Books

The Last Week: A Lecture by Marcus Borg

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

In honor of the Easter season, I read through The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem by biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. As I mentioned at Borg’s recent passing, I don’t always share his and Crossan’s interpretations. However, their strong emphasis on the political nature of Jesus’ ministry is a much-needed breath of fresh air in the midst of today’s hyper-individualized, over-spiritualized Christianity. One cannot and should not separate the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus from his life and ministry. Christ’s actions that resulted in his death are what discipleship is all about. And one has to understand the historical and political context of Jesus’ last week to fully understand what discipleship looks like.

However, my friend and co-editor here at Difficult Run Allen Hansen recently captured my thoughts beautifully on Facebook on the need to combine the political nature of Christ’s ministry with the reality of his resurrection:

The late Marcus Borg was a purveyor of a liberal Christian popular theology. By all accounts a generally thoughtful and considerate individual, Borg was oddly and dogmatically insistent upon a dichotomy between things literal and things spiritual/symbolic/meaningful. There was, according to him, no material, bodily resurrection. The tomb was not empty, but remained full. Instead, we should see it as a parable on meaning, Christ living again is as a dynamic experience, ascribing anything beyond that, say, an actual, divine being with a material body who is as alive now as he ever was before his death, is to trivialise the story. Nevermind that any 1st century apocalyptic and pharisaic Jews would have been bewildered by such an incomprehensible sentiment regarding resurrection. We’ll cut Borg some slack for theological rather than historical musings on earliest Christian theology. To my mind, reducing the atonement, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ to a parable on meaning is to trivialise it. I don’t yet have a fully articulated or consistent model for how the atonement worked and I may never have one, but a God willing to let his son suffer and die for us is no trivial god. Likewise a god freely choosing such suffering and humiliation for himself for our sakes. A god who can intervene on our behalf in history and nature, who can shatter the bonds of death and sin keeping us captive. A god who is able to lift us to his level, unlocking our eternal potential, thus making us everything that we should be rather than just another crappy metaphor reminding us of what we are not now, and never will be. The reality and power of the atonement is something that I have personally experienced. Because I have had that spiritual witness is why I am Christian rather than Jewish despite often feeling closer to the latter. To deny the possibility of bodily resurrection is to trivialise the new possibility which is Christ. It is almost a sneer at the hope of millions for a time in which everything that is wrong, unfair, imperfect, and evil is made right. It is affirming that life is nasty, brutish and short, but we can make it a little less depressing by telling stories that are true even though they are not nor ever will be actually, literally true. If you believe in that you are welcome to it, but I cannot agree that holding to a belief in a material, bodily resurrection is a trivial interpretation. Still, Borg got quite a bit right. It is just that what he got right is more powerful when considered as aspects of a bodily resurrection of the son of God.

Despite these criticisms, I highly recommend the book.[ref]My disagreements were largely found in their assessment of the resurrection itself, not the analyses of the days leading up to it.[/ref] You can see Borg lecture on Holy Week below.

Our Kids: An AEI Discussion with Robert Putnam

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Regular readers of Difficult Run know that research on marriage and family structure is a hobby horse of mine. It’s something I try to keep up with, which is why I was excited when political scientist Robert Putnam’s book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis was released. Putnam explores the growing inequalities within America by focusing on children and their family and social backgrounds. The book provides a useful narrative by fleshing out empirical evidence with interviews and anecdotes.[ref]He relies a little too heavily on anecdotes for my taste. More attention to the details within the data would have been preferable.[/ref] It joins an increasing number of impressive books that demonstrate the powerful influence of family structure on the outcomes of children’s lives.

See Putnam discuss his book on an AEI panel with Charles Murray and William Wilson below.

Reading Fiction Enhances Social Skills

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The Wall Street Journal reports on a brand new study in Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience:

People who read a lot of fiction are known to have stronger social skills than nonfiction readers or nonreaders. A new study suggests that reading fictional works, especially stories that take readers inside people’s lives and minds, may enhance social skills by exercising a part of the brain involved in empathy and imagination.

…[R]eading fictional excerpts about individuals and groups of people heightened activity in a brain system known as the default network. This system is active when people are imagining hypothetical situations, such as the past or the future, or thinking about another person’s perspective, the researchers said.

I’ve written on this topic before. The evidence continues to pile up.

 

The DR Book Collection

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“There was time now…”

We’re a group of heavy readers here at Difficult Run, but we’ve mainly expressed our love of books over the last couple years through sporadic lists.[ref]For example, see the “Top 10 Most Influential Books” lists by Nathaniel and Walker. And of course, there is the annual Best Books of the Year list.[/ref] As bibliophiles, we take an interest in what others are reading. We often buy or rent books based on the suggestions of others. However, we also research the books under consideration to determine whether or not we want to invest our limited time and energy into reading them. We consult reviews, interviews, and lectures based on the book. Even when the decision is made to not read the book, the research is often informative and enlightening.

Given that many DR readers are fellow book fiends, we will be posting video clips from interviews and/or lectures (depending on their availability) that are based on the books we read throughout the year. Think of it as our video Goodreads list. You can find the list of books along with the post date below:

Feb. 26, 2016: Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An International Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

March 5, 2016: Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

March 9, 2016: Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya, Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013).

March 11, 2016: J. Spencer Fluhman, “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

March 18, 2016: Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).

March 28, 2016: Marcus J. Borg, John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).

April 13, 2016: John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012).

April 21, 2016: Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013).

April 29, 2016: Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

May 19, 2016: A Reason For Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History, ed. Laura Harris Hales (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016).

May 19, 2016: Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

May 22, 2016: W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

May 26, 2016: Marc Zvi Brettler, Peter Enns, Daniel J. Harrington, The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

May 27, 2016: Edmund Phelps, Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

May 28, 2016: James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016).

June 6, 2016: Adam S. Miller, Future Mormon: Essays in Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).

June 15, 2016: John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame That Binds You: Expanded and Updated Edition (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 2005).

June 20, 2016: Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (New York: Free Press, 2011).

July 10, 2016: James K.A. Smith, How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014).

July 21, 2016: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York City: Harper, 2015)

July 30, 2016: Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller (Hopoken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010).

Aug. 7, 2016: Jack Harrell, Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).

Aug. 12, 2016: Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best…and Learn from the Worst (New York: Business Plus, 2010).

Sept. 13, 2016: The Economics of Immigration: Market-Based Approaches, Social Science, and Public Policy, ed. Benjamin Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Sept. 17, 2016: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012)

Sept. 29, 2016: Peter F. Drucker, Rick Wartzman (ed.), The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010).

Oct. 18, 2016: Joseph M. Spencer, The Vision of All: Twenty-Five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).

Oct. 28, 2016: Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011).

Nov. 12, 2016: N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (New York: HarperOne, 2016).

Nov. 17, 2016: Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).

Dec. 7, 2016: Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Dec. 7, 2016: Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

Dec. 11, 2016: Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Dec. 17, 2016: Scott Hales, The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Part One (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).

Jan. 7, 2017: Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

Jan. 7, 2017: Louis Cozolino, Why Therapy Works: Using Our Minds to Change Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016).

Jan. 8, 2017: Barry Schwartz, Why We Work (New York: TED Books/Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Jan. 19, 2017: Shūsaku Endō, Silence (New York: Picador, 2016 [1969]).

Feb. 4, 2017: Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution. (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).

Feb. 9, 2017: Christine Porath, Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016).

Feb. 23, 2017: James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009).

Feb. 23, 2017: Roger E.A. Farmer, How the Economy Works: Confidence, Crashes, and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

March 9, 2017: David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005).

March 15, 2017: Michael Austin, Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2014).

March 16, 2017: Russell Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2014).

March 16, 2017: John L. Esposito, Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think (New York: Gallup Press, 2007).

March 17, 2017: Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

May 7, 2017: Gregory Boyd, God at War: The Bible & Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997).

Sept. 23, 2017: Catch-Up

Oct. 1, 2017: Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

Dec. 13, 2017: Catch-Up #2

Dec. 16, 2017: Johan Norberg, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2017).

Jan. 16, 2018: Catch-Up #3

May 3, 2018: Catch-Up #4

June 8, 2018: Catch-Up #5

August 3, 2018: Catch-Up #6

Jan. 5, 2019: Catch-Up #7

“A Peculiar People”: An Interview with J. Spencer Fluhman

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

I was lucky enough to meet BYU history professor J. Spencer Fluhman last year when he presented at the Miller Eccles Study Group here in Texas. The lecture was based on his book “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America. Anti-Mormonism took on a number of forms, from describing Joseph Smith as an impostor and his religion as “false” to seeing Mormonism as a kind delusion or madness to fearing the Mormons’ political power and fanaticism. The U.S. Constitution granted religious freedom, but these fears and accusations led Americans to question what was truly meant by religion.

A fascinating read.

The interview below features both Fluhman and Joanna Brooks.

Why Growth Matters: An Interview with Jagdish Bhagwati

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Yesterday, a friend’s Facebook wall was blowing up with debates over the merits of libertarianism. One commenter wrote, “Libertarians should spend time in India or Pakistan to see what weak, ineffective government ultimately accomplishes.” My response was, “Just finished this yesterday.” I linked him to Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries by Columbia economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. The book explains how the Indian pro-market reforms of the early 1990s have led to economic growth and consequently reduced poverty. Of course, the book does not argue in favor of a stateless utopia (there are a number of things listed in the book for the Indian government to do). But it does demonstrate how powerful and positive a force liberalization can be in the lives of the most destitute.

Definitely for those interested in developmental economics.

 

Lost Christianities: An Interview with Bart Ehrman

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Last week, I posted an interview with economist Thomas Sowell on his brand new book Wealth, Politics, and Poverty. At the time I was reading through the book and have since finished it. The relative popularity of the post gave me an idea:[ref]I’m almost certain the popularity had more to do with Sowell than my reading list.[/ref] I will begin posting clips from interviews and/or lectures (depending on their availability) that are based on the books I read throughout the year. Obviously, not all of these books will be published in 2016. In fact, most won’t be. Nonetheless, if you’re anything like me, you might like to know what others are reading. And if it peaks your interest, you might like to get a firm grasp of the book’s subject and potential quality prior to reading. So, I plan on making this a consistent thing.

Without further ado, here’s the next book.

New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has at times been the center of public controversy due to some of his more popular books (Misquoting Jesus, Jesus, Interrupted), largely for introducing pretty standard New Testament scholarship to lay readers. His Oxford-published Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, however, is one of his earlier academic publications. The book covers the history of Christian diversity and contention in the first few centuries. The debates and controversies among the chaos of early Christianity ranged from the nature of Jesus to the contents of the scriptural canon. It’s a fascinating and important history. I’d merely piecemealed the book over the last few years since I was already familiar with the sects Ehrman describes,[ref]I started studying the Gnostics on my mission when I was given a book on the Nag Hammadi library.[/ref] but I finally buckled down and read through the entire thing. Well worth it.

You can listen to a Beliefnet interview with Ehrman below.

Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An Interview with Thomas Sowell

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Economist Thomas Sowell was featured once again on the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge to promote his latest book Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An International Perspective. The interview is a nice, if somewhat simplified overview of his main arguments. Poverty, he says, is the norm. Wealth is what needs to be explained. And wealth largely comes by means of productivity. Yet, why are some groups across the globe more productive than others? He delves into a number of factors, ranging from geography to culture (human capital) to politics. Both the conversation and book are enlightening.

Check out the interview below.

A Bibliophile’s Thoughts on Audiobooks

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Image by Flickr user Jeff_golden. Cropped to fit blog dimensions. Click for original on Flickr.
Image by Flickr user Jeff_golden. Cropped to fit blog dimensions. Click for original on Flickr.

I love books. A lot of my happiest memories are of whiling away long summer hours reading in the backroom of my grandfather’s book store.

Covers like this one by John Berkey defined my childhood daydreams.
Covers like this one by John Berkey defined my childhood daydreams.

But for a few years in grad school, I didn’t read very much. At one point I realized it had been several months–maybe a year!–since I had read a book cover-to-cover. I decided that simply would not do, and I started reading again. (I believe that was about the time I got into Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga.) The only other period in my life when I wasn’t reading was the time before I knew how.[ref]For what it’s worth, lots of people brag about how they or their kids start reading at age 2 or 3 or whatever. If it makes you feel any better, I started reading around age 5 or so and I don’t think that I really missed a ton getting an average start. I’m not sure a lot of great works of literature are written for the pre-K demographic. Just saying: a life-long love of learning doesn’t need a precocious start.[/ref]

I stumbled upon Goodreads at about the same time, and I’ve been tracking my reviews on there ever since. I don’t really go in for the social networking aspects of Goodreads. I basically treat it as a convenient reading journal. The best part is being able to look at a chronological timeline of the books I’ve read over the last couple of years. Individual titles or covers will bring me back to places where I was–literally and metaphorically–when I read those books. And all it takes is a glance at my bring the books back to life for me, little anchors that keep me from forgetting all the places that I’ve been.

But by far the greatest change to my reading life has been my subscription to Audible.

Getting sick was never quite as bad when I knew I could stay home from school and listen to this.
Getting sick was never quite as bad when I knew I could stay home from school and listen to this.

I have always loved audiobooks. As a kid, my go-to for getting through the flu was a dramatization of The Hobbit on cassette tapes stored in a small, wooden box. Later on, I acquired a CD dramatization of The Lord of The Rings (way before the movies were out) that I also listened through a couple of times.[ref]I tried to listen to them in the car once, but my wife stomped on that pretty hard. The 70s cheesiness that I was oblivious too was intolerable for her. Oh well.[/ref] The first few Harry Potter books (this was before the last ones had come out) also helped me get through hours of tedious desk work back in the day. But back in the day, an audiobook could set you back $50 or more, easily, and there was no way I could afford that as a replacement for used books and $7 paperbacks.

Audible has changed that, however. For $15/month, you get one audiobook. That’s good, but it’s not great. In addition, however, you can buy 3 credits for about $36 (so, more books for about $12/each.) Best of all, however, are their promotions. They send out a daily deal that offers a random book for $3-5 and frequently have other sales at $5 each. Most of these books will probably not suit your fancy, but even if only 5%-10% of them do, then you’re going to be picking up at least a couple more books every month for basically pocket change. Now, the economics of buying audiobooks being to make sense!

This is the secret to how I “read” over 100 books last year, and how I plan to get through about 120 in 2016. But you might have some questions, so let’s talk about how to get the most out of your Audible subscription (or similar) along with some unexpected pros and cons.

First: learn double-speed, love double-speed

You might not even realize this, but most audiobook apps (including Audible and iTunes) have the ability to increase narration speed while keeping the narrator’s voice at a level pitch (so you don’t end up listening to chipmunks). The math here is pretty obvious: faster narration means you get through books faster. Right now, the longest book in my Audible library is Brandon Sanderson’s monstrous Words of Radiance (Stormlight Archive, The), which clocks in at over 48 hours, followed by Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (almost 32 hours) and then Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World (about 27 hours). Most books fall in a more normal range of about 12-16 hours each, however, which means that double-speed means it takes only 6-8 hours to get through a typical book. And that’s an amount of time most people can probably find in one week.

Now, if you try to skip straight to double-speed, you’re going to get frustrated and give yourself a headache. It didn’t even occur to me to speed up the tracks until a friend suggested it. I started at about 1.25x and for a while that was all I could do. Once that was natural, however, I moved up to 1.5x and, after getting used to that, I finally went all the way up to 2.0x.

It says "Speed 3x," but it lies. It is only double-speed.
It says “Speed 3x,” but it lies. It is only double-speed.

Unfortunately, that’s the fastest you can go. Don’t get me wrong, if you look at the app you will see a button that claims you can also do 2.5x and even 3.0x, but it’s a lie. They don’t actually speed up the narration beyond 2.0x. I tested this myself back in December 2014 with the iOS version and a stopwatch to confirm, and it’s true. There are no speed increases after 2.0x.[ref]I have no idea why, and the friendly Audible customer service rep did not either.[/ref]

Second: when to listen

The conventional time to listen to audiobooks is in the car, and that’s a great one. I often have to travel in from Williamsburg, VA to Richmond, VA which is about a 1-hour trip (one-way), so every time I get four hours of listening done (remember: double speed). That’s about half a novel. Not bad! But I also work from home many days, and then I’m not in the car at all. So, what are some other good times to listen? Walking the dog is a great one, especially ’cause your dog will appreciate the extra time if you’re not in a hurry to get back. Doing chores is another great one. A lot of annoying things that have to get done (like folding the laundry) become a treat if they’re also your excuse to return to a great book. One of my favorites has also been long-distance runs.

There’s a caveat here, however. Audiobooks can be addictive. I’ve gotten in trouble on more than one occasion because I’ve got headphones in my ears (while I’m doing the chores) and my wife wants to talk to me. This, as you can imagine, is a bad scenario. Anything in life can be taken too far, and audiobooks are no exception. Be sensible about it.[ref]My wife would say that I’m not one to talk, but I’m working on it.[/ref]

Third: what to listen to

I have the most fun listening to enjoyable fiction, but I’ve also found that picking up books for $2-$5 / each makes me interested in things I wouldn’t otherwise be. I’ve gotten into a lot of history this way (most recently: a biography of the Dulles brothers[ref]The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War[/ref], another of T. E. Lawrence[ref]Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East[/ref], and also a history of the Plantagenets[ref]The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England[/ref]). You can also get a lot of Great Courses through Audible, so there’s a ton of great material on anything from quantum physics (I recently listened to a short one on the Higgs Boson) to marketing or music appreciation.

Here’s another caveat, however. When I listen to really, really interesting non-fiction I often like to enter notes into Evernote. And this is where audiobooks are less than amazing. Few things in the world frustrate me more than transcribing 40 or 50 notes from an Audiobook. I’ve done this a lot, and so here are some tips.

When you want to take a note, you can just add a bookmark with a note in the Audible app. Always type a note. Often you will think that it will be obvious when you come back, but the timing of the bookmark is not exact (especially on double speed) and if you have a lot of notes or a very long book, then by the time you come back to get your notes you might have to listen to rather long portions to remind yourself of exactly what you wanted to make a note of. In fact, if the quote is short, you should just try to write the entire quote out in the note field.[ref]Obviously this doesn’t work if you’re driving. Please don’t take notes if you’re driving.[/ref] If it’s not short, at least write the first phrase of the quote. That will make it easy to find.

As for transcription: good luck. For a while I tried reducing the speed to 1x, putting the phone on speaker, holding up to my mic, and trying to let Dragon: Naturally Speaking transcribe it. Results were mixed. Dragon could pick up on a lot of the words, but not everything. It was basically a toss-up whether manually transcribing the whole thing or fixing the mistakes in Dragon’s transcription was faster. Either way, it took about 2 minutes on average for a single note, which–if you have more than a few notes–will get very frustrating.

In other words: if you have something to listen to that you suspect is going to involve a lot of underlining, highlighting, or brain-waves: get it in paper and do it the old-fashioned way.

This doesn’t mean that audiobooks have to be light. I have listened to some great literature this way, books like Angle of Repose or Gilead, but it does skew towards fiction for me and away from the most interesting non-fiction, which I still prefer to get in hardcopy (or Kindle).

One word of caution, however. The rise of self-publishing has an impact in the Audible ecosystem as well. There’s really no easy way to separate self-published books (which are often abysmal in quality) from traditionally published books (which are only sometimes abysmal in quality). My recommendation is this: If you see something that looks interesting but you don’t recognize it, look up the book on Amazon and check out the editorial reviews. NOT the customer reviews![ref]Those can be faked, and often are.[/ref] The first thing you want to look for is not what the reviews say, but who they are from. Best case? Prominent newspapers like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Next best case? Super-famous authors. Worst case? Authors you have never heard of and/or outlets you have never heard of. It’s not a perfect way to gauge quality–obviously–but it will help you avoid the worst of the nonsense that is out there.

Fourth: did you learn anything?

Some folks will tell you that listening to audiobooks isn’t really reading. Well, sure, literally it isn’t. But I did find a Forbes article that tackled the question: Is Listening to Audio Books Really the Same as Reading? According to the article:

So on an intellectual level, is listening to a book really just as good as reading it?

Pretty much, but it depends on the type of book. Studies on electronic media consumption are still relatively limited, and the audio book genre has been “woefully unaddressed by the academic community in general,” wrote philosophy professor William Irwin in a 2009 essay.

However, even research that predates CDs suggests that reading and listening are strikingly similar cognitive processes. For example, 1985 study found listening comprehension correlated strongly with reading comprehension – suggesting that those who read books well would listen to them well, also. In a 1977 study, college students who listened to a short story were able to summarize it with equal accuracy as those who read it.

“The way this is usually interpreted is that once you are good at decoding letters into sound, which most of us are by the time we’re in 5th or 6th grade, the comprehension is the same whether it’s spoken or written,” explained University of Virginia psychology professor Dan Willingham.

That matches my experience, and so does the rest of the article which qualifies this a little bit by pointing out that some complex text can benefit from being literally read because it lets you easily skip back to re-read difficult sections. However, in my experience, it’s also true that some books are actually better when read. This really worked for Gilead, for example, because as an epistolary novel the narration was a perfect fit.

Speaking of notes, I really do recommend using Goodreads. Trying to go back and re-enter books you already read is a rabbit hole I suggest you don’t try to go down, but writing out reviews of everything you read–and recording the start and end date for each book–is a fantastic project that starts to really pay dividends within a couple of years of starting. Give it a shot.

So, have I sold you on Audible yet? Well, first let me point out to alternatives that might save you some cash. First, check with your local library to see if they let you digitally check out audiobooks. Mine does, and I was really excited. At first. Unfortunately, the particular app I had to use with my local library was the worst-designed thing imaginable. Most egregiously? No option to increase playback speed. That was a dealbreaker for me, and the library’s selection was also pretty meh. Still, you might have more luck. (I’m going to try again when we move to a new area.) Second, you can also check out iTunesU. I listened to some really great courses several years ago when that was getting started (including a fantastic overview of modern cosmology), but eventually these courses started to rely more and more heavily on video which, you know, defeats the entire purpose of an audiobook. There’s probably still a lot out there, however, and a lot is free, so you might want to check that out.

If you are interested in Audible, however, then let me make a suggestion: join Audible.

If you use that link just above to join, I get a little commission. Which is nice. But the real reason I decided to post this today is that Audible is also having a great members-only sale: $4.95 for the first book in a series. I don’t get a commission for that particular sale, by the way. I was just looking through the options, and saw some great ones. If you like sci-fi, then there are some fantastic deals. The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo last year, and it deserved it. Leviathan Wakesis the first book in a great sci-fi series that is currently running on SyFy as The Expanse.[ref]The later books are better, but the first one is solid.[/ref]. Golden Son is my favorite book of 2015. It’s not on the list, but it’s also #2 in a trilogy and the first book–Red Rising–is on the list.[ref]The last one, Morning Star, is out on audibook in 4 days![/ref] There are lots of other legitimate books on there as well. Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch) took the Hugo in 2015, for example. Revelation Space, Ringworld (A Del Rey book), and The Memory of Earth (Homecoming) are also all very good sci-fi (or, at least in the case of Ringworld, very famous sci-fi).

So, if you haven’t joined Audible yet, now might be a great time to try. And if you’re already a member, check out that sale.

Making Time for Books

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Since we posted our annual Best Books of the Year review yesterday morning, I thought this recent post over at Harvard Business Review was appropriate. Literary technologist Hugh McGuire describes the constant barrage of digital information day in and day out:

I was distracted when at work, distracted when with family and friends, constantly tired, irritable, and always swimming against a wash of ambient stress induced by my constant itch for digital information. My stress had an electronic feel to it, as if it was made up of the very bits and bytes on my screens. And I was exhausted.

To his horror, he realized that his constant immersion in this easy, instantaneous web of mental overstimulation caused him to

read just four books in all of 2014. That’s one book a quarter. A third of a book per month. I love reading books. Books are my passion and my livelihood. I work in the world of book publishing. I’m the founder of LibriVox, the largest library of free public domain audiobooks in the world; and I spend most of my time running Pressbooks, an online book production software company. I might have an unpublished novel in a drawer somewhere. I love books. And yet, I wasn’t reading them. In fact, I couldn’t read them. I tried, but every time, by sentence three or four, I was either checking email or asleep.

Drawing on new neuroscience research, McGuire points out that the constant novelty triggers the release of dopamine, conditioning us to continually seek out potential pleasure in new things (e.g. new emails, Facebook updates, etc.). This constant bouncing around between topics also depletes our brain’s energy. McGuire suggests three rules by which we can diminish the stress of information overload and learn to read again:

  1. When you get home from work, put away the laptop and iPhone.
  2. After dinner, don’t turn on Netflix, the TV, or the Internet.
  3. No glowing screens in the bedroom (Kindle is ok).

While I don’t do these exactly, I have made a rule of “no iPhone or Internet one hour before bed.” I finally have a set bedtime every night before work. Granted, I’ve only been doing this for about a week or so, but I can already feel a difference. If you saw anything in our Best Books post that you would like to read, but just can’t seem to find the time, give the rules above a try.