Rambles Through My Library [Paperback]

Raymond M. Smullyan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 13, 2009

"If you are a fan of Ray's, which I am, all you need to know to want to buy this book is that from its first page to its last, this beautiful volume is unadulterated Smullyan--I couldn't put it down!" Martin Gardner, former editor, Scientific American. In Rambles Through My Library, Raymond Smullyan takes you on a tour of selections from his favorite authors. Along the way he shares his thoughts, commentary, stories, anecdotes, and juicy tidbits about the authors and selections. Thus, the book is a combination of anthology, essays, reminiscences, scraps of thought, and autobiography--anything is fair game. Raymond M. Smullyan has had a remarkably diverse sequence of careers--magician, mathematician and philosopher, concert pianist, internationally known writer, and author of over twenty books. Now a retired distinguished professor of philosophy and mathematics, he continues to delight audiences with performances of magic, music and readings.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Praxis International (April 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0963923161
• ISBN-13: 978-0963923165
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #450,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thrilling, fascinating, September 17, 2009

By 

rbnn (Berkeley, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Rambles Through My Library (Paperback)

This book contains some marvelous essays based on books from Raymond Smullyan's personal library. The essays typically summarize facts about the books' authors, quote from the books, and intertwine personal anecdotes about Smullyan.

If this sounds dry, it isn't. Smullyan is a master, an extraordinary master, of zeroing in on the most interesting and memorable facet of a particular book or author. Indeed, Smullyan himself is known for his incredible, virtually unprecedented, knack for highlighting the elegance and the clarity of subjects that many find opaque and dry, like mathematical logic. I had read several works by Smullyan on mathematical logic, most recently his brilliant essay in the Handbook of Philosophical Logical on incompleteness theorems that manages to present Goedel's second incompleteness theorem in the form of a beautiful, simple, puzzle fully accessible to laymen.

Anyway, this book has terrific stories about Samuel Johnson, about early stage actors, about book-collecting, and some wonderful essays on idleness (or laziness), not to mention some nice excerpts from Bierce. I won't spoil the jokes and anecdotes by repeating them here - it's quite a short book - but they are memorable. Oh, and he skewers some authors who I myself concur are highly overrated as well.

I had only four complaints about the book.

First, quite a bit of it deals with material in translation. There are a lot of quotations from Chinese poetry, for example, and some from Greek. I am deeply skeptical about the value or purpose of reading poetry in translation, as this seems to me to do violence to the very idea of poetry, which is to use perfectly the tools of sense and sound of a particular language. Even though the translations are interesting to read, there is no way to know how accurately they reflect the originals. At the very least, I think that more detail on the originals and how the translations were done should have been included, particularly given Smullyan's penchant for precision.

Second, I would have preferred to see far more photographs, and also far higher-resolution photographs. I would have liked to have seen exactly what these books he discusses look like, at least the antiquarian ones.

Third, I wish the book were much longer, with a complete description of his library, or at least a catalog and short notes. Smullyan always prefers to present a small amount of thought-provoking material in his writings though. But still, the book sparks curiosity that is unfulfilled.

Finally, fourth, there's for me a wistfulness and poignancy to reading this book, because Smullyan is such an extraordinary and fascinating guy, with so many amazing stories (from his lives as a magician, working in a carnival, as a mathematician, as a reader, as a pianist) that I wish more information were available about him, that he had written more and shared more about himself over the decades. Moreover, the fact is that people like Smullyan, with his clear, penetrating mind, wonderful sense of humor, appreciation for all that is logical and beautiful, seem rarer and rarer and indeed barely exist at all any more. He embodies a culture of tolerance, of love of thought, of humanity that no longer exists. So it is somewhat sad reading his stories about love of books and of philosophy, knowing how one is reading stories about a bygone age.

In any case, there is sure to be something to interest everyone in this "ramble."

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A potent solicitation to reverie, July 16, 2009

By 

CD Lynch "hydrolith" (QLD, Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rambles Through My Library (Paperback)

This is a fabulously idiosyncratic collection of snippets from Raymond Smullyan's personal library, with commentary and anecdotes from Smullyan, who also wrote The Tao Is Silent, one of my favourite books.

Smullyan loves both obscure authors who have been unfairly neglected and authors who remind him of himself, so it's perhaps not surprising that he is himself an unfairly neglected author. Now in his nineties, he's as thoroughly enjoyable company as ever, both whimsical and wise. Whether reflecting on theatre, Samuel Johnson's character, the nature of book collecting, leisure, or ancient Chinese poetry, his insatiable curiosity and sense of wonder is infectious.

I now have a number of authors to add to my reading list, including the little-known American Hamilton Wright Mabie. In an essay called 'A Word for Idleness', Mabie writes:

"The study fire is sometimes so potent a solicitation to reverie that I ask myself whether it not be a subtle kind of temptation. Even when a man has cleared himself of the cant of the day, as Carlyle would put it, and delivered himself of the American illusion that every hour not devoted to "doing something" is an hour wasted, the inherited instinct is still strong enough to make an appeal to conscience. Those active, aggressive words, "doing" and "getting," have so long usurped the greater part of the space in our vocabulary that we use the words being and growing with a little uncertainty; most of us are not entirely at ease with them yet. ... The deepest life is as silent as the soil out of which the glory of summer bursts; all noble activities issue from it, and no great work is ever done save by those who have lived in the repose which precedes creation."

As Smullyan writes, this is sublime. 'Rambles Through My Library' is a slim book, but holds more than enough such discoveries to make an hour or so of idleness very worthwhile. The tao may be silent; fortunately, Smullyan is not.