12 Days of Reading Recommendations, Day 2: An Incomplete Education, Simply Explained
Like a lot of people this year, I've availed myself of a few different excellent library systems and gotten a lot of reading done. I thought for an end-of-year treat, I'd share the books I'd recommend and what makes them worth reading. And wouldn't you know it, my reading just happens to sort of self-sift into twelve different subject areas, so it's twelve days of reading! Each day's recommendations newsletter will clock in at 600 words or less, so you can gulp this quick bite when you need a minute to yourself. Enjoy giving your Libby app a vigorous workout or making some independent bookseller very happy.
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AN INCOMPLETE EDUCATION, SIMPLY EXPLAINED
As a teen, one of my favorite books was Judy Jones and William Wilson's An Incomplete Education, a compendium of survey articles on American studies, art history, economics, film, literature, music, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, science, and world history. If one read the sections of the book -- with subsections like "Famous Last Words: Twelve Supreme Court Decisions Worth Knowing By Now" -- one acquired both the immediate subject education and a look at something equally useful: How to organize information in an entertaining and logical way.
I have since begun a small collection of these types of books, and the editorial choices about how to organize the subject matter persist in being as illuminating as the subjects themselves. (To be honest, I would love to write a vade mecum for 21st-century adults; I just keep casting about for the angle.)
And so it was with a great deal of delight that I found -- and binge-read -- the DK "Big Ideas Simply Explained" series. I started off with topics I feel like I have a firm grounding in -- ecology, movies. Having confirmed that the writers didn't leave out anything I would consider important and had in fact introduced things that were new to me or else reinterpreted in light of very recent research, I thought, Okay, I can trust the editorial judgment here. And that's how I came to read Big Ideas Simply Explained on: astronomy, the Bible, classical music, ecology, economics, history, Islam, law, literature, movies, philosophy, politics, psychology, religions, science and Shakespeare. I have the one on sociology teed up.
You won't be a subject matter expert after reading any of these, but you'll have learned something, and isn't that what matters? The great thing about these books is how suitable they are for end-of-the-day reading, for the kind of reading where you're trying desperately to yank the troop of gibbering monkeys in your brain into formation so you can just concentrate for ten minutes, dang it, and every once in a while, you'll fall into a particularly fascinating section and be pleasantly surprised to look up and realize that not only do you now know something new about cognitive psychology, you've just spent an hour reading.
Re-learning how to direct your attention toward the things that make you marvel at what a world we live in -- instead of despairing at it instead -- is the best lesson these books could teach.
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER
An Incomplete Education, by Judy Jones and William Wilson.
The whole of the DK series "Big Ideas Simply Explained"
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