New Reading

I haven't updated by Google Reader shared items or my "Currently Reading" sidebar in ages, so I'm going to post on my latest reading. I started reading The Illuminatus Trilogy several days ago, and it's already got me hooked. I haven't read a work of fiction so bizarre and laugh-out-loud funny in ages. There is no simple way to describe it except as a kaleidoscope of lunacy. The book's major focus is the major conspiracies of American (and world history). You are bombarded with so many different conspiracies, cabals, hallucinations, and oddities that eventually you take complete leave of your senses. It also doesn't help that one of the novel's major figures is a talking dolphin named Howard. There's also a great subtext mocking the public figures of the time and the 60's-70's counterculture. It's similar in tone to Gravity's Rainbow, but much more readable and humorous.

I've also noticed many similarities to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Given that the three novels compiled in Illuminatus were published between 1969 and 1971, it's very likely that it was a major influence on Douglas Adams.

Part of my problem is that I can't seem to balance my desire to learn with my love of science fiction, postmodern, and genre literature. I end up spending all of my time reading dry academic texts, and neglect reading fiction. The result is that I get depressed more often. We're in a era of discord quite similar to the one so deliciously parodied in Illuminatus, and it sometimes helps to get lost in a completely fictional world. There's also a lot to learn from fiction--especially science fiction--that's applicable to the real world.

Also, it can get tiring in general to trod through the same tortured academic prose over and over again. I recently finished Edward Luttwak's Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace. While Luttwak's book was brilliant and intellectually challenging, it could have also benefited from some severe editing. The only policy book that was more painful reading was Alexander Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics, a very challenging IR classic. Before anyone says I'm throwing stones in a glass house, I absolutely acknowledge the fact that my posts are engaged in a constant battle against grammar and syntax. However, they are unpolished by design.

For me, blogging is a medium of conversation. Granted, the ideas being exchanged are by no means trivial, but I don't intend to apply the same formal third-person voice and strict revisions that I use in my essays. I revise my posts after-the-fact if I'm not satisfied with certain aspects of them (misspellings, faulty argumentation), but if I'm satisfied with the basic idea of a post I try to leave it up as I originally intended it. You don't speak from the OED when you're talking with friends, and that's exactly what I see myself as doing--engaging in an endless conversation with a group of intelligent fellow travelers. Of course, I don't always live up to this ideal--I don't post often and sometimes I don't even look at my blog for a week after I post (which is a more a consequence of the offline world than anything else). But I do my best most of the time.

However, Luttwak's book was an exception to the rule when it comes to policy books. His problems were merely sentence structure, grammar, and repetition. Most political writing suffers from the problems George Orwell catalogues in his famous essay Politics and The English Language.