I haven't posted to this thread in months, but goodreads is displaying
my year in books, so I thought I'd post a little update here.
I've had some disappointments since my last post in August: I started reading
The Sinful Stars: Tales of the Fading Suns and I guess I'm just not that into space opera. I put the book down in the middle of a story full of space nobles telling each other how awesome they were, and I don't think I'll be picking it up again. I also started reading a collection of horror stories in October,
41 Strange, and almost immediately dropped it. Terrible writing, apparently this collection won an award? I don't understand how.
But most of the books I read in the past four months have been better, though. Two stand outs were: Tadeusz Borowski's
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, a collection of short stories based on Borowski's experiences in Auschwitz and Dachau. The subject matter is obviously quite difficult, but the quality of Borowski's writing ("spare, brutal prose", to quote another reveiwer) made it an excellent read. And one of my other favourite reads of the year was Stephen Jay Gould's
The Mismeasure of Man, about the fraudulent idea of "IQ" as a single, quantifiable, measure of human mental ability, with a short history of the origins of "IQ" testing (it was not originally meant to be a measure of "intelligence") and it's consequences, as well as a brief but informative history of earlier methods of measuring human "intelligence". The copy I have is a revised edition published in response to
The Bell Curve, a piece of scientific racism from the mid-nineties. The truly terrible part of "IQ" and other such pseudo-scientific measures of human worth is that they all, inevitably, are used in support of racism, xenophobia and classism; and on that note, I'd like to end with this quote:
“We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
