Results for “What I've Been Reading”
441 found

What I’ve been reading

1. J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays 2006-2017.  The pieces on Robert Walser, Ford Madox Ford, Patrick White, Gerald Murnane, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Ramón Jiménez make this worth buying, the rest are mixed in quality.  Coetzee remains minimalistically grumpy in the right way.

2. Grant N. Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique.  Havers argues against Strauss from “the Right,” but sympathetically.  He suggests Strauss underrated Christianity and had too high an opinion of antiquity, and was a true liberal democrat, while the American founders consciously rejected ancient political thought.

3. Neil Monnery, Architect of Prosperity: Sir John Cowperthwaite and the Making of Hong Kong.  I didn’t find this inspiring to read, but still it is a useful account of the under-covered early days of how Hong Kong evolved into a freedom-oriented economy after World War II.  Here is a review from The Economist.

4. Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine.  “As Dolot remembered it, the presence of the Soviet state in his village in the 1920s had been minimal.”  And “Initially, collectivization was supposed to be voluntary.”  And “When their potatoes were gone…people began to go to the Russian villages and to exchange their clothing for food.”

I have only browsed my library copy of Masha Gessen’s The Future of History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, but it looked very good and so I ordered it from Amazon.

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius is a beautiful exhibition catalog, with text, edited by Stephen F. Eisenman, for a show currently on at Northwestern University.

David Kynaston, Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694-2013, seems to be a fine work of history, but it is not organized analytically in the way I might wish.  Still, some of you should be interested, as this is 796 pp. of well-written, carefully researched material on the BOE.

What I’ve been reading

1. The New Testament, translated by David Bentley Hart, Yale University Press.  I’ve spent a good bit of time with this book, and if you own and read a few New Testaments, this should be one of them.  It is the most accurate translation conceptually and philosophically, taking care to render the Greek of that period as faithfully as possible.  It doesn’t try to make the text “read nice,” nor does it make all of the books sound the same.  Of course, with any Bible translation you care both about a) what the authors really meant, and b) what other readers of the Bible thought they were imbibing.  By the very nature of its virtues, this volume is weak on b) precisely because it is strong on a), and thus it probably should not be your first translation.  Still, if you are tempted, this is more and better than “just another New Testament.”

2. Richard McGregor, Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century.  I am sick of books on these topics, because they tend to repeat the same old same old.  This one has fresh content on almost every page, and it is especially strong on explaining how the revisionist history debates in China and Japan fit into domestic politics and also foreign policy.

3. Barry Hatton, The Portuguese: A Modern History.  “Portugal largely missed the Enlightenment.”  This is the best introduction I know to that charming country.  In 1986, Portugal had only 123 miles of highway.  It had not occurred to me, by the way, that the 1974 coup was the first Western European revolution since 1848, unless you count the Nazis.  Here is a picture showing Portugal as an Atlantic rather than Mediterranean economy.  Explanation here.

4. Nils Karlson, Statecraft and Liberal Reform in Advanced Democracies.  How did liberal reforms happen in Australia and Sweden?  This book tells you about the world, rather than the theory or the taxonomy.  There should be many more books of this sort, a study in actual public choice.

Arrived in my pile is:

Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud Mehl, and Livia Chitu, How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future.

For economic historians I can recommend Bruce M.S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World.

What I’ve been reading

1. Peter Sloterdijk, Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews, 1993-2012.  No, he’s not a fraud, and this volume is probably the best introduction to his thought.  Is there an extended argument here?  I am not sure, but I did enjoy this bit:

The existential philosophers have greatly overstated homelessness.  In fact, people sit in their apartments with their delusions and cushion themselves as best they can.

But why does he have to follow up with?:

Living means continuously updating the immune system — and that is precisely what foam theory can help us show more clearly than before.

In the German-speaking world he passes for one of the most important world thinkers.

2. Declan Kiberd, After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present.  A very high quality and original look at how Irish literature reflects the nation’s development, though it assumes a fair knowledge of the works being discussed.

3. Fred Hersch, Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life in and Out of Jazz.  How someone from a previous generation a) became a star jazz pianist, b) discovered gay liberation, and c) woke from a coma to resume a miraculous career.

4. Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve.  In general I am a Greenblatt fan, and not persuaded by the critics of his popularizations, but this book is not doing it for me.  For the Hebrew Bible I prefer to read densely argued Straussians.

5. William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of DisgustMiller’s books from the 1990s remain an underrated source of “stuff for smart people.”  His book on disgust could be the best in that series, for me this is a reread and yes it did hold up.

What I’ve been reading

1. George W. Bush, Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors.  Not only are the paintings good, but this book is the perfect antidote to too much time spent on Twitter, especially if you read the text about all the injuries sustained.

2. Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought.  A beautifully written book, with wonderful balance, about a beautiful friendship.  Recommended.

3. Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896.  This will make the year’s “best of” list for sure.  I’m not usually a fan of reading a 900 pp. plus survey book to cover a period of more than three decades.  Usually too much stays superficial, and the author does not apply consistent quality standards to the whole work, if any of it.  But this book is interesting and informative on virtually every page, and it is unfortunately all too relevant for the current day.  Here is a good Kyle Sammin review.

Two books I have only browsed, but both look good:

Lizzie Collingham, The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World, with a slightly different title for the U.S. edition, and

Brian Fagan, Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization.

There is also:

Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History, is a thorough and informative treatment of what its title suggests.  Here is a WSJ review.

John L. Campbell and John A. Hall, The Paradox of Vulnerability: States, Nationalism & the Financial Crisis, considers the state capacities of Denmark, Ireland, and Switzerland in responding to the financial crisis.  I liked what was there, though wanted more.

Barry Riley, The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence, I have only perused bits, but it seems to be the book to read or own on this topic.

What I’ve been reading

1. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn.  While this volume of very short essays does reflect a literary sensibility, I didn’t find it fun or insightful to read.  By the way, “Vomit is usually yellowish and can range from pale yellow to yellowish-brown, with certain areas of quite different colours, like red or green.”  So I suppose the Knausgaard canon really is just the first two volumes of My Struggle.

2. Alex Millmow, A History of Australasian Economic Thought.  A very good introduction, New Zealand too.  There is no problem filling a book with substance on this topic, in fact it left me wanting more.

3. Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., John D. Jackson, and Robert D. Tollison, The Economics of American Art: Issues, Artists, and Market Institutions.  A useful overview and survey of the role of economics in the development of art markets in American history.

4. Cynthia Estlund, A New Deal for China’s Workers? The best book I know on labor unions and labor policy in China: “It surprises many Westerners to learn that the labor standards established by Chinese law on the books, apart from actual wage levels, track modern Western (especially European) labor standards rather closely in many respects…Professor Gallagher has described China’s labor standards regime as one of “high standards-low enforcement.””

5. Beowulf, translated by Stephen Mitchell.  I cannot judge veracity, but to read this is in the top tier of Beowulf renderings to date.  The Old English is presented on the opposing page, this book I will keep.

6. Orhan Pamuk, The Red-Haired Woman.  Eh. Contrived.

Arrived in my pile are:

Robert Wuthnow, American Misfits and the Making of Middle Class Respectability.

Jean Tirole, Economics for the Common Good, with nary an equation in sight.

What I’ve been reading

1. Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Technique.  Dense but carefully argued and consistently insightful, perhaps the best introduction to its subject matter.  It is especially strong on how Kierkegaard’s Lutheranism informed his critique of Hegel, his supernaturalism, and his strong opposition to complacency.

Kierkegaard also was an influence on my Stubborn Attachments, as Hampson writes: “Given that faith is to look beyond ourselves to Christ, the ‘future’ is for Lutheranism a critical category.  In the thought of the 20th-century Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann ‘future’ and ‘God’ become concomitant.  The relation to this future, to God, takes one outside oneself, whereas to rest on my laurels (my past) is of the essence of sin.  As we shall see, for Kierkegaard, relating to the idea of eternal life is existentially life-transforming.  It follows that in this tradition there is little continuity of person, for one and again I must break myself open (in my self-satisfaction) as I consent to dependence on God.”

Recommended.

2. Johnny Rogan, Byrds: Requiem for the Timeless: Volume 2: The Lives of Gene Clark, Michael Clarke, Kevin Kelley, Gram Parsons, Clarence White and Skip Battin.  Full of amazing and loving detail, this volume covers the less famous of the Byrds, and why their careers did not go further; whether in business or the arts, we spend too much time studying the winners.  Here are my earlier remarks on Rogan’s earlier editions as an extended essay on management theory and career advice.

3. Michael D. Barr, The Ruling Elite of Singapore: Networks of Power and Influence.  From 2013, but all the more relevant today.  Barr’s coverage is insufficiently appreciative of good results, but nonetheless offers an invaluable “how things really work” guide to Singaporean government, most of all on where accountability lies and where it does not.  There is guesswork involved, but this book offers plenty of details and analysis you won’t get elsewhere.

4. Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Europe After Napoleon: The Politics of Conservatism in a Revolutionary Age.  Published in 1964, before Kissinger became Kissinger, although he is a war criminal this volume shows the quality of his thought: “…an equilibrium based on considerations of power is the most difficult of all to establish, particularly in a revolutionary period following a long peace.  Lulled by the memory of stability, states tend to seek security in activity and to mistake impotence for lack of provocation.”  The person who recommended this volume to me told me it would explain why the internal and external requirements for foreign policy on the Continent are much more in accord than they are for either England or America.  It does no such thing, so I still would like to read on that question.

Jack Schneider, Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality.  Under a true value added measure, the schools in Somerville, Massachusetts turn out to be quite good, even though their raw test scores are not impressive.

David Osborne, Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Education System, covers how charter schools are transforming the American educational landscape.

What I’ve been reading

1. Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad.  At first I feared it was too trendy, but I ended up engrossed.

2. Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War.  Pseudoerasmus calls this the best book on the most underrated big war in human history; he is right.  It also gives you a good sense of how 50-100 million people might have died.

3. Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point in the American War in Vietnam.  Both a very good Vietnam War book, and a very good Vietnam book.

4. Rousas John Rushdoony. The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church.  Uneven in argumentative quality, but brilliant in parts, this is one of the conceptually most interesting books on early Christianity.  It turns out your views on Christology really do shape your politics, and furthermore there is a coherent version of libertarian Calvinism, except it isn’t very libertarian, and it comes from…having the right Christology.  Recommended, it opens up new worlds for the reader.

5. Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg.  I had never read this in German before.  For all its extraordinary intellectual and emotional peaks, it is also remarkably witty.

What I’ve been reading

1. Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.  One of the few books that have a perfect title.  These are a cross between short stories, ruminations, and essays.  Yiyun Li is from China, yet she refuses to write in Chinese or to have her work published in Chinese.  At times you wonder what is really in here, but her voice and vision stick with you.

2. Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam’s Holy Shrine.  Compulsively readable, and also excellent background on both the Gulf region and the Saudi-Iran conflict.

3. William R. Cline, The Right Balance for Banks: Theory and Evidence on Optimal Capital Requirements.  Not for the unconverted, but a good guide for anyone with a prior interest.  Capital requirements should be higher, but it is wrong to think the American economy currently has “too much finance.”

4. Regulating Wall Street: Choice Act vs. Dodd-Frank, published by NYU, with many notable contributors including multiple essays by Lawrence J. White.  Balanced, judicious, the best look so far at pending reforms to banking and finance.

5. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?  A lot of this book is only so-so, but the Preface — “A Glance into the Archives of Islam” — counts as one of the better works I’ve read this year, even though it comes in at only 27 pp.  It covers Hagar and Sarah, how Muslim and Christian understandings of the Abraham story differ, and the intellectual sources of institutional problems with Islam and political order.  That’s the secret to reading SZ, not to let yourself get distracted by the bad stuff or empty pages.  Amongst those who do not revere him, he remains underrated.

Arrived in my pile is the exhaustive and comprehensive Edward N. Wolff, A Century of Wealth in America.  This is likely to prove an important work for many researchers.

What also appears valuable, but I cannot read right now, is Kevin R. Brine and Mary Poovey, Finance in America: An Unfinished Story.

What I’ve been reading

1. Robert Knapp, The Dawn of Christianity: People and Gods in a Time of Magic and Miracles.  Jews, Christians, and polytheists, mostly in the first century after the birth of Christ.  Strongly conceptual, rather than a string of hard-to-remember facts and citations.  Here is a useful summary review.

2. Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream.  A well-known Argentinean novel, finally available in English.  A kind of ghost story, imagining wondering if the soul of your dying child really has been transferred to another person.  Short and very powerful.  Here is one very good review.

2. Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers.  Plenty of libertarian thought in here, and many historical tidbits of interest, for instance Julia Caldwell-Frazier, “The Decisions of Time” (1889) p. 486:

What obstacles and failures Prof. Morse encountered when he completed his rough model of the recording electro-magnetic telegraph; but see of what inestimable value his invention has been to mankind! Was not public opinion opposed to the telephone?—styled it “a useless thing.” But within a decade the telephone has become the most patronized means of urban intercommunication. Through all the innumerable obstacles and oppositions, we see, by the decisions of time, science tracing the wild comet in its vast eccentric course through the heavens; we see science bringing down the very lightning from the clouds, making it a remedial agent and a messenger, quick as light, to carry our thoughts.

Here is useful NYT coverage.  There is also:

Michael Vatikiotis, Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia, a useful introduction to why that part of the world has not turned into paradise.

Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, is a quality treatment of its topic material.

Jesse Eisinger, The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives, is a useful look at why so many cases are leveled against the company rather than the CEO. I found the book worthwhile, but don’t think he offered much of an argument as to why that should be bad.

Bradley M. Gardner, China’s Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation, is a good introduction to what the title promises.

What I’ve been reading

1. Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel, The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve.  I’ve only been reading the title of this one, as it came in the door just before I left for China.  But I like it already, and even if this book were nothing more than its title it still would be better than much of what is written on monetary policy.

2. Frédéric Dard, The Executioner Weeps.  French noir, full of cheap tricks, suspenseful, fun.

3. Robert Bickers, Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination.  A very good book, substantive, readable, and full of information not readily available elsewhere.  Yet the title is misleading, as most of the book, including the best parts, covers the first half of the twentieth century and in particular the Western presence and control in China (not quite domination).  Later on, the author says plenty about the Cultural Revolution, but doesn’t seem to want to actually condemn it.

4. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, Oliver Ready translation.  I hadn’t read this one since high school, so thought it was worth another try.  I can’t say I find Raskolnikov to be a convincing criminal, or a convincing character at all.  Maybe this story is better read as man’s struggle for freedom, and his inability to obtain it, due to the social processing of all his actions, rather than as a novel of crime per se.  I liked it, I didn’t love it.  If it were published today, it would not receive rave reviews.

5. Slavoy Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology.  While he is overrated by his trendy partisans, he is underrated by almost everyone else.  Might this be his best book?  Early Žižek is the best Žižek.  We have not escaped from the spectre of the Cartesian self, and what might a truly emancipatory political project have to look like?  2017 is not the worst time to be reading this book.  Here is one probably not very helpful review.  Usually the best five pages in a Žižek book are very very good, but in this case it is thirty or more.

And I very much enjoyed this sentence and the few pages of exposition that followed: “The notion that best illustrates the necessity of a ‘false’ (‘unilateral’, ‘abstract’) choice in the course of a dialectical process is that of ‘stubborn attachment’: this thoroughly ambiguous notion is operative throughout Hegel’s Phenomenology.”

What I’ve been reading

1. Sean McMeekin, The Russian Revolution: A New History.  Things might have been different, if you believe this book.  German support for Lenin was very important, and the author sticks to the main story lines.  Hard for me to judge, but at the very least it was interesting and also clearly written.

2. Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13.  This novel builds too slowly to fit my reading style in a somewhat busy time of year, but I suspect it would be wonderful read aloud in a monotone, or as an audio book.  A young girl disappears in England, and the story records how the town processes the event, and eventually forgets about it, over the course of 13 years.  Here is one good review, it is a quality work of some originality.

3. Ken Gormley, editor, The Presidents and the Constitution.  An edited volume that is wonderful and deserving of the “best of the year” list.  The book considers how each American president in turn faced constitutional issues, and how those were resolved.  This is an excellent survey of constitutional law, and a very good refresher on American political history.  If you are a non-American, and looking to learn who all those lesser-known American presidents were, and what they did, and why and how so many of them were mediocre or worse, this is also perhaps the best place to start.

4. Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire.  As clear and understandable a treatment of this topic as you are likely to find, Wilson himself writes: “A major reason for the Empire’s relative scholarly neglect is that its history is so difficult to tell.  The Empire lacked the things giving shape to conventional national history: a stable heartland, a capital city, centralized political institutions and, perhaps most fundamentally, a single ‘nation.’  It was also very large and lasted a long time.  A conventional chronological approach would become unfeasibly long, or risk conveying a false sense of linear development and reduce the Empire’s history to a high political narrative.  I would like to stress instead the multiple paths, detours and dead ends of the Empire’s development…”  Relative to those obstacles this is an amazing book.

5. Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby y compañia.  I tried this a few years ago in English, but it clicked for me only in Spanish.  It is a series of short, interconnected philosophical meditations on those who don’t write, have given up writing, or who cannot help but write.  One of the better novels of the new century, though note it does require some basic background knowledge of figures such as Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Herman Melville, and J. D. Salinger.

What I’ve been reading

1. Gunther S. Stent, The Coming of the Golden Age: a view of the end of progress.  Starting on p.84 (!), this short 1969 tract becomes a remarkable disquisition on stagnation, through the lens of “Faustian Man,” the decline of romanticism, Ortega y Gasset, Kierkegaard, and the hippie beats of San Francisco.  At some point the social sciences won’t make that much more progress, and Stent portrays the Maori as the non-complacent branch of the Polynesians.

2. Susan Southard, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War.  What is a city like after a nuclear bomb hits?  Beautifully written, both historical and anecdotal, and the ignoble record of the American government in this episode, with respect to cover-ups and poor treatment of survivors, extends well into the recovery period.

3. Jonathan Abrams, Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution.  A study of youth vs. experience, you can think of this as an excellent management book in addition to its basketball virtues.

4. Javier Cercas, La verdad de Agamenón, selected essays about literature, Borges, Tijuana, Spanish political culture as expressed through history, and the life of an author.  About half of them are excellent, none of them bad.  Could Cercas be the least-known (in America) great author in the world today?

5. Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What To Do Abut It.  The top one percent is not the relevant group.

6. Fernando Vallejo, Our Lady of the Assassins.  This short and violent novel is about Colombia during the period of its troubles.  Full of life and vigor, makes the case for complacency.

Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, Cents and Sensibility: What Economists Can Learn from the Humanities, covers a topic I am greatly interested in; here is a partial review by David Henderson.  Related issues are considered by Mihir A. Desai, The Wisdom of Finance, with Charles Sanders Peirce and Wallace Stevens being two points of focus.

I am happy to have just written a blurb for Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Become Richer, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality, self-recommending.

What I’ve been reading

1. Harold James, The German Slump: Politics and Economics 1924-1936.  Not economic history in the post-cliometrics sense, but a history of economic issues, very high quality, full of good information on just about every page.

2. William Rosen, Miracle Cure: The Creation of Antibiotics and the Birth of Modern Medicine.  A good book on exactly what the title promises, my favorite sentence was this: “Before penicillin,  three-quarters of all prescriptions were still compounded by pharmacists using physician-supplied recipes and instructions, with only a quarter ordered directly from a drug catalog.  Twelve years later, nine-tenths of all prescribed medicines were for branded products.”

3. Justin Yifu Lin and Celestin Monga, Beating the Odds: Jump-Starting Developing Countries.  An instructive look at how countries have to start growing before the right institutional framework is in place, and how they can get around that.  Haven’t you wondered how China racked up so many years of stellar growth with such a bad “Doing Business” ranking from the World Bank?  One of the better books on developing economies in the last few years.

4. Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.  An intelligent and indeed reasonable basic approach to answering questions about class, including “Why don’t they push their kids harder to succeed?” and “Why don’t the people who benefit most from government help seem to appreciate it?”  I am not the intended audience, but still this was better than I was expecting.

Rick Wartzman, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America, is a densely-written but nonetheless useful history of how America moved from paternalistic big businesses to lower-benefit jobs.

Arnold Kling, The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides.  This short book, revised, improved, and expanded, is so good it is wasted on almost all of you.  Here are various pieces of background information.

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. William Vaughan, Samuel Palmer: Shadows on the Wall.  Another first-rate Yale University Press book of art plates and art history, for this they are the best.  Get a hold of as many of them as you can.

2. Ge Fei, The Invisibility Cloak.  This short Chinese noir novel, with a dash of Murakami, is one of my year’s favorites and also one of this year’s “cool books.”  I finished it in one sitting.  Set in Beijing, the protagonist sells audio equipment, and then strange things happen.  Here is a good interview with the author.

3. David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.  So far I’ve only read bits and pieces of it, but I am surprised it is not receiving more positive attention.  It seems like one of the most thorough and smart and thoughtful biographies of any American president.  It has plenty of detail on Obama’s life and career, and you can learn what Obama’s ex-girlfriend says about how he was in bed at age 22 (“he neither came off as experienced nor inexperienced”, [FU Aristotle!])  Yes, at 1084 pp. of text this is more than I want to know, but what’s not to like?  Here is a good Brent Staples NYT review.  Garrow cribs his main narrative — the artificial construction of his blackness — from Rev. Wright and Steve Sailer, and doesn’t exactly credit them, although that (the former, not the latter) may explain why the mainstream reception has been so tepid.

4. Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech.  The title says it all.  I disagreed with almost everything in this book, still it is useful to see where the Zeitgeist is headed.

5. The Great Inka Road: Engineering an Empire, assorted authors and editors and photographers.  One of the best and most readable introductions to Incan civilization.  I’ll say it again: you all should be reading more picture books!  They are one of the best ways to actually learn.

Two useful books for presenting meta-information on learning things are:

Ulrich Boser, Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, and School, or, How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything, and

Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong.

And Thomas W. Hazlett, The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone, is a very learned, market-oriented look at what the title promises.