Benjamin Tammuz, Minotaur ** 1/2

Meh.

The description and review quotes for Minotaur promised an obsessive narrator and an avant-garde spy story; these are a few of my favorite things. This characterization only applies to the first 40 pages or so. After that, we get a few brief character studies that don't add up to much. When the story returns to our obsessive secret agent in the latter stages, it tries to explain how he came to be the way he is but fails to provide a convincing portrait.

Robert A. Burton, A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind *** 1/2

Burton is a neurologist who believes that other neurologists, with an assist from journalists, make unwarranted claims about the mind based on their research into the brain. In fact, it may be impossible to draw conclusions about the mind or consciousness from data about the brain. The mind is not the brain, even if you believe that the mind emerge from the brain.

Burton believes that consciousness is a set of "involuntary mental sensations," comparable to perceptual sensations but applied to mental activity. For example, understanding is the feeling you experience when your brain completes a calculation. In essence, Burton extends Hume's point about causation to the full range of rational thought: agency, intention, certainty, morality, and so on. My involuntary mental sensation is to find this idea fascinating.

The book contains many good insights, most of which I agree with. However, Burton's style is too casual and superficial. He addresses case studies only glancingly, and is surprisingly dismissive of philosophy:

After recently watching a few online introductory philosophy courses, my first reaction was that a fair number of age-old philosophical arguments seemed nonsensical.

That's quite a claim to make based on watching a few online videos! 

Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap ***

In the first chapter of The Slap, a group of family and friends is having a backyard barbecue. One of the children has a tantrum, and a man not his father slaps him. Descriptions of the book suggest that it "shows how a single action can change the way people think about how they live, what they want, and what they believe forever." But that's not really true. The slap merely serves as the pretext for examining a cross-section of Australian society. We meet a range of characters - young and old, native and immigrant, rich and poor - and learn how they react to the slap, but none of them change what they believe forever.

I understand why Tsiolkas chose to tell his story by rotating through eight narrators, but I think the book would have been better if he'd focused on the central character of Rosie, or maybe Rosie and one other character for perspective. Rosie was the richest character, and her story touched on all of the themes Tsiolkas addresses.

Tsiolkas limns the subtlety of certain emotions very well, but anger is not one of them. Whenever one of the characters gets upset, he or she becomes indistinguishable from the other characters.

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding **** 1/2

Human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it. .... Nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us only the knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals from us those powers and principles on which the influence of those objects entirely depends.

I came to this philosophical classic well acquainted with its main arguments and its extensive influence, but discovered the benefits of returning to original sources. On the one hand, it takes a while to get used to Hume's 18th century prose; on the other, I was surprised how often he sounds totally modern. For example, Hume's description of the chain of cause-and-effect leading from a past event to our current belief sounds almost exactly like Kripke or Putnam's account of reference, and his idea that belief is a feeling or sentiment anticipates James' pragmatism.

It was enjoyable and illuminating to read Hume's arguments in their original context and without modern commentary.

In all abstract reasonings there is one point of view which, if we can happily hit, we shall go farther towards illustrating the subject than by all the eloquence and copious expression in the world. This point of view we should endeavour to reach, and reserve the flowers of rhetoric for subjects which are more adapted to them.

Ken Kalfus, Equilateral ****

In the late nineteenth century, the astronomer Sanford Thayer convinces the international community to support his plan to construct a huge equilateral triangle in the Egyptian desert and light it on fire, to telegraph our presence to the canal builders on Mars. He has lofty expectations about communicating with the strange beings on Mars, but is having a hard time communicating with his Arab workers.

This relatively short novel is full of ideas about the human condition and the interplay between ideals and reality. It's also written in a lovely style, modern but with nineteenth century flourishes. 

Paul Tough, How Children Succeed *** 1/2

I learned about this book from Slate.com's list of favorite books of 2012. It makes the case that a child's success –– in school and in life –– depends more on non-cognitive traits like perseverance than on IQ or their standardized test scores. The subtitle refers to this as "the hidden power of character."

I went in expecting a discussion of educational reform, but the first chapter "How to Fail (and How Not to)" talks more about recent developments in pediatric neuroendocrinology, the second, "How to Build Character," about motivational psychology, and the third, "How to Think," about chess. These subjects make the author's argument more expansive, but also dilute its focus.

I basically agree with the author's points about the importance of character. However, his arguments made me a little nervous, especially in the early sections. He is making very traditional points about the influence of a child's relationship with his or her mother and about the value of hard work. They are not new ideas, and in fact they're the cornerstone of the conservative view that says disadvantaged people are responsible for their own predicament. The new idea is that character is malleable and teachable, that we can implement practices to improve it. I felt that the author argued more forcefully about the impact of character than about its improvability.

John Le Carré, A Perfect Spy ***

By consensus (including the author himself), A Perfect Spy is Le Carré's greatest novel. I beg to differ. I can see why people admire it, for its attention to a developing character, and I can certainly see why Le Carré is fond of it, for its autobiographical sketch of his father. However, I found Magnus Pym to be too passive a character and the double-agent espionage to be too blatant to be believable. I also found the prose of Pym's autobiographical sections to be too self-consciously literary. And too long -- I think Le Carré was working out his feelings about his father on the page. I would trade some of the details of Pym's adolescence for a deeper portrait of his wife Mary.

There's good stuff in here, to be sure, but I can't agree that this is Le Carré's best.