What I've been reading...

Marius B. Jansen, "The Making of Modern Japan" (2000): I really liked this one, despite it feeling dense at times. Jensen's narrative has a nice flow that shows both continuities and sharp breaks in Japan's government, policy, society, and the climate of opinion from Sekigahara to the turn of the new millennium. It as a good read, albeit increasingly out of date--David Pilling's "Bending Adversity" is perhaps a good supplement to Jensen's work. 

Jenny Uglow, "In These Times: Living in Britain Through the Napoleonic Wars, 1793--1815" (2014): A rich social history, brimming with fascinating insights gleaned from diaries, letters, and print-material of the era. This is a very good book of a transformative period in British history.

Alan Booth, "The Roads to Sata: A 2,000-mile Walk Through Japan" (1985): Great travel-writing, detailing a four-month walking trip along (or near) the western coast of Japan's three largest islands. Booth's anecdotes drift between humor and absurdity, and his journey brings him into contact with all manner of people--rich, poor, kind, rude. Despite the hardships he describes, reading this book has put me in the mood to take a long walking trip.

Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking Fast and Slow" (2011): An astonishing book on the science of human decision-making, and how it can and does lead to poor outcomes. I noted a few quotes while reading: 

"A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact." 

“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” 

“Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty."

“The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.” 

“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.” 

“Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.” 

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.”

Would certainly recommend.

Arrived on my pile: 

Dr. Junichi Saga, "Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small-town Japan" (1990).

Jonah Lehrer, "Imagine: How Creativity Works" (2012).