Category: Books

1. Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, by Nick Reding.  Maybe I should define a new category: "Good enough to finish."  This is one of the better recent books on the economics of culture.

2. The Great Contraction, Friedman and Schwartz.  Classic economics books like this are almost always worth a reread.  I had forgotten just how bad was the year 1931.

3. Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, by Andrew Coe.  There is way too much well-known diplomatic history in this book, but the best fifty pages are good enough to make it worthwhile.  That said, I could have saved a lot of time, by flipping rapidly through the boring pages. had I not been reading it on my Kindle.

4. A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska: The Story of Hannah Breece, collated and edited by Jane Jacobs.  A reasonably interesting look at Alaskan, Aleut, and Russian culture around the turn of the century, as told through the eyes of a settler woman and edited by Jacobs (with how much intervention I am not sure).  This makes for a good contrast with Jacob's work on urban economies.  It's not thrilling all the time but overall I would recommend it.

5. Middlemarch, by George Eliot.  No other book I have tried so profits by a reread on Kindle.  Given its density of information, it's simply much better when there is less on each page.

It's an excellent book, whether on Sicily or Italy more generally, and it is written by Peter Robb.  It is also an excellent book about Naples:

Every transaction in Naples, every social act, requires a complex and at times exhausting social trafficking, a subtle and insidious play whereby the socially weaker player contrives to ingratiate himself and at the same time take the piss out of the stronger, to catch the other wrong-footed, but delicately, imperceptibly, to introduce some subliminal sense of social unease that may then be used as leverage.  To create if possible a sense of obligation, of gratitude, even dependency.  There isn't necessarily any malice in this.  It's an old art of creating strength out of weakness and Neapolitan amiability itself is part of it.  In Naples it has always been a necessary art of survival.  If respect is the crucial concept in social relations in Sicily, the Neapolitan counterpart is its opposite, disrespect.

I also liked this sentence:

In Naples you remembered being happy and never why.

The subtitle is How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City and the author is Anthony Flint.  Here is an excerpt:

Through school, Jane's sharp mind and her penchant for challenging authority — her parents raised her to pay attention to ethics but never blindly conform — made her a bit of a loner and slightly quirky.  Like many adolescents, she made up imaginary friends to talk to.  But hers were Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin.  Franklin "was interested in lofty things, but also in nitty-gritty, down-to-earth details, such as why the alley we were walking through wasn't paved, and who would pave it if it were paved.  He was interested in everything, so he was a very satisfying companion."  She explained traffic lights to him, and women's clothes, and the city's system of trash bins and collection.  Another imaginary friend was a Saxon chieftain named Cerdic, plucked from the pages of an English historical novel.

The parts of this book about Jacobs are splendid.  The parts about Moses are good, though they were more familiar to me.  I believe there has otherwise never been much biographical material on Jacobs's life.  Here is an excerpt from the book.  Here is one review.  Did you know about her book A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska?

I find myself wishing for a single word to express this concept.

I sometimes refer to the concept while reading.  I think: "this book has insight through horribleness."  It requires a certain twisted perceptiveness on the part of the author, but to be sure the author is not usually writing truth.

It differs from "insight through analysis," "insight through description," and related concepts.  I am never sure if I should report on books which offer insight through horribleness.  Jack Henry Abbott is a (dead) author who has insight through horribleness.

It is glorious in its 1100 pp. plus of text, analytical diatribes, love stories, monomaniacal rants, ecological analyses, and unevenly eloquent prose.  I'm on p.206 and so far it's a first-rate book on the Mexican-American border (Imperial is a county in California), low lifes, the desperation of America's empty spaces, and this is from an author who issues books like others do blog posts.

Suddenly I turn the page and see a heading: Warning of Impending Aridity.  Some text follows:

This book represents my attempt to become a better-informed citizen of North America.  Our "American dream" is founded on the notion of the self-sufficient homestead.  The "Mexican dream" may be a trifle different, but requires its kindred material basis.  Understanding how these two hopes played out over time required me to cultivate statistical parables about farm size, waterscapes, lettuce prices, etcetera.  I have harvested them (doubtless bruising overripe numbers on the way), and now present them to you.  Some of them may be too desiccated for your taste.  If you skip the chapters devoted to them, you will finish the book sooner, and never suspect the existence of my arithmetical errors.  As for you devotees of Dismal Science, I hope you will be awestruck by my sincerity about Mexicali Valley cotton prices.

Jason Kottke has an excellent post on Vollmann's book, with links and excerpts.  One description is: "Just write that it's like Robert Caro's The Power Broker," she said, "but with the attitude of Mike Davis's City of Quartz"…but even that turns out to be inadequate:

Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.

How's that for the best sentence I read last night (it's from Sam Anderson)?  As Vollmann himself once said: 'I used to think the Imperial Valley was hot, flat and boring,'

You can buy it here.  Here is an Imperial slide show.

…the author has crafted a how-to guide for living in the
information-glutted 21st century, and a convincing defense of our
just-Google-it culture, which many say is dumbing down the species. His
four best ideas:

The Rain Man stereotype is wrong.
Many people with autistic traits function quite well in society. In
fact, we can learn from this neurodiversity," since autistics excel at
mentally ordering information, a key trait in the digital age.

Our
constant Twittering and e-mail checking may look like ADD, but they
actually mean we're paying better attention to long-running stories,
such as a presidential election or a family member's career.

Google is making us smarter. The Internet has rendered it
unnecessary to store a lot of "general knowledge" in our heads.
Instead, we can specialize in the areas that truly matter to us.

As
culture moves online, it becomes easier to copy and share. "When access
is easy," writes Cowen, "we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the
bitty." Hence the rise of Twitter, six-word memoirs, and other small
doses of culture.

The link is here.

This comes when, after you finish a book, you are still so wrapped up in it that you can't bring yourself to pick up another one and leave behind the mental and emotional world from the previous book.  Natasha claims that reading A Happy Marriage has paralyzed her.  Here's hoping that I get my reading wife back; in the meantime I still have my wife.

Kelly Jane Torrance has a very good article on this question.  This part is quoting yours truly:

"People have this innate view – it comes from friendship and marriage –
that commitment is good. Which I agree with," he says. That view
shouldn't, he says, carry over to inanimate objects.

It's not that he's not a voracious reader – he finishes more
than a book a day, not including the "partials." He just wants to make
the most of his time.

"We should treat books a little more like we treat TV
channels," he argues. No one has trouble flipping away from a boring
series.

There is more:

"If I'm reading a truly, actively bad book, I'll throw it out," he
says. His wife will protest, but he points out that he's doing a public
service: "If I don't throw it out, someone else might read it." If that
person is one of the many committed to finishing a book once started,
he's actually doing harm.

Mr. Cowen, who says he couldn't finish Alexandre Dumas' "The
Three Musketeers" or John Dos Passos' "U.S.A.," offers a more direct
economic rationale. He notes that many up-and-coming writers complain
they can't break through in a best-seller-driven marketplace. "We're
also making markets more efficient," Mr. Cowen says. "If you can sample
more books, you're giving more people a chance."

1. Genesis, by Bernard Beckett.  A dystopia by a Kiwi author who writes (broadly) in the style of Margaret Atwood.  My complaint that it was too short is one of the better complaints you can have about a book.

2. Calvin, by F. Bruce Gordon.  This excellent biography brings French Renaissance theology to life.  Recommended.

3. Bangkok Days, by Lawrence Osborne.  Books on this topic are tricky because they have a tendency to exploit cheap salaciousness but this one is quite good and also conceptual in nature.  It prompted me to order more books by the author.

4. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes.  It's a well-written book with a great cover, a nice title, favorable reviews everywhere, and good information on each page.  Still, I don't quite see what it all adds up to.  But if you're inclined to read it, I don't see any reason not to.

5. The Generalissimo: Chiang-Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China, by Jay Taylor.  A new and apparently exhaustive biography, based on many new sources.  The first fifty pages (all I've read so far) read very well.  I am told that Chiang was "incorruptible" — who would have known?  "Brutal, but underrated" seems to be the takeaway.  This could well be one of the more important non-fiction books of the year.

Here are more images.  I thank a loyal MR commentator (sorry, I've lost the name), for the pointer.

Tyler Cowen, the economist, advises readers to “snap up foreign fiction
translated into English, if only because the selection pressures are so
severe”: in order for a publisher to think a work of fiction worth the
risk of translating and promoting to a foreign audience, its quality
has on average to be higher than the average for homegrown work.

Here is more.  The best place to follow new releases of such fiction is the blog Literary Saloon.