If I start a book, I usually finish it. But over the last year or so I haven't been finishing much non-fiction: particularly not complex, long, and intellectually challenging non-fiction. I'm looking at you, Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis and The Righteous Mind by Jonathon Haidt!
Okay, both of those books are really popular non-fiction, but each of them has complexities.
In the first, Varoufakis explains the history and economics of the credit crises of 2008, the underlying causes of the ongoing collapse of the Greek economy, and the various proposals that the Northern European economic superpowers had for "fixing" the problem, along with his own analysis and counter-proposals to lift his home country from the mess. It's actually a fascinating read, even before you dive into the personalities, politics, and maneuverings of the brief era when he was the Greek finance minister.
I didn't finish it.
I rarely read -- have never read? -- a book like this in isolation. As the title of this blog implies, I'm usually reading more than one book in parallel, often one "serious" book and one simple consumable book at the same time. But that's not really the problem here. Over the past year or so I've just had other things that I've needed to do that have limited the time and attention that I have to spend on a book like this.
That's what happened with Adults in the Room. I'd read 50 pages, 25, a hundred, then go on with the other things in my life that were a more immediate priority. I'd come back to the book several days later, and read 5 pages more. Somehow a week and a half would elapse, and suddenly, I couldn't keep the thread anymore. What was that economic argument again? Who was that person? What does that acronym mean? When is it, in the life of the book?
Something similar happened with The Righteous Mind. It's a book about moral psychology. How do humans make moral judgements? What current research is there on how and why we do this? What are the impacts of our moral psychologies on our politics, our society, on our everyday human interactions? What does all of this say about (mostly) the current US political scene, and what are the practical implications for politics and society?
In the case of the Righteous Mind, it wasn't so much the difficulty of following and remembering the arguments and terminology of an unfamiliar field that gave me grief. The difficulty of the book came in following, remembering, and accepting controversial research and ideas. Don't get me wrong. I'm willing to learn, and to be challenged. But 95+% of anything I've ever read that has resembled sociobiology has been a smug, self-serving, "just so" story composed to justify the author's reactionary ideas about why people and society HAVE TO be exactly as they are. "Women have evolved to be loving baby-carers while men are intrepid hunters, because I made up a story about hominids based on stereotypes. So shut up and get back into the kitchen, you sweet little no-nothing. It's SCIENCE."
Ahem.
To be fair, very little of Haidt's book is based on sociobiology. (That's just my allergy talking.) The book is overall pretty interesting and I felt that I was learning some important things even as I was mentally arguing with the author.
I didn't finish it.
I'd been following Haidt out onto a limb, step by step. He had evidence, he explained limitations, he was travelling in an interesting direction that seemed worth exploring. I followed him, with reservations, preparing to leap with him into the next tree to see where we might end up. But.... my breaks in reading his book became longer than the intervals of reading, and at some point ...my foot slipped, I missed the branch, and I plummeted out of the tree.
In other words, Haidt's arguments felt and looked like garbage again.
It had just been too long for me to remember how we'd gotten to the spot we were at, and it would take too long for me to retrace my steps.
Before I'd begun them, I'd been really interested in reading both Adults in the Room and The Righteous Mind. As I read them, I learnt something, and the reading was a pleasure, not a chore. But...instead of finishing these books, I just have the regret of not finishing.
Which is why I'm finally quitting my bookclub. My book club books have become one of the things that keep me from reading the books I really want to.
In the end, I'd far rather have read Adults in the Room or The Righteous Mind than The Parcel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, At Home, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And while I enjoyed Less, The Sympathizer, and A Gentleman in Moscow, would my life have been less rich or interesting if I hadn't read them? Maybe, a little. But of those three, only The Sympathizer really gave me any insights I wouldn't have otherwise had.
So, even though The Origin of Waves is beautifully written, I'm going to gracefully detach myself from the group by expressing my appreciation for being included and by talking about how my other priorities don't allow me to continue. Maybe in August, seeing as I won't be around for July's book anyway.
I'll miss the social aspect, but there are so many other books I'd rather read than the ones that this bookgroup is interested in. There might even be other books that I'd much rather write.
