Neil Hopcroft

[audiobook]

A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge

Boundaries make up a huge part of human history, we are forever arguing over, and sometimes agreeing upon, them. This book takes a closer look at a number of these borders and the history of how they got to be how they are, telling stories along the way.

Some of the borders are chosen because they are important, some because they are interesting, and some just bizarre. He also touches on the more abstract borders of air and space.

There is some information about the political powers that shaped many of the borders, with a lot of European borders coming down to the families ruling the lands and how they got split up in the succession from one generation to the next. While those between Indian and Pakistan are shaped by a desire to separate Muslim and Hindu peoples, even when they had been living reasonably peacefully beforehand.

Where you see straight lines on maps, they often correspond to colonial powers drawing on vague maps of large regions they have no actual claim upon or even real presence in. Some people in corridors of Europe have agree that this side is mine, that side is yours, without any boots on the ground. Sometimes, like with the Mason Dixon line, those lines are surveyed after their drawing, and eventually pick up other meanings – what started as a boundary between states became a symbol of the fight for the freedom of slaves.

The chapters on the division of the middle east would bear another listen, it is an area fraught with conflict, a fire onto which we British poured a substantial amount of accelerant with our misguided attempts to devise a peaceful solution from afar. I still do not understand the political landscape of that part of the world, but I do wish everyone would stop kill each other and be nice.

All in all a fascinating book that explores boundary conditions, what we find there and how it resolves into what we see today. If you like maps this is surely a book for you.

[1972 edition, audiobook]

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J Adler is the work of a heretic. But I’ll come back to that later.

There are a number of levels of reading described by this book, elemental reading that most of us learn at school, through to syntopical reading, a skill for obtaining wisdom from the reading of multiple books at the same time. Most of the book concerns itself with analytical reading, during which he suggests you ask yourself a number of questions:

• What is this book about?
• Is it true?
• What of it?

In order to prepare yourself to answer these questions, you need to make some notes. This is where the heresy comes in, the notes should be made in the book itself. Either inside the cover sheets, or in the margins near the point they are highlighting. These notes should be personal, they are your understanding and for you to come back and understand again later. Marginalia.

He suggests there should be several phases to reading, an initial structural stage, where you get the feel of the book, reading the table of contents and skimming through the chapters. Then an interpretive stage during which you read and make notes on anything that seems important. Finally followed by a critical stage where you critique the book based on your notes and are elevated to the level of understanding of the writer.

There are some specific suggestions for various types of books, scientific books often lend themselves to this depth of reading while poetry much less so, though you can perform some mental gymnastics to interpret poems in this way.

I am currently reading Noise by Daniel Kahneman which is a scientific book written with this kind of reading style in mind – each chapter has a brief explanation before and a few important quotes after, removing the need for most people to make their own marginalia.

Finally there is a list of significant works that would yield to the suggested approaches to reading them.

While I have rarely seen this kind of reading in the wild, Piercarlo being a glaring exception walking the line between making notes and not marking the books by extensive use of post-it notes, I can understand that it would be a great way to get good information out of a book. You don’t see books with these kinds of notes in the second hand market because the notes are so personal, they have no meaning and a negative value to anyone else, making the book spoiled not augmented.

There are very few books I can think of that warrant this depth of attention, especially now that it is so much easier to write and publish books than it was when this guidance was written, but also because I feel I get more from a new book than I do from spending more time with one I know now. A second reading often yields much detail missed on the first, but to spend the time making notes in this way a book would have to be groundbreaking.