A Reading Vacation

Last Wednesday, I took the Amtrak Coast Starlight to spend a long weekend in Southern California for my Grandpa's 87th birthday. It was cheaper than driving (for one person, anyway) to take the train. And since tax season is over, I had the 11 hours each way to spare.

I get easily and epically motion sick, which didn't used to respond to medication. Fortunately, this trip, the Bonine seemed to have worked, so I was able to read the whole way down and back. On the San Jose to L.A. leg, I read Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right and Bruce Campbell's If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor. Both were light, enjoyable reads.

On the return trip, I read Peter Singer's Practical Ethics. It was assigned for a class I took in college, but I confess that (possibly ironically) I only read the bare minimum assigned sections and the book sat on my shelf for the next 8 years or so. Having never done any reading of anything even vaguely resembling philosophy, I wasn't sure what to expect.

The first thing that struck me was the imprecise language. I read tax code at work, and sometimes help edit Steve's scientific papers at home, so I was not sure what to make of statements like "Some may say..." or "Some think..." that cropped up the text. Who are some? Are their studies that back up the assertion that there are groups of people who hold these views?

I realized I was reading from the wrong perspective and adjusted my focus. This is a philosophy discussion; there are no facts.

Mindset thus adjusted, I plowed through the rest of the book, often having to stop and re-read sections whose reasoning I had failed to follow. It's not that the book had an obscure vocabulary or unusual structure (the writing style was simplistic, really), it's that discussions like "what are ethics" and "why should one behave ethically" are fairly complex when reasoned without divine influence.

All in all, the book was pretty fascinating not because of how it was executed, but the thought process it inspired in me as I was reading it. It tackled refreshingly taboo topics like euthanasia, infanticide, refugees from poverty and the treatment of "non-human animals" (as he phrased it throughout the book). I enjoy very much topics that are challenging to consider, no matter how dark.

I'm not sure what I'll pick up next, but since that train ride home was the most intellectually engaged I've felt in years, perhaps I'll wander through the philosophy section the next time I'm at the library.