At least you were reading Marx, who had things to say. I was probably still stuck on Ayn Rand. The repetitiveness is also there, but it was just stupid.
Please tell me this was the Kobayashi Maru test of your graduate program.
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I’m going to guess that the real advice used in the class is to not do the reading assignments. The Keynes is a quick easy read, even if you do it twice. The Smith is easy enough, but let’s be honest Capital is a beast. Depending on your editions it is somewhere around 2500 pages, and not a friendly 2500. If you’re actually taking notes and tracking the arguments developed across the three volumes, you’re looking at a major part time job to read it through once with good notes.
The second, full reading offered a meta-perspective to emerge…
and then a still unique sense of meta-meta.
Uncanny, disturbing…
Curious many years later whether my experience was due to the storytelling, or something personal back then, I cracked the covers again. Within a couple dozen pages I figured I’d be fine with the memory!
Well, he was a moral philosopher, not a mathematician or even an economist (cause they didn’t really exist in the 18th century). He was more concerned about shaping a moral social system, I think than in crunching numbers.
But I’m exactly the opposite… give me higher order maths and my heads spinning, but give me complicated ideas, and I’m pretty excited.
Yes. And people should still read it. It’s not perfect, there is more than enough room for criticism, but Marx still has a lot to say about the world we live in.
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This is a really interesting comment, because as soon as I got into the main post I thought the technique was very similar to some of Robert Anton Wilson’s exercises in Prometheus Rising - the approach is effectively attempting to read the book through two distinct reality tunnels. Finnegans Wake was a firm favourite of Wilson’s, and you could make an argument that Ulysses and FW are books that take care of switching reality tunnels for you, at a more fundamental level than simply changing the narrative voice or switching tense. Lord knows I’ve never made it through FW - I’d recommend Anthony Burgess’ shorter version to the time-pressured curious - but I reckon the advice given here would be superfluous.
Also I just realised that for maximum incoherence I should have written this entire post in the style of FW, but it’s not even 9am here for Christ’s sake.
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When you have to read or do stuff for a class, there is a very fine line between whisky making you relaxed and calm enough to focus and whisky making you relaxed and calm enough to not worry that much about the assignment anymore.
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Sadly no. This was the practice of both the “theory” specialists in our program. The other guy told us to read Kant’s Critique of Justice in a week. That book has at least once sentence that’s two and a half pages long. Of course CoJ is shorter, but it is super dense.
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Well, he was a moral philosopher, not a mathematician or even an economist
/s What!? But wasn’t he the grand-daddy of ruthless capitalism!? /s
Ask a Scot and they’ll tell you that 1776 was a banner year because of Wealth of Nations, not that minor disturbance in British North America. 
I must admit that my favourite economist, and one of my personal role models, is John Kenneth Galbraith (even though he went to Guelph U for undergrad ). He hardly ever wrote an equation. I fully accept that he would have hated my approach to things. 
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Other than some marxists and Pikety, I don’t read much in the way of economists (the dismal science!). I’m put off by treating economics as a hard science that you can apply universal laws to as opposed to a social relation that relates to our material conditions, that are constantly morphing and changing, and can be changed to better serve human beings… but I’ve heard of Galbraith, at least! Apparently, he’s in the institutionalist school of economic thought!
But yeah, 1776 was a crazy year, and not just because of the “shot heard round the world” (although like many historical events, it was probably roundly ignored at the time).
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I just got to listen to debra harry’s audio book ‘face it’
I couldn’t put it down all that history from nyc
and the unknown which was the young girl
been trying to come up with a review that does some justice
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Sometimes you need to be in the right mood for a specific book. Some I’ve started and stalled a few times before reading it through. Some books I could never bother with.
Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” took me a few starts, but there I had to adjust to the slang. Once I got into it enough, all was fine, and ever since I’ve never seen that initial obstacle.
I tried to read “The Rise and Fall of the Thurd Reich”. It’s physically a big book. I started wuth a used $2 hardcover. It was heavy, and I worried about dropping it as I lay on my back reading. Then found a used paperback copy, deciding I’d tear it into sections and read one at a time. No luck. I realized there were lots of people and dates that I didn’t care about, so I glance at them but later when they had more substance, I’d have to go back to reread their introduction. Dates don’t matter much except to show sequence. I came to realize that historical fiction is sometimes more informative because it gives the highlights without too much detail. But it also depends on the book, I read a book about the seige of Stalingrad and it was easy to read, maybe because it was a subset of events.
Technical books are easy, I just read them when I have a need. So the need gives reason for the reading. I often have some real experience to put the book in context, to make it non-abstract.
But this is all reading for my own purposes, reading to learn about the world. I admit it might be harder reading because the teacher says to read it.
This method seems long and difficult.
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Friend: “Hey, I lent your ‘Infinte Jest’ like a year ago, did you finish it?”
You: “I have no idea. I blacked out around half-way.”
Friend: “Close enough. Give it back.”
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Oh absolutely. I just think the length is a bit much to do all three volumes as a portion of the assigned reading in a single course. I’m guessing that they focus on some section of the argument given it isn’t just a Marxist theory course, so it probably work to just use that volume.
Here’s my tried and true economist joke (Chicago school): How many economists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Ans: None. Had the light bulb actually been needed to be replaced, the market would already have done so.
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I’ve always appreciated philosophy to literature because philosophy often lends itself well to tl;drs… You can’t really tl;dr art. I’m sure some details are still lost summarizing conceptual content, though
Having just today finished a long difficult book, I did it the traditional way one page at a time.
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I read a few Claasic Illustrated comic books fifty years ago, and much later read the actual classic novels, and memory says the comic books gave a good representation.
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