Category: Books

We continue Underrated Week, noting that this entry is sure to inspire philosophic debate.  Can it plausibly be argued that Michael Jordan is an underrated basketball player?  That Wayne Gretzky is an underrated hockey player?  Yes, I say.

When it comes to the Western classics, I hold a few works above all others, and by an order of magnitude: Homer, the Hebrew Bible, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Shakespeare, Proust, Moby Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses (shriek if you wish), and the two major novels of Tolstoy.

Yes, those are the most underrated classics.  There are simply too many people who lump them in with Rabelais, Stendhal, Twain, Mann and other totally splendid but slightly less than divine works.  If I could read Italian, Dante might also make the list. 

Next in line would be Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Goethe’s Faust (German language version only), and of course Bleak House of Charles Dickens; read the latter carefully and you will see plot twists that very few if any critics catch.  If you’re simply listing the best novel whose wonders most educated people have no clue of (one extreme form of underrating), Bleak House is the clear winner (loser?) on the entire list.

Sara Bongiorni and her family attempted to live without goods made in
China for a year, and found that it was no simple task.  She has
documented the project in a book called, A Year Without ‘Made in China.

In a book?  A printed book?  You mean the kind of book that is made out of um…paper and ink?  Good luck Sara, I love you but for at least a year — maybe more — I won’t be reading any Chinese goods you try to send my way…

Here is the link.

Yes it is "Underrated Week" and our next genre is science fiction.

But – sorry guys — I don’t think there is much underrated science fiction.  You might think the genre as a whole is underrated, but within the genre there are so many sad desperate souls (I know, I am one of them) who will clutch at straws and elevate the mediocre into the worthwhile and the worthwhile into the superlative.

Science fiction has been treading water since the 1960s.  Since that time its most glorious achievements have been on the screen, not on the printed page.  There are some excellent individual books, such as Eon or Hyperion, but the genre is mostly retreads.  Nor do I think much of attempts to cross science fiction with "serious fiction," whether it is coming from Philip K. Dick or Doris Lessing.  Yes the idea is cool but the execution is usually quite flawed.

Still we all must have our picks, so here are mine:

1. Sphere, from Michael Crichton.  Forget the last few books.  He is the best science fiction writer in contemporary times, though his publisher works very hard to make sure that label does not stick.

2. Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon.  Read Stapleton if you fervently believe that British Hegelianism is the missing element in most science fiction.  Yet this is probably my favorite science fiction novel of all time, who else can credibly skip over 20,000 years in a single breath?  "Civilizations rose and fell, yet now we must move on," or something like that.  Honorable mentions go to Stapledon’s Odd John and especially Sirius.

3. Jonathan Lethem, Gun with Occasional Music.  This is marketed as contemporary literature, which keeps away the science fiction fans.

It is hard to call Joe Haldeman underrated but still there are fans who don’t know he is one of the best science fiction writers, period.

I guess there is some underrated science fiction after all.

Crying Uncle: OK people, I retract the claim "Science fiction has been treading water since the 1960s."  Card and Butler are the most convincing counterexamples.

…is great fun.  I still can’t decide if it is a "good bad book," like Shantaram, or a "good good book," but it’s a good book of some kind or another. 

Imagine a cross between Memento and The Time Traveler’s Wife and you get halfway there.  There’s also plenty on when cheap talk equilibria matter (I hope you’ve seen Saw) and some visual influences from graphic novels and alternative typographies.  In any case it should become a big hit.

Many of you have asked for posts on the most underrated books.  Today will start a short flirtation with this topic ("underrated week," which of course starts on Friday) and we’ll break books down by category.

For mystery, I’ll nominate the works of Henning Mankel, although arguably he is not underrated any more by critics.  Verissimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans is my other pick.  Or how about Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx?

Readers, comments are open…

Here is one nomination for the most overrated novel of the 20th century.

I wonder about Gide and Sartre as well.  J.D. Salinger is too easy a target, as is John Barth.  How about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird?  I keep on thinking there is an obvious and juicy British nomination (just look up how the Penguin Guide to Classical Music treats Elgar recordings), but I can’t settle on a single glaring name which stands above all others.

For the most overrated major author, I’ll pick Carlos Fuentes.  I love Mexico (and I’ve tried reading his works in Spanish), but I find he deadens the place rather than bringing it to life.  Had he not been around for the fashionably left-wing, anti-imperialist 1960s, he’d just be another guy with a pen.

The most overrated good book is Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, which although very good is far from his best work.

What are your picks?

The Lott-Levitt dispute is a distraction but John Lott’s Freedomnomics has plenty of interesting economics.  I liked this bit regarding free-riding and the early history of radio:

…free-riding problems initially seemed almost insurmountable in providing radio service….some peope doubted there was any way to make listeners pay.  In 1922, Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, declared: "Nor do I believe there is any practical method of payment from the listeners."  Others assumed that radio transmissions would eventually be funded by paying subscribers, but no one could devise a method for limiting broadcasts to subscribers’ receivers.  Consequently, some believed that government would have to provide the service…

So what happened?  Did private businessmen throw up their hands and invite the government to run the industry?  Was society denied the benefits of radio because no one could solve the free-riding problem?  Of course not.  The problem was eventually resolved in 1922 when AT&T discovered that it could make money by selling radio advertising airtime….With enough at stake, companies find amazingly creative ways to solve free-riding problems.

Over time, the typical ten-acre swatch of cemetery ground, for example, contains enough coffin wood to construct more than forty houses, nine hundred-plus tons of casket steel, and another twenty thousand tons of vault concrete.  To that add a volume of formallin sufficient to fill a small backyard swimming pool and untold gallons of pesticide and weed killer to keep the gravehard preternaturally green.

That is from the really quite interesting Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial, by Mark Harris.  As you may have guessed, the book is a plea for eco-friendly burials.  As for me, I would like my body to be disposed of at a profit, though I doubt if we will have seen enough sectoral deregulation by then…

This newly translated novel is as good as they say it is.  You can add it to My Favorite Things Norwegian.

Buy it here.  Here is the first chapter. 

I wish to thank the many loyal MR readers (buyers!) who pre-ordered my Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.  On Amazon.com it went from non-existent in the rankings to a peak of #220, hovering most of the day in the mid-200s.

The offer of access to my secret blog still stands; pre-order the book and write to [email protected]. 

By the way, here is Daniel Klein on the use of tying to produce public goods.  Or think of the economics this way: ex post copyright brings monopoly rents to some producers.  Some of those profits are competed away by advertising, except in this case "the ad" is intended to provide real (not just persuasive) benefits to the consumers.  Here are books and papers on efficient rent-seeking.

Addendum: I’ve now been adding new posts to it, but of course I can’t tell you their topics!

It is simple.  Pre-order a copy of my forthcoming Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.

It is by far the most fun book I have written, and it was written with you in mind.

Here is the Amazon link, which also offers a book synopsis.  Here is Barnes&Noble.  Then, just send an email to [email protected] and tell me you bought the book.  I’ll send you the site address right away. 

But please, in receiving the site address you are making a pledge not to give it away, publish it, blog it, or otherwise reveal it.  Please don’t, it is our agreement.  You are also pledging your word that you actually pre-ordered the book.  I appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

My secret blog has 43 posts, plus who knows I may blog there a bit more or take special requests over there.  I would describe it as quirkier and more offbeat than MR, sometimes ribald, and in some ways more personal. 

This offer won’t last forever, and the secret blog won’t be up forever, so pre-order the book now!

And please, do forward this post to at least two (or maybe more) of your friends.

Marc Andreesen gives a list, what do you think?  Marc just started, he is already one of the best bloggers out there.

The book is very stimulating, here is one excerpt from my review on Slate.com:

Another human failing stems from the nature of happiness.  In the short run, people’s happiness is often shaped more by how many "positive events" occur in their day than by the arrival of one important piece of good news.  Winning $100,000 in the lottery feels almost as good as winning $1 million.  We therefore look, consciously or not, for small but repeated successes when we should be shooting for "one large win."  It’s easy to see why:  Big payoffs come only rarely, and perhaps late in life; in the meantime, who wants to keep on feeling like a loser?

Here is another bit:

Oddly, Taleb’s argument is weakest in the area he knows best, namely finance. Only on Wall Street do people seem to give proper credence–not too much, not too little–to very unlikely events. It is easy enough to use hindsight to identify the black swans Wall Street has missed, such as stock-price crashes. But it is harder to argue that the market undervalues surprise more generally. Stock and bond markets offer simple ways to bet on black swans. In financial terminology, you can purchase an option that is "deeply out of the money"; for instance, you can bet that Google shares will rise or fall in value an enormous amount over the next three months. These investments pay off precisely when the rest of the market does not anticipate the scope for surprise. Yet "long-shot" strategies are well-studied, and they do not yield extra profit. In other words, organized securities markets track rare and unpredictable events as well as the current state of knowledge will allow. If you don’t believe me, it is easy enough to bet on the Los Angeles Clippers to win the 2008 NBA title, or to bet on the longest odds at the racetrack. Such actions are hardly the path to either happiness or riches.

Here is my previous post on the book.  Here is Taleb’s podcast on EconTalk.  If you’ve read the book, do tell us what you thought of it…