Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind
By: Alan Jacobs
Penguin Press (September 8, 2020)
192 pages

Breaking Bread With The Dead is the final book of Jacobs’ three-part series. Part one is The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Amazon). And part two is How to Think (Amazon). They are together a collection of thoughts and ideas taken from Jacobs interacting with students as a professor. The point of this last book is that we should read old classic books by long-gone writers. I find it insane that the demerits of this are even an issue. I mean, good-grief people. You don’t have to agree with everything someone said or wrote or did their entire lives to take a marvelous idea from one of their masterly pieces. Reading old books is about changing your perspective too.

Two of my favorite quotes:

To read old books is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing. Watching the latest social-media war break out, I often recall Grace Kelly’s character in High Noon, a Quaker pacifist, saying, “I don’t care who’s right or who’s wrong. There’s got to be some better way for people to live.” (That by the end of the movie she abandons her pacifism only, if ironically, emphasizes the importance of her point.) The suspicion that there’s got to be some better way for people to live has the salutary effect of suppressing reflex.

“For a lot of families there’s no reason to trot out the old cultural chestnuts because the newest freshest thing is right at their fingertips.” Tost continues, So it’s no wonder younger folks don’t have any cultural memory or taste for aesthetic adventure. In pre-school their parents played the most recent kids’ music in the car for them instead of the older music the parents actually wanted to listen to. And at home the kids only watched kid-centric YouTube channels or superhero or Pixar movies instead of suffering through dad’s weird favorite old movies. So when the kids hit elementary school, they only have ears and eyes for whatever was being marketed to their age group that year. The same thing carried forth to junior high, high school, and beyond. So at what point would they have discovered who Akira Kurosawa or Billie Holiday or even Robert Redford might be? Every step of their development they’ve been trapped in the pre-packaged bubble of the new.

Buy this book.

Thinking, Fast and Slow
By: Daniel Kahneman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (March 1, 2013)
499 pages

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a book about how people make decisions. See, we have two mental tracks that are fighting to make our choices. The first is reactionary. The second relies on measured critical thinking. There is a tension to which process overrides which. Does whatever particular situation need an instant decision to keep us alive? Are we filtering out noise? Or, are we taking a test and need to approach it in a different way? This is a story about how our brains are, by default, lazy and emotional.

Two of my favorite quotes:

In addition to making your message simple, try to make it memorable. Put your ideas in verse if you can; they will be more likely to be taken as truth. Participants in a much cited experiment read dozens of unfamiliar aphorisms, such as: Woes unite foes. Little strokes will tumble great oaks. A fault confessed is half redressed. Other students read some of the same proverbs transformed into nonrhyming versions: Woes unite enemies. Little strokes will tumble great trees. A fault admitted is half redressed. The aphorisms were judged more insightful when they rhymed than when they did not.

How much pleasure do you get from your car? An answer came to your mind immediately; you know how much you like and enjoy your car. Now examine a different question: “When do you get pleasure from your car?” The answer to this question may surprise you, but it is straightforward: you get pleasure (or displeasure) from your car when you think about your car, which is probably not very often. Under normal circumstances, you do not spend much time thinking about your car when you are driving it. You think of other things as you drive, and your mood is determined by whatever you think about. Here again, when you tried to rate how much you enjoyed your car, you actually answered a much narrower question: “How much pleasure do you get from your car when you think about it?” The substitution caused you to ignore the fact that you rarely think about your car, a form of duration neglect.

Buy this book.