If I had a book club, it would be about big themes. For example, my previous period of reading would have had the theme of Big Thinkers of the 21st Century - Amos Tversky, Danny Kahneman, and Yuval Harari. The first book in that reading list would have been Michael Lewis's book THE UNDOING PROJECT, in which he breaks down and popularizes the economic/psychological theories on decision making. As I have mentioned before the simplest and fastest way to explain their far more wide sweeping theories about decision making were that sometimes people (and in particular leaders) make decisions based on gut instinct which is always heavily tilted from previous personal bias and emotional reaction rather than basing their decisions on information gathered and evaluated.
That is life changing idea if you give it a chance to expand in your mind and even apply it to your own decision making process. The book shows the ways that the theory was applied to, for example, baseball player recruitment and evaluation, see the movie MONEYBALL.
Yuval Harari wrote SAPIENS, a history of human kind which traces his perspective on the long march of civilization, and the social, economic, religious, environment, and epidemic events that helped shape it. His book is a big investment in time and concentration but well worth it. Harare has appeared on BBC World News as a commentator and my favorite quote from an interview with him was when a journalist asked him what his predictions are about the aftermath of the pandemic. He said, and I paraphrase from memory, 'The one thing I can tell you is that it is unpredictable because everything will be changed, everything will be different and new.'
In regard to the Michael Lewis book and the decision making theory, the obvious poster child for our current uninformed leadership in the person of Donald Trump is a man who scorns the educated and the informed, feels threatened by facts and information, and wants his own emotional state to rule public perception and policy. He wants what he wants regardless of what the data suggests, hence, he urged his followers in the Southern states to ignore the pandemic and open early without masks or protections. They did, and now we reap the deadly harvest as our numbers of new cases in those states, particularly Florida, rise to the highest level to date.
My next book club theme would be Latin American Authors beginning with Isabelle Allende. I read her book ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA, and gained so much insight into the history and spread of slavery in the Caribbean, in particular Haiti/Dominica, and she takes the story to New Orleans, La., after the revolution that eventuated in those countries throwing off the French and Spanish colonial rule and becoming independent nations. The story of the main character, an enslaved woman, is emblematic of the experience of so many women in that world, although, of course, the main character is privileged in ways that field slaves were certainly not, and therefore her story could go on longer. Field slaves had something like a 6 year life span once they entered the fields. Between the heat, the fevers, the malnourishment and resulting weakness and susceptibity to deadly fevers, the violence and the wide variety of deadly snakes and insects, the plantation workers in the Caribbean had little chance for long life.
Isabelle Allende, although she lived in several countries, was a native of Chile, so if you wanted a broader, pan South America survey, you would want to add these authors:
Mario Vargas Llosa, from Peru, I read his book THE STORYTELLER
Jorge Luis Borgas - Argentina
Gabriel Marcia Marquez, (winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature) most famous book: LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
Carmen Boullosa, Mexican, LEAVING TOBASCO, LA NAVE DE LOS LOCOS
Christina Peri Rossi-Uruguay, short stories, poems,
Gabriel Mistral, (another Nobel Prize winner) SONETOS DE LA MUERTE
Sandra Cisneros, Mexican, THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET
Needless to say, when I looked up most famous Latin American authors the list was all male, and I had to go to a list of female Latin American authors to get the women authors listed above. That is very odd because at least two of the women authors have received international acclaim and popularity, Cisners and Allende.
I have already read on Isabelle Allende book and one Mario Vargas Llosa novel, because I knew their names and ordered their books, but yesterday I ordered three or four more books, one of which just arrived, the famous LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA. That is the book I will begin reading next.
If it were my book club, I would ask each member to choose an author to read and then we could all trade books and at the next meeting people could compare their reactions.
Well I don't have a book club and I don't want to be in a book club of the type that are popular with my friends. I don't want to waste time, at present, on 'only entertainment' reading, which is what is most popular so far in these clubs. They read the best seller pop novels. I need to read by a theme, like in education. I want to learn. That doesn't mean that I disparage entertainment reading in general. I love various authors in the 'chick lit' level of writing and that would even make a great theme, however at present, I feel the need to learn and fill in the gaps in my personal education.
By the way, I have three college degrees, the first was in Literature (no women authors included and no authors from South America, Mexico or Canada, our closest neighbors). All my lit courses were still totally tethered to European literary history and tradition and classic American lit often ending in the 1800's, just like the history we took in high school which never seemed to get beyond the Civil War, if it reached that!
What kind of book club would you like?
wrightj45@yahoo.com
Happy Trails,
Jo Ann
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