Fall Book Reports

I've developed a taste for regicide of late. It started with Macbeth and then proceeded on to Agamemnon. I guess once you taste royal blood, you can't quit easily...

Macbeth I enjoyed quite a bit. You can't not love the lyrical nature of the text. You kinda get caught up in it. Stacy would often stumble upon me hidden in my room, contending with witches or railing against daggers in my best Oxford accent. Boy, Lady MacPerkins can sure cast a withering "I caught you" glance.

Agamemnon was a more challenging read. It's the story of the Greek king Agamemnon, who returns home from the Trojan war to his wife Clytemnestra, who welcomes him inside and then promptly murders him in his bathtub. Seems she was a little miffed that he scarified her daughter to the gods before going to war, and then returning home with a beautiful slave girl whom Clytemnestra was order to treat civilly. (Ever overreacting, she kills her too.)

I generally read before bed (but never in the bathtub!) and Greek tragedy proves a surprisingly good sedative. I'd rarely get more than a page or two down when I'd find my eyes crossing and would notice that I'd read the same paragraph four times and still had no idea what is was saying. And the death scene in Agamemnon is not terribly satisfying to our Grand Theft Auto generation. It all takes place boringly behind the castle door, with only an "I am struck!" or two yelled from behind the curtain to inspire. Now Duncan's undoing was off-stage in Macbeth as well, but at least you got bloody (and framed) servants and faux-fainting women. Much more to my liking!

Another interesting book I read last month was Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. A professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT, Ariely writes about all the irrational things we do, even when we know for a fact that they are irrational and easily avoidable. One particular example he gives examines how getting something for free taints our reason. It involves an experiment he set up where he sold chocolates for ridiculously low prices. He sold Lindt bon-bons (an exquisite Swiss chocolate) for something like 14¢ (I forget exactly), and right next to them he sold plain old Hersey Kisses for a penny each. Passersby were allowed to buy only one chocolate and had to choose between the two. The Lindt is a much better product, and at 14¢ it's a steal; most folks knew they would like the Lindt better and spent the 14¢ and bought the Lindt. Then, he lowered the prices by one penny each; now the Lindt was 13¢ and the Hershey Kiss was free. Since the difference in the price was exactly the same - 13¢, logic would say that the Lindt was still the one to buy - but almost no one did. The vast majority of the people went for the inferior freebie, just because it was free.

Lots of interesting and thought-provoking insights and experiments like that made for an interesting book. At the end of each chapter he tried to summarize his points with how we should take advantage of these idiosyncrasies of our logical reasoning with things we could do to improve our own lives or society as a whole. While interesting, for some reason these applications all seemed to skew to the politically charged or controversial ("Perhaps we should more seriously consider..."), which torqued me a bit, but since they were a paragraph or two out of an otherwise generally neutral chapter, I could live with it.