• Book Notes • – Page 4

w/KC: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, Merlin Sheldrake

October – November 2022

These are chapter-by-chapter notes (with occasional quotes) on Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures, by M. Sheldrake. I’m reading this book with KC, a chapter or two at a time, and adding notes for each chapter as I go. Having now finished it, my one line review is that it has some fascinating stuff in it, but it is a lot more focused on cool stuff than on giving a detailed account of the science.

w/CS: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, Thomas Halliday- Introduction

Tuesday 15 March 2022

LATER: This is the best science book I have ever read; I have a 20+ page document of notes on both the content and the lyrical writing. I regret that I had not systematically started keeping notes in this blog at the point we were reading this.

This morning CS and I meet to begin our discussion of the book Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday. Halliday is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who investigates long-term patterns in the fossil record; he appears to be quite young, but has already won a raft of awards for his scientific work as well as one or two awards for his writing. A riffle through the book leaves me with high expectations. I note with approval that it has about fifty pages of notes, all pointing to various scholarly articles and books. The front matter includes an abbreviated chart of geolgical eras (mostly the Phanerozoic eon, presumably indicating the time-span covered in the book); I do like it that the book works backward in time rather than oldest first.

Zen and the Art: Short review

Thursday 15 August 2019

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I’m happy to have read it again. I’m surprised at how well it read a second time.

One thing that surprised me was how much I remembered. Not just the core ideas, or the revelation about who Phaedrus was, or the interplay between Chris and his father, but quite a few of the scenes. The descriptions of coming over a rise, and the landscape opening up.

I liked the interplay between the descriptions traveling through the landscape, and the conceptual work — the Chataqua — that was being done. It was not too tight, not lockstep, but every now and then there were correspondences that resonated. The transition from the midwest, where the landscape was ordered out of value, to the west, where the untidyness of the land reflected its loss of value. The high country with its clarity and deliniation, with the abstraction of ideas about quality. The parallel for riding upwards through the valley and coming to the source of the river, and the upward path to the root of the ideas.