Books, books

I started reading Franz Johanssen's The Medici Effect this weekend. It's a relatively quick read, and a fairly good book; and if the book's blog is to be trusted as a source, it's been pretty successful.

My first thought when reading it was, "Doesn't everybody already know this?" But then I remembered that my first history of science class was Thomas Hughes' seminar on creativity in art and science, in which we read Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation, Silvano Arieti's Creativity: The Magic Synthesis, Peter Gay's Art and Act, Baxendall on fifteenth-century painting, Carl Schorske's Fin-De-Siecle Vienna, Russell McCormmach's Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist, and Freud on Leonardo. At the time, none of these names meant anything to me, other than Freud and Leonardo; certainly I had no idea who Koestler was, or how important the others have been in their fields. So in this case, I'm not quite the average reader.

I've also been slowly reading Kim Vincente's The Human Factor-- not because it's uninteresting (it's actually really interesting) or insubstantial (it has a very serious argument at its heart), but because other things keep getting in the way. However, it may turn out that reading them simultaneously is a lucky break-- the two may overlap in some useful, unexpected ways.