What I’ve been reading

1. Gavin Maxwell, A Reed Shaken: Travels Among the Marsh Arabs of Iraq.  One of my favorite travel books.  It avoids both being too impressionistic and being too didactic.  It never assumes that the writer’s state of mind is interesting to the reader per se.  It brings a little-known and by now largely destroyed corner of the world to light.

2. Ludwig Mises on the exhuastion of the reserve fund.  I first read that passage when I was fourteen years old and I was scared.

3. Dubner’s excellent memoir, largely about religion, will become a movie.

4. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor.  There is a splendid new Oxford University Press edition.  Browsing or reading this book is one of the best ways to get a feel for Victorian England (circa 1850-51), or for how labor markets have changed.

5. The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan.  Half of this is quite fun, the other half is quite stupid.  Your call, but half fun is actually a lot.

I’ve also relented and finally tried Game of Thrones.  I’m just at the beginning; we’ll see whether it ends up owned or liberated.

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