Results for “What I've Been Reading” 442 found
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.
What I’ve been reading
1. Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution. Excellent author, the chapters on the time period before the Constitution are good enough to make the “best books of the year list,” the rest is a much above-average summary and distillation, but of more familiar material. At 880 pp. of clear, limpid, and instructive prose, it is a winner in any case.
2. W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland. More of a mutual travelogue, with alternating contributions, than a series of letters, one learns that even in 1936: “There is little stigma attached to illegitimacy. Bastards are brought up on an equal footing with legitimate children of the family.” Furthermore, “All chocolate or sweets should be bought in London.” During the trip they run into Goering, yes the Goering.
3. Richard A. Posner, The Federal Judiciary: Strengths and Weaknesses. This is a grumpy book, but I don’t mean that in a grumpy kind of way, as I like many grumpy books: “The dominant theme of this book has been judicial standpattism — more precisely, the stubborn refusal of the judiciary to adapt to modernity.” By the end, Posner gives the federal judiciary a grade between B and B+, I was surprised it was so high.
4. Duff McDonald, The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite. “In the early 1920s, HBS was still without its own buildings at Harvard, faculty were crammed together in cramped offices, and classrooms were scattered around Harvard Yard.” This is a remarkably clear and engaging survey of its subject matter, the main drawback being it never explains the rise of HBS in terms of…management, as HBS itself might do so. There is thus an odd cipher at the book’s core, plus from the discussion of Michael Jensen onward, the book descends increasingly into ad hominem attacks and unfair moralizing. This volume is an odd mix, but still worth reading for its contributions.
Stephen Ellis, This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organized Crime, is one of the better books on that country: “…there are even private colleges in Lagos offering courses in credit card fraud and advance-fee fraud.”
Hugh Nibley, Approaching Zion, is a series of essays on society and theology from one of the Mormon “grandmasters.”
After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, edited by Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, collects many essays on the Piketty book and also on the topic more generally.
Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses of Early Islam, “…the early Muslim community believed almost universally that the Satanic verses incident was a true historical fact.” Ahmed, a brilliant scholar at Harvard, passed away in 2015, here is a short appreciation. If they wrote books for me, someone would be working on “Islam and Strauss” right now.
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. Mark Zupan, Inside Job: How Government Insiders Subvert the Public Interest. This is now the very best book on how special interest groups subvert the quality of public policy.
2. Historically Inevitable: Turning Points of the Russian Revolution, edited by Tony Brenton, contributors include Dominic Lieven, Orlando Figes, and Richard Pipes. I, for one, often find it easier to learn history through counterfactual reasoning. “What if they hadn’t put Lenin into that train?, and so on, and so this is my favorite from the recent spate of books on 1917 in Russia.
More generally, there are people who very much like counterfactual reasoning (say Derek Parfit), and people who don’t care for it much (say Jim Buchanan). The two types often don’t communicate well. The counterfactual deployer seems like a kind of smart aleck, caught up in irrelevancies and neglecting “the real issues.” In turn, the non-poser of counterfactuals seems stodgy and unable to understand the limitations of principles, how one might handle the tough cases, and what might cause one to change one’s mind. Being able to bridge this gap, and learn from both kinds of thinkers, is both difficult and yields high returns.
3. Mary Gaitskill, Somebody with a Little Hammer, Essays. Short pieces, never too long, strong throughout, mostly on literature (Nicholson Baker, Peter Pan, Norman Mailer, Bleak House) with some essays on movies too. This will make my best of the year list, and she remains an underrated author more generally.
4. Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. An original and consistently interesting extended essay on how “World Music” is evolving in digital times. A must-read for me, at least.
5. Johan Chistensen, The Power of Economists Within the State. I haven’t read this one, but it appears to be a very interesting look at the role of economists within government, for the case studies of New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, and other cases (in less detail). “Economists in government” remains an underappreciated topic, so I expect this book is a real contribution.
6. Julie Schumacher, Doodling for Academics: A Coloring and Activity Book. It’s funny, for instance one panel has the heading “Find and color the many readers who will enjoy your dissertation.” The images include a rat and a snake in the grass, but there aren’t even so many of those.
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.
What I’ve been reading
1. Erica Benner, Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli’s Lifelong Quest for Freedom. A useful and readable introduction to the practical issues of Florentine politics and how they influenced the life and writings of Machiavelli.
2. Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America. Volume one of the Penguin History of the United States, this book is especially good at tying in “settlement issues” to later “governance issues.” It is compulsively readable and has an excellent annotated bibliography. Circa 1770, exports were about 10% of American gdp (p.311); today exports are a bit over 12% of gdp.
3. Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth. This is a look at the significance of violence in American history, focusing on the Revolution itself, and it is a good way to remind foreigners how screwed up (and dynamic) we are.
4. Arguments for Liberty, edited by Aaron Ross Powell and Grant Babcock. I do not think the arguments in this book succeed as arguments for liberty, with the exception of some of the utilitarian arguments, noting that I am only a “2/3s utilitarian.” Still, you get Eric Mack, Jason Kuznicki, Kevin Vallier, Neera Badhwar, Michael Huemer, and Jason Brennan, and so this is the rare edited volume that lives up to what you ideally might want it to be.
5. Jok Madut Jok, Breaking Sudan: The Search for Peace. I’ve read a few books on South Sudan lately, to try to figure out, if only in broad terms, what is going on there. This is the one that actually does a good job explaining things! Above all else, I now have some sense of just how historically deeply rooted the current conflict is. Recommended.
Jonathan Schwabish, Better Presentations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks, is specific in all the right ways, most of all when it comes to Powerpoint slides.
My colleague Philip E. Auerswald has just published the very useful The Code Economy: A Forty-Thousand Year History.
What I’ve been reading
1. Ian McEwan. The Children Act. The main story line pretends to revolve around a Jehovah’s Witness who won’t take a blood transfusion, but I think it was meant as a book about Islam and he was afraid to say so. The resulting mix doesn’t quite work.
2. Arundhati Roy and John Cusack, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden are part of the book too. The two main authors conversing with Snowden is in fact the strongest argument against Snowden I’ve seen. Maybe he is just being polite, but it’s the only time I’ve heard him sound like an idiot.
3. Helen Hardacre, Shinto: A History. I’ve read only about a fifth of this 720 pp. book, but it seems to be a highly useful history on a topic hardly anyone knows anything about.
4. Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Compelling throughout, and worthwhile reading for anyone interested in media and media policy. Ellsberg, of course, was closely connected to Thomas Schelling and made significant contributions to the theory of choice under uncertainty.
There is also:
After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, edited by Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, is a very useful collection of writings on Piketty-related themes, including Solow and Krugman.
Nathan B. Oman, The Dignity of Commerce: Markets and the Foundations of Contract Law. An interesting blend of “moral foundations of capitalism” and analysis of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam, “…the early Muslim community believed almost universally that the Satanic verses incident was a true historical fact.”
What I’ve been reading
1. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicholas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe. A very good and extremely current introduction to exactly what the title promises, with plenty on earlier historical roots.
2. Noo Saro-Wiwa, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria. More or less a travelogue, but also one of the best introductions for thinking about Nigeria, and it does stress the different regions of the country. Both informative and entertaining.
3. The Maisky Diaries: The Wartime Revelations of Stalin’s Ambassador in London, edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky. Paul Kennedy called it the greatest political diary of the twentieth century. One of the best windows on the coming and arrival of the Second World War, and I don’t usually like reading the diary form. It’s also a very good look into how such an impressive person could be Stalin’s ambassador. By the way, why is the hardcover about a quarter of the price of the paperback?
4. Peter Leary, Unapproved Routes, Histories of the Irish Border, 1922-1972. Soon there may be one again, so I decided to read up on the background, a tale of Derry being severed from Donegal. This informative, easily grasped book also has a chapter on the fisheries border, a sign of the imaginativeness of the author.
5. Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789. Ellis is consistently excellent as an author, and this book is best on tying the intellectual evolution of the Founding Fathers to the troubles of the Articles of Confederation period.
There is also a new Deirdre McCloksey festschrift, Humanism Challenges Materialism in Economics and Economic History, edited by Roderick Floyd, Santhi Hejeebu, and David Mitch. It appears to be a very fine tribute.
Stephen D. King has a new book coming out on the reversal of globalization, namely Grave New World: The End of Globalisation, The Return of History.
What I’ve been reading about fascism
1. Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. A vivid and entertaining look at a major European fascist who remains neglected by Americans (I don’t even think this book has a U.S. edition). I was surprised how readable this book was, given its length and subject matter. The words “rollicking” and “psychopath” come to mind. He was nonetheless one of the most influential European writers of his time.
2. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914-1945. One of the classics, readable and comprehensive and one of the best places to start. One thing I learned from this pile of books is how hard some of those leaders worked to have the mid-level bureaucracy on their side. The centralization often occurred at higher levels, for instance Mussolini had 72 cabinet meetings in 1933, but only 4 in 1936. The Italian Fascist party, by the way, was disproportionately Jewish, at least pre-1938.
3. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism. Along with Payne, one of the core books to read, stronger on analysis while Payne has more historical detail. He is especially clear on how the fascists built up and refined their political coalitions over time, and the conflicting roles of party and nation in the history of fascism.
4. R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship. I’ve only read parts of this one, but it seems to be the best detailed historical account of a non-Nazi fascist regime. If you wish to know, for instance, how and why the Italian fascists reformed Italian public holidays, this is your go-to source.
5. Alexander de Grand, Italian Fascism: Its Origin and Development. Highly focused and to the point, also has an A+ quality annotated bibliography. It considers regions of Italy, demographic issues, looks at the arts, and for such a short book gives the reader a remarkably broad and multi-faceted perspective. Overall this book emphasizes how deeply rooted fascism was in so many other Italian institutions and ways of life.
6. I’ve also been reading plenty of Benedetto Croce, including his history of Naples and History, its Theory and Practice. He is oddly boring and non-concrete, but was a consistent opponent of the Italian fascist regime, except for the first two years of Mussolini’s rule (he later claimed that was for tactical reasons). In any case, the reader learns that the opposing side doesn’t always have a good ability to articulate why bad events are happening. I can recommend Fabio Fernando Rizi’s very good history and survey, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism.
7. Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. This beautiful short novel (also a movie) is especially good on anti-Semitism in Italy, how youth process political collapse in their countries, and how events can outrace your expectations and leave you in a haze.
Some books on Italian futurism are coming in the mail.
Overall I did not conclude that we Americans are careening toward fascist outcomes. I do not think that notion is well-suited to the great complexity of contemporary bureaucracy, nor to our more feminized and also older societies. Furthermore, in America democracy has taken much deeper roots and the system of checks and balances, whatever its flaws, has stood for a few hundred years, contra either Italy or Germany in their fascist phases.
Still, I did not find this reading reassuring, as people will support many bad things in politics. The Italian war in Ethiopian was remarkably popular, but exactly why? We Americans could (again) do something quite bad, but without being fascists.
Less directly on fascism, but by no means irrelevant to the topic, I can recommend two new books:
Andrzej Franaszek, Milosz: A Biography. Long, thorough, but readable treatment, focusing on more on his poetry than the political writings.
And I have been enjoying my ongoing browse of Robert E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life.
What I’ve been reading
1. Ousmane Oumar Kane, Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa. This excellent book clarified many aspects of West African and also Nigerian history for me, most of all how it connects to the earlier North African civilizations.
2. Sheelah Kolhatkar, Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street. I cannot vouch for the contents and allegations, which focus on Steven A. Cohen and his hedge fund career, but this is a highly engaging and better researched than usual look at the legal case against him.
3. Mark R. Patterson, Google, Yelp, LIBOR, and the Control of Information. Data fraud, data fraud, data fraud, welcome to 2016 yes you should be reading more books on this topic.
4. Kevin Vallier, Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation, “…public reason liberalism, properly understood, realizes foundational liberal values while according religion a prominent and powerful role in public life. I claim that, in theory and practice, public reason liberalism is far friendlier to religion in public life than both its proponents and opponents believe.” There is a Straussian reading of this book too.
5. Aurelian Craiutu, Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes. A much-needed perspective these days, from a very thoughtful scholar.
6. Gary Taubes, The Case Against Sugar. My intuitions agree with this argument, plus jelly donuts don’t taste that good anyway.
What I’ve been reading
1. Charles Wohlforth and Amanda R. Hendrix, Beyond Earth; Our Path to a New Home in the Planets. The core claim is that humans can (will?) colonize Titan, the moon of Saturn. But what are we to make of sentences such as: “The temperature is around -180 Celsius (-290 Fahrenheit), but clothing with thick insulation or heating elements would keep you comfortable. A rip wouldn’t kill you as long as you didn’t freeze.” Pregnancy would be tricky too.
2. Ian Thomson, Primo Levi. One of my favorite literary biographies, ever. This is also a first-rate look at the history of the Holocaust, and the postwar Italian literary world. Definitely recommended.
3. Philippe Girard, Toussaint Louverture. One of the best and most readable treatments of the Haitian revolution, with a focus on Louverture of course. Here is one good bit:
When it came time to pick between two extremes — slavery and unfettered freedom — Louverture stopped well short of the latter. By order of General Louverture, all former field slaves, even those who had settled in urban areas during the Revolution, would return to their original plantations, sometimes under their former masters. Those who refused would be “arrested and punished as severely as soldiers,” which implied that plantation runaways could be shot as deserters. He thereby merged the two worlds he knew best — the sugar plantation and the army camp — into a kind of military-agricultural complex.
According to many critics at the time, rebel leaders were in essence confiscating the slave plantations of their former white masters. Furthermore, the importation of laborers from Africa was to continue.
4. Lewis Glinert, The Story of Hebrew, delivers exactly what it promises: “For many young Israelis, Arial is virtually the only font they read.”
Also in various stages of undress are:
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable, foreword by Bernie Sanders.
Niall Kishtainy, A Little History of Economics, a modern-day Heilbroner.
Johan Norberg, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, a Julian Simon-esque take on the case for optimism.
What I’ve been reading
1. Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds. A super-fun but oddly uneven biography of Kahneman and Tversky, a meditation on the nature of collaboration, and a history of the early stages of behavioral economics (economics?) and for that matter a history of Israel in some of its early decades. There are cameos from Rapaport, Thaler, Gigerenzer, and others. Why did the Israelis take so readily to the idea of an economic psychology, compared to the Anglos?
2. Michel Faber, Undying: A Love Story. The pages are arranged like poems with stanzas, but it reads more like prose. It is the moving story of the death of Faber’s wife by cancer, very short and interesting throughout. So far published only in the UK.
3. Robert R. Reilly, Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music. A highly useful and to the point guide to classical music for the periods you probably do not listen to. It is strongest on the “intermediate” composers, such as Vagn Holmboe, Robert Simpson, and Edmund Rubbra. It makes a persuasive case for the 17 string quartets of Heitor Villa-Lobos, we’ll see if that was $40 well-spent.
4. Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund, Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game. This book is a series of letters, mostly about soccer. They are more substantive than you might be expecting, but still you have to love both Knausgaard and soccer to enjoy this one, on those I am only one for two.
5. Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis. Staying ahead of the Curve. This is about how cities are failing the middle class throughout much of the world. At the same time, suburbs are seeing a new poverty and urbanization is not always translating into rising living standards around the world. This book is where the problems of urban economics “are at” right now.
What I’ve been reading
1. Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives, by Sunil Khilnani. A highly readable introduction to Indian history, structured around the lives of some of its major figures. I passed along my copy to Alex.
2. Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa. More for classical music and Ojawa fans than Murakami readers, this is nonetheless an easy to read and stimulating set of interviews for any serious classical music listener. They are most interesting on Mahler.
3. Elsa Morante, History. In America, this is one of the least frequently read and discussed great European novels of the 20th century.
4. Miriam J. Laugesen, Fixing Medical Prices: How Physicians are Paid. Will people still care about these issues for the next four years? I hope so, because this is the best book I know of on Medicare pricing and its influence on pricing throughout the broader U.S. health care system.
My copy of Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy has arrived. It is a very good statement of how political fragmentation and intensified intellectual competition drove modernity and the Industrial Revolution.
I have only perused John H. Kagel and Alvin E. Roth, Handbook of Experimental Economics, volume 2, but it appears to be an extremely impressive contribution.
Marc Levinson’s An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy details what made the post World War II era so special in terms of its economics and income distribution and why it will be so hard to recreate.
Chris Hayes’s A Colony in a Nation, due out in March, he argues that racial equality really hasn’t improved much since 1968.
Guillermo A. Calvo, Macroeconomics in Times of Liquidity Crises is a useful book on sudden stops and related ideas.
Arrived in my pile is Yuval Noah Harati, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
What I’ve been reading
1. Ronald C. White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant is still underrated, this book is highly readable and to the point and not to fusty. Someone should get Paul Krugman (a Grant fan) to review this book.
2. Jeffrey Edward Green, The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy. “There will always be some plutocracy, don’t get bent out of shape too badly” is my brief summary of this one. This book could be more readable, but it is highly intelligent.
3. Esther Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language. I hadn’t known that almost all Esperanto words are accented on the penultimate syllable (bad for poetry), the system of correlatives and “table words” can be quite difficult (“It also has nine groups of word endings, not only for place but also for time, quantity, manner, possession, entity, etc.”), and how much the entire movement was influenced by the intellectual climate of late 19th century Russian Jewish thought. Recommended.
4. Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia. A revealing look into the mind of the author, but this one works only if you know and love her novels already. Ferrante’s “children’s” story The Beach at Night is worthwhile, very dark, you can read it in a small number of minutes. Here is a good NYT review.
5. Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone [Dream of the Red Chamber], Penguin edition, vol.I. I am not confident of my ability to follow along all of the longer plot lines, but it is more absorbing and readable than I had recalled from a much earlier attempt to read it. And overall it does make upper middle class life in 18th century China seem more civilized than its counterpart in Europe.
What I’ve been reading
1. Peter Ames Carlin, Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon. I hadn’t known that Simon originally recorded the Hearts and Bones album with Garfunkel, but later erased his partner’s contributions to the songs. Nor had I known that Simon produced a stripped-down, acoustic guitar version of “Surfer Girl.” For fans, the book is interesting throughout, and most of all the story is of an ongoing rivalry — with Art — that never became functional again once it collapsed.
2. Antonio Di Benedetto, Zama. A 1950s Argentinean novel set in colonial times, and beloved by Roberto Bolaño; the introduction describes the author as “a would-be magical realist who can’t quite detach himself from reality.” For fans of the disjointed tragic. I very much liked it, but had to read the first half twice in a row to grab hold of what was going on.
3. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and its Demons. Fresh and stimulating throughout, I found most interesting the parts of how the Commander in Chief role of the president evolved under Lincoln, and Lincoln as the first “media president.” Highly relevant for current politics too.
Forthcoming is Joe Quirk, with Patri Friedman, Seasteading: How Ocean Cities Will Change the World. Comprehensive and readable, though I am not a convert.
William Mellor and Dick M. Carpenter II, Bottleneckers: Gaming the Government for Power and Private Profit, is a very useful look at how laws and regulation block progress and create barriers to advancement.
I have only browsed Milan Vaishnav, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics, but it appears to be a quite interesting political economy take on the (non-optimal) transactional economies from having criminals so deeply involved in Indian politics.
Minxin Pei, China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay, takes a close look at Chinese corruption, based on a detailed study of two hundred cases.