Results for “best fiction” 318 found
Books about America, by foreigners, bleg
George Hawkey writes to me:
I know you’ve posted “best books” queries on the site before, so here goes. Do you have any input on the best books about American History and Culture, but written from a non-American point-of-view?
Obviously Tocqueville, and there’s a whole raft of Canadian published books on the US culture as well. What I’m looking for is more like: what would “The Best and the Brightest” be if it were written by a Japanese journalist. Or what if Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters” trilogy was written by a Russian sociologist? “The World Is Flat” but written about the US by an Indian?
In many cases, I’m guessing these texts are not yet or will never be translated, but I’m still interested in finding greater perspective on the US than what’s provided by the traditional pundits, authors and historians.
I’ll recommend these five works of fiction, starting with Nabokov and how about Ayn Rand as well? The comments are open for your further suggestions…
In my pile
1. Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels, by Heather Shouse. I’ve read enough of this book to know it is true to its title.
2. The Moral Lives of Animals, by Dale Peterson. It looks like Adam Smith’s TMS applied to the moral sense of non-human animals, making the point that the moral sense is not unique to human beings.
3. Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and his Fifteen Quartets, by Wendy Lesser.
4. Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes; so far I love it, imagine a mix of Raymond Chandler, near-future science fiction, and South African grit.
All are worthy of purchase, we will see how they develop. I found The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, the most enjoyable science fiction novel I’ve read in a few years, and it should appeal to fans of Thailand too.
What I’ve been reading
1. Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad. National Book Award for fiction, and it is enjoyed by most people who pick it up,Will Wilkinson reviews it well.
2. Margaux Fragoso, Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir. This book raises questions about the meaning of consent, but despite its quality I was unable to get all the way though it. Too brutal for me.
3. The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obreht. The author may be 25, Serbian, beautiful, and feted everywhere, but still I found it contrived and overwritten. The substance-obsessed Laura Miller nails it. Against my better judgment I enjoyed and finished Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination.
4. David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: a History of a Land, its Regions, and their Peoples. So far released only in the UK, in this excellent book Gilmour claims that for a while, in the 19th century, Garibaldi was the most famous person in the world.
5. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute’s Soliloquy. The first third is a superb humane and philosophical response to adversity, namely imprisonment on Buru Island. Of the rest, which is never sent letters to his family, at least half is very good.
6. Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact. Perhaps the best book on what its subtitle indicates.
Assorted links
1. Kevin Drum reviews TGS. And Lane Kenworthy. And Nick Schulz at Forbes: "It’s possible the most important non-fiction book this year won’t be published on paper."
2. Megan on the 1954 kitchen. And "densifying" to get more low-hanging fruit, from Ryan Avent. And more from Scott Sumner on the book: "Tyler Cowen’s book has been both a marketing coup and an intellectual game changer. It has gotten people to focus on issues they intuitively knew were out there, but for which they lacked a framework for thinking about."
5. Index method? why not just read the thing?
*The Return*
The author is Daniel Treisman and the subtitle is Russia's Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev. Is this the first non-fiction book to be making my "Best of 2011" list? Most of all, it argues persuasively that, rather than botching the transition away from communism, the Russians/Soviets did a remarkably good job, relative to what could have been expected. It's also the best all-round book-length treatment of what the subtitle indicates and it is readable as well. Excerpt:
But [under Putin] did the bureaucracy become more effective and the population safer? The state certainly grew. In Putin's eight years as president, about 363,000 additional bureaucrats were hired, mostly federal agents stationed in the regions. Law enforcement mushroomed. In the United States, there are two judges and prosecutorial employees per 10,000 residents. When Putin took over, Russia had eight; when he left, it had fourteen. Federal spending on law enforcement and national security rose from $4 billion in 1998 to $26 billion in 2007.
Despite this influx of resources, most indicators suggest the state became less, not more, effective. It built less housing, paved fewer roads, and laid fewer water mains and gas lines per year than under Yeltsin. The number of public schools and buses in service fell faster than before. Reforms of the education and health systems were repeatedly postponed…As for keeping citizens safe, few saw any improvement.
Here is a recent review of the book from the WSJ; I liked the book more than he did.
What I’ve been reading
1. The Half-Made World, by Felix Gilman. I very much enjoyed this mix of dystopian steampunk and speculative science fiction, reviewed by Henry here.
2. Vassily Grossman, Everything Flows. I found this more fluent and compelling than his longer Life and Fate; it's the story of a man who returns home from a concentration camp. Recommended.
3. Richard Overy, 1939: Countdown to War. I didn't think a book so short on this topic could be good. I was wrong. Overy has a strong overall track record as an author.
4. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. I don't have any objections to this much-touted book, but I expected to learn more from it than I did. It didn't feel like 352 pp.
5. Nicholas Ostler, The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel. A provocative book on the forthcoming decline of English as a globally dominant language. I'm not (yet?) convinced, but I'm less unconvinced than I thought I would be. One main point is that more and more business will be done without English at all, often through the BRICS countries. It is interesting to see that fewer people in South Africa are learning English.
*Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet*
That is the new book by Jennifer Homans and it is one of the very best non-fiction works of the year, impeccably written and researched. Here is the excerpt of greatest interest to most economists:
None of the Russian ballet's many admirers, however, would be more central to the future of British ballet than John Maynard Keynes. Keynes is usually remembered as the preeminent economist of the twentieth century, but he was also deeply involved with classical dance and a key player in creating a thriving British ballet…
For Keynes…classical ballet became an increasingly important symbol of the lost civilization of his youth…With Lydia at his side, Keynes plowed his talent and considerable material resources into theater, painting, and dance, even as he was also playing an ever more prominent role in political and economic affairs on the world stage.
The couple's Bloomsbury home became a meeting place for ballet luminaries (Lydia's friends) and a growing coterie of artists and intellectuals who saw ballet as a vital art…When Diaghilev died in 1929, many of them joined Keynes in establishing the Camargo Society, an influential if short-lived organization devoted to carrying Diaghilev's legacy forward — and to developing a native English ballet. Lydia was a founding member and performed in many of the society's productions…Keynes was its honorary treasurer.
In the mid-1930s, Keynes also built the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, funding it largely from his own pocket…As Britain sank into the Depression, Keynes's interest in the arts also took on an increasingly political edge: "With what we have spent on the dole in England since the war," he wrote in 1933, "we could have made our cities the greatest works of man in the world."
I did, by the way, very much enjoy Black Swan (the movie), despite its highly synthetic nature, a few disgusting scenes, and its occasional over-the-top mistakes. So far it's my movie of the year along with Winter's Bone, the Israeli movie Lebanon, and the gory but excellent Danish film, Valhalla Rising.
My favorite recording of Swan Lake (and my favorite classical CD of 2010) is conducted by Mikhail Pletnev (controversial but there is a good review here), who was recently cleared of child abuse charges in Thailand.
What I’ve been reading
1. Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan, by D.R. Thorpe. I'm not one of these people who enjoys reading a lot of long tracts about British politicians, but this is one of the best non-fiction books of the year. It's full of good information, offers useful context for British economic and political debates, has plenty of original research, and is as suspenseful as a very good novel. Most of all, it brings its world and character to life. Highly recommended.
2. J.P. Singh, Globalized Arts: The Entertainment Economy and Cultural Identity. The definitive book for updating coverage on its topic, including the best and most comprehensive history of the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity.
3. James K. Glassman, Safety Net: The Strategy for De-Risking Your Investments in a Time of Turbulence. p.11: "Reduce the proportion of stocks in your portfolio."
4. Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Loyalists, and Indian Allies. "The civil war had four overlapping dimensions. In the first, Loyalists and Americans battled for control of Upper Canada. Second, the bitter partisanship within the United States threatened to become a civil war, as many Federalists served the British as spies and smugglers, while their leaders in New England flirted with secession. Third, Irish republicans waged a civil war within the British empire, renewing in Canada their rebellion, which the British had suppressed in Ireland in 1798. Invading Canada, Irish-American soldiers faced British regiments primarily recruited in Ireland, for thousands of Irishmen had fled from poverty by enlisting in the royal forces. Fourth, the war embroiled and divided native peoples…In the North American civil war of 1812, Americans fought Americans, Irish battled Irish, and Indians attacked one another. They struggled to extend, or to contain, the republicanism spawned by the American Revolution." Some of this book has too much detail for my interests, but overall it is good.
5. Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History. I liked the cover so much that I also enjoyed the book more. I also liked the weight of this book a great deal; it was just right. In any case a fine one-volume introduction.
Observations about Rio
I'm no expert on Rio, but I have visited the city twice, have taken a favela tour, been in a police vs. drug gang shoot out (not as a shooter), and read quite a few books about the place, so here are my observations on the latest events:
1. The authorities will not win until they have a superior ability to supply local public goods in the favelas. That is a ways away. (The broader lesson is you should not take in more immigrants than you can supply local public goods for, and that is why fully open borders is not a good idea in every setting.)
2. On a day-to-day basis, the police are outmatched in terms of weaponry and also will to win. The military cannot remain deployed forever and a tank cannot rule a neighborhood. I am skeptical about current victory claims, which from my comfortable perch in Fairfax I suspect are temporary at best.
3. Sometimes the Rio police push out the drug gangs, but the alternative is paramilitary groups which then run the drug trade. (Those groups, by the way, employ a lot of former policemen.) A police victory is not always the solution. Here are the different types of police in Brazil.
4. The Brazilian state has extended its governance, throughout the country, much less than you might think. The current battles are, among other things, an exercise in nation-state building, which historically has not come easily to most regions. Furthermore relying on the military for a (partial) victory is in the longer run a double-edged sword, especially in a nation with a history of military coups and military rule.
5. For a different and now shocking look at Rio (the hills are mostly empty), watch the stunning 1959 film Black Orpheus. Very good trailer here.
6. One of my favorite non-fiction books is Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, highly recommended.
7. The Brazilians are now building high-speed rail between Rio and Sao Paulo.
*The Emperor of all Maladies*
The author is Siddhartha Mukherjee and the subtitle is A Biography of Cancer. This is not a typical excerpt, but it works as an excerpt for this blog:
In 1942, when Merck had shipped out its first batch of penicillin — a mere five and a half grams of the drug — that amount had represented half of the entire stock of the antibiotic in America. A decade later, penicillin was being mass-produced so effectively that its price had sunk to four cents for a dose, one-eighth the cost of a half gallon of milk.
This book deserves its rave reviews; it is one of the best non-fiction works of the year.
Related to this topic, here is an update on Christopher Hitchens.
Which works ought to be read in their original language?
Gabriel Power, a loyal MR reader, asks:
What works really ought to be read in their original language? Does this suggest classes or types that are best read in the original? Does it suggest that some languages are poorly translated into English while others are well translated (indeed, possibly improved upon, e.g. Poe into French)? Why?
I can speak only to German, Spanish, and English. Borges and Goethe and Juan Rulfo are much, much better in the original and I believe they cannot be well understood or appreciated in translation. Vargas Llosa is an example of a conceptual, plot-driven Spanish-language author who translates quite well into other languages. Max Frisch requires German and in general German humor (please don't laugh) does not translate into other languages, less than English-language humor does. Shakespeare translates relatively well into German, but I wonder about other Shakespeare in other languages. I have always thought of Chekhov as requiring Russian, but that is speculation. It is hard for me to imagine James Joyce in any language but English, but most modern American authors can be translated OK, in part because they are not writing "word-rich" material.
Potentially "cheesy" material, such as Poe, often does better in another language. Raymond Chandler in German was excellent, as it added a layer of cranky mystery to the proceedings. I think of "word rich" and "subtly humorous" as hard to translate, so genre fiction is often better in another language.
What can you all add to this?
Assorted links
*State of Emergency*
Could it be the best non-fiction book so far this year? The author is Dominic Sandbrook and the subtitle is The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974, here is an excerpt:
As a spender, Joseph had only one Cabinet rival: the Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher. Derided as the "Milk Snatcher" in 1971 because she had to carry out Macleod's plan to scrap free school milk for children aged between 8 and 11. Mrs Thatcher was actually a big-spending education chief who secured the funds to raise the leaving age to 16 and to invest £48 million in new buildings. In December 1972, she even published a White Paper envisaging a massive £1 billion a year for education by 1981, with teaching staff almost doubling and vast amounts of extra cash for polytechnics and nursery schools. She wanted "expansion, not contraction", she said. It never happened; if it had, her reputation in the education sector might be very different.
Every page of this book has excellent analysis and information, attractively presented. It masterfully covers a wide range of topics, ranging from how the British started drinking wine, to how the power cuts affected public morale, to the strategies of British labor unions, to the insightfulness of Fawlty Towers. It's a key book for understanding how the Thatcher Revolution ever came to pass.
It is simply a first-rate book. It is out only in the UK, but I was happy to pay the extra shipping charge from UK Amazon, which you too can pay here. Or maybe try these used sellers. Some reviews are here.
Words of wisdom
The best advice about how to conduct yourself at work is to know yourself, and get new information–from outside your own experience–about what is possible in the world. And that is what fiction, and plays, and poetry, and this blog, are about.
More here. I thank Alex and Garett for having done a short (very short) jaunt to El Salvador with me; more on that soon.
Negative review of Franzen’s *Freedom*
It is a very good review, as the book has vanished for me. Here is one excerpt:
…although the narrator of Freedom tells us on the first page, “There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds,” one need read only that the local school “sucked” and that Patty was “very into” her teenage son, who in turn was “fucking” the girl next door, to know that whatever is wrong with these people does not matter. The language a writer uses to create a world is that world, and Franzen’s strenuously contemporary and therefore juvenile language is a world in which nothing important can happen. Madame Bovary’s marriage sucked, Heathcliff was into Catherine: these words fail the context not just because they are of our own time. There is no import in things that “suck,” no drama in someone’s being “into” someone else. As for the F word, Anthony Burgess once criticized the notion that to use it in matter-of-fact prose is to hark back to “a golden age of Anglo-Saxon candour”; the word was taboo from the start, because it stands for brutal or at best impersonal sex. “A man can fuck a whore but, unless his wife is a whore, he cannot fuck his wife … There is no love in it.” A writer like Franzen, who describes two lovers as “fucking,” trivializes their relationship accordingly. The result is boredom.
Here are three very good sentences:
Too much of it takes place in high school, college, or suburbia; how odd that a kind of fiction allegedly made necessary by America’s unique vitality always returns to the places that change the least. Franzen clearly has little interest in the world of work. (The same applies, incidentally, to whoever edited the novel.)
And this:
Perhaps he can learn a lesson from Freedom: write a long book about mediocrities, and in their language to boot, and they will drag you down to their level.
I thank The Browser for the pointer.
Addendum: Andrew Gelman comments.