My Take | My New Year’s resolution is to get around to reading all these books
- A dirty and smelly sofa is my favourite place in the world, and the right titles give me the perfect excuse to lie down all day and do nothing
Now this time of year I could wish for world peace, or not. It makes no real difference. There is one thing, though, which I would like to finish next year. That’s the list of books I have been planning to buy and read but never got around to. I think I will do that in 2024. Excuse me if I overshare. They come in no particular order.
John Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II is one of my all-time favourite history books.
It covers a whole society in so many aspects, including films and Buddhist beliefs. I also learned from this book, if memory serves, that Japanese universities, including the top ones, were or maybe still are full of Marxists!
So, when I came across his other book, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, of course I wanted to read it. Perhaps it could be titled Embracing Victory, with all the bad things that followed from hubris?
Mansplaining misogynist YouTube star Andrew Tate once said something quite sensible: “The best upbringing is no money but good parents.”
Princeton academic Matthew Desmond was apparently born poor. As advertised, In Poverty, by America, he tries to understand the pervasive phenomenon in the world’s richest country.