Currently Reading

The Subtle KnifeThe Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
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Review: Forthcoming.
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Grade: ?

Paine: Collected WritingsThe Bible Against Itself by Randel McCraw Helms
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Review: Forthcoming.
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Grade: ?

Paine: Collected WritingsPaine: Collected Writings by Thomas Paine (Edited by Eric Foner)
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Review: Since this book is rather long and a bit dry (so far), I’ll break up my reading of it into parts and review it as I go. So far, I’ve complete Common Sense. I read the final revision, which was released after hostilities broke out in the American Revolutionary War. It’s really a political opinion piece that aims to persuade people to support the fight for Continental Independence.
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He used several arguments to support American Independence. The first part argued, rather persuasively, that Kingships are inherently immoral. Basically, one becomes a king through violence and Kingships have a proven history of perpetual war with other countries. Most surprisingly, considering his later works which are highly critical of Christianity, is that Paine used select passages from the Bible to critique monarchy.
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The latter parts used economic and political reasoning and a sort of Manifest Destiny in support of independence from Britain. He claimed that it would open up trade with the rest of Europe and keep us out of the destructive wars that Britain regularly found itself in at the time. He even used navel statistics in support of why now was the right time to fight for freedom.
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It was tough to read Common Sense from the perspective of the colonists. It was far too easy to be critical of Paine’s arguments and conclusions with the gift of hindsight. Still, the work was well written and very persuasive. I can see why he has received so much credit for influencing popular support for the war.
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Grade: ?

Completed in March

CryptonomiconCryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
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Review: This is the seventh Neal Stephenson book I’ve read and I was not disappointed. Like the previous three books of his I read (The Baroque Cycle), this one weighs in at around 1,000 pages. This is because these titles are actually two to three novels in one. Despite the intimidating length, the book was very easy to read.
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There are about four separate plot lines in Cryptonomicon that all intertwine one another. Three of the stories take place immediately before and during World War II and mostly take place in and around the Philippines. They each have their own main characters whose experiences of the war are vastly different. The first is Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a cryptology expert, who spends most of his time either breaking the codes of the Axis or hiding the fact that those codes have been broken from the Axis. For him, the War is a mental challenge. A second story features Bobby Shaftoe, a marine who is the sole survivor of a Japanese attack on Guadalcanal, who is assigned to carrying out the subterfuge plans of Waterhouse and others. Truly, this is a fraction of Shaftoe’s roll in the war, but to list all that he was involved with is beyond the scope of this review. For him, the war is primarily physical. The third, more minor story is that of Goto Dengo, a Japanese soldier who befriends Shaftoe before the war. For him, the war is primarily emotional.
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The final storyline follows Lawrence’s grandson, Randall (Randy) Lawrence Waterhouse. The story takes place during the tech boom of the ’90s. He is an extraordinarily tech-savvy programmer geek who starts a business with his good friend Avi Halaby. They plan on headquartering their new corporation in the fictional Sultanate of Kunikuta, a country they predict will be the next Asian Tiger. But the location ends up entwining Randy up with Bobby’s son and granddaughter, Douglas McArthur Shaftoe and America Shaftoe. A discovery by the Shaftoes involves Randy in the history of the land and war time secrets of his grandfather’s that his rivals are willing to kill to get. Suddenly, all the extreme privacy and cryptography concerns of Randy’s business partners seem like prudent behavior.
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In addition to many of the characters of Cryptonomicon being inter-related, they are the descendants of Characters from The Baroque Cycle. The similarities and differences between the related characters and their situations are interesting and often surprising.
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These books share other similarities with one another. First, not all the mysteries and plot lines are fully resolved by the end of the book. While this may leave some readers dissatisfied, I believe it adds an element of realism. Real life is never as tidy as our stories would have us believe. Second, Stephenson doesn’t shy away from science, technology, and history in his books. He includes specifics about cryptographic techniques, German U-boat technology, Pacific arena battle sites, and even use of the Zeta function as a pseudo random number generator. In previous books, he delved into metallurgy, Sumerian religious practices, pre-Reformation European politics, Philosophy, and the calculus. This makes them a joy to read for geeks like myself.
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Grade: A

Completed in January

The End of FaithThe End of Faith by Sam Harris
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Review: Though this was the first ‘new’ atheist book to catch my attention, I only recently finished it. Perhaps because I have done so much reading about the movement online and in other books, this book didn’t impact me the way The God Delusion did. The main point of the book is that faith, by its very nature, is dangerous. He makes this point well using many of the arguments and historical (recent or otherwise) events.
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Most of the arguments were quite familiar to me already but Harris’s prose conveys a sense of urgency that is absent from similar works I’ve read. He sees an extreme danger in the mixing of modern weapons and faith. He makes a good case for such alarm by examining end-times theology, where a large and growing group of Christians look for, and often try to create, the eminent end of the world. He also points out that Islam is at about the same place Christianity was in the Middle Ages, where the religion stifled any dissent via violent oppression. Now imagine the inquisition occurring with modern weaponry.
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The most interesting chapter is the 2nd one, entitled “The Nature of Belief”. In that part of the book, Harris leans on his philosophical and neurobiological education to examine how we come to believe things. He also ties belief to faith in his definition of the latter: “I am criticizing faith in its ordinary, scriptural sense - as belief in, and life orientation towards, certain historical and metaphysical propositions.” In his analysis of belief, he concludes that beliefs are representations of the world. This means that justified, or ‘true’ beliefs are ones that best represent the world. Since we can only know the world through our senses, justified beliefs are one that best conform with the evidence we gather through our senses. Since religious beliefs have scant evidence, claims Harris, faith is basically a set of unjustified beliefs.
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Overall, the book was an easy and informative read. He makes a good case that we must ‘End Faith’ in order to save ourselves, even if some of his prose tends to be a bit hyperbolic. Much to the ire of many of Harris’s fellow ‘new’ atheists, he concludes the book with a chapter about replacing faith-based spirituality with another kind of spirituality. He believes that through neuroscience and other evidence-based pursuits, we can achieve spiritual satisfaction without believing five impossible things before breakfast.
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Grade: B

Books Completed in 2007