1. David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918. Thorough, readable, never thrilling but consistently satisfying. It is a good follow-up to Niall Ferguson’s splendid The Pity of War.
2. Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. No surprises, good, perhaps best on the evolution of the natural gas market.
3. Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn. Never bad, it becomes excellent by the end.
4. Roger Ebert, Life Itself: A Memoir. One-fifth or so of this book is interesting, so some small number of you should wade through it. I liked the discussion of black and white cinema best, but most of it is rambling and insufferable.
5. Steve Sem-Samberg, The Emperor of Lies, A Novel. “I don’t want to read any more about the Holocaust” is not good enough reason to neglect this stunning Swedish novel. A fictionalized account of the Lodz Ghetto, it looks at the lives of the ghetto rulers and whether they were heroes or collaborators. I found it tough to read more than one hundred pages of this at a time; by focusing on the suicides rather than the murder victims, it is especially brutal. Definitely recommended, I urge you to get up the gumption.
6. Jo Nesbo, Nemesis: A Novel. Highly entertaining, indeed gripping, but by the end I was wondering whether I had wasted my time. It turns out not to be conceptual after all. A good plane read, which is for me what it was.
I didn’t “get” the new Stephen Greenblatt book; was Poggio so important? I still find myself unable to enjoy Hollinghurst, though in the abstract I admire the writing. Bellow’s The Victim is beautifully written but seemed to me dated.
Tyler,
Did you ever sample the Game of Thrones novel?
Sample, yes. Maybe someday I will try it again.
re: 4, but most of it is rambling and insufferable.
Why wasn’t this book liberated before the end?
Kindle!
still very easy to liberate.
Daniel Yergin’s book is annoying mainly because it attacks a theory of peak oil that didn’t survive 1990. Taking a proper definition of peak oil – that is, that the price elasticity of supply of oil decreases monotonically and that there exists a price of oil which economic growth ceases – Yergin starts to sound more like a “late peak” theorist. And aside from his simplistic analysis (his estimates of reserve growth are wildly overstated, he does not take into account revisions in the way reserves are accounted for), CERA, the organization Yergin heads, also happens to have had a notoriously bullish (and, for the last 10 years, wrong) outlook on oil supply and pricing.
Tyler,
You read a lot. I’m wondering if you’ve read many heterodox economics books, ones that directly critique neoclassical economics. I know economist’s standard response is that these guys are looney or don’t fully grasp economics, but given the field’s failure wrt the current crisis do you think some might be worth checking out?
I felt that Yergin was taken apart convincingly enough (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8391#more) that I would not spend time on it given the strong time constraints in my current job. However, if I had more free time I might reconsider.
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