So, I’ve previously mentioned a couple other books I read over the holidays:  The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson and Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza.  Both were excellent.

I also finally finished a book I’d been working on for months, The Counter-Revolution of Science by Friedrich Hayek.  This was one of those incredibly dense books, similar to Human Action by Ludwig von Mises (though this one, blessedly, is much, much shorter) that are valuable to have in mind for those times when we think we’re just waaayyy too smart.  Nothing like a book where you’re routinely thinking, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I get that — maybe…,” to put you in your place intellectually.  But it was a good summary of the corrosive influence of folks like Saint-Simon, Comte, and Hegel on society even today.

Best of all, I got to re-read a book I’d enjoyed as a boy — and then some.  My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George was about a teenage boy who runs away from home in New York City to live in the wild on ancestral family land in the Catskill mountains.  In tracking down a copy to buy, I discovered that it was available in a single-volume trilogy with two of George’s sequels (of which I’d previously been unaware), On the Far Side of the Mountain and Frightful’s Mountain.  Well, the first book was as riveting as I remembered, though I remembered far less of the details than I might have imagined.  The other two books were very good too, though they got increasingly preachy, and by the end the main human characters at times seemed mere mouthpieces for environmental activism.  (That Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote the introduction to the last one speaks volumes.)  Still, they were all very good stories, and just when the preachiness seemed ready to overwhelm the tale, it would blessedly recede.