Results for “best fiction”

291 found

The always-interesting Richard Florida has a new book out, namely Who’s Your City: How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live The Most Important Decision of Your Life.

The book tells you how to find the city for you (for me it is Los Angeles, but somehow closer to everything else, and with better bookshops) and why the mood of a city matters. 

Is the following true:? The class of city you live in matters less than before, because you can use Amazon or Starbucks in either Manhattan or Chattanooga.  But within a class of city, personality now matters more precisely because people can sort themselves on the basis of personality rather than convenience.

What about me?  I enjoy living in an area which is not totally flat and I also enjoy the feeling that I can drive from one mini-region to another and experience changes; Maryland and DC really do differ from Virginia.  I felt hedged in living in Wellington, New Zealand and in general I don’t like having my back to the water.

Last week Robin Hanson and I discussed which would be the best city to live in if a) all your basic needs were taken care of, and b) you could not otherwise spend any money.  Oxford, even with mediocre weather, seemed like a strong pick.  There is a true intellectual community and everything there costs a lot anyway; not being able to spend any money isn’t so different from the reality.

Part of Bolaño’s genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut
your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art,
if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very
busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous
to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?

That’s from one review of the newly translated Roberto Bolaño book.  (Might it have been titled "Conservative Fascism"?)  This work is not a structured narrative but rather a series of impressionistic portraits of how easy it is for some people to slip into being horrible and stay that way.  Imagine a fictional bestiary of creepy aesthetes who are playing at human relationships, sleepwalking through their dreamlike yet trivial obsessions, and in the meantime pledging allegiance to tyranny.  Literature is a "surreptitious form of violence" throughout.

Here are excerpts from other reviews.  At this point it goes without saying that everything by Bolaño is essential reading; however you may find many parts baffling if you don’t have a strong background in things Latin American.

1. Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, by Andrei S. Markovits.  Not the usual swill on this topic; sadly the main prediction of this book is that the passing of Bush will not make America much more popular in Europe.  Read this short article on the same.

2. Dante, Paradiso, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander.  There still is not a gripping English-language Paradiso on the market, as the Mandelbaum translation is flawed as well and don’t ever trust Penguin translations with anything.  This one doesn’t elevate me as the text should.  But it has the best notes of any edition, is laid out most nicely, and is the best for trying to follow the Italian and cross-reference the translation.  If you buy only one English-language Paradiso maybe it is this one.  An alternative is the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow edition, lyrical but archaic, on-line for free.

3. Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History, by Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll.  The table of contents looks amazing, but my browsing indicated this book to be boring.  Still, some of you should read it.  It is full of factual substance, slotted into an economic framework.

4. Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence, by John Chasteen.  Every now and then a history book sweeps you up into its world; this one did it for me, most of all the treatment of Alexander von Humboldt but from beginning to end as well.  The best and most readable book on its topic.

5. William Gibson, Neuromancer.  Wow, this is now twenty-four years old.  I’m teaching it next week in Law and Literature class.  Upon rereading what strikes me most is how little science fiction it offers and how much it follows in the stylistic footsteps of Hammett and Chandler.

1. Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul, by Michael Reid.  A good treatment of the region’s recent history; it is best for its balanced assessment of what market-oriented reforms have managed or not.

2. Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe, by James J. Sheehan.  Blah, blah, blah, blah, Europe has fewer soldiers than it used to, blah.  Blah.  Sheehan is a first-rate historian, but there’s not much to this book.

3. Architecture of Authority, by Richard Ross.  This book is nothing more than photos of jail cells, parole hearing rooms, Mary Boone Gallery, and the like.  Thought-provoking.

4. Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike.  Scattered essays on just about everything.  Completely apart from his fiction, Updike is simply one of the smartest and most impressive people out there.  It is amazing how many topics he knows so much about and how well he writes about them.

5. Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You With the Bill), by David Cay Johnston.  This is quite a good compendium of different ways that government screws us over, written from a mixed populist/libertarian point of view.  Recommended.  I expected not so much but the substance here held my attention.  I’d now like to know the total welfare cost of all these bad policies.

"Yes, but think of the dead!"

Another voice took up the strain.  "The dead," it said.  "Think of the unborn…"

Or:

"Whatever it dislocates," said Redwood, "My little boy must have the food."

Those are both from H.G. Wells’s excellent and far ahead of its time, The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth.  The novella concerns a new tool of genetic engineering that makes people thirty-five feet tall, and of course occasions social conflict.  Well’s short fiction is in general much underrated.

1. Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet, by John Armstrong.  The author does not demonstrate overwhelming expertise but this is nonetheless not a bad place to start on the most neglected of all the great writers.

2. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla.  Why Schleiermacher really matters, how Kant painted himself into a corner trying to solve the problems laid out by Rousseau, and why it all springs from Hobbes.  I found this well above average for its genre, though you must have a taste for Straussian-like books where big ideas clash at the macro level and there is little attempt at any kind of empirical resolution.

3. How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom, by Garry Kasparov.  This is a fun book, except that life mostly doesn’t imitate chess.  Chess is characteristic for its lack of self-deception; it is hard to avoid knowing where you stand in the hierarchy and excuses are few and far between.  That’s why most chess players are depressed.  Kasparov seems to save his self-deception for politics; let’s hope he is still alive a year from now.

4. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, by Richard Rhodes.  This favorite book of Jason Kottke is first-rate non-fiction, it is also one of the best books on the Cold War.

5. The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa.  One of the best studies of the psychology of political power and the connection between tyranny and the erotic.  A fun albeit sometimes harrowing read.  Another superb translation by Edith Grossman, might she be the best translator ever?

1. Days on the Family Farm, by Carrie Meyer.  An interesting economic study of life on an early twentieth American family farm, based on personal diaries, and an antidote to anyone who thinks that all GMU economics faculty are like the bloggers you know.

2. Theory of Clouds, by Stephane Audeguy.  I loved this novel, which was the rage in France but sadly will die here stillborn.  Think Julian Barnes, Sten Nadolny, or Kazuo Ishiguro.  Short, fun, dreamy, and conceptual.  Its quality illustrates one of my favorite book-buying algorithms, which is to snap up serious foreign fiction translated into English, if only because the selection pressures are so severe.

3.  Free Trade Reimagined, by Roberto Unger.  This is the fourth book this year to challenge the doctrine of comparative advantage, a more important fact than any argument in the books themselves.  The book is weak on empirics but it does present the sophisticated version of the anti-free trade arguments.  I don’t believe in open borders, so I suppose I’m not a free trader either.  Unger is smart, smart, smart, but that doesn’t mean he should be Minister of Long-Term Planning in Brazil, which he is.  Here’s the whole thing on-line.

4. The Bad Girl, Mario Vargas Llosa.  That makes two wonderful novels in one week.  I don’t enjoy all of his recent work, but this one is very fun, hearkening back to the tradition of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.  The Edith Grossman translation is first-rate as always.

5. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross.  Ross won’t quite say it, but he tries to convince the reader that
the twentieth century is the best century for music, ever.
That’s without pushing serialism too hard or resorting much to popular
music.  Sibelius, Janacek, Messiaen, and John Adams are among the heroes in this story.  If you
are only going to buy (and read) ten books on music, ever, this should be one of
them.  Here is one good review.  Here is a Jason Kottke interview with Ross, very interesting.

It was an amazing week for reading (the best since I’ve started doing MR) mostly because it was an amazing week for flying.  There’s more to come…

1. Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, by Robert Frank (the economist Robert Frank).  The best statement of the Frankian world view; every book of his is full of ideas and there are very few authors you can say that about.

2. John Lanchester, A Family Romance.  Imagine finding out your mother was once a nun and then that she led a life of lies.  I would have liked this book much better had it not been fiction.  It felt so real and even has good photos but I am disappointed to keep on thinking it is only a story. 

3. Gunther Grass, Peeling the Onion.  Why oh why oh why do I let myself be fooled.  There is only one author I find flat out too obnoxious to read, and it is this guy.  And that was before I learned of the whole SS business.  I had heard this one is different, but it isn’t.  Or it is, but he’s still too far over the line for that to matter.

4. Elizabeth Currid, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion Art & Music Drive New York City.  The title says it all.

5. The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, by Christine Kenneally.  The early chapters have excellent material on the contributions of Chomsky and Pinker, but after that it bored me.