Intellectual Resolutions - 2019

 Other editions
      By now you have probably abandoned any attempts at elevating your level of fitness for 2019 and have grown very tired of all those advertisements for machines and gyms designed for that purpose. Perhaps your goal now is improving your brain which is a more realistic option in that it can be done inside where it is warm. You probably don’t have a lot of time and I am quickly running out of it so I will offer here some shortcuts to smartness.

     They come in the form of books which are short and lighter than dumbbells. Brevity is not necessarily achieved by eliminating substance. Some of the subjects covered in these brief books are heavy indeed. I am not referring to the many titles that begin with  ….For Dummies and here will offer you works produced under the imprimatur of a scholarly publisher.

Very Short Introductions - Oxford University Press

     The folks at Oxford produce a large number of intellectual self-help books, all of which conveniently mention in the title, Very Short Introduction…. There are over 600 in this series arranged into six broad subject areas: Arts & Humanities, Dictionaries & Reference, Law, Medicine & Health, Science & Mathematics, and the Social Sciences. Those broad categories are broken into many narrower ones ranging from Agnosticism  and Adam Smith to Viruses and Zionism. I chose to skip, Ageing: A Very Short Introduction since I feel like I know something about that subject and, as I mentioned, am increasingly short of time. Additional details are offered below.

30 Second Books - Ivy Press

       

     If you don't even have enough time to read a very short introduction to a subject, you may be able to spare a few minutes to glance at these books which are produced by Ivey Press. Although not a university press, it does appear to be based in the U.K., which should be good enough. According to them, the 30 Second series is internationally acclaimed and has been translated into 30 languages. More details below.

Sources:
OUP
If you are looking for a very short introduction to something see the OUP website.
The entry for the series on Wikipedia is also helpful.
IVY
Ivy Press is part of the Quarto Group and the website is here.
The 30 Second titles are more easily found here. 

Post Script:
If you live in the London, Ontario area over 65 Very Short Introduction...are available up at Western. (Other institutions of higher learning offer these shortcuts; see this guide and description from the University of Michigan.)
There are also around 10 titles in the London Public Libraries. One of them is devoted to Derrida, about whom we no longer need to know.
I only located one 30 Second book, but it is a good one if you want to figure out philosophy:
30 Second Philosophies: The 50 Most Thought-Provoking Philosophies Explained in Half a Minute.