The Pioneers of Land Reform: Thomas Spence, William Ogilvie, Thomas Paine

The Pioneers of Land Reform: Thomas Spence, William Ogilvie, Thomas Paine

This is a collection of three early thoughts on land reform. In general, they advocated letting people that worked the land and added value collect the value. They wanted to limit excessive rent seeking in order to optimize economic growth. The methods that they sought about doing it differed. On one extreme, all land would be taken from the land holders and rented out to others. (Seems like there could be a lot of "ownership" issues and potential for corruption here.) On the other moderate side, there would be an inheritance tax that would be used to provide a form of universal basic income to everyone. (I wonder what would happen if the property was just transferred before the death?)  It is interesting looking at these a few centuries later. There are parts of the arguments that are easy to pick apart, while other "concerns" seem to be non-issues today. 

The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Man Who Knew Too Much by G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Knew Too Much predates the Hitchcock movie, but has nothing to do with it. It is a collection of mystery short stories that are mostly connected. It almost feels like a regular novel with a number of episodes. The structure is fairly similar to the "Father Brown" stories by Chesterton, tough without Brown.

The Age of Innocence

The well to do in New York run together in narrow social circles. Marriage is important. A lawyer works with people that they know. In this background, some people are getting engaged. However, another woman appears that appears more willing to go against the norms. There is also work on divorce. Feels like a Jane Austen book, set in New York in the early 1900s.

Great Classic Stories 2

The ones that stuck out as being good in this collection were
Young Goodman Brown: He wanted to be good, but saw that everyone that he respected was in cohorts with the devil. It also made me wonder what happened to the deep religiousity form early New England. Will the other super religious areas change that way also?
How I Edited An Agricultural Paper: A great Mark Twain humor piece that I had not read before.
A Piece of String : A small thing ends up leading to dire consequences (watch out for strings!)
Head and Shoulders: life intervenes, and roles switch, with the academic's showgirl wife eventually attracting his past intellectual idol.
I didn't like Nuns at Luncheon or Cousin William.

The stories:
Young Goodman Brown (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835)
The Cask of Amontillado (Edgar Allan Poe, 1846)
Cousin William (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1855)
How I Edited An Agricultural Paper (Mark Twain, 1870)
A Piece of String (Guy de Maupassant, 1883)
Angela, An Inverted Love Story (W.S. Gilbert, 1890)
Oh! The Public (Anton Chekhov, 1885)
The Nightingale and the Rose (Oscar Wilde, 1888)
The Story of an Hour (Kate Chopin, 1894)
A Coward (Edith Wharton, 1899)
A Jury of Her Peers (Susan Glaspell, 1917)
Araby (James Joyce, 1914)
The Mark on the Wall (Virginia Woolf, 1917)
The Interlopers (Saki, 1919)
Head and Shoulders (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920)
The Stranger (Katherine Mansfield, 1921)
The Blind Man (D.H. Lawrence, 1922)
Nuns at Luncheon (Aldous Huxley, 1922)

Ulysses

I picked up a copy of Ulysses at the local library, not sure exactly what type of "version" it was. It turns out it was a BBC radio version of the book created a few decades ago. The performance is fairly good, though there are a couple episodes with actors talk at very different volumes. It became almost impossible to hear the quieter ones without cranking the volume (and then the louder ones were much too loud.)

The book is often near the top of people's best-of lists. However, it is long and hard to read. This seemed like a good introduction. After listening, however, I think I'll pass on the full book. It seems a clear case of style over substance. I did like the "idea" that he had. The juxtaposition of different styles may make it worth reading just to see how it all plays out on paper. However, the content is just not appealing. We have a day in a life of some Irishman. It resembles the voyage of Odysseus. I liked the way it was told. I just didn't care about any of the people or what they were doing.