Chuck Smith's Blog

The Infamous “To Read” Bookshelf November 30, 2008

My to-read bookshelf was out of hand! Every year for Christmas and my birthday my family buys me things off of my amazon.com wish list. Plus, for several years, I had a Borders VISA that got me just what I needed: free books! I love reading just as much as the next Lit major, but I was obtaining books faster than I could read them. So part of my 101 things list was to get my “to read” bookshelf under control–less than 10 books. Plus I wanted to finally face Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett. Embarassingly enough, it had been sitting on the shelf for nearly two years. I decided to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone: by reading Consciousness Explained I would be under 10 books just in time for the holiday season.
It took about 3 weeks to finish, which isn’t too bad. Consciousness Explained had been recommended to me about 8 years ago by a colleague at work. He said it was interesting and really explained how the brain works. I’m always drawn in by these books that float between science and philosophy. I’d since read Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which was awesome for the first 3/4 then sort of petered out. I’ve also had the privilege of hearing Freeman Dyson speak about creatures that could survive while flying through outer space. The neat part about this intersection between science and philosophy is that it isn’t constrained by what has been experimentally shown to be true, but at the same time stays grounded in what we know. There is room for new ideas, innovation, and thought experiments.
I thought Consciousness Explained was thoroughly enjoyable. It’s remarkable how Dennett’s sense of humor really comes through in what otherwise may be considered a dry subject. He describes how we can be considered to be “conscious”, what it means to be so, and how is this different from non-conscious beings.
I particularly enjoyed the parts near to the end that described our experiences with color. How science has disproved the common notion that an object’s reflective properties define what color we perceive it to be. How some animals can see ultraviolet or infrared, which begs the question of how the world looks to them. Some people are color blind, so how do things look to them? One intriguing example is the following: if everyone on earth were red-green colorblind and an alien landed and told us they were different colors, we’d think they were insane. So why is it that we think one blue looks like another blue right now? Couldn’t they be different?

I often idly ponder my reading habits. I try to keep life interesting by alternating between fiction and non-fiction. Among the non-fiction I’ve been cycling through these philosophy-science books, business books, and technical reading. With fiction I have a few favorite authors (Joyce Carol Oates, for one) that I will read novels of, but for the most part I don’t like reading newer novels w/o first being familiar with the author. There’s too much disappointment in modern fiction! So instead I tend to read short stories–particularly the Best American series and Year’s Best Science Fiction. Then if I like an author, I’ll go buy his or her books. Michael Chabon has had several good short stories in these anthologies, so that lands me with my next to-read book: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It’s a Pulitzer Prize winner! 50 pages in and it’s good so far, we’ll see how it turns out…