Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

1. The study game: How to play and win with “Statement-PIE”, by Laia Hanau
The book that taught me how to study and take useful notes. I so wish I ran into it before my Junior year of college.

2. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
This shook up my thinking about more than just evolution, but how the world operates, and the deep mathematical foundations of growth, competition, and distributed problem-solving.

3. How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method - George Polya
Another book I wish I had read earlier in my academic career

4. How to Win Friends & Influence People - Dale Carnegie
Not at all what you might think. I read it because a professional magician recommended it in the strongest possible terms as an aid to performance, and darned if he wasn’t right. If I had to boil it down I’d say it makes the case for sincere empathy with the points of view of everyone you interact with, understanding your role as a bit-player in the story of their lives and getting what you want only through helping them get what they want (what ethicists might call treating people as ends and not means).

5. A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar - Huddleston & Pullum
In which I learned that nearly everything I’d been taught in English class about grammar was either wrong, or worse, nonsense.

6. Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Freshly Updated - Judith Martin
In which I learned the central importance of politeness and etiquette in civilization. The book is highly entertaining, but fairly discursive since large portions consist of letters and answers, for a more concise statement of the central thesis, see her essay The World’s Oldest Virtue.

7. Historian As Detective - Robin Winks
The book which changed my college career and convinced me I wanted to be a historian.

8. The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space - Gerard K O’Neill
The book which rescued me from wanting to be a historian, and probably prevented me from having a miserable existence as a History grad student at UC Berkeley, where I had been accepted into the PhD program, but where there was no funding available for the first year.

9. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain - Antonio Damasio
The book which finally overthrew emotionless ratiocination as the top of my personal totem-pole of valuable mental qualities. It had been wobbling for a while. Hume certainly pushed it close to the edge, and Nietzche set it teetering, but it took Damasio’s to fully demonstrate through case studies how man cannot live by reason alone, and the model of reason being the core self while the visceral emotions and passions are intruding influences is empirically false. (Don’t worry Reason, I still love you, but you have to play nice with the other parts that go into making up my self, k?)

10. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement - Milton and Rose Friedman
The book that opened my eyes to the moral beauty of Capitalism. Given my origins and predilections, this was as big a brain-quake in its own way as The Selfish Gene.

11. The Substance of Style - Virginia Postrel
This helped me get over my reverse-snobbery in regard to style and design, as well as demolishing the place that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs occupied in my mental landscape.

update: Unfortunately, the link to the spiffy little picture of my Mazda 3 is broken… ah, well.

Damn. The coolant and oil pressure lights went on in my car today so I took it to the mechanic; the bad news is that it’s going to take two or three hundred dollars to fully diagnose the problem; the worse news is that the cheaper of the two things it could be (given what they’ve discovered so far) is a cracked head-gasket which will run a grand or so to replace. If it’s the other thing, a cracked engine block, it would be about three to four grand, if I even wanted to bother. The car’s a 96 Saturn with 90,000 miles on it, so while by-and-large I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth on it….I sure didn’t want to replace it for a few more years.

Which means, among other things, I’m probably not taking any expensive vacations this summer. I almost booked a trip to Vancouver yesterday, and was trying to plan the dates to visit my family in the Bay Area in August, and now I’m thinking I can’t really afford it. Maybe if it was just the head-gasket, and I wanted to gamble on nothing else going seriously wrong for a while…sigh. It’ll be a few days at least before I know. Luckily, I don’t need the car every day, but it’s sure going to make shopping inconvenient. How inconvenient was driven home to me when I got home at 11:00, realized that I was completely out of certain necessities (the heaviest of which was kitty litter), and had to lug it back from the nearest 24-hour Rite Aid on foot.