Results for “best fiction” 318 found
What I’ve been reading
1. Pierre LeMaitre, Three Days and a Life. French crime fiction, conceptual, very good for those who like to read in this direction. I am glad I finished it. The first half is pretty good, the second half excellent.
2. Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud. The legacy of Wells and Stapledon surfaces yet again, if you are looking for an early but compelling science fiction novel you haven’t read, try this. The ecological features of the story are striking too.
3. John Wyndham, Chocky. How would/should parents react if one of their children appeared to be possessed? What weights should you assign to “possession by spirits,” as opposed to “possession by aliens”? Both conceptually intriguing and well-written. Also read his The Midwich Cuckoos on similar themes.
4. Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed: A Retelling of the Tempest. Given the author is so famous, it’s strange this book hasn’t received more attention. Perhaps that is because it requires a reasonable degree of familiarity with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, worth the reread if you must or are so inclined. This is one of Atwood’s best novels, and it focuses on an over the hill director’s attempt to stage Shakespeare at the local prison.
5. William Shakespeare, The Tempest. Given that I basically never regret a Shakespeare reread, I suppose I should do them more often. Folger edition of course.
My Conversation with Andy Weir
Andy was great, here is the text and audio, here is the introductory summary:
Before writing a single word of his new book Artemis, Andy Weir worked out the economics of a lunar colony. Without the economics, how could the story hew to the hard sci-fi style Weir cornered the market on with The Martian? And, more importantly, how else can Tyler find out much a Cantonese meal would run him on the moon?
In addition to these important questions of lunar economics, Andy and Tyler talk about the technophobic trend in science fiction, private space efforts, seasteading, cryptocurrencies, the value of a human life, the outdated Outer Space Treaty, stories based on rebellion vs. cooperation, Heinlein, Asimov, Weir’s favorite episode of Star Trek, and the formula for finding someone else when stranded on a lonely planet.
My favorite part was this, which Andy answered with no hesitation:
COWEN: What if there were two immortal people, let’s say it’s the two of us, placed on opposite sides of the Earth, an Earth-like planet, and we can wander freely with no constraints but just foot speed. How long does it take us to find each other?
WEIR: Can we collude in advance in any way?
COWEN: No, we cannot.
WEIR: OK.
COWEN: But we know we’re trying to find each other.
WEIR: We know we’re trying to find each other. Well, we should both — but can we have a — are we both rational actors and we —
COWEN: We’re as rational as you and I are; take that as you wish.
WEIR: So, no?
[laughter]
COWEN: No.
WEIR: I think the best thing to do would be for both of us to pick an arbitrary great circle to walk, around the planet, and leave markings along the way denoting what direction you’re walking. So I would arbitrarily pick a direction to go and I would just go that direction with the intention of circumnavigating the entire globe, and I would walk at maybe half what is a comfortable speed for me. And you would do the same thing. Now, somewhere, our two — in fact, in two points — our great circles will intersect.
COWEN: Right.
WEIR: And when one of us reaches the other one’s, then they start following the markers at full speed, and then you get the guy. Right?
COWEN: And what’s your best guess as to how long that would take?
WEIR: Well, if you pick two points, I’m guessing one of us would have to walk probably about a quarter of the way around the planet before we found the other one’s great circle. And then you’d have to walk again. So in terms of circumnavigation times, it would take you 2x to get all the way around the planet, because my initial plan was you’d walk half-speed. So I’m guessing it would be a quarter of that, so one-half x to get to your great circle, and then a quarter x to find you along your great circle, on average, I’m guessing. So one-half plus a quarter, so .75x. So three-quarters of the time that it would take to circumnavigate the planet.
COWEN: OK, great answer.
WEIR: That’s my guess.
Do read/listen to the whole thing…
Friday assorted links
1. Chinese restaurants and gyms sometimes livestream customers without their consent. And why is McDonald’s struggling in Beijing? And claims about relationships in Shanghai. And do the Chinese fear a new culture of Buddhist complacency?
2. Andrew Batson’s best books of 2017.
3. How many papers really end up without a citation?
4. The uninsured don’t use emergency rooms more than other patients.
How to understand modern China
Ari emails me:
On a completely different note, if I want to understand modern China what books, articles, etc. should I be reading? Do I start with a textbook? Historical scholarship? Fiction? Is Wikipedia the way to go?
Start by asking someone who understands modern China is my first response! But since you have failed that test, here are a few pointers:
1. Unless your mental architecture is very different from mine, books about sequences of dynasties are mind-numbing and not readily absorbed. So you first need some context to fit those pieces into.
2. Here is a wonderful syllabus on Chinese economic history, by Dr. Melanie Meng Xue. Read it all. I don’t find most books on China to be very useful. They may be full of true claims, but the frequency of repetition, across books, tends to be very high.
3. Set up a Twitter/RSS feed to follow China today. Here are seven excellent sources, more are listed at the end. Set up a separate Twitter account to follow people who cover China, they are more interesting than those who write on U.S. domestic politics. After all, this is mankind’s greatest story of the current day.
4. Find an “entry point” into China of independent intrinsic interest to you, be it basketball, artificial intelligence, Chinese opera, whatever. Follow that area, and don’t bother trying to generalize. Just have fun.
5. Subscribe to the email newsletter of Bill Bishop.
6. Alternate your interest between stories that make China seem quite normal and stories that imply China is pretty weird. But what is the right balance of those? Nobody knows! Experiment, realizing you don’t have a useful feedback mechanism. Here are a few China stories I have sampled recently:
The Chinese don’t want us to call it tofu any more.
Beijingers read on average an hour a day.
Chinese man repaints road markings to make his commute quicker.
P.F. Chang to open in Shanghai. But marketed as an American bistro.
Xi Jinping presses military overhaul, and two generals disappear (NYT), an underreported series of stories, try this one too.
7. Travel to every part of China. The country has the best food in the world (tied with India), is quite safe, has navigable infrastructure, and you can cross much of the country in a day by high-speed rail. Outside of Beijing and Shanghai, you might find five-star hotels for less than $100 a night. Go pre-equipped with multiple VPNs, and figure out the English-Chinese translation programs on your smart phone. They come in handy and many Chinese are already quite familiar with them. Learn some street signs, with quizzes.
8. Now go back and study all those dynasties.
Books that had hidden influence on me
Way back when, I considered the ten books that influenced me most, a list I still stand by. In response, someone asked me to name the books that influenced me, but whose influence I probably was not aware of. Let’s ignore the semi-contradiction in that request and plow straight ahead! Here goes, noting that if memory serves I read most of these between the ages of 10 to 12:
1. Alexander Kotov, Think Like a Grandmaster. From this book I realized you could think you understood a chess position, but then later learn you didn’t really understand it at all. A huge lesson, one I learned again and to a higher degree when high-quality chess computers came along. Most of the commentariat on economic and social affairs could use a reminder on this one. This book also taught me that you learn by doing — trying to solve actual problems — not so much from pure reading. Or the two in close conjunction. It may be the distortions of memory, but still I feel this is one of the best books I ever have read. Hail the Soviet training system!
2. Bobby Fischer, My Sixty Memorable Games of Chess. Reflects a certain kind of classicism in thinking and method. Later, it was revealed much of the analysis was faulty and in part was from Larry Evans and not Fischer himself.
3. Reuben Fine, Basic Chess Endings. I wasn’t influenced so much by this book itself as by a long series of articles in Chess Life and Review, showing the analysis was full of holes. See my remarks on Kotov.
4. David Kahn, The Code-Breakers, The Story of Secret Writing. I read this one quite young, and learned that problems are to be solved! I also developed some sense of what a history could look like and what a history should report. I recall my uncle thinking it deeply strange that a boy my age should be reading a book of such length.
5. Rudolf McShane and Jakow Trachtenberg, The Trachtenberg System of Basic Mathematics. From this I learned how powerful the individual human mind could be, and also how much school wasn’t teaching me. It began to occur to me that the mainstream doesn’t necessarily have the best or only methods. That said, non-mainstream approaches still have the responsibility of coming up with the right answer. Query: does it these days ever make sense to actually use this stuff?
6. The Baseball Encyclopedia, or something like that. From this book I began to figure out statistics and how they fit into broader patterns of historical explanation. I spent a lot of time with this one even before the age of ten. It helped me understand my baseball cards in terms of a much longer perspective and also, if I recall correctly, it explained the underlying meaning of many of the statistics, albeit in what would today count as a very naive, non-Moneyball manner. I still know that Chief Wilson hit 36 triples in 1912.
Honorable mentions: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Joy of Sex, all given to me by my mother. I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking. I also consumed numerous sports memoirs, such as Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer and also the war memoir Guadalcanal Diary. From those I began to think about the relationships between character, work habits, teamwork, and success. The Making of Star Trek helped me master the details of what was then my favorite TV series, and also to think about cosmopolitanism across different kinds of intelligent beings. In addition to chess I also was influenced by playing paper and dice war games, most of all Barbossa (the exact title may differ slightly), a really scary game where you have to consider the possibility the Nazis could have won and thus think about the contingency of history. I began to understand that violence could be a reality that stood above all else and how important it was to avoid such a scenario.
Then there is youthful science fiction, though perhaps that someday gets a post of its own. I read a lot of books about music too, many about jazz solos and chord composition, including in American popular music. Much earlier, maybe ages 5-8, it was maps and books full of facts about the world (ahem) and animals, most of all the taxonomic arrangement of the animal kingdom.
Finally, at the time I was fully aware that I wasn’t getting a single one of these titles through my formal school system.
My favorite or most influential Spanish-language works
Greg Irving emails me:
Hello Prof. Cowen,
I wonder if you might be tempted to create a blog post, at your convenience, of Spanish language works, ideally read in the original, that have most impacted either a) your appreciation for some till then unknown nuance or beauty in the language or b) your knowledge of/appreciation for some aspect of life in general. Might you?
Quizás obviamente, soy alguien que va aprendiendo el idioma poco a poco sólo de interés y no de necesidad. Si usted se digna a crear una respuesta por este correo electrónico, o en su blog, me alegraría mucho. Gracias por todo el conocimiento que nos da en sus escritos y por leer mi nota.
My Spanish-language reading is slow, but these are the works I found it profitable to devote a great deal of time to. They have influenced me significantly, and mostly I found the English-language version a poor substitute. Here goes:
1. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones. This was super-slow going, but it is one of my favorite books of all time, philosophical and conceptual and in Spanish deeply hilarious. OK in English, but this book alone is almost reason enough to study Spanish.
2. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo. Imagine redoing parts of Dante, with more narrative, in rural Mexico and with lots of comedy. The English-language version does not come close.
3. Julio Cortázar, Rayuela [Hopscotch]. One of my very favorite 20th century novels, again unsatisfying to me in English, I would not recommend that you try at all. Also try his short stories, most of all Bestiario and Historias de cronopios y de famas.
4. Jose Donoso, El obsceno pájaro de la noche [The Obscene Bird of Night]. A masterpiece, quite neglected in the U.S., I found this one so hard I often had to juxtapose it with the English-language text to read it at all.
5. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Noticia de un Secuestro [Notice of a Kidnapping], and Vivir para contarla [Living in Order to Tell It]. Oddly, I think his greatest works are the non-fiction. But these are at least pretty good in English too, unlike what is listed above.
6. Pablo Neruda. Non-Spanish readers certainly have heard of him, or maybe like him, but don’t really have a sense of how he is one of the very greatest poets of all time. It is Canto General, a book-length narrative poem retelling of the story of the New World, that influenced me most, but I love all the classic Neruda poems.
I don’t find it so profitable to read 17th century Cervantes in Spanish, though the defect is likely mine. The Savage Detectives and One Hundred Years of Solitude I find as good in English as in Spanish; Marquez himself suggested that was true for this work. Vargas Llosa is “good enough” in English, except perhaps for the inscrutable Conversation in the Cathedral, which I cannot follow in either language. Javier Marías I find “good enough” in English. The Goytisolo brothers are often too hard for me, not fun in English but I can’t quite manage the Spanish, perhaps in my dotage. Fuentes has never clicked for me, period. Hombres de maíz, by Asturias, is especially good in Spanish and pretty much neglected in the English-speaking world.
What else?
My visit to an Amazon bookstore
My commentary here is late to the party, but I had not visited a branch before. Here are my impressions, derived from the Columbus Circle outlet in Manhattan:
1. It is a poorly designed store for me, most of all because it does not emphasize new releases. I feel I am familiar with a lot of older titles, or I went through a more or less rational process of deciding not to become familiar with them. Their current popularity, as measured say by Amazon rankings, does not cause me to reassess those judgments. For me, aggregate Amazon popularity has no real predictive power, except perhaps I don’t want to buy books everyone liked. “A really smart person says to consider this again,” however, would revise my prior estimates.
2. For me, the very best bookstore and bookstore layout is Daunt, in London, Marylebone High St. You are hit by a blast of what is new, but also selected according to intellectual seriousness rather than popularity. You can view many titles at the same time, because they use the “facing out” function just right for their new arrivals tables. Some of the rest of the store is arranged “by country,” much preferable to having say China books in separate sections of history, travel, biography, and so on.
3. I am pleased that fiction is given so much space toward the front of the store. I do not see this as good for me, but it is a worthwhile counterweight to the ongoing tendency of American book markets to reward non-fiction, or at least what is supposed to be non-fiction.
4. I have mixed feelings about the idea of all books facing outward. On the positive side, books not facing outward tend to be ignored. On the downside, this also limits the potential for hierarchicalization through visual display. All books facing outwards is perhaps a bit too much like no books facing outwards.
Overall I am struck by how internet commerce is affecting Christie’s and Sotheby’s in a broadly similar fashion. The auction houses used to put out different genres, such as Contemporary, European Painting, 20th Century, and so on, for 3-4 day windows, and then they would display virtually everything up for auction. Now they have a single big display, with highlights from each area, and the rest viewable on-line. That display then shows for about three weeks. Like Amazon, they are opting to emphasize what is popular and to let on-line displays pick up the tails and niches. In all cases, that means less turnover in the displays. That is information-rich for infrequent visitors, who can take in more at once, but information-poor in relative terms for frequent visitors. As a somewhat infrequent visitor to auction houses, I gain, but for bookstores I would prefer they cater to the relatively frequent patrons.
5. I am most worried by the prominent center table at the entrance, which presents “Books with 4.8 Amazon stars or higher.” I saw a book on mixology, a picture book of Los Angeles, a Marvel comics encyclopedia, a book connected to the musical Hamilton, and a series of technique-oriented cookbooks, such as Harold McGee, a very good manual by the way. Isabel Wilkerson was the closest they had to “my kind of intelligent non-fiction.” Neil Hilbon represented poetry, of course his best-known book does have a five-star average, fortunately “…these poems are anything but saccharine.”
Unfortunately, the final message is that Amazon will work hard so that controversial books do not receive Amazon’s highest in-store promotions. Why not use software to measure the quality of writing or maybe even thought in a book’s reviews, and thereby assign it a new grade?: “Here are the books the smart people chose to write about”?
6. I consider myself quite pro-Amazon, still to me it feels dystopic when an attractive young saleswoman says so cheerily to (some) customers: “Thank you for being Prime!”
7. I suspect the entire store is a front to display and sell gadgets, at least I hope it is.
8. I didn’t buy anything.
*The Second World Wars*
The subtitle is How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, and the author is Victor Davis Hanson. I loved this book, even though before I started I felt I didn’t want to read yet another tract on WWII. Most of the focus is on the logistics and management side:
By 1944, the U.S. Navy was larger than the combined fleets of all the other major powers.
At the start of the War, the United States accounted for about 55-60 percent of world oil output.
The U.S. soldier was treated for psychiatric disorders at a rate ten times that of German troops. The average hospital stay for an American soldier was 117 days and 36 percent were not returned to the front. Supplies for a typical American soldier exceeded 80 pounds per day.
The German army killed about 1.5 GIs for every German soldier lost.
The highest American fatality rate was in the Pacific, at 4 percent, still a remarkably low rate for the war as a whole. America did so well because of high gdp and remarkably efficient supply lines and equipment and air and naval support.
Poland alone lost more citizens than all of the Western European nations, Britain, and the U.S. combined.
WWII took place in a strange technological window when weapons had advanced much more rapidly than protective body armor. That is one reason why casualties from the fighting were so high. The war is also unusual for having had so many battles and fronts where the victor gave up more lives than the loser, including of course the war as a whole.
Hanson considers the American submarine offensive against Japan as perhaps the most “cost-efficient” offensive from the war.
“No navy in military history had started a war so all-powerful as the Japanese and ended it so utterly ruined and in such a brief period of time…”
Strongly recommended, a shoo-in for the top tier of the year’s best non-fiction list, the writing is gripping too.
Here is a HistoryNet review: “utterly original.” Here is Matthew Continetti at NR: “Masterful.”
My favorite things Austrian, part I writers
Yes, I am in Vienna, but I will take this country in discrete chunks because the contributions are so significant. Today is literature, here are a few remarks:
1. Thomas Bernhard. One of the very best post-war writers, obsessive and funny and extremely neurotic. The Loser [Der Untegeher] is the one that works best in English, though his unique style is not at its most fevered pitch. Wittgensteins Neffe [Wittgenstein’s Nephew] is my favorite, one of the smartest and funniest novels I know, close to perfect. Das Kalkwerk is entrancing, though I suspect unreadable in English. He remains grossly underrated in the English-speaking world, mostly for linguistic reasons but also he is a rebellion against the idea of a culture of entertainment. In my personal canon he is one of the more significant writers.
2. Hermann Broch. Death of Virgil is a 20th century classic, again much under-read amongst the American educated classes. Die Schlafwandler [The Sleepwalkers] is impressive, and perhaps seen as his major work, but it is more uneven in quality and eventually it falls apart.
3. Robert Musil. There are wonderful and historically significant major passages in The Man Without Qualities, but the drama loses its interest, the loose ends are not tied up, and ultimately I will call him overrated, especially compared to Bernhard or Broch.
4. Peter Handke. In German only, I say, and in any case not my taste. He is serious about politics in exactly the wrong way, and I hope future generations reject him.
5. Elfriede Jelinek. Many were surprised when she won the 2014 Nobel Prize in literature, and you are most likely to know her for writing the book behind the movie The Piano Teacher. Like Wagner, you could say her work is “better than it sounds,” but still it doesn’t sound that good. I find it irritating and offensive, plus she is a communist. Nonetheless, irritating fiction is better than boring fiction, see “Günter Wilhelm Grass.”
6. Karl Kraus. I used to think his work would eventually “come together” for me, but the more of it I read, and the more I read about him, I conclude he is a figure of historic interest only, and a good aphorist, but not an enduring literary artist. He was a keen satirist of the mores and totalitarian tendencies of his time, and that is to be appreciated. But if you try reading the rambling 500-page The Last Days of Mankind, in either English or German, you will conclude it was a work of its time only.
7. Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo Hofmannstahl. Both remain underrated, and don’t forget Hofmannstahl’s libretti for Richard Strauss, including Der Rosenkavalier.
8. Christoph Ransmayr. He is popular in contemporary Austrian literature. I was not convinced, but will try again, if you love The Last World let me know.
9. Heimito von Doderer — I have not yet read him but am hopeful.
9b. Ingeborg Bachmann. I just bought some this morning.
10. Johann Nestroy. From the Enlightenment, mostly a playwright, worth spending some time with to get a perspective on Austrian literature before the 20th century.
11. Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein are both often best read as literature.
12. Stefan Zweig. The World of Yesterday is a favorite, sad and bittersweet, and it treats the European civilization that was passing away at the time of the Second World War, still relevant. Zweig committed suicide in Brazil, here is an excellent biography. The rest of his fiction still is read around much of the world (not so much America, famously in Russia), but I find it pretty ordinary and of its time.
I’m not counting Canetti, Kafka, and the like, who are not properly Austrian, though they lived in the Empire. Rilke does not count either, though he is one of the greatest of poets. Joseph Roth was born in Galicia, yet I think of him as an Austrian rather than Polish writer, again still somewhat neglected in the English-speaking world. Try Radetzky March. Franz Werfel I find ordinary, though I have not yet read Forty Days of Musa Dagh, for some his masterpiece, I did buy a copy of that one recently.
The bottom line: There are amazing wonders here, and yes “weird stuff.” Most of the educated people I know are not clued into them.
My pick for a summer beach read
The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest
By Cixin LiuChinese science fiction, or Chinese ghost story, or maybe even Chinese reinvention of the novel? These are the works of fiction I am most enthusiastic about since Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. I say read a plot summary of the first volume before starting the book, unless you are inclined to read it twice, as I did. — TYLER COWEN
That is from Bloomberg, the link has picks from other regular contributorrs.
*Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States*
That is the new James C. Scott book, and so far it is the most interesting non-fiction read of the year (I am about halfway through). You can think of it as an extended essay on which technologies actually gave rise to economies of scale, expressed through governance but not only. Ultimately the focus settles on Mesopotamia, but the discussion is wide-ranging and the lessons are applicable to much of human history. Here is an opening summary bit:
I propose that cereal grains have unique characteristics such that they would be, virtually everywhere, the major tax commodity essential to early state building. I believe that we may have grossly underestimated the importance of the (infectious) diseases of crowding in the demographic fragility of the early state. Unlike many historians, I wonder whether frequent abandonment of early state centers might often have been a boon to the health and safety of their populations rather than a “dark age” signaling the collapse of a civilization. And finally, I ask whether those populations that remained outside state centers for millennia after the first states were established may not have remained there (or fled there) because they found conditions better.
Here is one good passage:
It is surely striking that virtually all classical states were based on grain, including millets. History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit, or sweet potato states. (“Banana Republics” don’t qualify!) My guess is that only grains are best suited to concentrated production, tax assessment, appropriation, cadastral surveys, storage, and rationing. On suitable soil wheat provides the agro-ecology for dense concentrations of human subjects.
In contrast the tuber cassava (aka manioc, yucca) grows below ground, requires little care, is easy to conceal, ripens in a year, and, most important, can safely be left in the ground and remain edible for two more years. If the state wants your cassava, it will have to come and dip up the tubers one by one, and then it has a cartload of little value and great weight if transported.
The discussion of how the technology of fire is the ultimate root of economies of scale is alone worth the price of the book. Scott analogizes complacency/peace to the domestication of non-human animals, including the phenomenon of less violent emotional reactions and greater conformity.
Urgently recommended, and fun to read as well.
Here are various articles on the work of James C. Scott. Here is a good NYT profile of Scott and also his farming work.
What I’ve been reading
1. David Der-Wei Wang, editor. A New Literary History of Modern China. Almost one thousand pages, and aren’t edited volumes so often poison? Still, these short, collated excerpts provide one of the most useful and readable entry points into modern Chinese intellectual history; this will be making my “year’s best” list. Every year you should be reading multiple books about China, all of you. Here is a sentence from the work, from Andrea Bachner: “In a brothel in Singapore at the beginning of the twentieth century, a quaint Chinese intellectual (reminiscent of Wang) immersed in the project of writing a new Dream of the Red Chamber in oracle bone script on turtle shells inspires an English visitor to dream of creating a novel superior to Ulysses, tattooed on the backs of coolie laborers.”
2. Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — And Us. The word “forgotten” is misleading in the title, but nonetheless an excellent look at how signaling theories work when the signal is distributed across a quality that is neither useful nor especially burdensome and costly. In other words, it’s not all about the peacock’s tail. The result is aesthetic beauty, and competition across that beauty for its own sake. This book offers an excellent and clearly written treatment of the particulars of avian evolution, signaling theory, and also aesthetics, bringing together some disparate areas very effectively.
3. Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation, edited and translated by Ken Liu. A strong collection, with two stories by Cixin Liu. Here is a new article on Chinese science fiction.
4. Thomas Hardy, Unexpected Elegies: “Poems of 1912-1913” and Other Poems About Emma. Some of Hardy’s best poetic work, it mixes “passion, memory, love, remorse, regret, self-awareness and self-flagellation…to serve a speech of intense emotional candor, all in celebration of his dead (and for many years estranged) wife, Emma,” by one account.
There is a new, expanded edition of Amartya Sen’s Collective Choice and Social Welfare, still the best place to go for his views on normative economics.
Robert Wright’s new book is Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. I am not sure how amenable Buddhism is to bookish treatment, and furthermore the word “true” makes me nervous in this title (“useful”?), but still this book reaches a local maximum of sorts. If you want a book from a smart Westerner defending Buddhism, this is it.
What I’ve been reading
1. Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy. LitHub wrote: “Even in the wake of Knausgaard and Ferrante it is hard to find a literary phenomenon that has swept Europe quite like the autobiographical project of Édouard Louis.” I don’t know that I enjoyed this book very much, but it was an effective fictional experience. Most of all it scared me that such a tale of poverty and abuse could be so popular in Europe these days. Recommended, but in a sobering way; I would rather this had been a bestseller in 1937.
2. Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs. A novel about the consequences of a Delhi terrorist bombing that is both deep and compelling to read, full of surprises as well. Here is a useful NYT review.
3. Edward T. O’Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age. This focuses more on George’s connection to social and labor movements, and less on George as an economist or land theorist, than I would have liked. Still, it is an information-rich narrative that most of all brings the times and movements surrounding George to life.
4. Andrew Marr, We British: The Poetry of a People. A good introduction to its topic, most of all for the mid-twentieth century, with plenty of poems reproduced. Here is a Louis MacNeice poem, Snow:
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes —
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands —
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
What I’ve been reading
1. Philippe Desan, Montaigne: A Life. Knotty, complex, and almost 800 pp., the bottom line nonetheless is that I will not liberate this book but rather keep it forever. I’ve read only about 200 pp. so far, but it is one of the best guides to understanding its main topic, most of all when it comes to integrating how his written texts sprang from his actual life.
2. Dieter Helm, Burn Out: The Endgame for Fossil Fuels. That’s not the right title, because most of this book covers the game rather than the endgame. This is a careful and conceptual look at how different sectors of energy production are likely to evolve, taking good care to distinguish different parts of the world and stationary vs. mobile energy sources.
3. John F. Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform. A very good and readable book on a much misunderstood topic. Upon a close read of the data, it turns out the War on Drugs and private prisons are overemphasized as causes of overincarceration, whereas much of the actual blame should be placed on altered incentives for prosecutors. Note that Pfaff also has a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in addition to his JD.
4. Kevin N. Laland, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind. If you read and profited from Joe Henrich’s The Secret of Success, this book is the next step. Here are remarks by Robin Hanson on the book.
5. Edna O’Brien, August is a Wicked Month. Irish fiction, 1967, old and old-fashioned enough that the sex in the story still sizzles, as does the comeuppance. I will read more of her.
Nadia Hillard’s The Accountability State: US Federal Inspectors General and the Pursuit of Democratic Integrity, is a thorough and useful account of what the title promises.
My favorite things Ireland
The last time I was in Ireland I wasn’t blogging yet. What riches lie here, let’s give it a start:
1. Poetry: I pick Joyce’s Ulysses, then Yeats and also Seamus Heaney, especially if the word “bog” appears in the poem. A good collection is The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, edited by Patrick Crotty. Beyond the ranks of the super-famous, you might try Louis MacNeice, from the Auden Group, or perhaps Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, who writes in Gaelic but has been translated by other superb Irish poets into English..
2. Novel/literature: Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels. One of the very very best books for social science too, and one of my favorite books period. After Joyce, there is also Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Lord Dunsany, John Banville (The Untouchable), William Trevor, and Elizabeth Bowen. Iris Murdoch was born in Ireland, but does she count? More recently I have enjoyed Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Eimear McBride, Claire Louise-Bennett, with Mike McCormack in my pile to read soon. Roddy Doyle is probably good, but I don’t find him so readable. Colum McCann somehow isn’t Irish enough for me, but many enjoy his work. Can the Anglo-Irish Oliver Goldsmith count? His Citizen of the World remains a neglected work. The recently published volumes of Samuel Beckett’s correspondence have received rave reviews and I hope to read through them this summer. Whew! And for a country of such a small population.
3. Classical music: Hmm…we hit a roadblock here. I don’t love John Field, so I have to call this category a fail. I can’t offhand think of many first-rate Irish classical performers, can you? James Galway?
4. Popular music: My Bloody Valentine, Loveless. Certainly my favorite album post-1970s, and possibly my favorite of all time. When the Irish do something well, they do it really really well. Then there is Van Morrison, Them, Bono and U2, Rory Gallagher, Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats, The Pogues, The Cranberries, and Sinead O’Connor, among others. I confess to having an inordinate weakness for Gilbert O’Sullivan. Traditional Irish music would need a post of its own, but it has never commanded much of my attention.
5. Painter: Francis Bacon is the obvious and probably correct choice, but I am no longer excited to see his work. I don’t find myself seeing new things in it. Sean Scully wins runner-up. This is a slightly weak category, at least relative to some of the others.
6. Political philosopher: Edmund Burke, who looks better all the time, I am sorry to say.
7. Philosopher: Bishop Berkeley. He is also interesting on monetary theory, anticipating some later ideas of Fischer Black on money as an abstract unit of account.
8. Classical economist: Mountifort Longfield and Isaac Butt both had better understandings of supply and demand and marginalism, before the marginal revolution, than almost any other economists except for a few of the French.
9. Theologian: C.S. Lewis, you could list him under fiction as well. Here is a debate over whether he is British or Irish. Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia covers Lewis, one of my favorite books from the last decade.
10. Silicon Valley entrepreneur: Patrick Collison (duh), of Stripe and Atlas, here is his superb podcast with Ezra Klein. Here is further information on the pathbreaking Stripe Atlas project.
11. Movie: There are plenty I don’t like so much, such as My Left Foot, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Waking Ned, and The Commitments. Most people consider those pretty good. I think I’ll opt for The Crying Game and also In the Name of the Father.
12: Movie, set in: Other than the movies listed above, there is Odd Man Out (quite good), The Quiet Man, and The Secret of Roan Inish, but my clear first choice is the still-underrated masterpiece Barry Lyndon.
The bottom line: The strengths are quite amazing, and that’s without adjusting for population.