What I've Been Reading (Sep 2023)
Been a while since I’ve written one of these up, and I’ve read plenty of books in the past summer, so might as well recommend the ones I’ve enjoyed the most as well.
Dostoyevsky’s Critique of the West: An engagement with Dostoyevsky’s social and political worldview. There’s lots to learn here, especially about Russian Westernizers and their alienation from the rank-and-file peasants of Russia, along with Dostoevsky’s skepticism towards the majority of ideology being professed within Russia at the time.
Japan’s Economic Dilemma: Bai Gao’s primer from 2001 on the rise and decline of the Japanese economy, along with an institutionalist history of how Japanese economic institutions and regulations evolved over the past century from the post-war era to the Lost Bubble era. A good way to explore why a nation that was once thought to become the dominant economic power no longer has that reputation and instead has just remained in stasis.
Conversations with Castells: A short, but great primer on Castells’ thoughts in Q&A interview format. Castells manages to grasp the core of where we are headed as a networked society to a degree that many other sociologists miss out on. His book on why the USSR stagnated and collapsed is also worth a read.
Driving After Class: A great ethnography exploring the pressures of suburban life and how despite being much wealthier than the average American, the pressures of suburban life and status create a fundamentally anxious population trying to remain at the top of the rat race.
What’s the Use of Truth?: Rorty’s book (pamphlet?) with Pascal Engel exploring his pragmatist and a somewhat deflationary account of truth. Engel has a counter-proposal when it comes to the philosophical account of truth and it’s interesting to see how despite both being influenced by analytical philosophy on the status of truth, Rorty and Engel end up in very different positions on how they think “truth” is to be defined.