How to read a book

Reading a new book is a bit like encountering someone new. Your view of the book, or the other person, is at first rather cautious; you don’t want to trust this new resource too much until you have a better view. Initially, you have probably heard something about the book, perhaps a recommendation from a friend, or a review, or the subject matter, or even, heaven forbid, the jacket design, appealed to you. Whatever the case, you retain an element of uncertainty before you fully open yourself to this book. You ask yourself, I will devote several hours to this book, so I want to think it will be worth it. How, in other words, do you assess a new book? Let’s take an example: The Seduction of Place (2000).  

I live in Cambridge, which for possibly accidental reasons is situated quite close to several new and planned cities: Milton Keynes, Letchworth, Stevenage, Harlow and Peterborough, to name a few. Does this conscious urban design make people happier? More broadly, what is the relationship between cities, their buildings, and their inhabitants? When there is a new development, such as a shopping centre, or a bypass, or a community garden, is there any way to measure the effect on the inhabitants? I recently visited Dundee, and in my opinion, the siting of the new Tay Bridge bringing traffic to the middle of the city centre had a disastrous effect on people’s lives.

So I was looking for a book that  examined the relationship between the built environment and people’s lives. I want a stimulating but entertaining read.

Joseph Rykwert’s The Seduction of Place (2000) struck me as a possible answer to these questions: the subtitle is “The History and Future of the City”. The blurb for the book describes how Rykwert “assesses how and why urban projects from the past succeeded or failed and what lessons can be drawn”. That sounds like the right book to me. He is a respected writer (Wikipedia describes him as “one of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation”). There were no fewer than fourteen plugs (praise from reviewers) for the book on the covers and the first page, and the twenty-eight people thanked for their comments by the author before we get to page one. I had a train journey, so I took the book with me and settled down to be instructed, and hopefully entertained. 

It seems a bit churlish after all that to say I was disappointed. There is no question of the author’s learning; perhaps indeed that proved to be the challenge. 

My method for appraising a book is simple. I proceed on two fronts. The first assessment is at the macro level, the same as the appraisal of a journal article: is the author answering the question proposed by the title? One would hope, both for articles and for books, that the question may need some elucidation, despite the presence (for the journal article) of an abstract, but it seems pretty clear that this book is about “the history and future of the city”, as the strapline states. But after fifty pages, I had discovered some points about the history of the city, but almost incidentally. I wasn’t sure what the first 75 pages, around a quarter of the book, were for.

If this is a book about the history and future of the city, do we need to have a chapter devoted to the Industrial Revolution? Do we need to have a potted history of agriculture? Do we need to know the details of why Voltaire and Rousseau came to Paris, and why they didn’t like it? Do we need the details of Pugin’s Contrasts, which I have never envisaged as a study of things urban? In Rousseau’s case, his reason for coming to Paris was to earn enough money so he could leave and write his Confessions. Fascinating - but irrelevant. Here is part of the passage devoted to Rousseau, to show Rykwert’s fascinating yet rambling style:

As Rousseau admired Turin, so Voltaire admired London as the model of a truly meritocratic city. And he was right, since even the pre-Hanoverian English crown never succeeded in establishing a powerful centralizing court, though the Stuart kings tried, and one of them, Charles I, lost his head in the process. Their failure was clearly represented by the ramshackle modesty of the palaces at Whitehall and Saint James’s, which were never aggrandized, despite plans to do so and reconstruction after fires. This was the great age of European palace building when very modest sovereigns indeed, like the prince-bishops of Wurzburg, built themselves residences the British Empire would never equal (p22).

This is an aimless walk rather than an argument.

Secondly, I read a book on the micro level, examining each sentence. when I encounter a statement about which I have some knowledge, I compare what I know with what the author knows. Or, simply, I use my common sense to ask “is this statement likely?... Am I satisfied that  this author is using reasonable argument to make his point?” It’s somewhat like a conversation with a taxi driver. You exchange a few platitudes, and then the driver launches into his theory of why the country is going to the dogs  - and you bite your lip and keep quiet for the rest of the journey.

Here are a couple of examples of Rykwert’s detailed statements. On page one, the author describes the situation at the end of World War Two:

Building became the highest social priority: in the first half of the century, any young man in a Latin-speaking country, whether in Europe or South America, who needed a university degree but had not special interests, often studied law; but after 1945, many of them gravitated to architecture.

This is a strange, rather cavalier claim. I’m confident to think there was an increase in the number of students studying architecture, but moving from law to architecture? Why from one to the other? Why “young man”, not “young woman”? What is a “Latin-speaking country” anyway, and why just these countries? Does Rykwert mean Spanish, or classical Latin, which hasn’t been spoken for over a thousand years? Did people not study architecture in Japan or China after 1945?

Rykwert refers to the computer game SimCity (not Sim-city) and misrepresents it. SimCity is an exception among computer games in that money is not the only measure of success; it is an attempt, simplistic of course, to create a simulation of managing a city that takes into account multiple factors, including providing work, leisure, transport, and attempting to keep the population happy by reconciling these often conflicting goals. For Rykwert “because the computer has to quantify, success and failure cannot be measured in more complex terms”. In contrast, SimCity measures success by a range of criteria, just as a city authority has to. I don’t state that it is perfect, but it is certainly about more than money. It is a remarkable  simulation because it presents the player with difficult choices: there is no single way to build a city successfully.

Rykwert’s book is an interesting comparison with a typical journal article. STEM (science and medicine) articles make claims and attempt to provide evidence for each statement they make. By contrast, Rykwert’s style is to proceed in an ambling fashion, introducing many details that are neither to the  point nor evidenced. An example is a paragraph devoted to the epic poem Gilgamesh, on page 13. Ostensibly, this is included because it is a conflict between the “urban” Gilgamesh and the “nomad” Enkidu, leading the author to link it to examples of rulers being reminded of their rural origins. How did we get here? Before I come to terms with that paragraph, I encounter another discursion into Hesiod’s ages of gold and iron, and then to Atlantis, and so on, for a further three or four pages, until we come to a theme: “what strategies are open to citizens who wish to shape their habitats in ways that would conform more closely to their wishes”.  That question is not the same as the subject on the cover. It’s an interesting topic in its own right, but it seems to reveal the rambling, discursive technique of the author, like a long Sunday supplement article where you keep reading because you like the author’s style. Personally, I’d prefer to state the subject and stick to it, and to reduce the discursive rambling.