1. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, by Michael Fried. The text is weak (and mostly skippable), but still this had high value for me. It's a look at how photography has become the centerpiece of contemporary art, starting with Jeff Wall and offering well-chosen color images from the leading creators. I had been needing a book like this.
2. The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How American and Europe are Alike, by Peter Baldwin. This book offers an onslaught of facts and statistics, toward the aim of showing that the United States and Europe aren't so different after all. You also can read it as a critique of purely statistical reasoning. At the very least, it's a good reference work even though I wasn't convinced by the central thesis.
3. Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. This is an exciting and prophetic book about taking the ideas of self-experimentation and self-recording to an extreme. Record your entire life and then do…?…with the data. Something, they'll figure it out. Just record the recorders and run regressions on what ends up working.
4. The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds, and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot by Chip Brantley. There is now a "go-to" book on the pluot and this is it. It explains why plums vary so much in quality, why plums are usually bad these days, how the pluot was intended as a replacement, and why some stores call them plumcots. I paid attention the whole way through.
5. The Informers, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez. I loved the first part, about the guy's relationship with his dying father, but found the wartime blacklist story only "good." Still, this is one of the better Colombian novels and I could imagine the author writing a truly great novel someday. Here is one good review.
6. Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs. Has any novel this year received better or more unanimous critical reviews? The writing is smart, beautiful, and quirky and Moore is not afraid to let her main character be weird. Still, I lost interest within one hundred pages and stopped reading. I am willing to admit the fault may be mine and over Christmas I'll try it again. Somehow I need more analytic structure in my fiction. If you look at the Amazon reader reviews, they make related points. Here is some background information on the book. Do let me know if you loved it.
7. Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. My mouth watered at the thought of a popular (Norton) Joyce Appleby book on the origins of capitalism. It is intelligent throughout but it wasn't teaching me anything so I put it down. Skimming did not alter this impression. It is more a disappointment than a bad book but it is a disappointment nonetheless. All of a sudden she's afraid to take chances.
8. Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder. It bored me and I stopped. It's OK but I view it as an inefficient blend of narrative and mild information about East African ethnic cleansing. Most critics praised it.
The new Pamuk book, due out in October, is phenomenal and is getting better each day.
> This is an exciting and prophetic book about taking the ideas of self-experimentation and self-recording to an extreme. Record your entire life and then do…?…with the data. Something, they’ll figure it out. Just record the recorders and run regressions on what ends up working.
Yeah, basically. Why so skeptical? This sort of thing happens again and again with new tech – just think about cellphone cameras: ‘What can one do with cruddy little cameras built into the back of your phone? Take some lousy pictures for Facebook?’
Yeah – and, well, a lot of other things. Most of it is just always having a camera (any camera) handy for all sorts of things that are unpredictable & spontaneous, or valuable but not valuable enough to justify lugging around a ‘real’ camera.
Lifelogging will be much the same. We don’t know all the uses because we don’t know how our lives are lacking. We can come up with some plausible ones: it’ll be helpful for absent-minded people, or the elderly, or the hard of hearing (didn’t catch that parting comment? rewind and replay until you figure it out. Forgot what you were doing because you have Alzheimers? Make a habit of vocalizing your current objective and then you can just rewind to your last utterance).
And everytime I hear someone criticize lifelogging, I think back to one of the journalists who played around with a system: he closed his article uncertain about the benefits, worrying about privacy issues – but writing that because of lifelogging, he caught his son walking for the first time, a moment that otherwise would have vanished ‘like tears in the rain’.
That’s the ultimate justification, I think: lifelogging is so we don’t have to forget entirely what we don’t want forgotten.
I have not read Peter Baldwin’s book but lived
in England for 20 years and have known America
even longer. At first sight the two nations
(divided by a common language, Bernard Shaw
thought) may seem sufficiently alike. But
extended residence will reveal many subltle
differences. The English speak far more indirectly
than Americans, leaving many things unsaid, and
relying instead on implication. While Americans are no
strangers to irony, it is not the coin of daily
conversation that it can be over there. Even when
two people know one another well, the English are
reticent about using first names frequently.
And there is the whole question of history. FDR
and Winston Churchill knew one another well. And yet
Churchill was convinced that FDR had little
understanding of the place of the British
Empire.
Here is a test. Philip Larkin was a quintessentially
English poet, whose poems say a great deal to English
readers without addressing obviously big themes.
Many American readers are likely to think his poetry
skilled and felicitous but essentially small-scale.
It is a fundamental difference in approach.
On a related note, lifelogging will surely come in handy for, say, arson investigations (video)
Snow really is good, not just beautiful but page-turningly beautiful.
“All of a sudden she’s afraid to take chances.”
As Robin Hanson suggests, when people become prominent they take fewer risks that might impair their reputations. Perhaps this is as true of novel-writing as it is of commentary.
Re: Total Recall. But how I remember events may be very different from what actually happened. Don’t take that away!
Seriously, I think we may be surprised how our memories quickly morph.
Tyler, how do you know the new Pamuk is phenomenal? Did you read it in Turkish? I am also excited about the new Nicholson Baker book, The Anrthologist, reviewed in yesterday’s Times.
The Informers is a very nice book, i read that book.The Informers is really a very interesting book. I have 1 book from that given list but i dnt have othe 7 book so i am planning to purchase the books so when i purchase and complete any of one i will add on my review for that book..
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