I notice that I have a bunch of book pages typed up that I haven't posted anything on here in the blog. These are books that I got from the library, read quickly, typing up more or less extensive quotes as I went through them, but in most cases not a lot of comments. One could, in theory, go back and annotate them further. I like having the quotes accessible, especially since the books aren't. And typing is something I have a lot of practice doing, having spent a good chunk of my worklife in typesetting shops. I think there's even a sort of cognitive advantage in not just reading but typing.

The books:

• Reza Aslan: How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror (2009, Random House): Key insight is that Jihadism posits a war on a cosmic plane where it is impossible to defeat. Winning against a cosmically projected war is more a matter of returning to reality. Unfortunately, much of the US Global War on Terror is similarly cosmic, equally ungrounded in reality.

• Alan Beattie: False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World (2009, Riverhead): A spotty, impressionistic, somewhat contrarian survey of how some nations developed better than other nations, starting with a long riff on Argentina vs. United States.

• Adam Cohen: Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America (2009, Penguin Press): Focuses on FDR's first 100 days, and on five key advisers who influenced FDR in that period: Lewis Douglas, Raymond Moley, Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, and Harry Hopkins.

• Juan Cole: Engaging the Muslim World (2009, Palgrave Macmillan): A quick tour of the Middle East, focusing on hot spots and problem areas, starting with a piece on oil and winding up in Pakistan.

• Diane Dumanoski: The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Out Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth (2009, Crown): A book on the effects of climate change. Overreliant, I think, on James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis.

• Dexter Filkins: The Forever War (2008, Knopf): War reporting, mostly from Iraq, with an opening section from pre-2001 Afghanistan. Not a very sensitive observer, let alone critic, of the war, but a vivid writer with a fair share of atrocity stories.

• Betty Fussell: Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef (2008, Houghton Mifflin): In depth look at the American beef industry, from someone who still eats steak and throws in some recipes at the end.

• Eugene Jarecki: The American Way of War, Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (2008, Free Press): Somewhat simplistic survey of the military-industrial complex, sympathetic to Eisenhower, excessively so.

• Gretchen Peters: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (2009, Thomas Dunne): In-depth look at the drug angle in the Afghanistan war. Unfortunately, her angle takes her to conclusions that only serve to propagate the war.

• Nicholas Schmidle: To Live or to Perish: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (2009, Henry Holt): Good background history of Pakistan embedded in a travelogue that takes the author to some of the most dangerous places in the country, ultimately getting him kicked out.

There are a couple more books I'll try to get to soon.