Nightstand Reading: Eric Liu

Editor’s note: Whether he’s interviewing Daniel Schorr at Town Hall, inspiring leadership or talking about patriotism, local author Eric Liu manages to get us thinking—and to get the conversation going. In The True Patriot, a book written in the pamphleteering style of Thomas Paine, Liu and co-author Nick Hanauer offer a lively challenge to look at civic ideals and what it takes to be a modern-day patriot. Liu (who, we should mention, is also president of The Seattle Public Library Board) is the kind of writer who makes you want to know more—including knowing what he’s reading. Here’s a look at Eric Liu’s nightstand reading:

Paradise Lost by John Milton; edited by John Leonard. I read a piece in the New Yorker this summer about Milton and how the politics of his time shaped his literary imagination, and was led to read, for the first time, this epic and convention-shattering poem. For over two months, it has been the last thing I read before bed. Every night I read three or four pages of this sumptuous, imagination-expanding tale of the fall of Man and the story of the charismatic Satan. I find myself mouthing the words as I read them, then pausing every few lines to read the detailed literary and historical annotations provided by John Leonard in this Penguin Classic edition. The gorgeous convoluted language, the hallucinatory imagery, the searing psychological and moral insights — they all lead to very rich dreams!

The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, complexity and the radical remaking of economics by Eric D. Beinhocker. My True Patriot co-author Nick Hanauer put me onto this book, which is a lucid, compelling overview of the emerging (and emergent) field of complexity economics. The book’s basic argument is that traditional economics, based on a physics metaphor of equilibrium, has never been able to account for one pretty important phenomenon: how wealth gets created. Beinhocker shows how a new generation of economists is now explaining the economy through both the metaphor and the actual dynamics of evolution and other nonlinear emergent phenomena. It’s a fascinating survey, and though I’m only midstream, I’ve already taken away some key insights: that left to themselves, economies inherently create and perpetuate inequality; that therefore government intervention to keep the playing field level is not just justifiable but essential; and that too often, the metaphors we use in public policy can blind us as much as they enlighten us.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. I am at work now on a book about imagination, in collaboration with my friends at the Lincoln Center Institute in New York. In the course of my research I came upon Jonah Lehrer’s wonderful book. It is a fantastic review of how a range of nineteenth and early twentieth century artists — Cezanne, Proust, Whitman, Woolf, and others — prefigured in their works and in their approach to artmaking so many of the laws of neuroscience now being unearthed by brain imaging and other hi-tech scientific tools. It’s a wonderful tour through many disciplines and a subtly forceful defense of the central role that art must play in making sense of the world and of our own minds.

Putting People First: How We Can All Change America by Bill Clinton and Al Gore. This was the campaign book that Clinton and Gore published in the 1992 campaign season. I pulled it off the shelf to see how well it holds up, and it’s surprisingly good for the genre of candidate books and it’s a surprisingly relevant exemplar of progressive argument-making. Democrats today could do worse than to steal liberally (so to speak) from this playbook.

Editor’s note: Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer lead a discussion on what it means to be a patriot, this Thursday, September 25, at 6:30 p.m. at the Captiol Hill Branch. Update on October 2: Please note that Eric Liu’s appearance on October 8 at the Green Lake Library has been cancelled due to the temporary closure of the Green Lake Branch.