Like everyone else with any brains, I read some books in 2008. Here is a list of the more interesting ones:

1. The Golden Bough (1890) by James Frazier

This book was excellent — and long. It took forever to read, and I’m still a couple dozen pages from the end (827 pages in all). Basically, the book goes through every folk custom you could possibly imagine. Did you know that some women in Polynesian tribes practically spend the entire time their husbands are away at war engaging in sympathetic magical actions to (nominally) increase the likelihood of their husbands’ victory? Or that the High Priest of Nemi had to constantly be on guard under a sacred tree, for fear that someone would ritually murder him and take his place? Or that some African tribes are so nervous about tabooed words that they regularly change their entire lexicon to avoid any word that so much even resembles that of a dead ancestor’s name?

The power of words, names, tabooed things, connection between sex and the growth of vegetation, priestly kings, the execution of mock kings, the ritual of Adonis, tree-worship in Europe, the myth of Osiris, the Corn-Mother, the ritual of Attis, the religions of pre-Roman Latium, child sacrifice, the ritual killing of sacred animals, it goes on and on. If you took a group of humans with no outside influence and plopped them down in a virtual Earth, they’d probably reinvent all this stuff. Why? Because the scientific method requires a massive infrastructure composed of millions of educated people, and this doesn’t. Many modern educated people think they understand how paganism and superstition works, but I found that I had no idea until I read this book.

My point in reading this work was to figure out what humans are really about, what BS they make up spontaneously without influence from large centralized cultures. The verdict is that there is tremendous commonality in pagan rituals across space and time, which only serves to further reinforce the concept of psychic unity of humankind and human universals, which was already articulated so well by Cosmides and Tooby in 1997 and earlier.

To pique your interest a little bit, note that The Doors’ 1968 song Not to Touch the Earth is based on a line from the book. Do you know what “not to touch the earth, not to see the Sun” actually meant to the ancients? The book is also notable for being one of the first to analyze the New Testament in light of millennia-old paganistic themes and imagery, though this analysis is absent in the abridged version. The unabridged version is twelve volumes, and I can only assume that no one but a specialist would have the time to read it.

The book is also informative for the errors in thinking it uncovers, relevant to modern-day Christians, Jews, Muslims, and all other theists. These modern-day religions are essentially going through the motions that their ancestors were practicing for thousands of years. When these rituals and beliefs are examined in light of localized paganism, their primitive nature is obvious — when similar rituals and beliefs are inherited by worldwide mega-religions, they are equally absurd, but lent false credibility through popularity. It is curious that a Messiah of humankind would deliberately introduce a set of beliefs and rituals that so closely mirror ancient traditions that most people have ostensibly been practicing for tens of thousands of years. But, that is what theists actually believe.

The Golden Bough was the best book I read in 2008.

2. Diplomacy (1994) by Henry Kissinger

This is another book that might cause injury if it fell on you in an earthquake. Mr. Kissinger’s sweeping analysis of diplomacy from Richelieu to the collapse of the Soviet Union is extensive, authoritative, riveting and fun. Mr. Kissinger examines the contrast between the American and European conceptions of how states should act, American idealism, power struggles in 17th century Europe, and much more. He examines successive diplomatic agreements and how they did or didn’t work in the long term: the Peace of Westphalia, Congress of Vienna, Treaty of Versailles, Yalta Conference, and the endless give-and-take of the Cold War. It’s interesting to compare Kissinger’s largely hagiographic treatment of Metternich with his more cynical view of more historically proximate figures, including Wilson, Nixon, Molotov, and Hitler. He presents a more nuanced and inside view of the Vietnam War that monkey-see-monkey-do war protesters were ever able to do. Kissinger unavoidably becomes more emotional when discussing events and decisions in which he participated directly, and it’s also interesting to see how different that is from his detached analysis of European history. Kissinger really drives home how foreign Wilsonianism can seem to the European historic frame of reference, but it’s amazing, upon reflection, how completely Europe seems to have adopted the American perspective.

This work covers an impressive amount of history, and personal experience, by an intellectual giant. As a centrist, I came away from this book laughing at both the standard leftist and rightist views of foreign policy, as well as the standard American and European views. In humorous anecdotes, Kissinger relates how mind-bogglingly dense and anti-intellectual Ronald Reagan was:

“The details of foreign policy bored Reagan. He had absorbed a few basic ideas about the dangers of appeasement, the evils of communism, and the greatness of his own country, but analysis of substantive issues was not his forte. All of this caused me to remark, during what I thought was an off-the-record talk before a conference of historians at the Library of Congress: “When you talk to Reagan, you sometimes wonder why it occurred to anyone that he should be president, or even governor. But what you historians have to explain is how so unintellectual a man could have dominated California for eight years, and Washington already for nearly seven.”

Of course, this phenomenon of the election of a dumb leader occurred again just seven years after Kissinger’s book was published. At the moment, Kissinger is 85, so I felt like reading this work before he died.

3. Rainbow’s End (2006) by Vernor Vinge

Sorry Dr. Vinge and fans, this book was pretty unimpressive. Most of the main characters are geezers in their 80s and 90s that have been magically rendered youthful by the biotechnology of 2025, so much so that they appear to look like teenagers. (And this is hard sci-fi? Not that I have anything against lively geezers, but these geezers acted like geezers.) As one reviewer on Facebook said, Vinge introduces some visionary technologies at the beginning, then goes nowhere with them. It is reminiscent of a book that a visionary nerd might write — big on the concepts, poor on execution. It’s not typical, though, because I love many of Vinge’s other executions of visionary concepts, especially short stories like Run, Bookworm, Apartness, and Long Shot (which I had the pleasure of hearing Vinge read aloud in a bookstore on the Haight in 2004).

Basically, the hero of the story is some crabby old guy brought back from the brink of Alzheimer’s by technology. He used to be an award-winning poet, but now can’t write for shit. Some virtual rabbit (symbolism, lulz) comes out of the woodwork, and without any evidence or demonstrations to back up his claim whatsoever, promises him to give him his poetry genius back (how?). He has to go through all sorts of ridiculous hoops to do this, including crawling around in the basement of UC San Diego and putting mysterious black boxes in his bathroom to collect bio-samples (?) from his daughter-in-law. The climax is some huge cyber-battle around UC San Diego, which includes the operation of real robots, but for some reason nobody gets hurt. Meanwhile, other characters hang out in a rest home, after which the whole book is named. Boring.

Also, this book had no explosions. Only threatened explosions. My favorite Vinge story (The Whirlgig of Time, yes!) had a nuke in it, so I was disappointed. The “big danger” of this book that we’re supposed to identify with is that books are being destructively scanned. Oh no. Many statements that Vinge can’t help but in his characters mouths about the true value of the scanning (fast, make it accessible to everyone, books can be recreated) undermine the big scare enough to make it a big yawn. Mind control technology is mentioned as the aim of the (lame) villain in the book, but it is never deployed.

4. The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2001) by Vernor Vinge

Phew, this is much better. Being younger or middle-aged when he wrote most of these stories, Vinge is not preoccupied by people in rest homes trying to be young again. This book is what Vernor Vinge is all about. A few of these stories were written practically half a century ago, but they’re still fresh. This is because Vinge can come up with original concepts, including concepts about different types of minds, that will remain edgy until the Singularity actually happens. This is a nice hefty book, 464 pages. This is sci-fi with originality and creativity that goes so far beyond the lame crap on TV today, it isn’t even funny.

There are 17 stories here, most of them written in the 60s and 70s. Bookworm, Run, a story about an enhanced chimp that loses his intelligence as he gets out of wi-fi range for his brain upgrades, illustrates the absolutely crucial notion of “smartness” that about 90% of transhumanists think they understand but don’t. A being is not distinguished by their physical form, but what their brain can do with it, and this story drives that home.

Another golden story is Long Shot. This truly amazing piece is from the point of view of an artificial intelligence whose body is a space probe being sent to Alpha Centauri. It begins with the launch and continues into the contemplation of the AI’s purpose as it traverses the cosmos. Vinge adopts the “view from nowhere”, making as few anthropomorphic assumptions about the AI as possible as he writes the story from its view. Maybe, if the modern geek community read this story, they’d begin to think of AIs as actual potential beings with unique thoughts instead of two-dimensional plot device shadows based on mad scientist humans. Too bad that won’t happen.

There are other good stories in here, but you’ll just have to read them. Keep an eye out for my fave, The Whirlgig of Time.

5. Dreams of Terror and Death (1927) by H.P. Lovecraft

Oh yes, that’s what I’m talking about. Lovecraft is a god of literary horror and dark fantasy. Ignore the lame artwork on the cover, the artists that share this man’s vision were Goya (as in “Saturn Devouring His Son” Goya), Doré, and Sime. This loner genius produced some of his greatest works as part of his short Dream Cycle, which go beyond the Cthulhu Mythos (which everyone is already familiar with anyway), into realms that are just as much about fantasy and grandeur as they are about horror and darkness. The Dream Cycle, collected in its entirety in this compilation, is short, about 250 pages, and unfortunately the editors of this volume felt the need to insert a 100-page story with absolutely nothing to do with the Dream Cycle, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Skip it if you like.

The central figure in these stories is Randolph Carter, Lovecraft’s thinly veiled proxy for himself, a dreamer who travels bizarre dreamscapes. In one story he goes in search of Unknown Kadath, a forbidden ice-covered waste at the top of the dream-world with a Cyclopean castle rumored to harbor the world’s darkest and most powerful gods, such as Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos. On the way, he travels through Ulthar, the land where it is forbidden to kill a cat (and woe unto anyone who tries), confronts the High-Priest of Leng, who wears a yellow mask and dwells alone in a prehistoric monastery, and visits exotic ports where mysterious black galleys stop only to sell rubies and pick up large quantities of fresh meat, with none of their crew leaving the ship for weeks.

Remarkable in contrast to the incredibly boring and uncreative pop kruft that passes for horror nowadays (torture = scary, so let’s shove it full of torture!), Lovecraft makes the horror about what isn’t seen rather than what is seen. He highlights the mysterious and fantastic as being inherently horrifying due to the insignificant place they put humans in, which is about as transhumanist of a theme as anyone could ask for. Lovecraft’s theme is that knowledge can be dangerous, leading us places we never anticipated, and to blindly build up our technological and scientific capabilities without stopping to consider as many of the consequences as possible is a foolish thing to do. What a contrast with the totally reckless “full speed ahead, everything will be fine, lol” mentality regretfully displayed by so many transhumanists and futurists.

The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is the centerpiece of this one. Other good selections are the classic The Dreams in the Witch-House, The Doom That Came to Sarnath, Polaris, Ex Oblivione, and who could forget, that horrifying story about the intersection of science and the unknown, From Beyond.