Nerding It Up

I went by Barnes & Noble today to spend a gift card I had received for Christmas (this is what nerds get in their stockings). Normally, I would want to buy an expensive book (hey it's not my money) that I normally wouldn't buy myself, but the prices there were awful high and I knew I could save 25 or 30% online. So I ended up buying several smaller books.

First I bought The Art of War, a 2500 year old book by Chinese general Sun Tzu. My old copy was borrowed and never returned, so this is a replacement copy.

Once you read Sun Tzu, fortune cookies will pale in comparison. For example one of the key concepts from Sun Tzu is found in Art of War VI:29 "Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards." Hmmm… true, so true. I can use that in chess or football or invading third-world countries! See what I mean? A vague platitude and some lottery numbers seem kind of shallow after that.

If this interests you then your nerd-ification is nearly complete. I also bought a history book called Carnage and Culture by Victor David Hanson. I read his book Ripples of Battle last year and was fascinated by his synthesis of events in western history, connecting things in a way that makes perfect sense. History need not be boring, and I figure there are two ways for an author to make it interesting: 1. You can make it personal by zooming in on individual stories (this is why we like movies, biographies, and historians like Stephen Ambrose) or 2. You can zoom way out and connect the dots to bring the big picture into focus, explaining the why instead of just the what and how. This is what Hanson does and the effect is fascinating.

Then finally, I wedged myself firmly into nerd-dom with four volumes of Shakespeare: Julius Caesar, MacBeth, The Merchant of Venice, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Each volume is an Arden Shakespeare edition with commentary and footnotes because, really, what's the point if you can't understand what's being said. The average person has a vocabulary of about 5000 words but Shakespeare uses over 29,000 different words, many of which he invented. So a little help is perfectly reasonable.