the Beijing Consensus

This book is a short study on China's international economic stance for the Foreign Policy Centre by Joshua Cooper Ramo. It was one of the many many things about that which I've read over the last month for an essay (hence why this blog has been largely postless in that time, I've been doing mostly course reading, and rarely do I actually finish an entire book for that. I've also been playing borderline-obsessive amounts of Fallout 4, and it was the whole Christmas-and-such debacle a few weeks ago, but I digress). I can't really be bothered to write a proper post about it. The 'Beijing Consensus' is the informal state of affairs by which China, through diplomatic and resource-acquisitive and sheer-we've-got-a-massive-economy means, is increasingly building up an international norm of self-determination among smaller developing states, i.e. helping them ignore/bypass the Washington Consensus (the formal state of affairs by which the USA, through diplomatic and military and resource-acquisitive and sheer-we've-got-a-massive-economy means, spent most of the 20th-century increasingly building up an international norm of America-determination among smaller developing states, i.e. helping them doing whatever America wanted/needed them to do). Ramo, as you'd hope a policy researcher would've, has done his homework, and this book, though slim, is chock-full of economic statistics and nuggetty facts demonstrating that the Washington Consensus was pretty regressive but is bit-by-bit getting replaced in many continents by the Beijing Consensus, which also comes across as a much less parochial structure. Good on you China, I guess. Anyway, this'd make interesting reading to anyone who likes big-picture international politics or economics or relations or whatever; I especially recommend it if you're writing an essay about China's place in the modern global economy.

Don't tell the Foreign Policy Centre but I've uploaded this into my Drive so anyone with the link below can read it for free. It was probably elsewhere on the internet already. Google Docs can't hack .pdf's though apparently, so it screwed up the formatting a little bit, but it's still a rather interesting read: here.

Emily Dickinson: selected poems

This book, the 'Everyman's Library Pocket Poets' selection of 207* poems by esteemed-posthumously but unknown-when-alive introverted genius poet Emily Dickinson, is pure gold. I don't often read poetry, but E.D. is one of those big unignorable names, and when an alien in a novel I read back in 2014 found himself converted to humanity by reading some of her stuff, she became a rather more powerful blip on my poetry radar. I'd ingested snippets of her work, but reading through a full book** of poetry (even if it's barely making a dent in the 1780 or so she wrote - fortunately all of them are available for free on the internet) was an entirely more wholesome, uplifting, spiritually refreshing experience. I'm not meaning to come across as sarcastically poetic, this is legit poetry: it steers the heart and mind of the reader into fleeting contact with the eternal unknowable splendour of beauty and truth, of nature and God, of goodness and light, of life and infinity and the mad joyful place individuals can but take within the cosmos. These are the themes of her poems.
   The collection is split into three sections, Death and Resurrection and Works of Love broadly explore these, and The Poet's Art likewise but with a more reflective focus on the work of poetry as an attempted series of communications of these enormous themes. There is nothing I can particularly say to sum up these poems but that they are magnificent and should be compulsory reading for all humans. I didn't even really have many thoughts in response to reading them - I was mostly just overwhelmed by 'wow' at the sheer power that language can have if arranged in such a way as this. This is poetry at its best: subtle yet vivid, sometimes funny, idiosyncratic, warm and honest and kind (often poems are direct complimentary praises of undersung animals, which is nice), full of God and perfection and humanity and finitude and bees and love and flowers and birds and the sky and the sea and heaven and morbidity and self-knowledge of the type that makes you realise how truly small you are in the world and how wonderful that can be.

   You don't have to read this exact book but please, I implore you, make your life richer, at least read some of Emily Dickinson's poetry - start here.

* I highlighted my favourites (i.e. ones that made me sit back, stare at the ceiling for a minute, exhale poignantly, blink and frown/smile, then re-read slowly) as I went through: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 13, 16, 22, 24, 28, 31, 36, 37, 39, 46, 48, 51, 52, 59, 63, 65, 68, 72, 74, 81, 82, 89, 95, 106, 109, 119, 131, 133, 134, 137, 142, 149, 151, 152, 164, 167, 168, 176, 178, 182, 185, 190, 192, 194, 200.

** The story of how I acquired it is quite good. I was in Paris last December, protesting for stronger international climate action at COP21, and while there among the many conversations I had one was about Emily Dickinson with an anarchist who was part of our demonstration group. They'd read her work before, and wholeheartedly encouraged me to do so; they also bemoaned the capitalist exploitation of her body of work for profit when she never profited from it herself when alive, and barely even had recognition for it. Seriously, read her life story, it's really sad. A woman who spent her life largely alone in thought and wonder constructing poems of unspeakable beauty about yet-greater-still unspeakable beauty - now packaged out by publishing conglomerates.
   Anyway. On an afternoon off from training/preparing/planning/protesting, this leftist poetry-fan and I and a couple of others visited Shakespeare & Company, one of the most famous independent bookshops in the world, round the corner from Notré-Dame Cathedral - it's like heaven in there, fat shelves stacked to the ceiling with volumes old and new and fat and thin (but all expensive, I only went in to look around and smell things). Several hours later, back at the activist lodgings, my anti-capitalist acquaintance said "ooh, I forgot" and presented me with this very poem collection, which they'd apparently stolen as a gesture of respect for Emily Dickinson against modern booksellers. I'm not entirely convinced by their logic but I can respect the radical romanticism of their general intent. And it was indeed an excellent book, so thank you, my friend.

2015 overview

At the beginning of last year I did a recap, basically to assess how my blog's going as a project for me. This is very much the same gist so I've copied-and-pasted most of that one into the intro for this post. Sorry.

   So, this post isn't about a book I've read. However, this whole blog was started about two years ago in an effort to encourage me to read more critically; to retain more of what I read from non-fiction books, to derive more meaningful enjoyment from fiction books, and generally to force me to keep up a regular reading habit in case strangers on the internet got the impression that I was slipping.

   Anyway, with 2015, the sophomore year of Thoughts on Books, behind us and an arguably admirable forty-five books (of massively varying length and intensity) under my belt (a dozen more than 2014), I'm glad to announce that this blog remains a pleasurable habit, one which I will continue into the foreseeable future for all books I finish reading.

   But before I start dumping my reactions from books in 2016 upon you, I'm going to reflect on some of the ones I finished this year, with a handful of books best befitting a series of arbitrarily-selected categories. These will probably just be the ones with the most memorable reading experiences, but I will have distinctly separate reasons for choosing each one. So, here we go:

   (I notice, shortly before publishing this post, that I've included almost two-thirds of the books I've read this year in this list, which is hardly a tightly-disciplined selection, but what can I say, I read some bloomin' good books in 2015 and if they deserve mostly-lengthyish posts each then they certainly deserve a mention at the end of the calendar.)

1. Must-reads for everyone interested in social/political/economic issues:
• The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson
• Bad Samaritans and 23 things they don't tell you about Capitalism both by Ha-Joon Chang
2. Maybe-not-must-reads but interesting books about economicsy-stuff that I wrote proper reviews for a proper blog about:
• Economics of the 1% by John Weeks
• the Economy of the Word by Keith Tribe
3. I learned a load about gender this year, kickstarted by the Equality Illusion by Kat Banyard and also by a philosophy module in feminism; Justice, Gender and the Family by Susan M. Okin and Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine then together convinced me that gender should be more or less abolished, an opinion which had considerable friction with much mainstream Christian thought, and I tried to reach a reasonable conclusion to my gender reading-list after Tim and Kathy Keller's the Meaning of Marriage
4. Some good heart-challenging Christian books:
• the Radical Disciple by John Stott
• Out of the Saltshaker and Into the World by Becca Manley-Pippert
5. And also 3-2-1, which is just a fab intro to Christianity
6. I reread everything by J.D. Salinger and strongly suggest you do too (in any order, but my posts about them are best read in the following order): Raise High the Room Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: an Introduction and For Esmé with Love and Squalor and Franny & Zooey and the Catcher in the Rye
7. Two books based on BBC satirical sitcoms by Armando Iannucci (a very specific but gloriously clever-and-funny category):
• The Thick of It: The Missing DoSAC Files
• I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan
8. Two novels that made me cry a bit in a manly fashion:
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• the Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
9. A genius collection of bittersweet (emphasis on bitter) short stories: Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor
10. And a genius (moreso in my opinion, true genius always has hope at its heart rather than despair) collection of bittersweet (emphasis on sweet) short stories (and essays): the Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan
11. Several children's books that are actually really good:
• Albert Blows a Fuse
• Slowly, Slowly, Said the Sloth by very-hungry-caterpillar-guy
• The Book With No Pictures by Ryan from The Office
12. And a children's book that actually wasn't great but I just think my post about is quite funny:
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
13. I don't even know, I laughed an enormous amount at this one but would probably not recommend to anyone:
• Boo: the Life of the World's Cutest Dog
14. Just a wonderfully elegantly thought-provoking reading experience, What? by Mark Kurlansky
15. And an unprecedentedly complex genre-defining mind-blowingly epic classic that I owe a re-read, Dune by Frank Herbert

I don't know if you're a regular reader or not, or even if I have any of those, or any readers full-stop, but I hope you enjoy and maybe continue to enjoy my spewage of half-thunk reactions to prose well into the future. [Also, I realised at the beginning of 2015 that in 2014 I'd barely read anything written by non-white-males that year, which was not deliberate but is pretty bad in terms of limiting my intake of human experience and viewpoint. I made more of a conscious effort in 2015 to read things from underprivileged groups who haven't always found it ludicrously easy to make their voices well heard in the publicity of verbage, and will continue to do so in 2016.]

I briefly considered also copy-pasting the unwarrantedly-enthusiastic endnote, which is basically a toast to words, from last year's post. If you want to read it and laugh at me go right ahead, I'm there too.