What I’ve been reading

Lots of catch-up from time abroad:

1. Liza Mundy, Everything is Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Men, Women, and the World.  Excellent stories, even-handed, and surprisingly philosophical.  How can you not read a good book on this topic?

2. Janos Kornai, By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey.  Charming memoirs of one of the major economists from the Communist bloc.  An intellectual autobiography, an account of how and why human beings change their minds, and an explanation of why he was more creative in Hungary than with the mainstream at Harvard.

3. Trevor Corson, The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket.  The first few chapters are an excellent overview and history of sushi, after that the book is a lame account of a bunch of losers taking a sushi course.

4. Brink Lindsey, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture, on how America became so libertarian, reviewed here by George Will.

5. Hermann Broch, Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers).  Broch remains one of the most underrated authors of the 20th century, this may be his masterpiece but start with his shorter Death of Virgil.