What I'm reading

I just ordered another three books from the Great Canadian series. They are great biographies because they give you a taste, but are short enough to read in a day or two if you want. It's also almost a project that feels like a meditation on the idea of a biography as you get a sense of what the biography can offer as your run through the many authors with their different styles and ideas.

I'm currently reading concrete reveries by Mark Kingwell, who I read quite a bit a few years back but haven't paid as much attention to since.

I just finished two books, one from the aforementioned Extraordinary Canadians series on Mordecai Richler, and though an interesting one, it wasn't one of my favourites. I guess it seemed to go more into his soul, than the others. His supposed arrogance and rudeness disappeared in this telling. Though it might have made it more human you felt like something was missing, that some things were glossed over. Interesting to learn about his story though, for example though attached and known as being all about Montreal, I was surprised to learn that he spent much of his life overseas.

The other book I read was by Tyler Cowen who's site marginal revolution has made it's way into my RSS reader. It's an interesting thesis, that the internet and modern technology now privileges those who can be more like autistics. In that they order information different and have other characteristics that so called 'normal' people should pay attention to.

Now it's an intriguing thesis and he sort of pulls it off, but aside from exploring some aspects of autism and labelling certain of their characteristics, the links he is able to make with them I find difficult to follow and not that useful. For example in a chapter about diplomacy, he suggests that we can learn from autistics to be more objective. I'm not sure how useful a lesson that is. Overall it was a disappointment, but it doesn't mean it wasn't interesting