Results for “best fiction” 291 found
Christmas gifts
This is not quite a year-end "best of" list, but if you are looking for gifts, here are my off-the-cuff picks in some select areas.
1. TV show: Season one of Veronica Mars. Matt Yglesias and Dan Drezner are fans as well.
2. Classical music: Maurizio Pollini, Chopin’s Nocturnes.
This recording has none of the flaws that Pollini would have shown in
these pieces 20 years ago; they are lyrical and beautiful. For something
new try Golijov’s Ayre song cycle, and don’t neglect the accompanying Berio pieces. Richard Egarr’s Goldberg Variations is the only harpischord recording which stands up to Glenn Gould. Finally, Paul McCartney’s Ecce Cor Meum was better than most other new releases, and yes I hated Liverpool Oratorio but he finally figured out how to do it.
3. Non-fiction: Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling Upon Happiness, or for the economist David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations. Google back to my reviews if you don’t remember them.
4. Fiction: A slow year for this category, maybe I will pick Suite Francaise. I’ll bet against the new Thomas Pynchon being any good but if I am wrong I will let you know.
5. DVDs: You might try Solo con Tu Pareja, the new Criterion release of the 1991 Mexican film by the guy who did Y Tu Mama Tambien. After that, stick with TV, at least for the time being.
6. Popular music: You could try the new Dylan, or the new Beck, but so far I think the new Justin Timberlake is — against my will I might add — more interesting than either. My real pick here is the Argentine sensation Juana Molina. Buy Son.
Acoustic guitar, clear voice, light percussive rhythms, ringing bells,
sheer magic. This is that "isn’t it amazing I never heard of her
before" CD you were looking for…
7. Jazz CD: The new Monk/Coltrane find is the obvious pick, but the new Ornette Coleman release is one of his best.
If you read only one book by Orhan Pamuk
The White Castle is short, fun, and Calvinoesque. Not his best book but an excellent introduction and guaranteed to please. Snow is deep, political, and captures the nuances of modern Turkey; it is my personal favorite. The New Life isn’t read often enough; ideally it requires not only a knowledge of Dante, but also a knowledge of how Dante appropriated Islamic theological writings for his own ends. My Name is Red is a complex detective story, beloved by many, often considered his best, but for me it is a little fluffy behind the machinations. The Black Book is the one to read last, once you know the others. Istanbul: Memories and the City is a non-fictional memoir and a knock-out.
Random rants on music and books
1. Bob Dylan’s latest has received rave reviews just about everywhere. Who can doubt an honest effort from the elder statesman? In reality it is little more than a repackaged version of his last two (superb) albums and thus mostly predictable and mostly boring. By the way, it is becoming clearer — against all former odds — that he was often a horrible lyricist but he remains, even in his dotage, a remarkable vocalist.
2. I loved the first half of Samuel Beckett’s Watt, but then lost the thread of the book. Beckett’s fiction remains underread, if only because we’ve yet to figure out just how good it is (or isn’t). The best parts are astonishing, but at times I feel I am listening to one of those unfunny British radio comedy shows.
3. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children is a novel about thirty-somethings, in a pre- and post 9-11 NYC, transitioning (or not) into adulthood. That is a recipe for literary trouble. But I bought it anyway, trusting Meghan O’Rourke, and yes it deserves the sterling reviews. I kept expecting Megan McArdle to show up as a character and give them all a good talking-to about microeconomics, which is exactly what the characters need.
4. The best world music release of the last year or so remains Amadou and Mariam, Dimanche a Bamako. It is also the best pop album of the last year. The two Mali musicmakers are blind and also married to each other. I don’t see how anyone could help but love this music. After a year from its purchase, I’m still listening to it.
5. Steven Slivinki’s Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government is exactly what the subtitle suggests. How did that happen? One factor is that the Republicans found Democratic rule too horrible a prospect to bear and they became more populist. Let’s hope the Democrats don’t make a comparable mistake.
6. Stephen Miller’s Conversation: The History of a Declining Art. I loved the title, hated the subtitle. Much of the book, which considers the preconditions of good conversation, is fascinating and, despite its popular level, goes beyond the muddled arguments of Habermas. It collapses when it argues that the quality of conversation is declining in the modern world. The evidence consists solely of examples of bad modern conversations.
Trip thoughts
That was at the Hotel Real, the dish is called "Wiener Backhahn." When we asked how to get to the restaurant, one Lichtensteiner (what do you call them in the English language?) said "It is close. Lichtenstein is very small. (Pause) But it is very beautiful." Zurich has a high percentage of foreigners; it feels like 20 percent or more. The Western side of the city is now "cool," and almost bohemian; eat at LaSalle. The Swiss seem to have legalized prostitution. The French-speaking Swiss generally favor joining the EU; the German speakers — 63% of the country — do not. The German speakers also are more likely to speak good English than good French. Crossing the border, German bookstores do not feature Freakonomics prominently; their economics sections are full of doom and gloom about Germany; are Levitt and Dubner too entertaining for them? Some guy named Frank Schatzing has an 800-page German science fiction bestseller called Der Schwarm, just translated into English, is it any good? Swiss food prices have gone through the roof. I’ve experienced the $30 pizza, the $40 schnitzel, and the $42 breakfast, all good but none extraordinary. Rural Switzerland now has plenty of Thai restaurants. Switzerland was the first country where I first saw first-rate scenery, mountains, or for that matter cows. Does this mean I still overrate the value of the Swiss landscape? Paris was the first city where Natasha was able to go shopping and see the West; does she overrate it? Do I overrate German bread and orange juice? What was the first good blog you read?
Caught my eye
1. The Selfish Gene, thirty years later, transcript and audio file.
2. Inside Man. I’ve been burned by Spike Lee movies too many, oh so many times, but this one is excellent. It is also a study in game theory and the value of meta-rationality. While we are on the topic, how did I forget Live and Let Die – the only good Roger Moore James Bond film — on my list of notable movies set in Louisiana?
3. Charles Murray on his new book and plan for welfare reform. An interesting idea, but can you say "time inconsistency" three times in a row fast?
4. James Surowiecki on why newspapers are not doomed.
5. Don’t expect too much from job retraining.
6. Steve Levitt’s Africa fact of the day, and yes it involves both sex and violence.
7. Stanislaw Lem passes away; could his Solaris be the best science fiction novel ever? Don’t forget the Tarkovsky film version either.
My favorite things Virginia
It feels like an eon since I have traveled, plus I have been at home with the sniffles and a nasty cough. So here goes:
1. Music: Right off the bat we are in trouble. Ella Fitzgerald was born in Newport News but she is overrated (overly mannered and too self-consciously pandering to the crowd). We do have Patsy Cline and Maybelle Carter, the latter was an awesome guitar player and a precursor of John Fahey, not to mention the mother of June Carter.
2. Writer: There is Willa Cather, William Styron, and the new Thomas Wolfe. Cather moved at age ten to Nebraska. Some of you might sneak Poe into the Virginia category, but in my mind he is too closely linked to Baltimore. If you count non-fiction, add Booker T. Washington to the list.
3. Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Person: I have to go with Helen Keller. If you choose her for "20 Questions," no one will hit upon her category.
4. Movie, set in. The first part of Silence of the Lambs is set in Quantico, Virginia. No Way Out, starring Gene Hackman and Kevin Costner, is set in DC and around the Pentagon.
5. Artist: Help! Can you do better than Sam Snead? George Caleb Bingham was born here, but I identify him with Missouri.
6. The Presidents. I’ll pick Washington as the best, simply because he had a successor, and Madison as the best political theorist. Jefferson’s writings bore me and Woodrow Wilson was one of the worst Presidents we have had.
The bottom line: Maybe you are impressed by the Presidents, but for a state so old, it makes a pretty thin showing. It has lacked a strong blues tradition, a major city, and has remained caught up in ideals of nobility and Confederacy.
The Great American Novel — my runners-up
1. Faulkner. He came close to winning. But which novel? Absalom, Absalom is the deepest and richest. But you need to read it at least twice in a row, and that makes it less of a story. Here is the first page. As I Lay Dying is the most enjoyable. Read it through once, without trying to understand it. Then read it through voice-by-voice. Then read it through again. Sound and the Fury and Light in August (Faulkner’s easiest major work) cannot be dismissed either.
2. Henry James – The Golden Bowl. Are you interested in Girardian doubles, the triangulation of desire, self-deception, the use of gifts to imprison, the mediation of desire through objects, and the dynamics of marriages? This was James’s last and best novel. For my taste Portrait of a Lady is static and stands too close to the Merchant Ivory tradition. Interestingly, I believe not one of you mentioned James in the comments thread.
3. Huckleberry Finn. It seems more Shakespearian each time I read it. Right now Yana is reading it and loving it.
A few comments: Fitzgerald is not quite there. I am tempted to count Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a novel, not a poem. Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Nabokov’s Pale Fire are close, although my wife will not let me treat the latter as an American novel. Philip Roth has many excellent novels but no one for me stands out. Only the first third of Gravity’s Rainbow is wonderful. I prefer Hemingway’s short fiction and most of all his sociological non-fiction on bullfighting. Bellow is excellent but I wonder how much his books will mean to people one hundred years from now. The dark horses you already have heard about.
What I’ve been reading
1. Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking, by Fuchsia Dunlop. The other night I made a sauce with five chopped green onions, blended to a smooth paste with one tablespoon sichuan peppers (first dunked into hot water). Add three tablespoons chicken stock, one teaspoon light soy sauce, one and one half teaspoons sesame oil. Apply to cooked chicken. More generally, buy Chinese cooking wine and black (Chinese) vinegar and you are almost ready to go.
2. Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, seventh edition. This is not just a reference work, it is also the best book on jazz, period. The main drawback is a lack of material on Norwegian jazz, a recent interest of mine.
3. This NYT article on previously-covered Dana Schutz. Or try this article on nuns and the origins of reggae.
4. Recent books by Julian Barnes and Zadie Smith, while entertaining enough, won’t attract interest thirty years from now. Question: What is the optimal lag time before deciding a work of fiction is worth reading? Few novels require urgent reading, so how about fifteen years? Why do I violate this rule so regularly?
5. Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey Through Chinese Culture, Language, and Cuisine, by A. Zee. This unique book lives up to its subtitle; it teaches you how to make sense of Chinese characters, how the Chinese think about food, and how it all fits into a bigger picture.
Amazon.com to sell its own literature
Digital copies, written exclusively for the website, are avavilable for 49 cents apiece. These short pieces range from 2000 to 10,000 words. About sixty authors have signed up, including Danielle Steel. On Friday the bestselling title was Harry Dent’s "Bubble After Bubble in the Ongoing Bubble Boom: Oil Bursts, the Housing Bubble Fades and Now Stocks Emerge Into a Greater Bubble That Finally Ends in 2010."
Here is the story. Will this practice render short story compilations, or perhaps magazines of fiction, obsolete? As with iPod, won’t consumers prefer the unbundled units? Or does fiction differ by giving the editors and compilers a greater role in producing excitement and cache?
Addendum: Here is a good story on the marketing of ebooks, and one entrepreneurs who thinks the days of paper books are over.
My favorite things New Zealand
Having once spent a year living in Wellington, this one is easy:
1. Movie and movie director – Forget Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings, I’ll opt for Vincent Ward’s The Navigator, where a group of medieval peasants suddenly emerges in late twentieth century Auckland. Ward’s Map of the Human Heart might count as Canadian, but I love its surrealistic treatment of love and memory. What Dreams May Come is sappy in parts but has Robin Williams doing a serious take on Bergman and Dante, doesn’t that sound strange? Note that this category is especially strong – for instance Andrew Niccol directed the underrated Gattaca.
2. Music – The Kiwis have many good indie bands but Split Enz is the peak, buy their greatest hits. Otherwise I’ll nominate the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, if only for their name.
3. Fiction – Keri Hulme’s The Bone People or Janet Frame’s autobiography are both first-rate, catch the movie too.
4. Painter – Umm…things slow down a bit here. The obvious pick is Colin McCahon, here are some images. Here is my favorite, but I will admit some lameness in the category overall.
5. Food – Fish and chips is to New Zealand as barbecue is to Texas — tops in the world. The best places are owned by Greeks. New Zealand is also a first-rate locale for Malay, Cambodian, and Burmese cuisines.
6. City – Wellington is for me the single most beautiful city in the world, make sure you go to the lookout on Mount Victoria, here is alas only part of the panorama. Wellington is also full of lovely Victorian homes. I will Napier as an underrated second, here is some Art Deco, the city center was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1920s and rebuilt in that style.
The problem? I like New Zealanders so much, I wish there were many more of them. Here is a brief photo tour, if you haven’t already decided to go.
The World’s Banker
Then Suharto looked at [James] Wolfensohn. "You know, what you regard as corruption in your part of the world, we regard as family values."
That is from Sebastian Mallaby’s The World”s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations. This study of Wolfensohn is not only the best book on the World Bank, but it is one of the best books on both leadership and the economics and politics of bureaucracy. It is also the most biting critique of NGOs I have read, and oddly, the most convincing extant defense of the Bank. Here is Dan Drezner on the book.
I’ve also been reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, a fictional tale of Turkish secularization and religious opposition. I’ll cite Pamuk, Jose Saramago, and W.G. Sebald as the Continental writers of the last thirty years who will still be read fifty years from now.
Is Ayn Rand important?
No, I don’t mean historically, but rather as a thinker to read today. Bryan Caplan tells me this is the one hundredth anniversary of her birthday, so here are my bottom lines:
1. Her greatest strength: Her analysis of the mentality of resentment. She is, oddly, best as a sociologist, albeit in fictional settings. Wesley Mouch is a brilliant character in his loathesomeness. Her treatment of cocktail party conversations, while unintentional ridiculous parodies, also point to sad truths.
2. Her worst intellectual tendencies: The competition here is strong. One could list sheer dogmatism, a necessity to make everything black or white, or an unwillingness to read others carefully or charitably. More specifically, I will cite her tendency to redefine any favorable aspect of altruism as something other than altruism.
3. What do you really learn from her? Most of her formal philosophy is wrong or at the very least underargued. The true take-away message is a reaffirmation of how the enormous productive powers of capitalism — the greatest force for human good ever achieved — rely on the driving human desire to be excellent. I don’t know of any better celebration of that combination of forces.
4. Her quirkiest yet correct view: That landing on the moon was an intrinsically wonderful thing to do, and libertarian objections be damned.
5. Her quirkiest yet incorrect view: That Mickey Spillane was a titan of American literature.
Addendum: Here are Bryan’s bottom lines, which with I cannot agree. Try Alex also, directly above. Here is Steve Chapman on whether Rand has gone mainstream. Reason magazine weighs in too. And here isa humorous treatment of Rand on food.
Do MacArthur Awards stimulate genius?
As part of a program widely known as genius grants, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation most years gives one or more authors $500,000, hoping financial freedom will help the writers produce their best work.
An examination of the program, however, reveals that most of the 31 writers chosen since 1981 as MacArthur Fellows had already hit their artistic peak. That conclusion is supported by the 14 major awards – either a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award or PEN/Faulkner prize – and 37 minor awards the authors received before getting their MacArthur money.
Surveying book reviews, author profiles and the opinions of literary scholars, Crain’s determined that 88% of the MacArthur recipients wrote their greatest works before being recognized by the Chicago-based foundation. The sheer number of books produced by the writers declined, too, after their MacArthur awards.
It would reinforce romantic notions that great art requires personal sacrifice to suggest that, half-a-million dollars in hand, writers get lazy. But something else appears to account for the failure of the MacArthur program to fulfill its promise: Writers are mostly chosen too late in their careers, average age 48, and well after the literary establishment has recognized them for excellence.
Daniel Drezner offers further commentary. I see two options. Either the prizes stimulate genius by paying rewards ex post, or we would be better served by scattering smaller grants to a greater number of unknown writers. Ex ante subsidies do better than ex post prizes when the relevant creators are liquidity constrained. That is, without the upfront grant, a great but still obscure writer might have to drop out of the game for lack of money. Since that is a plausible description of the market for fiction, most prizes and grants in this area should take more chances. Tenured academics, in contrast, are not usually liquidity constrained (unless they have expensive lab bills); ex post prizes will work better for them.
That being said, it is easy to see why foundations — which involve accountability to a board of trustees — might prefer a more conservative approach. Yes a foundation may care about the world, but it must also support its own reputation, generate favorable publicity, and build a "ruling coalition" which reaps reputational awards from making quality grants. All of these factors will militate in favor of awards to established producers. When accountability is in place, who will opt for a very risky investment which fails in at least ninety percent of all cases?
Murakami and Kafka
The most important fact we gleaned from the records was that, medically speaking, the incident had caused no lasting impact on the children. From right after the event to the present day, the examination and tests consistently indicated no internal or external abnormalities. The children were leading healthy lives, just as they had before the incident. Detailed examinations revealed that several of the children had parasites, but nothing out of the ordinary…The one notable thing was that the two-hour span during which the children had been unconscious in the hills was erased from their memory. As if that part had been extracted in toto. Rather than a memory loss, it was more a memory lack.
That is from Haruki Murakami’s new Kafka on the Shore.
He is one of the few contemporary writers always worth reading. His Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche is a minor (and neglected) classic of social science. Or do you love intellectual-geeky science fiction, but think you have run dry? Try his Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The best "literary" introduction is probably A Wild Sheep Chase.
Books of the year
The Economist and The New York Times (password required) have put out their "best books of the year" lists. Each list is at the respective link, the common elements are:
Philip Roth – The Plot Against America
Anne Tyler – The Amateur Marriage
Colm Toibin – The Master
Alan Hollinghurst – Line of Beauty
David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas
Orhan Pamuk – Snow
Moving on to non-fiction, we have:
Ron Chernow – Alexander Hamilton
Seymour Hersh – Chain of Command
The 9-11 Commission Report, and
Stephen Greenblatt – Will in the World
As for my favorites in fiction, Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is my clear pick, with nods to Garcia Marquez and Alice Munro. For non-fiction, my memory summons up Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, and Bart Schulz’s Henry Sidgwick: An Intellectual Biography. For science I’ll nominate Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos. I’m leaving off everything that has made our "Books we Recommend" list over the months.
My apologies if I forget your book. No, I haven’t forgotten its content (yet), I simply have no idea whether it came out this last year. Age has compressed my sense of time into two rather gross categories: "my plans for the future" and "the distant past."