APRIL 23, 2026 – Having finished reading one book—a “barn burner,” as my dad would’ve called it—by Ned Blackhawk, entitled The Rediscovery of America, I’m closing in on the finish line of another book, The Korean War, a deeply troubling revisionist history by Bruce Cumings, a noted American scholar of modern Korean history. I’m waiting eagerly, meanwhile, for the next installments of a book in progress, Erik Hansen’s Let Go the Heart, a soul-searching work of art.
My next book-to-read, however, won’t be our next book club assignment, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by the late highly acclaimed and equally vilified expert on ants (among many other matters), Edward O. Wilson.
In the first place, the tome is 697 pages long. With the notable exception of Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant with 1,047 pages and weighing in at four pounds—the first of his 11-volume Story of Civilization (later volumes co-authored by his wife, Ariel Durant)—my limit is 600 pages, including pictures.
In the second place, the very first sentence of Sociobiology is, “Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide.” The sentence that follows it, however, takes the reader on a sharp turn: “That is wrong even in the strict sense intended.” What ensues from that is an exegesis of Wilson’s theory—that evolutionary biology is determinative of social behavior—and support therefor.
The foregoing considerations—length and depth—suggest that in downhill skiing parlance, Sociobiology is a triple-black-diamond run. Personally, I don’t want to wind up bound to a ski patrol rescue sled guided down a 40-degree pitch, 2,000-foot vertical drop after having impaled myself on a protruding dead fir limb along the side of the run; one patrolman gripping the handles of the sled and snow plowing in front of it to slow the descent and a second patrolman snowplowing behind the sled as she hangs on to the safety rope—all when I could’ve been reading For Whom the Bell Tolls.
In any case, books are an interesting fixture of civilization. Once upon time they were no more tangible than sound waves. as stories were passed from one generation to the next by oral tradition. With the use of hammer and chisel on stone, other books achieved greater weight, you might say. Then came the invention of paper, adapted to scrolls and screens. Add movable type (invented in China in the early 11th century, a good 400 years before Gutenberg’s Bible), stitching and leather and an explosion of published books occurred. Fast forward to semi-modern times and paperback books, punched out by the millions, and we had more than enough . . . to ban and burn. Today we’ve arrived full circle with the proliferation of e-books—as intangible as sound-waves of the oral tradition.
In each of their many forms, books are extensions of ourselves; self-contained “brains” preserving an infinity of thoughts, data, dreams, hopes, joys, tragedies, knowledge, opinions, speculations, stories—true, false and in between—and of lives lived and lives imagined.
This view of books I want to convey to our granddaughter Illiana. (Off in Connecticutland, our younger grandchildren are immersed in primers of all kinds. In due course, they’ll graduate to higher forms of books.) The other day, she remarked that she could “spend all day in a library.” I told her that based on that inspiration, we’ll visit the grand rooms of the New York Public Library during our trip East in June. I then remembered the gem of a library in our own backyard—the Hill Reference Library in downtown St. Paul. We’ll visit there too. Farther afield one day, Illiana and her cousins will surely see the famous Biblioteca Joanina inside the Paço das Escolas of the University of Coimbra in Portugal—a veritable palace of books, which we visited with Byron and Mylène in 2018; a place of 60,000 “brains,” each dressed in a cover of Baroque majesty.
Given the time she spends with us, Illiana is plenty familiar with Beth’s endless inventory of books, and she always knows what books I’m currently reading. Books are sure to be a symbol by which Illiana remembers us—and more important, by which she emulates us and stretches her understanding of the world and her place among its inhabitants.
And now I must exchange the screen at the writing table for . . . a book in the reading chair.
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
