I bought this book as a present for my wife, who would have no shame in admitting that she can’t stand all the “positive thinking” malarkey. She read it, and didn’t really enjoy it, finding that it had many of the same messages for how to be happy but without the “positive” sticker on the front. So I was curious as to what lay within…
And once I’d read it, I could see her point. Many of the conclusions that Mr Burkeman comes to are, indeed, those that you might read elsewhere, but without the same spin: you would read elsewhere of the benefits of mindfulness, of Stoicism, of self-awareness in many websites and books.
The spin here, if there is one, is that you don’t have to do these things with any view that they are designed to be positive affirmations. You can just do them because they seem to work. Plus, you get to poke fun at the wilder elements of the “positivity” crowd, which Mr Burkeman does very effectively in is re-telling tales of huge conference centres with crowds chanting empty slogans about “winning” or whatever it happens to be.
So in the end I rather liked this book. From my personal point of view, I’m becoming increasingly wary of the whole move to Stoicism, as I think it may entrench particular points of view that I don’t subscribe to (in particular I fear it pushes people into accepting a bad status quo, rather than in pushing back against it).
On the other hand, I’m all-in on Mindfulness: there is clearly a bunch going on in our brains that isn’t directly accessible to us, and the identification of ourselves with our stream-of-consciousness self-talk seems like a great candidate for why so many of us are so upset, so much of the time. My cats don’t do that (or at least I don’t think they do…), and they are pretty content.
So anything that tries to break us out of this is a good thing. Plus, the book got me watching Youtube videos of Eckhart Tolle, and the guy is like Yoda, if Yoda were wearing clothes that escaped from the 1970s that his mother had knitted him, sitting and smiling and blinking and not saying much, but when he does saying wise things. How much do I love him!
Three and a half stars, rounded up to four because of the Tolle bits.
I’d heard and read so much about this book, it’s won all sorts of awards, and when I came to it myself it was… underwhelming. There seemed to me to be some rather large plot holes (given the apparent god-like powers available to some of the participants).
To be fair, there was some interesting speculative science in here as well, which I enjoyed. However, I struggled with the characters: for many of the key ones, there actions seemed at best insufficiently motivated, and at worst simply transparent devices to move the story along its determined arc. Again, I did learn some interesting things about the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s and beyond, but I’m not sure that was the whole point.
It’s the first of a trilogy, and I’m not sure I can face the others. Too many books with a higher probability of being excellent out there for me to risk my time on another few hundred pages which will likely be as similarly a miss for me. It’s a shame when reading becomes an exercise in Bayesian statistics, but my prior odds on the next in the trilogy being worth my time aren’t looking good right now. Maybe I’ll get enough new information to change my mind!
A moving short story about an ugly old man, a young girl, a snow goose, and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Forces from Dunkirk in 1939. How does that even fit together in a novel, let alone in a short story?? Well, read it, and you’ll see. It’s a brilliant example of the power of the short story, masterfully painted, emotionally moving without being sentimental.
How much did I like this? Well, I didn’t enjoy it, I loved this book genuinely, straightforwardly, and, well, just tremendously!
I didn’t read anything in advance that gave me much of a clue as to what to expect, other than it vaguely involved people playing Dungeons & Dragons, at least somewhat, and it was a bit reminiscent of Ready Player One, which was my book of the year, back in the day. All of these were true, to be fair – the heroes in this tale are young adults, they play D&D, and it’s set in the 1980s. But I don’t think that makes it YA fiction, any more than it makes it “Ready Player 0.5” or something – or actually more precisely I don’t care, it was just such straightforward fun!
I’m not going to say much more than this, because SPOILERS. One of the things I really liked was that the style of writing – I found it compelling, dragging you along by the scruff, so that I had no idea what might or could happen. It caused me to read it all in a bit of a charge, and all the better for that I think. At some point I realised this was part 1 of a trilogy, so it’s not a huge book to get through in any case. The 1980’s period detail was excellent, and all the characters were well painted (although I think I ended up with less of a feeling for what was going on in Simon’s head than the others’).
One warning: there is a thing going on with cancer in this book (not really a spoiler, as you find this out in the first couple of pages). Having been through chemo myself eighteen months ago, I found the first 25 pages or so to be tough going in parts, and wildly evocative for me. Very well written, which is what made it tough going. If that’s you, stick with it, because it’s worth the ride.
Here’s what the narrator has to say about this:
To be honest, though, two minutes after being faced with a diagnosis of leukaemia is not the ideal time to have someone establish that when the medical profession says ‘cured’ it means ‘survived five years’.
Mark Lawrence has a great ability to sketch out a character in a line or two – here’s the key to one of the narrator’s friends, with an aside that also points to the witty narrative:
He knew pi to more decimal places than any sane person would want to. I sometimes joked that it was an irrational feat of memory.
Well worth the five stars, and I can’t wait for the next one!Â
A book about words, where they come from, how their use has evolved, and how interconnected they all are. Sounds brilliant? So why only three stars – what’s not to like? Well…. it’s a bit all over the place, albeit by design. Each short section is maybe two or three pages, and covers a few related words, with anecdotes and jokes and origin stories and links to other curiosities.
In the end, it was a bit like being trapped at a party by a very smart person, who was entirely happy to show how smart they were, thirty-two times in a row. Each individual instance was entertaining, just the overall effect did not make a great book. I confess I had to put it beside the loo and read it in brief bursts, to preserve my sanity. Fun, but not quite as much fun as I’d hoped.
Oh Mr. Fry, how I love thee, let me count the ways! Sadly, in the end, this book failed to be one of the ways in which that love could find its expression.
The first third was the setup: a recap of the family tree of the early gods, immortals, Titans, and other supernatural beings. This inevitably has a bit of a tendency to be an old-testament-style recitation of “X begat Y who begat Z”, perhaps spiced up a little as it is more mythic to “X slept with his sister and begat Y who then appeared as a goldfish in a dream with her uncle and thus begat Z”.
The remainder was a retelling of a number of the core stories from the resulting myths. Many I vaguely knew, although they often had surprising endings that I didn’t know (e.g. King Midas and his golden touch). Each one was just, I think, too insubstantial, told only in skeleton form, without much colour – albeit with Stephen Fry’s characteristic twist of humour. Other stories I didn’t know, but just didn’t feel improved by the knowing of.
So Mr Fry saved this as a two star book, and it makes the “it was OK” pile. I’d read more of his fiction any day, just not sure about this one…
I learned three main things reading this very readable account: first, that there have always been atheists, with writers expressing various philosophical positions and arguments about atheism for all of Greek and Roman ancient history (even early Christianity having a place for it). Atheism was only ever one point on the spectrum of beliefs, but it was always around, and often attracted some high profile proponents.
Second, I found an eminently clear account of the major lines of philosophy running all the way through the ancient world. I hadn’t really seen this laid out like this before, and seeing it set against the historical political background was very helpful.
And finally, I found an interesting slant on the Stoics, which made me rather uncomfortable with the modern geek (not Greek!) revival of Stoicism as a philosophy for living your life today.
The first and the last of these are worth a bit more unpacking. The first is, of course, the main purpose of the book. Tim Whitmarsh gives us a scholarly and yet very readable account of the various threads of (non)belief in the ancient world, and how these were received by their contemporaries. He starts in about the seventh century BC, where the ancient Greek city states were enormously diverse, but didn’t seem to view organised religion in political terms, but rather “for personal communion with the divine”. It provided a vehicle for collective involvement in the community, but differences in belief were personal matters, so long as they didn’t impact the cohesion of the community. This view seems to have continued for hundreds of years – even the trial of Socrates in 399BC for (among other things) “failing to acknowledge the gods the city acknowledges” was about this risk to social cohesion, rather than any atheistic leanings per se.
As we transition into the Roman era, after the Punic Wars and the final sacking of Carthage in 146BC, we still see religion and the gods viewed in the same way: the Roman emperors after Augustus (who died in 14AD) were viewed as gods, but just one amongst many. The ensuing two centuries of Pax Romana didn’t change this: not believing in the gods was acceptable, especially if you were prepared to keep the peace by making the odd minor contribution to the community in other ways. It was only with the emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity on his deathbed in 312AD that we would have seen a move towards a much sharper division into “true religio” versus “false superstitio”. With this came the assumption that “all humans are born with a natural sense of the divine but that some people have been led into misunderstanding by false teaching”.
For me, this Christian belief is reflected in Christianity’s much more prosyletizing approach to religion. The Greeks and Romans didn’t really do this, because their polytheism allowed them to incorporate the gods of peoples that they conquered. Indeed, the often produced tables of equivalences, and as long as you knew which of your gods mapped to which of theirs, you could continue to worship whichever you chose (or none at all), and everyone was happy. Not so with Christianity, which was much more all-or-nothing. It’s not until the arrival of the Enlightenment that atheism became a philosophical position that could be held in the Western world (and even then, you were wise to keep quiet about it in many cases!).
All of this is the main thrust of the book, and Mr Whitmarsh provides an excellent and readable account of all of this. Definitely worth the wear on your eyeballs of reading it all.
My other learning, as I said, was a realisation that the modern revival of Stoicism has a rather unpleasant (for me) set of philosophical beliefs embedded within it. I certainly agree that many of the main thrusts of Stoicism are helpful views to hold: be resilient against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by anticipating the worst, act according to your beliefs, and confine your actions and your judgement to your own sphere of influence, rather than wasting too much time judging others. All good and helpful, and much lauded today by everyone from Navy SEALs to Tim Ferriss.
But in Mr Whitmarsh’s contrast of Stoicism against the other philosophies that were around at the time I saw a different side: the side that says don’t fight against conventions and the prevailing political system, don’t push back against the hierarchy, just stay in your own small world. All very well if you are already at the top of the hierarchy (as Marcus Aurelius of “Meditations” fame of course was – extraordinarily wealthy, and in due course emperor himself). But not so good for anyone in, say, the bottom half. So I need to do more personal reading here, but for the moment, whilst I will read quotations from modern fans of Stoicism with a more jaundiced eye…
How do we know what’s going on in the world? How do people come to take action based on that understanding – be it catching a ball, typing a book review, learning long division, or building a hadron collider (of any size)? Andy Clark sets out a compelling story of how all this has been coming together in neurophysiology over the last few years into a model based on a hierarchy of processing elements, from the raw sensations upwards, with feedback from the higher levels back to the lower ones.
This model is called ‘predictive processing’, and if offers a compelling, unified view of how brains seem to work in the world. Crucially, the hierarchies of processing layers in brains don’t just sit there waiting for input, but rather they are always predicting what they expect to see coming up from the lower level, noticing any errors, and passing those errors up to the next level whilst simultaneously passing back down an updated prediction as to what might be going on. This means we actively build and re-build models as we go and as we act, rather than waiting for a complete model to become available and then deciding how to act.
The story told here is compelling, detailed, and fits with our emerging understanding both of the data from animal (including human) experiments and of computational models such as neural networks. It explains all sorts of things like dreams, saccade movements of our eyes, and some of the mechanics of language processing. It’s a great story, and I suspect the truth as we eventually uncover it will be more or less along these lines.
Having said all of which, I didn’t find this an easy book to read. Andy Clark is a Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University, and even as a sciency person myself, I found his prose style dry and, well, academic. There were a few typos that I spotted, and a bit of a heavier hand with the editing might have helped. My complaints here vary from his desire to make up new words like “surprisal” where we already have perfectly good ones like “surprise”, to mixing between a description of hierarchies as sometimes going from front to back, and sometimes going from low to high – occasionally using both in the same sentence. It meant I could only read a few pages at a time before I lost the thread – although I would say there were helpful summary sections at the beginning and end of each chapter, which helped me keep my grip on things, more or less.
My favourite chapter summary, by the way, was for Chapter 8, The Lazy Predictive Brain, which opened up talking about a famous 1989 paper on robotics called “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control”. Which always sounds like a fun Saturday night to me! (or perhaps that’s just my brain hierarchy switching from up-down to front-back…)
The book is dense with footnotes and references, which is great if you’re another person in this field, but less useful if you’re a more general reader. So although this was a very interesting book in many ways, and I suspect really really good if you’re in this field, I’m only going to give it 3 1/2 stars for myself, rounded down to three for prose density.
So many good ideas in this book – little ways you can improve your life, each supporting one of Dr Chatterjee’s four pillars of Relax, Eat, Move and Sleep. The author is a GP in the UK National Health Service, as well as an author and occasionally a TV doctor, and one of the nice elements of the book for me was the little stories of how he has used some of these practices to improve the lives of his patients, often without having to resort to additional medication. He is a strong believer in looking at the whole person and their lifestyle, rather than just the set of symptoms, and it’s clear that this is the way forward for health across an aging population serviced by a limited set of resources. So much more effective in the end, and the interventions seem likely to be both longer-lasting and less expensive. It’s great to see a well-researched, practical book with everyday, accessible, changes that can really make a difference to how you live.
My wife read this book first and although we are both fit and eat well, we have already adopted some of his suggestions, and I now I have been through it as well we have solid list of more things that we can try!
