I’ve thought of running a week-long or five-day MR symposium of a book of general interest to MR readers. Each day I would "review" one part of the book, in sequence. You could read along and of course comment, but the posts also would be fully intelligible to people who weren’t reading the book at all.
If we did this, which book would you like to have covered, not counting some of the books we discussed yesterday…?
i vote Gold: The Once and Future Money.
Finnegan’s Wake
Are you going to give us a head start? You’re a fast reader
Fiction: The Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolan~o); Non-Fiction: Escape from Empire (Alice Amsden)
The Forgotten Man
Paul Collier’s latest book.
Atlas Shrugged… just to see someone get through it in a week.
The Master and Margarita. This seems to be not widely known, despite its critical acclaim.
I vote books, not plays (even as much as I love Shakespeare).
Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain: The Science of Neuroeconomics by Paul W. Glimcher
This “symposium” sounds suspiciously like criticism, which, we already know, is useful only as the handmaiden of Google. The project ought to be killed, on your own recommendation.
Keep in mind that it can take several days for Amazon or B&N to deliver a book so if you want us to order through links on your site, you should give us plenty of notice (a week? 3 days?)about the next book so we can all be ready at the same time. A classic coordination problem? This might also drain your commissions if people instead choose to go to Borders. Are you then providing a public good and being under-compensated?
I would like to see, and would gladly participate in, an extended discussion of John Rawls,Theory of Justice. But I doubt I will live that long.
Jonathan Spence’s bio of Mao, partly because it’d be interesting to compare notes with everyone, but most just because I’m already halfway through it.
Principled Agents? by Tim Besley
The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant
The structure of the book would lend itself well to blog posts on each chapter.
The Age of Fallibility by George Soros
This book covers a lot of interesting current events that would make for interesting blog posts. I’d also be interested to see how you treat his views of reflexivity and the open society. On that other hand, the self promotion/autobiographical references in this book might make it hard to finish. If you are tempted to stop reading after a bit I would recommend that you switch to reading the appendix. It clarifies some of his views, but has a completely different tone than the rest of the book.
I haven’t read it yet, but ‘Your Financial Edge’, Paul McCulley of Pimco’s latest book would also be fun.
Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital
Joel Mokyr’s ‘The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy’ —
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7426.html
The White Man’s Burden
The Bottom Billion
Inequality Reexamined
James Macdonald’s “A Free Nation deep in Debt” or
William Clark’s “Academic Charisma and the origins of the Research University” or
Sarah Hrdy’s “Mother Nature” or
Frans De Waal’s “Primates and Philosophers”.
I vote that you choose a title that’s available online.
Since Tyler certainly seems to have very eclectic reading tastes and reads numerous books at one time, I think something where he lets us know a few books that he would like to read in the future and lets people vote on which one the group would like to read. Other than that, I imagine he’s probably read quite a few of the books already suggested and am not sure if he’d want to go back and re-read. Who knows? maybe he would. I also think reading fiction would be best for the reasons stated above.
Pick anything recent from Russ Roberts’ list. Give us two weeks head start so we can discuss intelligently. I’d love to see a redux of Taleb’s “The Black Swan” or Pink’s “A Whole New Mind”. Russ just dumps these on us with a podcast and leaves us to drown in brilliance during the weeks following.
“Under the Volcano”, Malcolm Lowry
I have a book report due…
I’d like to nominate something more practical. I just started “Unleashing Capitalism: Why Prosperity Stops at the West Virginia Border and How to Fix It” (http://www.lulu.com/content/715045). It is very specific to West Virginia (where I have never been). But the very practical application of economic principle is compelling and interesting.
The General Theory, Das Kapital, and Wealth of Nations are all too dense for me to discuss in depth on a daily schedule. If you pick one of these big books, please extend the discussion schedule.
If you pick an unreadable, like Pynchon (which I put down after 200 pages), then I predict you are going to have a very lonely discussion.
Also, I’m not as interested in discussing fiction with you, because that’s not your expertise. I’m sure that we (all) could have a very fine discussion of a fiction book. But given the crowd, I think that a serious non-fiction discussion would be deeper and more fruitful.
Who decides which books get press (Harry Potter) and which get censored? After all, censorship is becoming America’s favorite past-time. The US gov’t (and their corporate friends), already detain protesters, ban books like “America Deceived” from Amazon and Wikipedia, shut down Imus and fire 21-year tenured, BYU physics professor Steven Jones because he proved explosives, thermite in particular, took down the WTC buildings. Free Speech forever (especially for books).
Last link (before Google Books caves to pressure and drops the title):
http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?&isbn=0-595-38523-0
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