Some favorite lesser-known books

Which aren’t Parfit or Borges or Orwell

It’s been a little while since I’ve done a list of recommendations, and I wanted to break up the constant AI and EA posting with something different.

Sometimes when I list off books and authors that have influenced me the most, I feel embarrassingly predictable. “No way, you post about EA and you like GEORGE ORWELL?!” In my defense, Orwell’s nonfiction really is that good. He was effectively the best “blogger” of the 1940s. You can see why a lot of EA bloggers have drawn inspiration from him in essays like You and the Atom Bomb, which in just a few paragraphs does a convincing macro history of technology, cuts through empty slogans to work out what kind of world a weapon only a few countries can build is going to create, and coins a term for a new technological and geopolitical dynamic (“Cold War”) that presidents ended up using for decades. He taught us all how to post, even if indirectly.

Parfit’s Reasons and Persons also had a huge effect on my writing and thinking style. I was getting exhausted in my philosophy major because most arguments for each ethical system seemed to be drawing an incredibly delicate chain of provincial inferences to a conclusion the author wanted to reach anyway. Reading Parfit was one of my first experiences of feeling like I could suddenly see the full landscape of possible answers to complex ethical questions laid out in front of me, with an honest guide next to me who’d look around and say “Well, of all the choices, this one looks the least terrible.” That move of laying out the whole landscape and then planting a flag at the least bad spot is something I try to mimic. But as with Orwell, it’s not surprising that someone posting about EA likes Parfit.

My favorite book, and the one that had the biggest influence on me in general, is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Reading it was a rolling religious experience. Before that, I felt like language couldn’t reach a lot of my basic everyday experiences of the world, the ones that felt most important but also most isolated from other people, or even from my own ability to put them into words. I figured everyone was cut off and alone in their interiority, because I almost never saw those common but hard-to-describe parts of everyday life described. This was pretty depressing! So much writing seemed more focused on a persona the author was trying to play than on describing what’s actually up. After the book I became kind of manically convinced that language could reach almost anything. In a lot of my posts I’m trying my best to grasp at halfway good descriptions of what the weird ideological experiences I’ve personally had in the 2020s feel like from the inside, since I haven’t seen it done much. A lot of writing about EA and AI risk doesn’t really try to describe what it’s like to be drawn to the ideas as someone who’s otherwise a pretty normal product of the ideological and cultural trends of the 2010s and 2020s. A lot of people would relate to that, and I think EA comms could use more of it. Do people even know what it’s REALLY like reading an article from 80k while listening to Sonic Youth? So much to articulate… but “Proust is a good author” also isn’t news.

This post will be a round-up of books I’ve loved that I don’t think get recognized enough, or that people wouldn’t just infer I like from my writing. You’ve probably already guessed that I have a little shrine to Superforecasting on my desk. Here I’ll stick to less predictable books.

Fiction

Little, Big & Engine Summer (John Crowley)

Growing up in New England, you’re surrounded by buildings and trees that feel weighed down by forgotten history, and you get the sense there are deep secrets everywhere, in the old houses and in the stone walls running through the middle of the woods. You feel very small against this history, and when you leave and spend more time with people who grew up in newly built-up parts of the country, you sometimes find yourself thinking that they don’t know about The Secrets. There’s a part of you that feels in service of The Secrets.

What are The Secrets? No clue.

Little, Big is the best attempt I know of to write a fantasy novel about those secrets actually unfolding. It’s full of flowery language that some people love, and that’s nails on a chalkboard for others. You can read the first few pages in the Amazon sample and decide which one you are. There’s a lot of gentle, relatable stuff about love and marriage and kids and getting older mixed in with the magical realism.

The book has a reputation for spreading mostly by word of mouth. I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more popular. Harold Bloom, for example, said:

I always regularly reread a book that I wish more people would read: Little, Big. It is literally the most enchanting twentieth-century book I know.

If I could hit pause and spend a few days in a cabin in the woods with one book, this would be the one.

Crowley (who passed away recently) also wrote a much shorter book called Engine Summer, about a utopian post-apocalyptic community that’s slowly revealed to have been altered by contact with advanced technology. The language is a specific combination of eerie and nostalgic that always takes me completely out of myself, in the same general way Neutral Milk Hotel does.

There’s a deep sense of homecoming for me in most of Crowley’s writing, and it often feels like coming up for air after I’ve given too much of my mind over to, say, AI discourse.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark)

This is one of the few books I can open to almost any page, read aloud, and make the listener laugh. One of my least favorite personality types from my teaching days is the person who gets into teaching mainly to show students how to “really live.” Once you’re in a school, it becomes obvious how many people enter teaching with the desire to form a mini cult of personality around themselves. This book is an incredibly funny short satire of a teacher doing that. To her students, she’s basically Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, but it’s slowly revealed that she’s not only a fascist but literally believes that she’s God. I can appreciate Big Personalities, but it’s useful to learn the subtle ways they pull people in, and this is a very funny exercise in spotting them. She’s also convinced the entire time that she’s the progressive, forward-thinking teacher at her school. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate how little that feeling predicts actual progress.

There’s a particular dry humor here I love (especially the flat little flash-forwards where Spark mentions in passing how each girl’s life turns out) that I try to imitate in my writing when I can.

The Book of the New Sun (Gene Wolfe)

This is the best book at being a book that I know of. I used to imagine when I was a kid that a lot of books written for adults would have the same overwhelming, layered complexity that the actual world seemed to have. Sadly, a lot of books turned out to be drawn-out, repetitive slogans, or copies of the same few tropes. This one lives up to my childhood expectations of what books could do.

The basic setup, which isn’t a spoiler (this is maybe one of the only un-spoil-able books because of how dense it is), is that the narrator, an apprentice torturer named Severian, lives in the far future, where society has regressed to a feudal dark age after being much more technological. Because everything’s narrated from his perspective, you only get subtle hints about what the world’s actually like. At one point he mentions offhandedly that the moon is green, and you’re left to work out for yourself that it was terraformed. There are a lot of funny moments that come out of this. In one, he says he’s “climbing the face of the mountain,” and only later mentions that the world’s so old that all the mountains have been carved into the heads of long-forgotten rulers, which means earlier he was literally climbing a face. There’s a lot like this that you don’t notice the first time through. The book is basically designed to be reread and reread and yield new information each time.

These are just the most surface-level facts you need to find by reading between the lines. Fans have spent decades figuring out what actually happened in the book. Once you’re done, I’d strongly recommend picking up the Lexicon Urthus, a big encyclopedia about the book put together by one extremely dedicated fan, that’s surprisingly pleasant and fun to just read cover to cover.

But obviously the depth wouldn’t be that interesting if the book weren’t also so well written. Wolfe was influenced a lot by Proust, and also by Jorge Luis Borges. (Again, shocker, I’m an EA blogger who likes Borges. You’ve probably never met a guy like me before.) One of my favorite appreciations of the book is this long bit from Henry Farrell comparing a passage from Proust to one from Wolfe:

Proust too becomes transformed when looked at with science-fictional eyes. Proust’s theme, famously, is time. As far as I have read and likely further (I am only now beginning to venture into the budding grove), he is depicting a France on the cusp of modernity. Swann lives in a world of nobles, generals, haut-bourgeois men and women with a nicely calculated and punctilious understanding of the nuances of their own class and others, as well as servants who can be tyrants in their limited domain but would never dream of venturing beyond it (another fantastical reference: Proust’s world is a Gormenghast to which no Steerpike has ever come). History weighs heavily, while the future is there primarily in the narrator’s regret that everything he describes has gone or been transformed so utterly that it might as well be.

This single-sentence passage is my favourite in the entire book:

All these things and, still more than these, the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of which I used to go forward into the church when we were making our way to our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little people’s supernatural passage — all these things made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town; a building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space—the name of the fourth being Time—which had sailed the centuries with that old nave, where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant, hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches, long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where, near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger brother; rearing into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault, ribbed strongly as an immense bat’s wing of stone, Théodore or his sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert’s little daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been bored, or so it was said, “by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had buried itself in the stone, through which it had gently forced its way.”

This seems science-fictional to my eyes – the church both a ship that sails through the years instead of space, and a process of accretion. A passage from Wolfe’s New Sun books – also my favourite (and Belle’s) from these wonderful books – provides a kind of counterpoint:

The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless as all dead things, as though it were time itself that had been laid open by the fall of the mountain. Fossil bones protruded from the surface in places, the bones of mighty animals and of men. The forest had set its own dead there as well, stumps and limbs that time had turned to stone, so that I wondered as I descended, if it might not be that Urth is not, as we assume, older than her daughters the trees, and imagined them growing in the emptiness before the face of the sun, tree clinging to tree with tangled roots and interlacing twigs until at last their accumulation became our Urth, and they only the nap of her garment.

Deeper than these lay the buildings and mechanisms of humanity. (And it may be that those of other races lay there as well, for several of the stories in the brown book I carried seemed to imply that colonies once existed here of those beings whom we call the cacogens, though they are in fact of myriad races, each as distinct as our own.) I saw metals there that were green and blue in the same sense that copper is said to be red or silver white, colored metals so curiously wrought that I could not be certain whether their shapes had been intended as works of art or as parts for strange machines, and it may be indeed that among some of those unfathomable peoples there is no distinction.

At one point, only slightly less than halfway down, the line of the fault had coincided with the tiled wall of some great building, so that the windy path I trod slashed across it. What the design was those tiles traced, I never knew; as I descended the cliff I was too near to see it, and when I reached the base at last it was too high for me to discern, lost in the shifting mists of the falling river. Yet as I walked, I saw it as an insect may be said to see the face in a portrait over whose surface it creeps. The tiles were of many shapes, though they fit together so closely, and at first I thought them representations of birds, lizards, fish and suchlike creatures, all interlocked in the grip of life. Now I feel that this was not so, that they were instead the shapes of a geometry I failed to comprehend, diagrams so complex that the living forms seemed to appear in them as the forms of actual animals appear from the intricate geometries of complex molecules.

and I contend (although your taste may legitimately differ) that neither Wolfe nor Proust suffers when their prose is compared.

It’s been a special privilege watching friends read the book and slowly freak out as they realize what it’s doing. There’s so much to talk about. It feels, more than most books, like a secret world we’ve both actually been to and know some (but probably never all) of the secrets about.

The Notebook, the Proof, the Third Lie (Ágota Kristóf)

This one’s pretty gruesome throughout, so I can’t recommend it to everyone. I enjoy bleak Eastern European media. This one specifically manages to be bleak in a way I haven’t bumped into elsewhere: the main characters are children who are both ethically naive and incredibly competent at getting the upper hand on the evil around them. Something about this combination worked very well for me, like watching a new type of horror movie. Zizek had a wild review of the book that convinced me to read it.

The Book of Disquiet (Fernando Pessoa)

Proust is the best author I’ve read at describing what it feels like to exist. This book, written in the voice of an assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon, is the best I’ve read at describing what melancholy feels like. I remember being shocked by how overwhelmingly relatable it was for something written a hundred years ago. After Proust, it was another book that convinced me language could reach my hard-to-articulate experiences, and that most people were a lot more like me than I’d assumed, so we could reach each other too. I’ve been meaning to read more Pessoa.

Star Maker (Olaf Stapledon)

I got into learning about space as a kid after the Magic School Bus episode where they visit the planets. How could anything be cooler? But one day years later I learned just how large space is, and shortly after that I learned about black holes, and they made me think about death and infinity, which were the most terrifying ideas I knew of at the time. I stopped learning about space for a while.

When I started to again, I think I was motivated in part by a strange longing for something in space to give some deep meaning or context to my life. Surely everything that exists, taken all together, would have something to say? I didn’t have this as a conscious thought, but I think it was behind my early interest in both science and science fiction.

Star Maker lets the whole strange history of the universe play out. It’s one of the only sci-fi books I’ve read that’s as strange as space felt when I was reading about it as a kid. It goes way farther than most science fiction books at approaching what I think we’re often looking for from the genre. It follows the longing behind a lot of science fiction, the hope that the universe as a whole will have something to say to us, all the way to its weird and inhuman conclusions, the dissatisfaction of any possible answer, and the recontextualization of that dissatisfaction as an acceptable part of everyday life. For a history of the entire universe, it’s also pretty short!

Nonfiction

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (George Washington Plunkitt)

One of the very funniest books I know. Everyone I’ve lent this to has loved it. It’s very short. It’s also in the public domain, so you can read it all here.

This is a transcript of a series of short talks, published in 1905, by a leader of the very corrupt Tammany Hall political organization in New York City. Plunkitt explains how you too can succeed in corrupt politics, and otherwise rants confidently about his insane beliefs. He hates, among other things:

• The civil service exams, which turn his once-promising Tammany men into hateful anarchists

• Dress suits

• The “Hay Seeds” i.e. the rural folk of upstate New York, who he warns the city may have to fight a new civil war against

• Brooklynites (they can never become “real New Yorkers”)

One piece of advice that stuck with me:

That is the way and the only way to’ make a lastin’ success in politics. If you are goin’ to cast your first vote next November and want to go into politics, do as I did. Get a followin’, if it’s only one man, and then go to the district leader and say: “I want to join the organization. I’ve got one man who’ll follow me through thick and thin.” The leader won’t laugh at your one-man followin’. He’ll shake your hand warmly, offer to propose you for membership in his club, take you down to the corner for a drink and ask you to call again. But go to him and say: “I took first prize at college in Aristotle; I can recite all Shakespeare forwards and backwards; there ain’t nothin’ in science that ain’t as familiar to me as blockades on the elevated roads and I’m the real thing in the way of silver-tongued orators.” What will he answer? He’ll probably say: “I guess you are not to blame for your misfortunes, but we have no use for you here.”

Nature’s Metropolis (William Cronon)

I got really excited when I first realized that economic history exists and what it is. So many histories we read when we’re young, told mainly through the big personalities of the people running things at any one time, seemed to leave out a lot of complex dynamics and questions about why the world looks the way it does. Reading good economic history was the first time I really felt like I understood the story of all the mysteries around me in my everyday life.

Nature’s Metropolis is an amazing combination of economic and natural history of Chicago and how it shaped the American West in general. It’s beautifully written, and the economic and social and natural dynamics themselves are the main characters and actors. It leaves you feeling like you understand America and cities more deeply.

The Machinery of Government, and most other books by Joseph Heath

After almost every Joseph Heath book I’ve read, something key about how society actually works has been clearly and directly put into words for me for the first time. It becomes part of my basic toolkit for thinking about the world, and in conversations I can much more easily and confidently slice through a lot of empty slogans to get at what we’re actually talking about. It’s like magic.

I’m a big fan.

I talked above about really liking descriptions of the complex, high-level processes that govern how politics and society develop. Heath was influenced by the philosopher Habermas to believe that because our society is fundamentally held together by more and more complex social commitments, the logic of our social systems can be dug up and articulated and argued about even if almost no one enforcing and participating in that logic can explain it at first. A great place to start is his memorial essay for Habermas. More recently, he’s compared articulating these invisible but rationally analyzable processes to saving civilization, and I’m inclined to agree. His combination of jovial, polite, but direct descriptions of the background social realities we live in, alongside his clear confidence that they can be spelled out, leaves his books completely full of useful ideas and information that cohere into clear rational pictures of the world.

I’d recommend most of his books, but my favorite is The Machinery of Government, which is built around this belief, that language and reason can reach, articulate, critique, and shape the very complex background practices running liberal government. He’s aiming to reconstruct the implicit moral principles of liberal government. As I described above, in my philosophy major I was often exhausted by tenuous, multi-step ethical arguments that seemed so obviously based on fragile provincial intuitions. Heath, in comparison, is incredible at using ethical and political philosophy to describe the world, and describe it in such a way that the ethical commitments he’s describing seem so clearly grounded in our actual social practices and ways of relating to each other that political philosophy achieves, in a way I rarely find, the same sense of being on solid ground that I admire in Parfit. His stated goal is “helping other people to express their understanding of the world,” and seeing that done so well can be intoxicating after long stretches of reading political philosophy that only feels desperate to be taken seriously.

Chapters 3 to 5 in particular are among the clearest and most compelling descriptions of (small-L) liberal political philosophy I’ve read. Since I read those chapters, most political conversations have felt a lot easier. I’m much less confused about where the disagreements are, and I can usually steer away from the stupid, time-wasting sinkholes where we constantly misunderstand each other. It’s the same feeling as after I understood physics, where suddenly so much other information easily flows from the simple central ideas I have access to. These ideas could still be wrong, but they make it much easier to find what rationalists call the “double crux” of my political disagreements with other people, meaning the one hinge where, if either of us changed our mind about it, we’d change our mind about the whole debate.

Heath describes philosophical liberalism as at least partly an emergent pattern of advanced societies, and thus no one person needs to be able to clearly articulate it in order to contribute to it. So good civil servants following these principles are more like native English speakers following grammar rules that they might not be able to articulate, and Heath’s role as Habermasian articulator of our social practices is to make those rules explicit.

In my opinion, Heath’s other best books are Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy, Cooperation and Social Justice, and Following the Rules. Each one does the same thing for a different part of the world and our social relationships to each other. In the same way that Proust made me much more optimistic that language can let us reach each other about our deepest experiences, Heath made me much more confident that reason and philosophy can reach the most important patterns and subtle practices guiding the world we build together. That includes the ones far beyond what’s clear and obvious to us from inside our own conscious lived experience.

Quine and Analytic Philosophy (George Romanos)

This is an especially well-written short introduction to Quine’s central, very destabilizing project in analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy taught me a lot about how to think, Quine especially, and this book works as a perfect guide (with lots of help from LLMs along the way) to the higher-level mental tools and moves analytic philosophers use.

Civilization and Capitalism (Fernand Braudel)

If you enjoy economic history like Nature’s Metropolis for the Big Trends, this is one of the great Big Trends books. Individual people barely show up in this book. It’s a very intricate economic history of the world from 1400 to 1800 as capitalism develops, told mostly through either big material flows and trends or how those flows affected the texture of the lives of anonymous everyday people. The first volume mostly focuses on the material basics of life, and the second and third ascend to the market economy, and “capitalism” above that, which Braudel uses to mean a small world of giant financiers and merchants who have successfully shielded themselves from competition via monopolies, friends in the government, and privileged information.

Braudel himself was an amazing intellectual character. He wrote most of the draft of his first big book, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (which went on to transform the field of history), from memory in a German prison camp during World War 2. For thinking about macro history and the future, Braudel can help you marinate your brain in better intuitions about what actually changes the world.

Some quick thoughts on how these have influenced me

I’ve tried (with very mixed success) to carry a few things these books share into my own writing:

• Putting into words the ethical rules already implicit in how society works, or in what we’d rationally want if we could step back from the social games right in front of us (mostly from Parfit and Heath). Underneath this is some faith that reasoning can actually change people’s minds, because so much of our ethical behavior runs on social relationships we can describe and refine, even if we’ve never consciously thought about them. This was a motivation behind my environmental liberalism post.

• Describing what the weird ideological experiences of the 2020s actually feel like from the inside. A few of my posts are attempts at a kind of stream-of-consciousness writing about being into the specific stuff I like in the specific situations I’ve been in. I’m always pleasantly surprised by how many people relate.

• Borrowing specific kinds of dry humor that work best only in writing.

• Taking the crazy depth of the world seriously (there’s always more to analyze), and trying to get some footing in that depth instead of steamrolling over it and pretending it isn’t there. The Book of the New Sun and Braudel both leave me with a constant, overwhelming sense of deep history, where words feel like a precious but incredibly fragile, surface-level attempt to make sense of it all, and one that’s often clearly not up to the task. I think we can put a lot of rational hope in words, but I’d like my writing to stay visibly aware of how small it is next to the world and the future it’s trying to describe.

• Remembering that the world isn’t obvious, and that a lot of knowledge only becomes visible after you’ve trained yourself to think in specific, subtle ways (learning physics felt like this, and so did reading Heath). I read magical realist books like Little, Big partly as fables about that process.