Category: Books

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.

Ours and yours, forget about the theory of tax incidence.  Just type in /marginalrevol-20 after any Amazon link, and we get a small chunk of the proceeds.  Alternatively, go to the Amazon box on the right side of this blog, just above the site meter.  It costs you nothing, and we thank you in advance. 

We do get some review copies, but most of the books we cover we buy with our own money.  The small extra income we get from Amazon referrals allows us to buy many more and give you a better sense of what is going on in the world of ideas.  I do collect CDs, but not books, which I treat as a burden.  If you are wondering, most of the books reviewed end up donated to the Harper Library at The Institute for Humane Studies, itself a worthy cause.

1. Michael Crichton, Next. Yes it is "writing-by-numbers," yes it is better than his recent work, but no, it is not nearly as good as Jurassic Park, Sphere (my favorite), Congo, or for that matter his book on Jasper Johns.  Some critics like it.  The start is OK but it falls apart as it proceeds.  By the way, here is my previous post on human-chimp hybrids. 

2. Robert Bolaño, Distant Star.  A minor masterpiece.  He is another of those first-tier Latin writers, along with Asturias and Rulfo, who for mysterious reasons no one in the United States seems to read.

3. Richard Powers, The Echo Maker.  A deserving winner of a National Book Award, plus I am interested in the neurology theme.  I find many of Power’s earlier books too intellectualized, but this one held my attention throughout.  By the way, I also tried the non-fiction National Book winner, the book about the Dust Bowl years, but it didn’t hold my interest.

4. The Poor Always Pay Back: The Grameen II Story, by Asif Dowla and Dipal Barua.  A very good look at the micro-credit movement.

Addendum: The NYT picks its ten best books of the year.

O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It, on ebay.  How long before there is a free pdf on the web?

This paper explores some of the scholarship that influenced Milton
Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz’s "A Monetary History".  It shows that the
ideas of several Chicago economists — Henry Schultz, Henry Simons,
Lloyd Mints, and Jacob Viner — left clear marks.  It argues, however,
that the most important influence may have been Wesley Clair Mitchell
and his classic book "Business Cycles" (1913).  Mitchell, and the NBER,
provided the methodology for "A Monetary History", in particular the
emphasis on compiling long time series of monthly data and analyzing
the effects of specific variables on the business cycle.  A common
methodology and the stability of monetary relationships produced
similar conclusions about money.  Friedman and Schwartz deemphasized
Mitchell’s "bank-centric" view of the monetary transmission process,
but they reinforced Mitchell’s conclusion that money had an
independent, predictable, and important influence on the business cycle.

Here is the link, here is a non-gated version.

I have a new nomination:

[Alice] Sheldon (1915-87) was the most important sf writer ever to live in the
Washington area.  She also was, in her varied career, a psychologist, a
CIA officer and a chicken farmer.  Her biographer, Julie Phillips,
combines diligent archival work with more than 40 interviews to
successfully portray one of sf’s most brilliant — and tortured —
authors.

That is from a review of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon, by Julie Phillips.

Do, in the comments, give us your nominations for this category, but please make sure you don’t have any intrinsic interest in the topic of the book.

1. Dave Eggers, What is the What.  Despite its preciousness, I quite liked A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  Sadly this quasi-fictional tale of a Sudanese refugee reveals that most contemporary writers are lightweights, pure and simple.

2. Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir.  I loved Palimpset, volume 1, but this follow-up is junk.  Julian is his best book, but overall he has more misses than hits.

3. Othello.  I’ll teach this in my spring Law and Literature class.  I read Shakespeare as despising the Moor for turning his back on his natural Muslim allies and fighting them in Cyprus.  In a strange way Othello deserves some of the bad treatment he receives — why should anyone trust him?

4. The new Stephen Dubner book…I am not reading it yet, but I don’t want to be slow with the news.  Discover the other Dubner.

5. Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic.  This is from the guy who brought us Everything Bad is Good for You, except it turns out that cholera isn’t good for you, it is bad for you.  A brisk and readable story of public health issues in Victorian London.

6. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold [Crónica de una muerte anunciada].  I regard One Hundred Years of Solitude as a good but overrated book; this slim volume may well be his most exciting fiction and it is clearly the most humorous.  I’m also fond on his non-fiction book about the kidnapping and volume one of his memoirs, plus of course the short stories; that is what he will be known for.