Results for “best fiction” 318 found
My favorite things Chile
1. Fiction: I’ve already covered Roberto Bolaño plenty on MR; The Savage Detectives is his masterpiece but it’s all worth reading. The massive 2666 is due out later this year. José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night, while hardly read in the U.S., seems to me one of the most gripping novels of the 20th century. If you read the Amazon reviews you’ll that others who have read it agree. This is one of the least read first-rate novels I know. It’s not easy going, however, and it’s taking me a long time to read through a mish-mash of the English and Spanish-language texts. To top it all off, Isabel Allende has many fun books, most notably The House of the Spirits, which almost everyone will enjoy. Chile is much stronger in literature than most people think.
2. Popular music: Ricardo Villalobos is the lead figure of Chilean techno, which is now I hear quite a vibrant genre; Taka Taka is quite a good mix album. What else can you point me to?
3. Poetry: My favorite Neruda is Canto General, his retelling of Whitman’s America but covering the entire hemisphere. A masterpiece. Estravagario is excellent and while I haven’t read Residencia de la Tierra, it is considered another one of his classics. The love poems are very nice though perhaps not his best material. In any case he is one of the three or four best poets of the twentieth century. Gabriela Mistral is talented but I cannot say I love her work.
4. Playwright: Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden is good.
5. Favorite small town: There are so many, but how about Villarica, Punta Arenas, or that small port place next to La Serena whose name I cannot remember? Chile is one of the world’s best countries for lovely small towns.
6. Movie, set in or made in: Sorry folks, but I can’t think of a single one. What am I missing?
7. Seafood dish: Curantos.
8. Pianist: It’s hard not to pick Claudio Arrau, but, despite his musical intelligence, I don’t actually enjoy most of his (to me) lugubrious recordings. I have heard he was much better live in concert.
9. Painter: Roberto Matta is the obvious choice.
The bottom line: Writing, writing, and more writing. More generally, Chile is one of the very nicest countries on Earth. The key is to get around to those small towns.
Who wants cryonics?
Arnold Kling reports:
[Robin] Hanson says that the expected return from being cryonically frozen is positive. If it works, the benefits are high, and the probability of it working is greater than zero. Yet few people sign up for it. I think that we are afraid of looking weird if we sign up for it.
I wonder if people who already look weird, for whatever reason, sign up at disproportionate rates. I suspect not and that only some very particular preexisting unusual traits predict an interest in cryonics. Is the best predictor of signing up is interest in science fiction? If so, does this mean that the non-signers are simply people who are not able to imagine the potential benefits? Or does an interest in science fiction already label the person in some way where the marginal image cost of signing up is then especially low? Both cryonics and science fiction of course have very high rates of male participation, some exceptions aside. I predict that the reading of fantasy novels does not so well correlate with interest in cryonics, once you adjust for any prior interest in science fiction.
The Price of Everything
Here is Ezra Pound’s Usura Canto, here is a link to Russell Roberts’s The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity, available for pre-order. Can you guess which one has the better economics? In fact Russ’s book is the best attempt to teach economics through fiction that the world has seen to date.
Here is Russ’s summary of the book. Here is Arnold Kling on the book.
Bottomfeeder
The author is Taras Grescoe and the subtitle is "How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood," buy it here. Yes this is one of the best non-fiction books this year so far and yes I say that after having read (and mostly liked) the last five books on the exact same topic. I hope it does well because this book is an object lesson in how to best your competitors and we’ll see whether or not that matters.
Did you know that the average cell membrane of an American is now only 20 percent omega-3-based fats? In Japan it is 40 percent.
Or did you know that American sushi restaurants promising you "red snapper" are usually serving tilapia or perhaps sea bream.
The book has a superb explanation of how "frozen at sea" fish are now better, safer and tastier than "fresh fish," including for sushi.
English fish and chips was originated by Jewish merchants in Soho, drawing upon the same Portuguese traditions that led to tempura in Japan.
The Japanese are experimenting with acupuncture to keep fish alive and "relaxed" on their way from the ocean to being eaten.
Two of the practical takeaways from the book are a) if only for selfish reasons, do not eat most Asian-farmed shrimp, and b) eat more sardines. They are, by the way, very good with butter on sourdough bread.
This is one of the best single topic food books of the last five years. It is historical, practical, ethical, and philosophical, all at once.
What I’ve Been Reading
1. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, by Jill Bolte Taylor. What’s it like to lose half your brain in a stroke, be aware of the entire process, be unable to reason coherently, and then recover your faculties over the course of years? This first person account is written by a Harvard neuroscientist.
2. Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. Many critics are claiming this is the first great 9-11 novel. It grips your attention immediately and has a strong craft but philosophically does it have anywhere to go? It is rare that I put a book down after the halfway mark but that was the case here. Some of you will like this but I look for something more exotic from my fiction.
3. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others, by Marco Iacoboni. This is now the go-to popular science book on mirror neutrons. I especially liked the discussion of why we find conversation easier than giving monologues (well, not everyone does), even though a priori you might expect the opposite.
4. Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier’s Flight From the Greatest Manhunt of World War II, by Brendan I. Koerner. The story of a black WWII GI who goes AWOL and marries into a Burmese hill tribe. This could have been a great book but as it stands it is a "good enough to read" book. The digressions are often more interesting than the main story.
5. Hedge Funds: An Analytic Perspective, by Andrew Lo. Finally a serious book on hedge funds based on real data, written by a leading financial economist, and covering August 2007. I’ve only browsed the book but it is a must for anyone who follows this area.
6. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. I read this (yet again) on the flight back from Japan, it is still one of the best books and one of the most important books for aspiring social scientists. A must-read if you don’t already know it.
I hate perfume
I really, really do. All perfume, and yes that means yours too. But I loved the book Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. If you are rating this book along the single dimension of how skillfully it informs the reader, it is one of the best non-fiction books I have read, ever.
Plus it has good sentences like:
Nobody ever died from wearing Mitsouko, but lots of babies were born as a result of it.
And:
Fragrances for men are mostly identical crap, designed to trap you and give you away as a lout.
Recommended.
Markets in everything, Thorstein Veblen edition
A watch that doesn’t tell time. Oh, it costs $300,000. And:
He added that anyone can buy a watch that tells time – only a truly discerning customer can buy one that doesn’t.
And here’s the best part: The watch sold out within 48 hours of its launch.
I thank Darren Klein for the pointer.
Addendum: I am reminded of Borges on Veblen: "When, many years ago, I happened to read this book, I thought it was a satire. I later learned it was the first work of an illustrious sociologist."
What I’ve Been Reading
1. The World is What It Is, by Patrick French. This authorized (yes, authorized) biography digs up all the dirt on V.S. Naipaul; I’ve never read anything like it. Here is a Paul Theroux review. Here is another rave review. Theroux’s own self-loathing, quasi-fictional biography of his "friendship" with Naipaul — Sir Vidia’s Shadow — remains one of my favorite books but this is a wonderful sequel. And if you haven’t read through Naipaul’s ouevre you should, especially A Bend in the River, A Turn in the South, and Among the Believers, among others. There is something to be said for misanthropy raised to an art form and packed with intellectual content.
2. Paradise with Serpents, by Robert Carver. The only question is whether this is the first or the second best book on Paraguay in the English language; here is the other contender.
4. Problems with farm price futures, worth a read.
Kindle
It’s pretty good.
The worst part: On day one the screen froze and it wouldn’t even turn off. Natasha had to read the instructions and press on a battery point with a pin to reboot it. What if that happened to me on an airplane? Must I now always carry around a small, sharp pin?
The best part: For fiction — that is fiction I’m actually going to read — I would rather use this screen than a traditional book. It is somehow easier to have a more focused appreciation of the words without being distracted by the book as a whole.
The actual worst part: For non-fiction it is not fast enough for real scrolling, flipping through, browsing and reading. The machine is best for linear, sequential consumption of the text.
I’m not sure if this entry should go under the "Books" or the "Web/Tech" category.
My favorite things Utah
Lately there has been too much travel, yes, but writings these posts is fun. I am headed toward Sundance. Here goes:
1. Author: Orson Scott Card’s The Ender Trilogy (start with Ender’s Game) is a modern landmark which will be read for years to come. Next on my list is Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.
2. Actor: James Woods, as he plays in Casino and Virgin Suicides, two fine movies.
3. Best Robert Redford movie: Out of Africa, schmaltz yes but I love it.
4. Film, set in: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid comes to mind.
5. Novel, set in: Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. The first half in particular is a knockout.
6. Can I have a category for kidnapping victim? Jeopardy champion?
The bottom line: I love Utah. I love its baked goods, its Mexican food, its sense of building a new world in the wilderness. I love that it has a uniquely American religion and I find Salt Lake City to be one of America’s most impressive achievements. I regard southern Utah as quite possibly the most beautiful part of the United States. That said, I had a tough time filling out these categories and of course plenty of the usual categories are blank altogether.
Outsourcing, taken to extremes
If backward time travel is also somehow possible, maybe firms in the
future will choose to outsource some of their operations to the past,
locating their manufacturing and other services in lower-wage time
periods. This opens the possibility of transtemporal gains from
trade… assuming, of course, that governments don’t implement
effective trade barriers.
That is Glen Whitman, here is more, interesting throughout. By the way, Stephen King was right: the movie Jumper is quite good, albeit it requires a taste for conceptual science fiction counterfactuals. It’s the best treatment of teleportation I know, with of course references to Plato’s Ring of Gyges. Catch it on video if you can.
Who’s Your City?
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.
The Spanish idea of the film canon
I’ve been reading César Vidal’s El Camino Hacia la Cultura, which might translate roughly as "The Path Toward Culture." Imagine a Spanish Harold Bloom, yet trying to be more representative than idiosyncratic in his canonical picks. Overall his choices are what you would expect, albeit with a strong emphasis on modernism and in fiction he stresses the Continental novel of ideas. The very useful poetry list is full of Spaniards. Here is his list of the best movies (worldwide) since the 1990s:
Jacob’s Ladder (TC: I love this movie), Dances with Wolves, Dreams (Kurosawa), JFK, Glengarry Glen Ross, Malcolm X, Groundhog Day, Schindler’s List, Forrest Gump (ugh), The Shawshank Redemption, Braveheart, Fargo, The English Patient, Titanic, The Apostle, Saving Private Ryan, Matrix, Magnolia, The Sixth Sense, Nueva Reinas, El hijo de la novia, Gladiator, Return of the King, De-Lovely, Apocalypto (TC: !…another winner).
The absence of traditional indie cinema and most European cinema is striking. Sadly Asian movies are missing altogether, except for Kurosawa. Overall I am struck by a) the gutsiness of this list, and b) the author doesn’t seem to see it as gutsy at all.
Nazi Literature in the Americas
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.
What I’ve Been Reading
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.