Evoking Zeitgeist

One of the most difficult challenges for any writer is to try to evoke the spirit of a nation - in a balanced but insightful way. Chauvinism comes all too easily - be it of the American, English, French or even Scots variety.

But summoning up the soul of a country with appropriate text is a much greater challenge – and may well be best done by an outsider who knows the country well…Think Madame de Stael and Germany; de Tocqueville and the USA  

This train of thought is sparked off by my reading – almost in one go – a delightful book called “The Story of Scottish Art” – explored in this nice video. The author is himself a painter and uses a lot of examples (carvings as well as paintings) to illustrate the text - as well as his own water-colours. The book is based on a BBC series.

One of the things which endeared the book to me was the way he skilfully wove together aspects of the painters’ lives with developments in the nation. 

Painting is a good “handle” on a country – but it’s rarely used. Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily gives a “food and Mafia” take on that country; and Simon Winder’s “Germania” and Neil McGregor’s “Germany; memories of a nation” cultural takes on Germany – but skate over painting.

In 2007, I found myself leading a project in Sofia, Bulgaria and quickly became so taken with the paintings – particularly from the interwar period - I came across in its fascinating small galleries that I started to collect them. Naturally I wanted to know something about the artists – and found myself traipsing into antiquarian bookshops in search of information. The result was initially a small book of 50 pages – and, by 2015 or so, a larger one of 250 pages Bulgarian Realists – getting to know Bulgaria through its Art

This particular book started its life quite literally as a scribbled list on the back of an envelope - of painters whom a gallery friend thought I should know about in 2008 or thereabouts…..

It eventually became a list of 250 or so Bulgarian artists of the “realist” style which I developed to help me (and visitors) learn more about the richness of the work (and lives) of artists who are now, for the most part, long dead and often forgotten. 

But it also got me wondering about who is best placed to try to evoke the spirit of a nation….Social historians? Anthropologists? Artists? 

Some of you may know the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb whose book The Black Swan became a best-seller a few years ago. In it he makes a profound point about the process by which artistic “genius” is recognised (or not – the latter being more often the case). More than four centuries ago, the English essayist Francis Bacon had a very simple intuition….about a man who, upon being shown the pictures of those worshippers who paid their vows then subsequently escaped shipwreck, wondered where were the pictures of those who happened to drown after their vows. The lack of effectiveness of their prayers did not seem to be taken into account by the supporters of the handy rewards of religious practice. “And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like”, he wrote in his Novum Organum, written in 1620.

This is a potent insight: the drowned worshippers, being dead, do not advertise their experiences. They are invisible and will be missed by the casual observer who will be led to believe in miracles.

Not just in miracles, as Taleb goes onto argue…..it is also the process which decides whether an artist is remembered. For every artist of genius, there have been many more with the same talent but whose profile, somehow, was submerged….

Art, of course, is the subject of high fashion – reputations ebb and flow…..we are vaguely aware of this…but it is money that speaks in the art “market” and it is the din of the cash register to which the ears of most art critics and dealers are attuned…… 

As I read Lachlan Goudie’s little vignettes of painters in “The Story of Scottish Art”, I realised that painters have always occupied an important position in social networks – often poor themselves, they rub shoulders with a wider range of people than most of us. In the early days, of course, they would focus on religious figures and then society people. But from the mid 19^th Century, artists such as David Wilkie were able to celebrate ordinary folk in their paintings.

Nowadays, of course, we rarely see faces any more in paintings – just blobs and abstractions. Perhaps our artists are telling us something?

But my question is, I think, a good one – who is best placed to gives us insights into a country’s soul? Poets? Writers? Painters? Anthropologists? Historians? Social historians? Travel writers? Sociologists? Or who? 

Further Reading

Watching the English by anthropologist Kate Fox is one of my favourites – for that country.

Theodor Zeldin is probably the best on the French.

Perry Anderson’s article A New Germany? offers a great intellectual and political history of contemporary Germany. But otherwise, it’s not easy to find a serious book about modern Germany (although many good -histories) Gordon Craig’s magnificent “The Germans” came out in 1982 and John Ardagh’s “Germany and the Germans” in 1987 – since then there has be no real update to their insights into the German soul - Gitty Sereny’s “The German Trauma – experiences and reflections 1938-2001 and Fritz Stern ‘s “Five Germanies I have known” (2007) notwithstanding

On Italy, people are spoiled for choice – not just Barzini’s classic “The Italians” (1964) but Foot, Gilmour, Ginsborg, Hooper, Jones and Parks all giving a sense of the modern Italians….You pays your money….

The background to social history is laid out in this article

7 social historians lay their claims here

A book on The anthropology of Ireland demonstrates its possibilities

And the others?

A Plus for Postmodernism - part III of series

My foray, these past few days, into “the literature” of postmodernism has provoked two thoughts –

the first the (flippant) question of why on earth these guys can’t agree their terminology. What are we actually talking about - is it critical theory? literary theory? structural theory? Constructivism? Deconstructionism? Postmodernism? postmodernity?

Why so many different words? I know they’re trying to tell us that words are meaningless…but hey, I’m getting confused!

Confused people, of course, tend to lash out. And there’s a lot of anger in the air – so maybe that’s why we’re angry!!

The second thought is a discovery - that the trawling through the most significant commentaries on the field (Perry Anderson, Peter Berger, Marshall Berman, Chris Butler (“A Short Intro to PM”), Terry Eagleton, David Harvey) unearthed one gem – The Saturated Self- dilemmas of identity in contemporary life (1991) by a well-read and good writer who happened to be a social psychologist, Kenneth Gergen who dramatically introduces his book thus - 

Many nonacademic readers are aware of the debates over the canons of Western literature now engulfing the academic community, and the increasing currency of such terms as de construction, poststructuralism, and postmodern. Yet these are meagre indications of the radical reconsideration of longstanding traditions of truth and knowledge which are underway.

As beliefs in objective knowledge fall into disrepute, the entire face of education, science, and "knowledge-making in general stands to be altered. The issues are far too important, and too much fun, to be contained within the walls of academia.

One aspect of this ferment is of special concern to me. For many years one of my central interests has been the concept of self, our ways of understanding who we are and what we are about. Beliefs about the self seem pivotal to all our undertakings. We believe that as normal human beings we possess reasoning powers, emotions, conscience, intentions; these beliefs are critical to the way we relate to others…… 

Remember this was written 20 years ago!! 

It is not simply that the present turn of events has altered the emphasis placed on rationality, the emotions, and the like, or that it adds new concepts to the traditional vernacular. Rather, like the concepts of truth, objectivity, and knowledge, the very idea of individual selves—in possession of mental qualities—is now threatened with eradication.

I have just started reading the book – although this excellent review has given me a good sense of the argument It starts with the observation that a combination of modern transport systems and the internet have transformed how each of us relate to others and then moves to consider how this has affected the way we understand (or fail to!) the world.

The last post made the point that one of the aspects of Postmodernism with which I don’t have a problem is its celebration of seeing the world from multiple perspectives – indeed I joked about my 57 varieties of capitalism. Even in 1991 Gergen accepted that our pursuit of progress was putting the very existence of the planet in danger - and argued that awareness of the multiplicity of perspectives could – if put into an appropriate decision structure - help give voice to marginalised groups.

In fact, a few years later, this is exactly what happened when a social anthropologist presented a fascinating case study of the process by which Arsenal Football Club found the site for its new stadium 

which started off quite elegantly - just the market actor (Arsenal) and the hierarchical actor (Islington Council) - but was soon clumsified by the entry of an egalitarian actor (the Highbury Community Association). Association). The result was a solution, totally overlooked in the early stages, that gave each of these contending actors more of what it wanted (and less of what it did not want) than it would have got if it had somehow established hegemony and "gone it alone." 

This "clumsy solution" came about more or less by accident, and it stands in marked contrast to the sort of outcomes that we usually get, especially in relation to policy issues that have a high scientific input: environment and development in the Himalayan region, for instance. All of which raises the question: "How can we get clumsy solutions by design." One important part of the answer is: "By doing pretty well the exact opposite of what policy orthodoxy says we should do." Rather than a single, agreed definition of the problem, we need to move towards noisy and argumentative institutional arrangements in which all three voices (each with its distinctive definition of the problem - a definition, moreover, that cannot be reconciled with the other two) are (a) able to make themselves heard and (b) are then responsive to one another.  

Michael Thompson uses the “grid-group” or “cultural analysis” approach which I’ve discussed before on this blog – but sets it out very clearly in The Case for clumsiness (2004)

The ideas were considered important enough to be presented by Professor Keith Grint in “Wicked problems and clumsy solutions – the role of leadership” (2008) Michael Thompson was interviewed by the RSA here. This tribute gives a good sense of his work

Update; I’ve been a bit remiss in not mentioning one book which is a model of clarity - From post-industrial society to post-modern society – new theories of the contemporary world; Krishan Kumar (2nd edition 2004) which follows an earlier 1978 book of his which looked at the post-industrial writers such as Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine who explored the move to a service economy and a ‘knowledge society’, and  the social and political changes that could be expected to follow from this. Those theories have been joined by others with a more ambitious scope about the information and communication revolution, the transformation of work and organization in the global economy; and of political ideologies and cultural beliefs

Spirit of the Times - part II of series

“Modernism” is the label we stick on the cultural and intellectual genie which was released by industrialisation from the middle of the 19^th Century - although purists insist that “modernity” is actually the world for the philosophical aspects. In many ways “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848) marks the start of what was to be a very turbulent century 

The cultural aspects are superbly described in Peter Gay’s Modernism – the lure of heresy (2007) which has a stunning 32 page bibliographical essay. The intellectual/political aspects of modernism probably require both The Crisis of Reason – European thought 1848-1914 by JM Burrows (2001) and Contesting Democracy – political ideas in the 20^th Century by Jan Werner-Mueller (2011) 

There is some dispute about when Modernism eventually gave way to Post-modernism - with Perry Anderson’s The Origins of Postmodernity (1999) doing the most thorough detective work. This timeline tracks down a reference by C Wright Mills in 1958 – but most people now accept that Daniel Bell’s use of the phrase “post-industrial” in 1960 signalled the birth-pangs of post-modernism with The Temporary Society by Warren Bennis and Philip Slater (1968); The Age of Discontinuity by Peter Drucker 1969 and Between Two Ages - America’s Role in the Technetronic Era by Zbigniev Brzezinski (1970) best capturing the transition pains…

I’ve made a couple of efforts to make sense of Post-Modernism – with my last attempt selecting what I considered to be the more accessible of what is a very turgid field of study.  This was probably the best summary I came across. 

I’m encouraged to return to the fray by a book which came out recently with the title Cynical Critical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (2020) by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay  

This looks to help those of us who are puzzled by the way that both hard left and hard right seem engaged in a new Culture War – with the clear progress which has been made toward racial and gender equality not apparently being enough to satisfy significant numbers who are taking to the streets and toppling statues…..Is this just impatience – or is there more to it than that. Pluckrose and Lindsay think the latter. Here’s how the they start - 

A fundamental change in human thought took place in the 1960s. This change is associated with several French Theorists who, while not quite household names, float at the edges of the popular imagination, among them Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. Taking a radically new conception of the world and our relationship to it, it revolutionized social philosophy and perhaps social everything. 

Over the decades, it has dramatically altered not only what and how we think  but also how we think about thinking. Esoteric, academic, and seemingly removed from the realities of daily existence, this revolution has nevertheless had profound implications for how we interact with the world and with one another. At its heart is a radical worldview that came to be known as “postmodernism.” 

Ultimately, the Enlightenment that postmodernists rejected is defined by a belief in objective knowledge, universal truth, science (or evidence more broadly) as a method for obtaining objective knowledge, the power of reason, the ability to communicate straightforwardly via language, a universal human nature, and individualism. They also rejected the belief that the West has experienced significant progress due to the Enlightenment and will continue to do so if it upholds these values 

When I’m being flippant, I refer to Postmodernism as the “whatever” school – since its proponents use that phrase and a shrug of their shoulders to express their contempt for the poor souls who still believe in objectivity or searching for “truth”.

Personally I have a lot of time for people who insist on looking at the world with multi-angled prisms – I posted once about 57 varieties of capitalism. But that doesn’t make me a relativist! I respect the process of trying to disprove falsities… 

And, in all the discussion, I can’t understand why no one refers to the classic book on this subject which was long before any French deconstructionists got involved in the fight – The Social Construction of Reality by T Luckman and Peter Berger (1966)

In Praise of Richard Hoggart

I have a young Bulgarian journalist friend who has a multilingual blog The Bridge of Friendship about cross-border issues. He’s based in his home town of Russe on the Danube – a selection of the earlier posts can be read here.

We chat frequently and he has taken recently to posing what he calls “challenges” – when he presents, in a few phrases, a new issue which he needs to explore. This wrenches me out of my usual channels and has me musing about things which normally pass me by.

And this was particularly true of the latest one he threw at me – about the sociology of literature or was it literary theory – or indeed critical theory?  Is there a difference? And does it matter?    

As I’m not a fan of novels, this was a tough one. But then I remembered the reason for my dislike of English novels and their boring portrayal of the various dilemmas of middle-class characters….it’s the narrowness of the social context which turns me off – in contrast with the dynamism I find in Scottish and Irish writing – let alone French and German cultural icons. 

Take the Germans first – I was still in my early 20s when I first came across artists such as Georg Grosz and Kathe Kollwitz and writers such as Bert Brecht and Heinrich Boell – all profoundly influenced by the experience of war and exploitation, the first three angrily whereas Boell’s  stories were more resigned. Michel Houllebecq’s novels react against consumer capitalism where JG Ballard’s tales show the threatening dystopia.

In picking out such artists I simply show my own preference not just for critical narrative but for stories to be set against a social context. Other people are different – they don’t like to be reminded of such realities – preferring more magical tales….Where does that get us? 

In 2014, Michael Schmidt produced a 1,200 page book called “The Novel; a biography” which discussed the plots of hundreds of writers – grouping them into strange categories such as 

THE HUMAN COMEDY: Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola 

IMPERFECTION:  George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, George Gissing, Samuel Butler

BRAVERIES: Robert Louis Stevenson, Bruce Chatwin, William Morris, Charles Kingsley, Henry Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling

SMOKE AND MIRRORS: Lewis Carroll, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Athur Conan Doyle, J. M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm, Kenneth Grahame

PESSIMISTS: Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane

LIVING THROUGH IDEAS: Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy 

A book I read with some interest a few years back was Grand Hotel Abyss – the lives of the Frankfurt school; by Stuart Jefferies (2015). For me, Erich Fromm was the most interesting of the group but he soon parted company with them. Jefferies’ Intro to his book is useful as it reminds us that - 

The School came into being in part to try to understand failure, in particular the failure of the German Revolution in 1919. As it evolved during the 1930s, it married neo-Marxist social analysis to Freudian psychoanalytical theories to try to understand why German workers, instead of freeing themselves from capitalism by means of socialist revolution, were seduced by modern consumer capitalist society and, fatefully, Nazism.

The School was forced to leave Germany in 1933 – for the USA and, while in Los Angeles exile in the 1940s, Adorno helped develop the California F-scale, a personality test designed to discover those likely to fall prey to fascist or authoritarian delusions. Breivik would have been the perfect example of the authoritarian personality Adorno wrote about, one who was ‘obsessed with the apparent decline of traditional standards, unable to cope with change, trapped in a hatred of all those not deemed part of the in-group and prepared to take action to “defend” tradition against degeneracy’. 

But Herbert Marcuse was the only one of the group to take a revolutionary path – remaining in the States and supporting the students during the 1968 unrest. 

What I find most curious is that the ultimate legacy of the Frankfurt School was not actually in the field of literature but - in popular culture. This is what fascinated the group in 1950s America – and spawned the discipline of Cultural Studies - started in the UK by Richard Hoggart in 1964 but whose biggest star was Stuart Hall. The Frankfurt school may have shown an initial interest in people like George Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann who were trying to develop a sociology of the novel but soon veered into polling work on the authoritarian personality…. 

I came to adulthood in the late 1950s – just as the New Left was getting off the ground. I remember the impact Hoggart’s “The Uses of Literacy” (1957) made with its picture of the resilience of working-class culture and the threat posed by the banality of “popular culture” – as well as the excitement as I held in 1960/61 the first few issues of “New Left Review” in my hands after its creation from “New Reasoner” and “Universities and Left Review”. 

The wider global context is nicely caught in the diagrams in this short paper 

But Cultural Studies has probably done more harm than good – it was certainly the means through which the issue of identity came to the fore and destroyed the left. Richard Hoggart is, for me, an immensely important – if rather neglected – figure in the story. Raymond Williams is the man who attracts the adulation these days from the trendies – perhaps because he is so high-falutin’ and boring!

So what do I take from this canter down Memory Lane? What lessons about culture? About the left? About the UK? Well, my prejudices are still intact – I find it curious that anyone can take writers such Goldmann, Lukacs and Williams seriously…. 

On the other hand, I realise that I have neglected Richard Hoggart for too long. He was a superbly sensitive writer whose various autobiographies (he lived to the grand old age of 95!) are beautifully written – you can get a sense from some excerpts from A Measured Life – the times and places of an orphaned intellectual; R Hoggart (1994; 2019) 

And I’m delighted to see that he’s still celebrated today – see this recent article in the Los Angeles Review of Books

Further Reading

Understanding Richard Hoggart – a pedagogy of hope M Bailey, B Clarke, J Walton (2011)

Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies ed S Owen (2008)

a review of the above book

Rereading Richard Hoggart ed Sue Owen (2008) some excerpts of a more personal tribute

“Promises to keep – thoughts in old age”; R Hoggart (2005)

Cultural Studies 1983 – a theoretical introduction; Stuart Hall et al (2016) which contained the lecture series he gave in the US in that year which was issued only two years after his death

The Novel; a biography; Michael Schmidt (2014)

Reading as a Conversation

Some months back I offered some hints to identify whether a book was worth reading 

-       check the Introduction – or Preface. This is the author’s chance to show (s)he understands how overwhelmed we are by the choices; to offer us a convincing argument about why (s)he has to inflict yet another book on us. And the best way to do that is to give a brief summary of what others have written and identify the missing elements which make a book necessary. Books which fail even to attempt that prove that the author is living in a bubble... 

-       Look for a summary of each chapter…..I have always liked the old habit of prefacing a book chapter with an explanation of what that chapter will deal with. When I got hold recently of George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism; (1928) it was to discover that his Table of Contents has no fewer than 33-pages..

-       Look, at the end, for a (short) list of recommended reading, ideally with notes explaining the choice. Most books have a long “bibliography” which, I’ve taken to calling a “virility test” - demonstrating nothing more than (a barely compressed sense of) superiority. I want instead to see a shorter (and annotated) list for several reasons - partly to smoke out the author’s prejudices; partly to see how honest (s)he is; and partly to see how well (s)he writes    

-       Make sure that the writing is clear – with suitable use of graphics and tables which are needed both to break up and to illustrate the text…. 

But I also need to be persuaded that the book in question has three other features --

- respects the basic facts about an issue;

- has a coherent “narrative structure” (here’s a good example of a book which lacked this)

- refers to the various sides of the key arguments on the issue  

And this can be done only by checking the reviews. 

These, of course, are just my views. Different sorts of people have different methods  of productive or active reading.

Those who want to know more about how to extract most benefit from a book should have a look at the classic How to Read a Book (1965) by Mortimer Adler whose first edition  was actually written in 1940. Part I is best skimmed – the meat of the book is from chapter 7

Adler divides what he calls “inspectional reading” into two categories. The first is skimming; the second is superficial reading. 

Skimming is the most effective tool for discovering those truly great books you want to read.

If upon skimming a book, you realize it doesn’t hold your interest or have new information, that’s a success. It means you’ve made your way through a title in just a few minutes instead of spending a couple hours to arrive at that conclusion. If you realize you are interested in the text, you’ve guaranteed you’ll enjoy reading the entire book.

For any non-fiction book we read, we should be able to answer a few questions after spending just a few minutes with the book. First, what kind of book is it? Is it explanatory or expounding? Is the purpose of the book to explain how something works, or to convince the reader to take a certain action? Broadly, what is the author trying to say? The purpose of skimming is to learn these answers quickly – at a bird’s perspective – and have a feel for the style of the author. 

This is actually an excerpt from a post with the great title of How to never read another boring book by Elizabeth Peterson in which she shares her approach to active reading. 

Chapter names and summaries
Inspect the table of contents for chapter titles and descriptions. The chapter titles will reveal how the information is organized. Older books often include descriptions or outlines about the organization of individual chapters. This is also useful for when you want to read about a specific idea or piece of research. 

Index
Look through the index to see the individuals, concepts, studies, etc., the author references in the book. This is will give you an idea of what ideas or research, if any, the book presents, and a blueprint of their arguments. You’ll also be able to see quickly whether the book covers any ideas or ground that is new to you. Additionally, you might choose to go straight to a certain chapter to see the research on a given topic. 

Publisher’s Blurb and Preface
The publisher’s blurb often includes a summary of the author’s arguments and conclusion, making it a great resource for answering basic questions about the book. You may be inclined to dismiss the publisher’s blurb as empty praise to convince you to read or buy the book or simple adulation for the author – and you may be right in some instances. However, you should definitely read the blurb to find out.
Likewise, in their prefaces or “notes to the reader”, authors often include interesting observations or references which didn’t make it into the final version of the book. The preface also usually includes the author’s hopes for the books stated clearly. 

Introduction
If the book has an introduction, read it. There is often so much good information added here that the author thought was important, but for whatever reason, couldn’t include in the body of the book. Often, a chapter or passage got cut from the final version of the book, so the author included those resources or ideas for the reader in an introduction. With older books, the introduction often explains the cultural setting and ideas the author was addressing at the time. Contemporary titles often include references to similar or related work, for you to read next. The editor may also have notes explaining why the book is structured in a particular way. 

Final chapter
Finally, look through the end of the final chapter. As Adler advises, “Few authors are able to resist the temptation to sum up what they think is new and important about their work in these pages. You do not want to miss this, even though, as sometimes happens, the author himself may be wrong in his judgment.” 

Having read all or most of these key passages, we can now explain the conversation the book is joining, the major arguments the author includes, and their conclusion. Instead of sinking a couple hours into a book we may or may not finish, we now know the major points and whether we want to read the entire book. This brief skimming may very well be all the time you need to spend with a book. 

And here’s another fascinating read – which introduces me to the benefits of a book’s Index! 

-       The index is everything

-       Use the Table Of Contents as the skeleton

-       Preview with the preface 

The Index is Everything

You can take any path you want, but for me, the index is my first stop after the title. Armed with a guess of the book's point of view from the title, I use the index to understand what topics we’re going to cover and hopefully how we’re going to approach them. 

If you want to play along, open that non-fiction book you haven’t read yet — or just see the example below. Look through the index, notice what topics are covered, and more importantly, at what depth. If an author is spending a good deal of pages on something, make a note of that topic.

Remember, what we’re trying to do with this process is answer two questions: what is this book about, and, am I interested in reading it? I’ll take a look at a random book from my bookshelf and look through the index, right now. Turns out this book is Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. 

Ok, first index page...boom! What do I see? What stands out? What topics get a lot of coverage? What seems interesting or out of place? 

What is this book trying to get across?

For Homo Deus, it looks like this author is trying to set up a new paradigm called Dataism. It might be related to scaling human cooperation, and he seems to be supporting his thesis with some tenets from techno-humanism, pre-existing religions, and probably some AI for extra spice.

Am I interested? Eh, kinda. Enough to delve deeper for sure.  

The Table Of Contents is the Skeleton of a Book

Once I’m armed with a handy-dandy list of topics culled from the index, I compare my index map with the good old TOC (table of contents). The TOC is the skeleton of the book, and the terms from the indexes you grabbed earlier are like the fleshed-out limbs. 

The TOC shows the way the author wants you to understand the progression of the book. (Like the title, authors also think about what the TOC looks like.) It gives you the big picture of the approach. Then the index helps you fill in the types and level of details. 

You could start your process at the TOC if you want to, but I have found that starting with the index and overlaying that research on top of TOC is most helpful. 

It looks like Harari takes a historical view of humanity as he leads us to what is coming next—if I can assume as much, because it’s the final chapter of his book: “The Data Religion.” And when I look at the index and account for the way page numbers and chapters align, I can see the stuff about “Dataism” is overlaid against a chapter titled “The Data Religion.”

My best guess right now is that this book is about how we will organize ourselves using data in the future instead of religion.

Do this for a few minutes. Build a rough map in your mind of the book. It’s sort of like connecting the dots between the chapter titles in the TOC and the topics and page numbers listed in the index. All of the above takes 5-15 minutes and is really a simplified version of “inspectional reading,” popularized by Adler and van Doren, which is just a more methodological skimming or “pre-reading” process. Once we’ve answered the question of what the book is about, the remaining question—and indeed the main question—remains. 

Do you care?

If not, throw the notecard in the front pages somewhere (for future reference) and toss the book back on the shelf. Maybe, if you are interested in knowing more, spend an hour or two reading some of the sections that interest you. For instance, with Homo Deus, I’m likely to read a few index points and the final chapter on Dataism. 

But, before I do any of that, I always skim the preface.  

Preview with the Preface 

In the preface, good authors will tell you right away what the book is about and where it is going. In that way, the preface is like the trailer to a movie. Maybe you see Ben Affleck and Pee Wee Herman are co-starring and lose interest. Maybe the author makes a point you never thought of, and you become more interested. Follow that instinct. 

I’ll get through a preface in about 5 minutes. Skimming is my friend—I don’t need to memorize or meditate too deeply on it. It’s mostly just to make sure my mental map is on the money. 

The preface and the index are indispensable to understanding what the book is about. So far, all we are trying to understand is: what is this book trying to get across? 

How to Extract the Knowledge Nuggets

So how do I get those useful knowledge nuggets? I use the index map (page numbers) and again, I follow my interests or problem-solving needs. I start by reading the pages corresponding to the seemingly useful parts from the index. Yeah, right in the middle of the book. Feel free to just start reading on page 212. Seriously.

For instance, from the index map above, do I really want to understand what the “biological poverty line” is? Or did some other topic seem more interesting? This is where I break free of the author's structure, and delve into the book to find the pieces I need or that I want to know. 

I suggest following a topic over multiple chapters, so if the author starts talking about something on page 2, picks it up again on pages 25-29, and then again at 101-105, read those pages in sequence. Other interesting topics might be mentioned along the way. If so, add those to your map and find their places in the index. Let curiosity and interest take the lead.  

Interact with the Book

Writing in the margins and taking notes is also a huge part of this process for me; underlining words and marking up pages. I like to draft points to myself—notes, ideas, thoughts. If it’s a hard copy of a book I’ll use a pencil. If it’s digital, I’ll use the built-in notes app.

One thing I appreciate about notations in a book is that it allows you to track your thinking about the book over time. If you do end up coming back later, these little notes can serve the same purpose that commenting your code does.  

It’s been a long read – so here’s a video from Ryan Holiday – one of at least three people who have made a profession out of helping us find our way through this pro- and con- fusion of books, the others being Tom Butler-Bowden who has produced a very useful series of book summaries; and Robert Greene who produces superbly-designed books covering such central topics as War, Strategy, Seduction, Mastery and Human Nature and whose working methods are nicely described here.

The picture is "Conversation" by Rene Magritte

How to Fix the World?

I’ve managed to keep my head down and get a sense of the first 6/7 books in my list of some 30 I felt I needed to look at to spark off some movement in my brain cells as I try to write a satisfactory conclusion to the text I’ve been working on for some years about the various global crises we confront (the 1st of the E-books listed in top-right corner). These are the books – and my initial reactions… 

Title	What I make of them
Development Betrayed – the end of progress and a coevolutionary revisioning of the future; Richard Norgaard (1994)	A book ahead of its time – with its distaste for modernity and progress and our loss of community. It’s strong on the philosophical mistakes we’ve made but the gloom of its first half made it difficult to sustain the reading. Need to return for the positive messages
The Third Way and Beyond – criticisms, futures and alternatives ed Hale, Leggett and Martell (2004)	There was a moment in the late 1990s when the idea of “stakeholding” (Hirst; Hutton) offered a different concept of the company and of capitalism – but Tony Blair blew the opportunity. I’ve just come across this book – which seems to capture the possibilities of that time…..
Common Ground – democracy and collectivity in an age of individualism Jeremy Gilbert (2013)	The title certainly points to what I consider the central dilemma of our times – although Gilbert’s language is too suffused with French “constructivist” thinking to make much sense to me….
Unaccountable – how the elite brokers corrupt; Janine Wedel (2014)	Wedel is an anthropologist – and gives a powerful account here of the corruption at the heart of the American economic and political system. A bit light on prescriptions
Rebalancing  Society – radical renewal beyond left, right and center Henry Mintzberg (2015)	One of my favourite little books which I’ve brought in as a measure for the other books. He’s basically got it all – strong analysis of what’s wrong; recognition of the importance of worker coops and social enterprise; and of the need for a shift in power
Back to the future of Socialism Peter Hain (2015)	Most of the books in the table are by academics but this one is by that rarity – a thoughtful and caring politician. The title is a reference to the classic 1956 “Future of Socialism” and is a useful update – although it has been criticised for being too much of a defence of New Labour
Reclaiming the State – a progressive vision of sovereignty in a post neo-liberal world Bill Mitchell and Thomas Fazi (2017)	written by an Australian economist and Italian journalist, this is an excellent analysis of the various forces which both weakened the state and strengthened the forces of privilege and reaction You get the sense that leftist parties and governments just rolled over…The last half of the book focuses on 3 issues – modern monetary theory, UBI and nationalisation

 As usual, however, I’ve been diverted by other tantalising titles – not least Gordon Brown’s new book "Seven Way to Change the World" 

I have always had mixed feelings about Brown - admiration at one level for his mind but awareness that he could be a bit clunky and overwhelming.

I still have memories of going to meet him for lunch in 1974 when he had invited me to contribute to his famous "Red Paper on Scotland" . I had just been elected to one of the top positions in Europe's largest Region and he, I was thinking at the time, is a bit of a young upstart - being talked about even in his early 20s as a future Prime Minister. 

But I must have hidden such feelings well - since he asked me a few years later to write one of the chapters of a book he and Robin Cook edited about inequality in "Scotland; the Real Divide".

He may have been out of power now for more than a decade - but he is extraordinarily well-connected to the global intellectual elite and, if anyone's capable, of getting their mind around the key issues confronting us, it's him.

My gut feeling is that he is too much of an ivory-tower "policy wonk" to be able to communicate with us - but the title he's chosen shows that he knows he's got to get the level right.....even if the sub-title “how to fix the most pressing problems we face” is a bit hubristic.

But this was ever Gordon’s problem – a confidence that targets and incentives could fix problems….Interesting to see that the phrase also creeps into the title also of Ed Miliband’s new book….What does this tell us? 

Other tempting titles are -

Title	Why the book seems relevant
Rethinking Governance – the centrality of the State; S Bell and A Hindmoor (2009)	It was a rare voice in those days actually making the case for strategic government
Power and Love – the theory and practice of social change; Adam Kahane (2010)	One of 3 important books I missed in those years demonstrating the lessons the burgeoning social movement offered for a revitalised democratic practice – Kahane being now a Canadian consultant in reconciliation and change
Can Democracy be Saved? Participation, deliberation, social movements; Della Porta (2013)	Della Porta is Italian and one of the world’s most prolific writers on social movements
Waves of Democracy – social movements and political change; John Markoff (1996 - 2013)	And Markoff is a Pittsburgh Prof of political science
Dangerous Years – climate change, the long emergency and the way forward; David W Orr (2016)	David Orr is one of the most serious academic ecologists. This interview gives a good sense of the book’s argument
Human Scale Revisited – a new look at the classic case for a decentralist future; Kirkpatrick Sale (2017)	An updating of an important 1950s book which has long fascinated me
Democracy and Prosperity – reinventing capitalism through the century of turbulence T Iversen and D Soskice (2019)	This is a pretty academic book – taking us through the very important literature on “Varieties of Capitalism”
Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire; Rebecca Henderson (2020)	A powerful book which pursues the critical question of whether capitalism can actually change for the better. Henderson thinks it can – an argument I look forward to hearing!
Inequality and the labyrinths of democracy; Goeran Therborn (2020)	The possibility that capitalism is inconsistent with democracy has become an increasingly loud question in recent years – and is here magisterially addressed
Market Economy, Market Society; interviews and essays on the future of European social democracy; ed M Adereth (2021)	What looks a fascinating contribution to the discussion from the Iberian peninsula
Seven Ways to Change the World – how to fix the world’s most pressing problems; G Brown (2021)	Brown is the most serious and well-read of global ex-leaders –as is shown in this excellent review
Go Big – how to fix our world; Ed Miliband (2021)	another defeated ex-Leader of the Labour party, Miliband doesn’t quite have Brown's gravitas – but gets a suitably serious assessment analysis from the other side of the Atlantic here