What I’ve been reading

1. Ian McEwan. The Children Act.  The main story line pretends to revolve around a Jehovah’s Witness who won’t take a blood transfusion, but I think it was meant as a book about Islam and he was afraid to say so.  The resulting mix doesn’t quite work.

2. Arundhati Roy and John Cusack, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden are part of the book too.  The two main authors conversing with Snowden is in fact the strongest argument against Snowden I’ve seen.  Maybe he is just being polite, but it’s the only time I’ve heard him sound like an idiot.

3. Helen Hardacre, Shinto: A History.  I’ve read only about a fifth of this 720 pp. book, but it seems to be a highly useful history on a topic hardly anyone knows anything about.

4. Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.  Compelling throughout, and worthwhile reading for anyone interested in media and media policy.  Ellsberg, of course, was closely connected to Thomas Schelling and made significant contributions to the theory of choice under uncertainty.

There is also:

After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, edited by Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, is a very useful collection of writings on Piketty-related themes, including Solow and Krugman.

Nathan B. Oman, The Dignity of Commerce: Markets and the Foundations of Contract Law.  An interesting blend of “moral foundations of capitalism” and analysis of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam, “…the early Muslim community believed almost universally that the Satanic verses incident was a true historical fact.”