Five Books I want to Read

Battlepanda, my ally from the  relativism wars, has tossed me the "five books I really should read" challenge.

One of the reasons I'm still freelancing at this advanced age is that, while reading is my greatest pleasure, forced reading is like rape to me -- turning something nice into something awful. I am physically  incapable of reading something I don't want to read.  (When I was in college my roommate had to read two Henry James novels in one week, and I remember thinking that even one probably would have killed me).

So here are five books I hope to read someday. There's an East Asian tendency -- though I don't write about it on Idiocentrism much, "Orientalism" is my only area of accredited expertise.  (Yeah, yeah, Edward Said.)

Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki (ca. 1000 AD). Back when my ancestors were living on roots and cabbages and living in pit houses, Japanese women were writing books that have been compared to Proust.  Sei Shonagan is another one.

Dream of the Red Chamber / Story of the Stone, Cao Xueqin, ca 1791. Regarded as the greatest of Chinese novels. Both Genji and this book have competing translations, and I am capable of checking the Chinese text if I want to. (But reading the book in Chinese would take me around a month of 40-hour weeks, though I'm sure my reading-speed would increase as I went along.)

Tso Chuan, ca. 450 B.C. This chronicle is almost the only more-or-less reliable extended record of actual Chinese life before the foundation of the Qin dynasty (ca. 200 B.C.) The early chapters have monsters, and cannibalism and fratricide appear from time to time. The reason why Confucius advocated serenity and restraint was because it was badly needed then. (Legge's bilingual OUP  version is one of the physically ugliest books of all time).

Hobbes' Leviathan. My recent reading about state-formation and "the monopoly of legitimate violence" leads me to think that both this book, and also Hegel's "struggle to the death", are more historically accurate and real than we would like to think. That's what studying the career of Genghis Khan does to you.

Thomas More, Utopia. This is a short book and will actually get read soon enough. It fits with my early-modern program (Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne, et al) as well as my interest in political theory.

Or maybe something by Jane Austin, whom I barely remember from 40 years ago.

Two areas where I really should brush up are economics, and the whole sociobiology / evolutionary psychology / brain science / genetics / prehistory complex. Neither would be just one book, though. As it is, I depend on Brad Delong and the slightly disreputable folk at GNXP to keep me posted.

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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