Results for “best fiction” 318 found
My favorite things Mars
This was a reader request, so here goes:
1. Song about: Venus and Mars, by Paul McCartney and Wings. The melody is nice, the synthesizer is used well, and the song doesn't wear out its welcome.
2. Album about: David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Venus and Mars is not overall a good album; it is mostly dull and overproduced. So Bowie is a clear winner here.
3. Novel about: The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. Worth a reread, especially if you first encountered it when young. Red Mars by Kim Robinson is a runner-up. What else am I missing?
4. Film about: Mission to Mars. Underrated de Palma, much better on a big screen, where it has a nice poetry of motion. I already know that some of you hate this movie, so there is no need to pillory me again on this count. I have never seen The Eyes of Laura Mars. What's that old science fiction movie modeled after The Tempest?
5. TV show about: Veronica Mars, especially season one. Excellent dialogue, and it asks what family really consists of. One of my favorite years of any TV show. Is the British show Life on Mars good? I vaguely recall My Favorite Martian from when I was a kid. Was it actually about being gay?
6. Musician: Sun Ra.
7. Mars, painting of: Jacques Louis David probably wins this one. This image is from Pompeii.
8. Best Cato Institute essay about Martian economics: By Ed Hudgin.
The bottom line: It's not just a culture, they've got a whole planet to work with.
Good advice from the FT
Tyler Cowen, the economist, advises readers to “snap up foreign fiction
translated into English, if only because the selection pressures are so
severe”: in order for a publisher to think a work of fiction worth the
risk of translating and promoting to a foreign audience, its quality
has on average to be higher than the average for homegrown work.
Here is more. The best place to follow new releases of such fiction is the blog Literary Saloon.
*A Happy Marriage*
That is the title of the new novel by Rafael Yglesias. Here is a tiny excerpt:
I devoured this book eagerly on a plane flight and I recommend it highly to those who are married, have been married, will be married, should be married, and should not be married.
The blogger son Matt, in the form of a fictional persona, makes numerous cameo appearances. The economist Paul Joskow, in the form of a fictional persona, makes a cameo appearance. In real life he is Matt's uncle.
How many other novels explain to you — tongue in cheek — the exact difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics?
In my view Rafael Yglesias is one of the best American novelists of the last twenty years and probably the most underappreciated. Here is my earlier post on his earlier novel Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil.
What I’ve been reading
1. From London to Elista: The Inside Story of the Three Matches that Vladimir Kramnik Played for the World Chess Title, by Eugeny Bareev and Ilya Levitov. Via John Nye, the quality and drama of this book stunned me. Chess aside, the use of the dialogic form works remarkably well.
2. The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al Aswany. Fun, philosophical, erotic, and a bestseller in the Arab world. Many Americans don't know this book but it is worth picking up.
3. Lanark, by Alasdair Gray, This book is as good as I remember it; I was surprised to see it has only four reviews on U.S. Amazon. Many critics consider it the best and most creative Scottish novel of the twentieth century and of course it has tinges of science fiction and fantasy.
4. Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. If you are drawing inferences, keep in mind this means I had not read this book to date. It is a source for Roissy and also has some early anticipations of behavioral economics. Sporadically interesting, I would say.
5. Time Out Barcelona. The Time Out series is the most useful resource for urban travel, including for food. No other guide book comes close.
The new Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez biography
One day [Alvaro] Mutis climbed the seven flights of stairs, carried two books into the apartment without saying hello, slapped them down on the table, and roared: "Stop fucking about and read that vaina, so you'll learn how to write!" Whether all GarcÃa Márquez's friends really swore all the time during these years we will never know — but in his anecdotes they do. The two slim books were a novel entitled Pedro Páramo, which had been published in 1955, and a collection of stories entitled The Burning Plain (El llano en llamas), published in 1953. The writer was the Mexican Juan Rulfo. GarcÃa Márquez read Pedro Páramo twice the first day, and The Burning Plain the next day. He claims that he had never been so impressed by anything since he had first read Kafka; that he learned Pedro Páramo, literally, by heart; and that he read nothing else for the rest of the year because everything else seemed so inferior.
That is from the new and noteworthy Gerald Martin biography of GarcÃa Márquez. This very impressive (and enjoyable) book was seventeen years in the making. It's also not a bad way to learn about the political and economic history of northern Colombia. This should make any short list of either the best non-fiction books this year or the best literary biographies. The reader also learns the probable origins of the famed spat with Mario Vargas Llosa (p.375); it had to do with a woman, namely Vargas Llosa's wife.
What I’ve been reading
1. Siddharth Kara, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. A serious research effort and the best book so far on its topic.
2. Joseph Contreras, In the Shadow of the Giant: The Americanization of Modern Mexico. A neglected side of recent Mexican history; one of the best books on where Mexico is headed. Here is a recent article on related progress in Mexico's legal system.
3. Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. This revisionist account argues the conflict is political rather than racial and that the notion of "genocide" is an externally imposed category for international political reasons. I found the arguments of this book hard to assess but it made for stimulating reading.
4. George Scialabba, What are Intellectuals Good For?, recommendation via Henry. Fascinating essays on 20th century intellectuals, from an "ethical left" point of view. I especially liked the piece on Pasolini (a favorite director of mine).
5. Dying Inside, by Robert Silverberg. This 1972 classic has just been republished. Is it science fiction or speculative fiction? In any case it is full of social science; the basic premise is about how other people react to a man who has the ability to read peoples' minds and how psychologically destructive this power turns out to be. If you wish to read every great science fiction book this is a must.
What is driving the eBooks boom?
Via Yves Smith, here is one hypothesis:
What's popular on Fictionwise? Well, once again it seems like
porn is blazing a path to a new media format. Of the top 10 bestsellers under the "Multiformat" category, nine are tagged "erotica" amd the last is "dark fantasy"…People who read erotic romance and 'bodice rippers' love
ebooks because of the privacy they offer, both during purchase and when
reading.
By the way, Andrew Sullivan asks how one is to post 250 times a week and read Ulysses. The answer is simple: one page at a time.
One advantage of Kindle is that it provides a new tool for mental accounting. Call me irrational but formerly I could not read more than seven or eight books at a time without abandoning some of them midway. Kindle (like Netflix, I might add) gives me a new queue and allows me to have more "hanging," partially unread books at any point in time, yet without disrupting my mental equilibrium. I'm rereading Moby Dick, one chapter at a time, on plane trips, and next in line are Middlemarch and…Ulysses.
What I’ve been reading
1. Laurence M. Ball, Money, Banking, and Financial Markets. A truly modern money and banking text; could this be the best money and banking text ever? I don't yet see an Amazon link for it but presumably it will be out soon. (Addendum: Link is now here.)
2. William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and other Biological Components of Fiction. An excellent book on why we find fiction and narrative so satisfying; the notion of vindication is central to the hypothesis. Recommended.
3. David Post, In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace. This book is written in the style of Jefferson in at least one way. I mean that as praise.
4. Joel Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and Times of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds. Fills in many of the pieces about his life and work; it seems he lived part of his life as a practicing Muslim.
What I’ve been reading
1. The Aztec World, by Elizabeth Brumfiel and Gary Feinman. Long-time MR readers will know Aztec history is a special interest of mine. This book, a companion volume to the Aztec exhibit from Chicago’s Field Museum, is perhaps the best introduction to the Aztecs to date.
2. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. This achieved (justified) rave reviews in the UK but it has hardly made a dent in the U.S. market. It is non-fiction but written in a hybrid form and often feels more like a novel.
3. The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory, by Torkel Klingberg. When push comes to shove, the author fails to establish his major thesis. Still, this book is way above average for how seriously it treats the actual science behind its argument. I learned a great deal from it.
4. Somewhere Towards the End, by Diana Athill. A scary and effective memoir about how Athill, a famous editor, dealt with aging and the end of her sex life.
5. Not John Steinbeck.
Here are predicted hot reads for 2009.
Assorted links
1. Ten young progressive intellectuals.
2. International bright young things; the new economic superstars.
3. First Chinese restaurant with three Michelin stars.
4. Best science fiction books of the year; you’ll find one list here and another here.
5. Here is Alex Ross’s list of the best classical music recordings of the year.
The Superorganism
The subtitle is The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies and that is the new book by Bert Hölldobler and Edmund O. Wilson.
This is another plausible candidate for best non-fiction book of the year. I liked this paragraph:
Here is another good bit:
Whenever two kinds or organisms live in close mutualistic symbiosis, as is the case in leaf-cutting ants and their fungus, we should expect communication between the two mutualists. The fungus may signal to its host ants its preference for particular vegetable substrates or the need for a change in diet to maintain nutritional diversity or even the presence of a harmful substrate.
Here is a New York Times review of the book. The photos are wonderful too. Here is a short paper on the work of Barlow and Proschan and the general topic of "reliability"; it has implications for the financial crisis as well.
Europe Between the Oceans
Can you say longue durée? If so (or if not), here’s the new book by Barry Cunliffe, with the subtitle 9000 B.C.-AD 1000 indicating a coverage of murky yet critical millennia.
It’s a history of Europe which blends economic geography and economic archaeology. The underlying question is how Europe became so innovative and the answer has much to do with trade and migration. Imagine a more balanced and grounded Braudel. The explanation of the "Neolithic package" and its spread across Europe is stunning. I loved it when the author broke away from a passage about Phoenician trade routes to explain some odd lines in Homer. If you are wondering, Cunliffe is a moderate neo-migrationist. The photography and the color plates of the art are lovely. You can learn how to view the Roman Empire as an "interlude" and as a break from the major story and how to understand 800-1000 A.D. as a period of rebalancing. And you get passages like this:
…the actual return in calorific value for the effort expended in collecting [shellfish] is comparatively small. A single red deer would be worth fifty thousand oysters! That said, the value of shellfish is that they are always available and can be substituted when other food sources run short.
If you enjoy early economic history, this is a must, noting that it does not have the titillating feel of a popular science book. It is my pick for best non-fiction book of the year so far.
Here is the book’s home page. Here is one short review. Here is a Times review. You can buy an excellent long review (LRB) here.
Buy the book here (at $26 the per page price is low) to learn why economic archaeology should win a Nobel Prize someday.
Cow [Vache]
Nobody leads the cow
To the greenery cropped and dry
To the greenery without caresses,The grass which receives it
Must be sweet as a silken thread,
A thread of silk sweet as a thread of milk.Ignored mother
For the children it is not lunch,
But the milk on the grass
The grass before the cow,
The child before the grass
That is by Paul Eluard, translated by Ted Hughes. I’ve still been very much enjoying Letters of Ted Hughes.
Elsewhere in the world of fiction, I found the "philosophical" European bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog precious and unbearable; I couldn’t get to page 30. The new John Updike novel, The Widows of Eastwick, has been mostly panned, but I agree instead with this very positive NYT review.
What I’ve been reading
1. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, by Victor Pelevin. A fun Russian weird novel; here is a good review of it. It’s one of the few works of fiction I’ve finished lately.
2. The Patron’s Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art, by Jonathan K. Nelson and Richard J. Zeckhauser. Put together a collaborating art historian, a first-rate microeconomist, an interest in signaling and a preface by A. Michael Spence and this is what you get.
3. White Heat: The Friendship Between Emily Dicksinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple. Yes, this is a very good book. But it has the same problem that most other Emily Dickinson books have. Her poems are so short you can fit them into a narrative and they are so strong they tend to overwhelm any non-fiction context they are put in.
4. Geoffrey Heal, When Principles Pay:Corporate Social Responsibility and the Bottom Line. The main point is that socially responsible behavior is often profitable for business in the long run. I know that doesn’t sound like such a compelling message right now, but this is a highly intelligent and now a sadly neglected book.
5. Samuel Johnson: A Biography, by Peter Martin. This is only the third best biography of Johnson (Walter Jackson Bate is #2) and it is still one of the best books of the year. What does that say?
My Favorite Things Alaska
All this attention is being devoted to Alaska, so I thought I should do my own evaluation. Note in advance that politicians don’t usually make these lists, they’re not "favorite" enough for me. And enough about her for now anyway (though I’ll note in passing, in response to Andrew Sullivan and others, that if voters want to like her, they’ll simply refuse to see McCain in the properly cynical light); but no more comments on this issue for now as I want the blogosphere back!
1. Novel, set in: Jack London’s Call of the Wild or White Fang are the obvious choices. Did you know that London’s fiction was very widely read in the former Soviet Union?
2. Music: There’s Jewel and Bette Midler and maybe you’re all wondering which one I will pick. But the excellent Kevin Johansen, also associated with Buenos Aires I might add, is the proverbial rabbit from the hat. Ha!
3. Movie, set in: Both Never Cry Wolf and Grizzly Man are very good; the former had a lead character named Tyler before the name became fashionable. And isn’t Nanook of the North set in Alaska? Into the Wild is another pick and I doubt if I have exhausted the list.
4. Basketball player: Carlos Boozer is from Juneau.
5. Sculpture: Alaska is probably #1 in the entire United States once you consider the indigenous peoples. The best works are from the 1950s and 60s and they are not always attributable. My personal favorite is Thomassie Annanok but of course that is a matter of taste. Ingo Hessel’s book on Inuit Art is a favorite of mine, noting that it focuses more on Canada than Alaska.
6. Other arts: The Tlingit (some of whom live in Canada) have excellent totem poles, boxes, and carvings. The Haida are another rich artistic tradition.
7. Novel, set in: Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is the obvious pick plus I hear The Cloud Atlas (The Liam Callanan book, not the David Mitchell one, which is very good but not connected to Alaska) is good.
8. Travel book, set in: Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau: A Sea and its Meanings is lovely. I’ve never read John Muir’s Travels in Alaska but it is likely a contender.
9. Blogger: Hail Ben Muse of Alaska, advocate of free trade!
The bottom line: It relies too much on "set in," but overall the list is better than I had been expecting. Sadly, Alaska is the one American state I have yet to visit.