Category: Books

1. Lynn Freed, Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home – Her message is that to be a great writer you must be brutal in exposing the truth and somewhat brutal period; a short memoir of female South African ambition, recommended.

2. Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents – Western study of Orientalism was not always racist or biased, a useful corrective to Edward Said.

3. Roy Richard Grinker, Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism – One of the better books on the topic, by an anthropologist with an autistic daughter, most interesting for its cross-cultural perspectives.

4. Charles Clover, The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat.  Yes the topic is "overfished," but this book stands above the others.  Among other virtues, it has a good treatment of which regulations and property rights management systems are actually working.

5. ESPN-NBA; there is more logic on this site than almost any blog, worth the price.

Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra.

I am fairly confident in that pronouncement, even though a) it is only January 11, and b) I have read only the first hundred pages.

Here is a New York Times story, here is a New York Times review.  It helps to have visited Bombay.

Any new visitor to [Nigeria] is bound to notice the odd phenomenon that literally thousands of houses and buildings in cities and towns bear the message "THIS HOUSE IS NOT FOR SALE," painted prominently near the front door.  Ask any Nigerian the purpose of the message and they will quickly tell you that it is to prevent 419 [scamming].  Apparently, one popular method of 419 is to assume the identity of a real estate agent or simply a property owner trying to sell one’s house.  In Nigeria’s cities and towns, where the real estate market is tight, buyers can be induced to make down payments to secure a later purchase, and in some cases entire transactions have been completed before the buyer discovered that the deal was a scam.

That is from Daniel Jordan Smith’s informative and entertaining A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria.  Here is the book’s home page.

Top 10 collections of translated poetry, from a single Chinese store:

1. Paul Celan, Selected Poetry and Prose
2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems
3. Dylan Thomas, Selected Poems
4. Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems
5. Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems
6. Allen Ginsberg, Selected Poems
7. Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems
8. Constantine P. Cavafy, Collected Poems
9. Federico Garcia Lorca, Selected Poetry
10. The Eddas

Not a bad list, I would like to know more about their clientele.  The top four "General Titles in Poetry" are:

1. Friedrich Hölderlin, Collected Prose
2. Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Holderlin’s Poetry
3. Wang Zuoliang, History of English Poetry
4. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

Thanks to Yan Li for the pointer.

Keith Ellison made history Thursday, becoming the first Muslim member
of Congress and punctuating the occasion by taking a ceremonial oath
with a Quran once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

(From the NYTimes). I wonder if Jefferson every took scissors to the Quran to cut out all the ridiculous bits, the way he did to the Bible?   

You can’t find "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" at the
Fairfax City Regional Library anymore.  Or "The Education of Henry
Adams" at Sherwood Regional.  Want Emily Dickinson’s "Final Harvest"? 
Don’t look to the Kingstowne branch.

It’s not that the books are
checked out.  They’re just gone.  No one was reading them, so librarians
took them off the shelves and dumped them.

Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works
have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new
computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at
least 24 months.

First Tower, now this.  In any case I do not think they are using the correct algorithm; here is more.  Circulation figures, by the way, have become a bargaining chip for more government funding.  That, plus growing demands on space, explain the ruthless culling underway.

A loyal MR reader writes:

Why are there so many well-padded books out there that really ought to be nice, long articles?

David Sucher has raised similar questions in the MR comments.  The answer is simple: most people don’t read the books they buy.  But they like the self-image generated by the book purchase decision, and they like to feel they are getting something for their money.  Driven by market demand, book publishers demand a certain amount of heft and sometimes this means padding.

Yes there is a tendency toward shorter "books," some of which are called blogs.  The price is lower.  Another loyal MR reader once wrote in praise of MR: "if I wanted to read something longer I would read a book or something".  Or not read, as the case may be.

Addendum: Note also that marketing expenditures are more or less constant, relative to the size of the book.  Higher marketing expenditures (definitely the trend) thus spur higher-margin and typically larger books, as suggested by the Alchian and Allen theorem (why buy a big ad campaign for book which sells for a penny?).  For those of us who actually read the books, as book choice goes up, the importance of marketing goes up, and the padding goes up as well.

Here are some picks, including by yours truly, but mostly with a British slant.  The top three "winners" are:

1

The God Delusion Richard Dawkins

2

The Blunkett Tapes David Blunkett

3

Everyman Philip Roth

You’ll also find a list of underrated books…

Bibles for porn stars (link is safe for work).  Thanks to Brian Hollar for the pointer.

Has science fiction influenced your work?

It’s about the only thing I read.  General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up.  Science fiction is about everything else.

That is from a fun interview, Discover magazine, January 2007.  Here is Minsky’s new book.  What makes humans special, in his view, is that they have multiple and quite different ways of thinking about virtually any problem, including the mathetmatical, the literary, the symbolic, and so on.

I am unfamiliar with speed reading techniques, so I cannot evaluate them.

The best way to read quickly is to read lots.  And lots.  And to have started a long time ago.  Then maybe you know what is coming in the current book.  Reading quickly is often, in a margin-relevant way, close to not reading much at all. 

Note that when you add up the time costs of reading lots, quick readers don’t consume information as efficiently as you might think.  They’ve chosen a path with high upfront costs and low marginal costs.  "It took me 44 years to read this book" is not a bad answer to many questions about reading speed.

Another way to read quickly is to cut bait on the losers.  I start ten or so books for every one I finish.  I don’t mind disliking a book, and I never regret having picked it up and started it.  I am ruthless in my discards.

Fairfax and Arlington counties have wonderful public library systems, and I go about five times a week to one branch or another.  Usually I scan the New Books shelf and look at nothing else.  I can go shopping at the best store in the world, almost any day, for free. 

I am both interested and compulsive.  How can I let that book go unread or at least unsampled?  I can’t.

Virtually every Tuesday I visit the New Books table at Borders.  Tuesday is when most new books arrive.  Who knows what might be there?  How can I let that New Books table go unvisited?  I can’t.  About half the time I buy something, but I always walk away happy.

Here is another reading tip: do less of other activities.

Blogging hasn’t hurt my writing, it has helped by non-fiction reading, but I read fewer novels.  That is the biggest intellectual opportunity cost of MR, though for the last month I’ve made a concerted effort to read more fiction.  But it is not like the old days when I would set aside two months to work through The Inferno, Aeneid, and the like, with multiple secondary sources and multiple translations at hand.  I no longer have the time or the mood, and I miss this.

Here are two earlier posts on time management.

Addendum: Jane Galt comments.  And here is Daniel Akst.