or two books in common—out of hundreds!—and almost none of his books are on my wishlist.

A cry for help

There were a what I would call a disturbing number of financial self-help books, like You Can Negotiate Anything, The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster, general self-help books like The Listening Book or The Courage to Be Disliked, parenting books like Brain Rules for Baby, there’s even a book by Tony Robbins! (Awaken the Giant Within, which he says “changed everything about my life. It’s my Bible” but which apparently still has room for improvement because he gave it only a 9 out of 10).

It’s the kind of list of books that a good, liberal westerner will definitely want his friends to know he’s read. Authors like Jonathan Haidt, Yuval Noah Harari, Jordan Peterson (for diversity!), Nassim Nichloas Taleb, David Brooks (sweet Lord no) feature prominently. A lot of these feel like books he picked up in an airport or single-click-impulse-bought from a Kindle screen or search ad.

Those were all 9/10 books. It’s a long list.

Programming stuff

I found Philosophy of Software Design − by John K. Ousterhout in the 8/10 list, which I would probably read, except that I’ve already read so much work by Ousterhout that I feel like I’ve got the idea. Code − by Charles Petzold is another one that I’ve read parts of in essays, but a whole book about the philosophy of coding … well, it’s a bit late for me, at this stage in my education.

More self-help books

OMG there are so many more self-help books—Four Thousand Weeks, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, How to Think More Effectively, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten—that I’m going to stop listing them.

It’s truly incredible how some people just can’t seem to get enough of pop psychology and pop philosophy. The self-help books are almost outnumbered by the financial-advice books—Discover Your Inner Economist, You, Inc − The Art of Selling Yourself, The Innovator’s Solution—so I’m also going to stop listing those, even though there are still dozens of them.

Two books in common

Then I saw Guns, Germs, and Steel − by Jared Diamond, which is still technically on my list but I’ll probably never get around to reading it. Winning a Pulitzer Prize makes it suspect for me, because that suggests to me that it’s almost certainly anodyne enough that it doesn’t offend any good liberal’s pro-Empire, Orientalist stances, which they’ve clothed in humanism.

Thinking, Fast and Slow − by Daniel Kahneman is on my list, though. So, there’s one book. I think I might have read Moonwalking with Einstein but it was long ago and I’ve completely forgotten what it was about. Ah, yes, reading his brief description, it was about “memory palaces”.

Hate-reading

This guy has read a lot of books that he didn’t like. Half of this page is 6/10 or below. Like, no wonder. You can’t just read whatever slop drifts beneath your gaze and expect to have fun. He hasn’t read a single book for fun! No fiction, no original philosophy, everything filtered through someone else’s presentation.

I scrolled ‘til the end to see if he’d hated a book that I’d loved, but I didn’t see anything.

An example: Yuval Noah Harari

Way down the list is a 2/10 review of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century − by Yuval Noah Harari, which writes,

“His book “Sapiens” was amazing, so I read this new one. It’s just some thoughts on our present and near future. Not so different from what you find in every-day articles. I’m personally averse to news commentaries, so I shouldn’t have read this.”

I would be embarrassed to write that I was surprised to find that a book named 21 Lessons for the 21st Century was “just some thoughts on our present and near future, ” but I also am not “personally averse to news commentaries,” so we otherwise have almost nothing in common.

Imagine reading self-help books, financial-help books, and parenting books like a fiend but also some historical and cultural books, but not actually following any news or trying to fit what you’ve learned into the world you live in. The mind reels. That feels even more pointless than what I’m doing here. I’m almost depressed for him. He might need help.

I’ve not read Sapiens but I did read Eine Kurze Geschichte der Menschheit, for which I ended my review with,

“Harari is a good storyteller and summarizes many interesting facets of the sweep of history. However, he isn’t as opinionated as the facts he relates would require him to be. The result is that he looks either obtuse or biased. He shies away from judgment—and he’s too smart not to have noticed the natural conclusions to much of the information he cites. My gut feeling in some places was that he was hedging his bets so as to continue to be regarded favorably by the elites whose crimes he has partially documented. That is, he wants to sell his books and his presence, so he leaves the condemnation up to the reader.”

United in hating The Alchemist

Ah, there’s one! Right at the end! We both hated The Alchemist. Where he wrote,

“How is this so popular? Its weak message is “pay attention to serendipity”. I was open to liking it, but it gave me nothing I could use.”

I was, of course, harsher:

“Heavy-handed and saccharine doesn’t even begin to cover it. I have no idea where the metaphor ends and the literalism begins. I’m not even going to bother checking how many months this thing spent on Oprah’s best-seller list. Avoid this book.”

The last straw: He hated Murakami

Oh, and below that, he hated What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. I just finished (and very much enjoyed) Norwegian Wood and I loved Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I can’t imagine someone giving a Murakami book a 1/10.

Nothing in common

It’s great that he published a list of all of the books that he’s read. I can tell by this list, though, that a penchant for cataloguing books we’ve read is all that we have in common. A conversation would most likely be painful for both of us.