Results for “best fiction” 318 found
Friday assorted links
1. A Fine Theorem on Arrow and general equilibrium theory.
3. Are living room gigs the future of live music? (noisy video at the link) And are the best LA dumplings to be found in WeChat circles?
4. Who’s complacent?: Jimmy Buffett to launch new chain of Margaritaville retirement homes.
6. The Economist reviews The Complacent Class. And my dialogue with Josh Barro over the book. And thanks to all of you who bought and will buy, I am pleased the book has made #5 on the Washington Post non-fiction bestseller list.
My Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri
I thought this was one of the very best of the conversations, Jhumpa responded consistently with brilliance and grace. Here is the link to the transcript, podcast, and video versions. In addition to discussing her books, we covered Rhode Island, Elena Ferrante, book covers, Bengal and Kolkaata and Bengali literature, immigrant identity, writing as problem solving, Italian authors, writing and reading across different languages, Indian classical music, architectural influences including Palladianism, and much more. Here is one excerpt:
TYLER COWEN: …You’ve written a great deal about not having a native country, about not having a language of your own that’s clearly yours, or even a culture. Having read or reread all of your work and surrounding works, and if I think, “How do I frame you?” I would say I think of you as a Rhode Islander because that’s where you grew up. You were born in England but came here when you were three, grew up in Rhode Island. How would you react to that?
JHUMPA LAHIRI: Uncomfortably.
[laughter]…
LAHIRI: I mean, with all due respect. It’s true.
LAHIRI: Well, I think what was helpful about it is that it opened up the setting of The Lowland, which is set in part in Rhode Island, but it’s the first of my books in which I can actually mention Rhode Island by its name. Whereas the other books, the preceding books, are set in these sort of fake Rhode Island slash Massachusetts, this area, this terrain that really is Rhode Island, just to boil it down. But I couldn’t mention it. I couldn’t name it as such. And I think that’s telling.
It was saying something, the fact that in the earlier books I was writing about the ocean. I was writing about this small campus, this little town, and describing these settings that I knew very well, the settings I had grown up in, but I couldn’t come out and say that it was Rhode Island. I kept calling it some suburb of Boston. So I think the writing of that piece unlocked something. Then in The Lowland, they’re in Rhode Island, and I don’t pretend anymore.
And:
COWEN: If you compare Interpreter of Maladies to your other short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, do you think of the latter, more recent work as being more about reconciliation and there’s a greater role for children or families in at least some of the stories? Or do you think, overall, your fiction with time is moving in the direction of Hardy and becoming darker?
LAHIRI: I think it’s becoming darker and I think that’s usually the case as we get older, right?
Jhumpa on Kolkaata:
…it’s a city that believes in its poets, that believes in its politics, believes in humanity in some sense. And life is so extreme there, in so many ways. People are put to the test, and you see life being put to the test constantly around you. There’s nothing you can really accept easily or take for granted about yourself or about the universe if you’ve been there. It’s a jolt to your consciousness, but a fundamental one, an essential one, to shake us out of this, whatever takes over, if you protect yourself.
Do read (or listen to) the whole thing. Jhumpa’s last two books are excellent and highly underrated, both were written in Italian (!) and then translated. One is on writing and reading in a foreign language, the other is on book covers.
My favorite things Nigeria
Yup, I’m here. I made this list before setting off:
1. Popular music: Few from any country come close to Fela Kuti, the main question is how many you should buy, not which ones. Most of them! On the CD medium, that old series of “two albums on one CD” was the best way to consume Fela. On streaming, you can probably just let it rip. And rip. And rip. Other favorites are King Sunny Ade and I.K. Dairo, I don’t love Fema Kuti. You also might try Nigerian psychedelic funk rock from the late 60s and early 70s, for instance found here. Most of all, there are thousands of wonderful local performers in Nigeria, you can watch a few of them on the Netflix documentary on the Nigerian music scene, titled Konkombe, recommended and only an hour long.
There is now a good deal of hit Nigerian and Nigerian-American music, such as Wizkid. It is enjoyable but does not compare to Fela in terms of staying power.
2. Basketball player: The Dream is one of my three or four favorite players of all time. My favorite Hakeem was watching him pick apart David Robinson play after play after play…see the final clip on the immediately preceding link.
3. Novel: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart. Honorable mentions go to Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, and my colleague Helon Habila. There are also the Nigerian-American writers, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Teju Cole is worth reading, including his non-fiction.
4. Movie: Well, I’ve seen parts of some of them, and you should at least sample some Nollywood if you haven’t already. It’s kinetic. The documentary “Nollywood Babylon” (Netflix) gives you some background. As for “Movie, set in,” I draw a blank. “Album, set in and recorded in” would be Band on the Run, Paul McCartney and Wings.
5. Actor: Chiwetal Ejiofor, he starred in “Twelve Years a Slave,” and is from a Nigerian family in Britain.
6. Presidential name: Goodluck Jonathan.
7. Artist: Prince Twins Seven Seven, or more formally Prince Taiwo Olaniyi Wyewale-Toyeje Oyekale Osuntoki. He received his nickname because he was the only surviving child from seven distinct sets of twins.
8. Food dish: At least for now I have to say jollof rice, a precursor dish to jambalaya, further reports to come however!
The bottom line: Lots of talent here, plenty more on the way.
*Island People: The Caribbean and the World*
That is by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, published this November, a great book, could it be the very best book on the charm and importance of the Caribbean? Not the Caribbean of the cruise, but rather the real cultural Caribbean as found in Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and Trinidad. The Caribbean was open, globalized, multiracial, vulnerable, and deindustrialized before it was “cool” to be so, and so it stands as a warning to us all. Yet so few seem to care. The Caribbean cultural blossoming of the 20th century remains one of the most remarkable yet understudied sagas, but this book, among its other historical virtues, gives you a very good look under the hood.
Did you know that in the 1930s Cuba received more visitors from the U.S. than did Canada?
This is one of the very best non-fiction books of this year, and its depth of knowledge and understanding truly impressed me. Just to prod your memories here is the broader list.
*Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts*
That is the new book by Christopher de Hamel, and it is one of the very best non-fiction books this year, in fact so far it might rank #1. It is twelve chapters, each one about an individual medieval manuscript, the best-known of those being the Book of Kells. The integration of text and the visuals is of the highest order of quality. Most of all, the book brings each manuscript to life, relating its creators and creation, the surrounding historical context, its subsequent preservation and fame, and how that history has embodied varying attitudes toward copying and preservation. No less illuminating is the anthropological treatment of how each manuscript is currently guarded and displayed, the author’s travel history in getting there, and a more general “philosophical without the philosophy” introspection on what these objects are really supposed to mean to us.
This book is not in every way light reading, and it does assume some (very broad) background in medieval history, but it brings a whole topic to light, and instructs, in a way that few other works do.
Here is just one short excerpt:
My initial inquiry as to whether I might see the manuscript of the Aratea in the Universiteitsbibliotheek in Leiden was met with the reply that this would hardly be necessary, since there is a high-class published facsimile from 1989 and the complete book is in any case digitized and freely available on-line. It was a response entirely within the theme of copying. If you had applied to the palace librarians of Aachen in the early ninth century to see the late-antique Terence, they would almost certainly have assured you that you would be better off with their nice new copy by their scribe Hrodgarius.
Hamel worked for a long time in the book department at Sotheby’s and then in a library at Cambridge University. He is a bit of a fuddy-duddy (he thinks the bustle of NYC is extreme, for instance), but nonetheless has produced a lovely and complete work that virtually every author should envy. I am ordering his other books too, mostly on the history of books.
Here is a Guardian review, John Banville in the FT raves about it, and here is The Paris Review. I believe I ordered it on Amazon.uk, all five-star reviews by the way. Here is the U.S. Amazon listing, with access to used copies, I am not sure when the American edition comes out.
How to choose and assess the movies you are watching
Greg Adamo, a loyal MR reader, writes me with a query:
I have two related questions sparked by your review of American Honey.
First, do you have any tips on judging movies? I make a lot of mistakes. I dismiss a number of very good movies after seeing them the first time. If I happen to watch them a second time – or even a third – I come to see a lot of virtues that I missed originally. I thought Pulp Fiction and the Big Lebowski were quite overrated the first time I saw them. 20 years later, having seen them both several times, my view has changed greatly. These are only two examples – there are dozens more. How can I avoid this problem?
Second, what is the correct time period for appreciating a movie? We have an annual award system (the Oscars). Like me, it also makes a lot of mistakes. Misfires like Crash or Shakespeare in Love – the don’t hold up to other winners. How Green Was My Valley beat Citizen Kane. Hitchcock never won an Oscar. It’s not just me that goofs up – it’s everyone.
I can’t help but think time is a factor. Suppose the Oscars were like the Baseball hall-of-fame and had a five-year waiting period. Would that improve the selection? Is there a market-failure in the movie-critic journalism business that pushes reviews out so near to the release date?
This is an area in which overconfidence and bias abound. I wonder if I’m better off disregarding individual movie reviews in favor of aggregated data – i.e. rotten tomatoes.
Those are some very good questions, I will offer some general observations in response:
1. If the movie was shot for the big screen, you must see it on the big screen. Otherwise your response is not to be trusted.
2. Try not to discriminate by genre or topic, for instance “I don’t like war movies,” “I don’t like romantic comedies,” and so on. You’ll miss out on the very best of that genre or topic this way, and those are very likely very good indeed. (NB: In your spare time, you can debate whether there is a horror movies exception to the principle.)
3. In my view, the bad Oscar picks were evident right away. A five year wait will only elevate some other set of mediocre movies instead. Movie awards are designed to generate publicity for the industry, not to reward merit. Ignore them.
4. I use movie criticism in the following way: I read just enough to decide if I want to see the movie, and then no more. I also try to forget what I have read. But before a second viewing of a film, I try to read as much as possible about it.
5. On net, I find the best reviews are in Variety magazine, as they are written for movie professionals. And the market for reviews is largely efficient. That is, if you read six smart critics on a movie — usually just two or three in fact — you will have a good idea of the quality of the movie. But you must put aside movies that are politically correct or culturally iconic, as they tend to be overrated. Brokeback Mountain and The Graduate will make plenty of “best of” lists, and they are both interesting and extremely important for both cinematic and cultural reasons. Still, I would not say either is a great movie, though they have some wonderful scenes and themes.
6. Hardly anyone watches enough foreign movies, that means you too. Or you might not watch enough outside your favored cinematic area, such as French, Bollywood, etc. There is a switching cost due to different cinematic “languages,” but most of your additional rewards at the margin probably lie in this direction. Furthermore, the very best foreign movies are so excellent it is easy to find out which they are.
7. I still think Pulp Fiction and The Big Lebowski, while good, are overrated. Don’t always assume your second reaction is the correct one. In addition, a lot of movies are made to be seen only once, so don’t hold that against them. For instance, I am not sure I need to see the opening sequence of Private Ryan again, but I am very glad I saw it once. It made seeing the whole movie worthwhile, but since most of the rest is ordinary, albeit serviceable, seeing it again would be excruciating.
8. It is a mistake to smugly assume that television has surpassed movies. The best movies (mostly foreign) are better than the best TV, even today.
What tips can you all offer?
Sunday assorted links
*Hitler’s Soldiers*
The author is Ben H. Shepherd and the subtitle is The German Army in the Third Reich. That may seem like a timeworn topic, but I found this book consistently fresh and interesting, also well-written, analytic throughout, one of the year’s best non-fiction studies. Here is one bit:
Two occupied populations whom the German army particularly tried to cultivate were the Muslim peoples of the Crimea and the Caucasus. The Sunni Tatars comprised a quarter of the Crimea’s population, and German army administrators saw them, as they would also come to see their Muslim brethren in the Caucasus, as presenting an opportunity to woo Islam in the Soviet Union for political and military gain. The Germans granted the Tatars religious rights and concessions and reintroduced major religious holidays, and Manstein’s otherwise infamous November 1941 order required his troops to treat the Tatars with respect…the Germans appointed a Muslim committee to re-establish the religious infrastructure.
…Yet the failings of German occupation were soon apparent to these Muslim peoples.
Overall the message is that the German army was less effective and less moral [sic] than many other historians had suggested. Recommended.
*The Fall of Heaven*
I loved this book, the author is Andrew Scott Cooper, and the subtitle is The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran. It is the best book I know for understanding the Iranian revolution, and it is compulsively readable throughout. Did you know for instance that the Ayatollahs were deeply disturbed by the presence of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and also Rhoda on Iranian TV?
Here is one excerpt:
Iran’s political and economic malaise gave a renewed sense of urgency to the Shah’s top priority, which was to settle the question of the Imperial succession once and for all. His initial preference was for a European princess who could provide the House of Pahlavi with the luster of dynastic legitimacy. He soon ran into trouble. The Windsors rebuffed his interest in Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin Princess Alexandra of Kent, while his favorite, Princess Maria Gabriella, the Catholic daughter of the deposed King Umberto of Italy, was ruled out owing to opposition from the Vatican and Iran’s ulama.
And this, from the Shah himself:
“When everybody in Iran is like everybody in Sweden, then I will rule like the King of Sweden,” he declared.
I would describe this book as relatively sympathetic to the Shah, and also arguing that the oppressions and tortures of Savak are sometimes overstated.
This one makes my best non-fiction of the year list, and it will be in the top tier of that list.
My personal tech ecosystem, updated
A few of you have asked, I considered that question in 2012, here is a significantly revised update:
1. Now I know how to text, sort of, though I hardly ever do it. It strikes me as the worst and most inefficient technology of communication ever invented (seriously). It’s not that fast, and it’s broken up into tiny bits of back and forth. I don’t see how it makes sense beyond the “What should I get at the supermarket? — Blueberries” level. There is intertemporal substitution, so just, at some other point in time, spend more time talking, writing longer letters, making love, whatever. Not texting. It is never the best thing to be doing, except to answer some very well-defined question.
2. I now carry only one iPad around, as I donated my spare iPad to a poor Mexican family. I use it very often for directions, book and restaurant reviews, and general life advice. Plus email and keeping current on my Twitter feed. I simply don’t want a screen any smaller than that. My iPad now also has a rather pronounced crack on the front glass, but that adds to its artistic value. I dare not drop it again.
3. I have an iPhone, which I hardly ever use for anything. Occasionally someone calls me on it, or I use it to check email in situations when it might be rude to pull out the iPad. Other times I am rude, but it’s actually a form of flattery if I am willing to check my iPad in front of you. You may not feel flattered, however.
3b. Except for the occasional Uber ride, I don”t use apps and hate reading news sites through the apps, I won’t do it. I’m used to the web, not your app, and I hope I can get away with being a stubborn grouch on this forever.
4. I now have a Bloomberg terminal, which is very cool. It is amazing that a product designed in the “before the internet as we know it” era still is the clear market leader and the best option. Bloomberg is a great company with a great product(s). Right now I can do about 5 of the 25,000 separate commands, but the fault is mine not theirs. In the meantime, send me email at my gmu address, not what is listed on the Bloomberg column.
5. I use my Kindle less over time. It remains in that nebulous “fine” category, but I prefer “real books.” Kindle is best for works of fiction when I know in advance I wish to read every page in the proper order. I am continuing with my long-range plan to read Calvin’s Institutes on my Kindle, bit by bit, in between other works. This will take me ten years, but a) he is a brilliant mind, and b) in the meantime I won’t lose sight of the plot line.
6. I have a new Lenovo laptop, sleek and fast, plus some computers at work. I don’t even know what they are, but probably they are quite subpar.
Way more iPad and way less texting are I suppose the main ways in which I deviate from the dominant status quo. Come join me in this and we shall conquer the world.
What I’ve been reading
1. Samuel Fleischacker, The Good and the Good Book: Revelation as a Guide to Life. A nice, articulate, and well-reasoned account of how a reasonable person might turn to faith and believe that faith and reason are compatible. The author is a well-known Adam Smith scholar.
2. Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression. The best and most readable book I have found on the deportation of Mexicans during the Great Depression, most of all during the 1931-1935 period. Reading up on this era puts today’s America in useful perspective.
3. The Curse of Cash, by Kenneth Rogoff. The quality of argumentation and presentation is high, as one would expect from a Ken Rogoff book. Still, I don’t think it has so much to convince those who might be worried about a currency-less surveillance Panopticon, or those who think negative interest rates are mostly a contractionary and not-so-useful tax on financial intermediation.
4. Mats Lundahl, The Political Economy of Disaster: Destitution, plunder and earthquake in Haiti. More of a potpourri of Haitian economic history than what the titles indicates, the best 20 percent of this book has insights you won’t find in other places. For me that is a high hit rate, I liked it.
5. John Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI. I’m only about fifty pages into this one, but so far it is a first-rate biography, both detailed and conceptual in nature, likely to make the list of the year’s best non-fiction books.
Which part of the world is most underrated in literary terms?
I asked that question of Michael Orthofer, and his answer was this:
Underrated, I would absolutely think the regional language and literature of India. I think surprisingly, even though, perhaps, English is the main literary language of India and a great deal is locally translated, even there much of the vernacular literature still isn’t available in English.
What one can see of it and also in part hear about it — we’re missing an awful lot. There is a literary culture there, especially, for example, in Bengali, but we’ve had that since Tagore. One of the remarkable things is Tagore won his Nobel prize over a hundred years ago, and there are still novels by him which haven’t been translated into English. He is really a very good novelist.
It’s truly worthwhile, and this goes for many regions. The southern region of Kerala where they write in Malayalam — there’s remarkable literary production there, and we just see so little of it.
My inclination was to suggest Chile. Here’s why this country of below 18 million people is nonetheless a fierce literary contender:
1. Pablo Neruda was one of the two or three best poets of the latter part of the twentieth century. His Canto general is not his best poetic work but as a general statement of the history and underlying unity of the New World it is unparalleled. Gabriela Mistral is noteworthy too.
2. José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of the Night is one of the very best Latin novels, yet it is hardly read these days, I am not sure why. I think it is clearly better than say One Hundred Years of Solitude.
3. Roberto Bolaño is probably the most important Latin author post-García Márquez, and he is from Chile, though he wrote much more about Mexico.
4. Antonio Skármeta isn’t even a top figure in this lineage yet he is still quite good, the same holds for Ariel Dorfman (born in Argentina, moved to Chile shortly afterwards), Alejandro Zambra, and yes Isabel Allende, who is the Chilean author most in the public eye in the United States. She is usually too sentimental for my taste but some of it I enjoy nonetheless.
And why is Chile underrated? Well, when you are there it feels fairly provincial — just ask a Porteño. Bolaño didn’t stick around and more generally exile from Pinochet prevented the creation of any well-defined group or movement. The Pinochet years also gave Chile a…shall we say…non-artistic reputation, and finally both Neruda and Doñoso don’t translate so well out of the Spanish.
Do you have an alternative choice?
What I’ve been reading
1. Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism. Lots of detail, not just the usual BS, scary too. Too much detail, too scary, thus a good book.
2. Christopher Goscha, The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam. The best general history of Vietnam I know, and it does not obsess over “the Vietnam War.” Readable and instructive on pretty much every page.
3. Adolfo Bioy Cesares, La invención de Morel. One of the better short Spanish-language novels, ever. I’ve already started my reread. Borges, Cortázar, Carpentier, and García Márquez all expressed their admiration for it. Imagine a mysterious island that becomes more rather than less strange as the story develops, and characters start to wonder if they are living inside a simulation.
4. Samuel Arbesman, Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension. I was very happy to blurb this book: “Why can’t we understand technology anymore? In this consistently entertaining and insightful book, Arbesman offers a necessary guide to where we are headed and why everything seems so strange along the way.” Here are a variety of positive reviews.
5. Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai. First published in 2000 to strong critical acclaim, the publisher ended up going bankrupt and this more or less fell off the map, until its recent reissue. If I count it as a new edition, it is my favorite fiction book of the year so far. I don’t think all parts of the novel work equally well, but the best parts are superb and most of all it is a book written for smart people. Even before finishing, I went and ordered everything else she has done. That is not a lot, but I hear through the grapevine she has a good deal of writing in the works. Here is the lead Amazon review on Samurai:
This book is joyful and thrilling. The intimate and familiar story of a single mother struggling to raise a young son is made original and even epic by the sheer elasticity and power of author Helen DeWitt’s imagination. Mother and Son, Sybilla and Ludo, both possessed of gifted and versatile minds, are obsessed with the Kurosawa classic, The Seven Samurai (a film I always felt forced to appreciate until I read this book). Syb uses the film to provide the male role models the boy doesn’t have in his life, and Ludo uses it to develop his own version of a Samurai test with which he plans to find the best father possible for himself. Armed with the refrain that ‘a good samurai will parry the blow’ he sets out to test and win over men of samurai mettle who might recognize his merits. The true joy of reading the book comes in the fact that even though mother and son are both geniuses, multi lingual and well versed in history, literature, math and sciences, their pursuits in learning and discovery seem exciting and comprehensible. What at first description might sound intellectually intimidating (Ancient Greek, Old Norse, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Fourier Analysis and a blow by blow with variations on the theme of the Rosetta Stone) are made accessible and often hilarious by the dazzling ingenuity and finesse of the wonderful Dewitt. Reading it made me feel I had suddenly come across a vast unrealized potential in myself for the power of creative thought and the ability to comprehend complex ideas. All this disguised in a book of fabulous adventure and tremendous longing.
Here is her superb short LRB piece on being stalked. Here is one earlier and somewhat explicit profile of Dewitt, here is her response: “If you don’t see the dead books, turning down a $525,000 deal looks strange.” Here is a very good New York profile.
My conversation with Michael Orthofer
That is the latest entry in the Conversations with Tyler series, here is the transcript, audio, and video. Here is the overview:
Michael Orthofer, one of the world’s most prolific book reviewers, joins Tyler Cowen for a conversation on — what else? — books. Read to discover why Michael believes everyone should read more fiction, how we should choose books, why American popular literature is overrated, what he thinks about authors like Herman Melville, Fyoder Dostoevsky, Goethe, J.K. Rowling, Arno Schmidt, and many others, his recommendations for the best sites for readers, why studying literature at college was such a big disappointment, how much book covers matter, and why his opinion will never be the final word.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Here’s another life hack which I totally reject, but it may just be because I’m an addict of sorts. You tell me why, for you, it’s wrong.
A lot of people say to me, “Well, I love fiction, but I’m never going to read new works because I can’t tell what’s really good. I’ll just wait 20 years and then look back on what was truly excellent from 20 years ago and read that 20 years later. In the meantime, now I’ll just read classics or things in other areas which are verified as being truly excellent.” Does that make sense?
ORTHOFER: I worry very much about people who rely on what gets that stamp of approval. Just because it has a cover review in the New York Times Book Review does not mean that that book really is, if we look at it from five or ten years down the road — that that book will still be a significant work. I find so much which is highly praised at any one point long‑term won’t be. Again, however — .
Another question:
COWEN: If we take American citizens, who are not necessarily the people who read you, but at the margin, we could give them more nonfiction, we could give them more travel, we could give them more fiction, or we could actually give them more of some really good TV, which of those things are we rooting for them to do more of, at the margin?
And this exchange:
COWEN: Bottom’s Dream. Most people have never heard of Arno Schmidt.
ORTHOFER: Regrettably, no.
COWEN: We have a chance now to read his masterwork. Some of his others are in English already. Tell us why we should care.
…COWEN: But you giggled when you read Bottom’s Dream, right?
ORTHOFER: Yes.
COWEN: You giggled a lot.
ORTHOFER: The English edition, I think, is just under 1,500 pages.
COWEN: A mere pittance compared to Dream of the Red Chamber, right?
Do read the whole thing.
Here is my short review of Michael’s big book on world literature: “If you measure book quality by the actual marginal product of the text, this is one of the best books written, ever. Reading the manuscript in draft form induced me to a) write an enthusiastic blurb, and b) order about forty items through Amazon, mostly used of course. The book is basically a comprehensive guide to what is valuable and interesting in recently translated world literature, a meta-book so to speak, with extensive coverage of most of the countries you might want.” And here is Michael’s blog. You can order Michael’s book here.
*CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping*
That is the new and excellent book by Kerry Brown. Almost all books on China are either bad or mediocre, but this one is the best book I ever have read on the exercise of power in contemporary China. Every page is good, here is a short excerpt:
More important than a cabinet in the Western system of government, yet ostensibly separate from day-to-day decision making, the Politburo owns the crucial function of dispensing ideological, spiritual and political leadership. This description means it covers nothing and everything. It has the broadest framework within which to operate, which means it can wander into every area of administrative and governmental life in the country. But like the ideal city described in Plato’s Republic, in a strange way China is really run on the model of philosopher kings.
Definitely recommended, one of my favorite non-fiction books of the year so far. I can readily imagine re-reading it.