Results for “best fiction”

318 found

1. Ice, by Vladimir Sorokin.  A totally lurid, highly sexed, contemporary Russian, pre-apocalyptic mix of science fiction and horror.  I finished it.

2. The Once and Future King, T.H. White.  Oddly absent from Law and Literature syllabi, I’m teaching this in my next class.  This is many people’s favorite book.  It’s written in a simple manner, but it cumulates in an oddly beautiful way.

3. What economists should learn from sociology, not to mention Arnold Kling on me, and Brad DeLong on Milton Friedman.

4. How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It, by Patricia Love and Steven Stosny.  The claim: talking about relationship problems is an inherently shameful activity for the man and thus it will fail; the couple should just read this book and do what is best.

5. Econoblog with Ed Glaeser and Daron Acemoglu, on democracy and economic growth.  If Greg Mankiw can debate Jacqueline Passey, Ed can cite Borat as evidence in a dialog with a world-class economist.

6. Invading Mexico: America’s Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846-1848 by Joseph Wheelan.  If you wish to embarrass your friends (and yourself), ask them whether they would in retrospect support the U.S. conquest of territory from Mexico.

Bookslut will tell you "not," but you would be missing something special.  Most generally, revel in the language, the fun, and the set pieces.  Don’t look for deeper meanings, in my view there ain’t none, and for the better.  My specific tips:

1. V: Published when Pynchon was 24.  Read it once, straight through, without trying to make sense of it.  Then read it again.  Companion to V. is a useful supplement.

2. The Crying of Lot 49.  Short, fun, and somewhat scrutable.  It is a common introduction to Pynchon, although Pynchon himself dismisses its importance.

3. Gravity’s Rainbow: The masterpiece.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t finish it, the story falls apart in any case.  Even reading the first fifty pages yields a high return.

4. Vineland: This short novel came after a 17-year hiatus.  It has its defenders, but I find it unreadable and unpleasant.

5. Mason & Dixon: I love the 18th century, so you might think I could get into this one.  Pam Regis tells me it has to be read aloud.

6. Against the Day: The new 1200-page monstrosity.  How to read it?  Lean it against your sofa, and wait until your wife starts complaining about it, thereby prompting you to pick it up and get it out of the way…

The bottom line: Pynchon is about the highest-IQ author out there, a mixed blessing.  Start with Gravity’s Rainbow, or V, and hope for the best.

#15 in a series of 50.

I’ve loved Rafael Yglesias’s book Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil for about ten years, but only Friday, when browsing in the library, did it occur to (silly) me it was also The Best Novel By A Father of A Major Blogger.

The story, told by literary flashback, turns around a doctor who encourages his patients to relive their childhood traumas but goes one step or more too far.  One review: "Entertaining, thought-provoking, shocking, enlightening, puzzling, this fascinating work
tackles many issues such as incest, insanity, the nature of love, the drive for power,
religious, business and political creeds, therapeutic ethics — and, of course, what (or who)
is evil."

Somehow, unjustly, the book never captured the "For Smart People Who Are Looking for Conceptual Yet Fun Fiction Along the Lines of Byatt, Eco, and Calvino" slot that grabs so many readers.  It seems largely forgotten. 

By the way, here is the son’s post on government contracting.  Here is yet another generation up.

It is easy to hate his self-important puffery, but Norman Mailer remains one of America’s best writers.  His books include:

1. The Naked and the Dead – Outdated, but still full of powerful writing, and lacking many of the later objectionable mannerisms.

2. Advertisements for Myself – A collection of journalism, a mixed bag, but the peaks are high.

3. Armies of the Night – About the 1968 Chicago Convention, I’ve never read it but it gets consistent raves.

4. Of a Fire on the Moon – The story of America’s space program, and one of the best non-fiction books period.  As a writer, one of the books I most envy.

5. The Executioner’s Song – The story of Gary Gilmore, the first half is incredible — a candidate for "The Great American Novel" — although the second half meanders.

5. Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery – I usually hate historical fiction but this is gripping.

6. Harlot’s Ghost – His best book, 1168 pages of panache and joy.  One of the most underrated and underread of the important American novels. 

The thing is, he has many other books too.  His new The Castle in the Forest, a psychological autobiography of the young Hitler, is better than his bad books but it does not compare to the books on this list.

I am unfamiliar with speed reading techniques, so I cannot evaluate them.

The best way to read quickly is to read lots.  And lots.  And to have started a long time ago.  Then maybe you know what is coming in the current book.  Reading quickly is often, in a margin-relevant way, close to not reading much at all. 

Note that when you add up the time costs of reading lots, quick readers don’t consume information as efficiently as you might think.  They’ve chosen a path with high upfront costs and low marginal costs.  "It took me 44 years to read this book" is not a bad answer to many questions about reading speed.

Another way to read quickly is to cut bait on the losers.  I start ten or so books for every one I finish.  I don’t mind disliking a book, and I never regret having picked it up and started it.  I am ruthless in my discards.

Fairfax and Arlington counties have wonderful public library systems, and I go about five times a week to one branch or another.  Usually I scan the New Books shelf and look at nothing else.  I can go shopping at the best store in the world, almost any day, for free. 

I am both interested and compulsive.  How can I let that book go unread or at least unsampled?  I can’t.

Virtually every Tuesday I visit the New Books table at Borders.  Tuesday is when most new books arrive.  Who knows what might be there?  How can I let that New Books table go unvisited?  I can’t.  About half the time I buy something, but I always walk away happy.

Here is another reading tip: do less of other activities.

Blogging hasn’t hurt my writing, it has helped by non-fiction reading, but I read fewer novels.  That is the biggest intellectual opportunity cost of MR, though for the last month I’ve made a concerted effort to read more fiction.  But it is not like the old days when I would set aside two months to work through The Inferno, Aeneid, and the like, with multiple secondary sources and multiple translations at hand.  I no longer have the time or the mood, and I miss this.

Here are two earlier posts on time management.

Addendum: Jane Galt comments.  And here is Daniel Akst.

1. Michael Crichton, Next. Yes it is "writing-by-numbers," yes it is better than his recent work, but no, it is not nearly as good as Jurassic Park, Sphere (my favorite), Congo, or for that matter his book on Jasper Johns.  Some critics like it.  The start is OK but it falls apart as it proceeds.  By the way, here is my previous post on human-chimp hybrids. 

2. Robert Bolaño, Distant Star.  A minor masterpiece.  He is another of those first-tier Latin writers, along with Asturias and Rulfo, who for mysterious reasons no one in the United States seems to read.

3. Richard Powers, The Echo Maker.  A deserving winner of a National Book Award, plus I am interested in the neurology theme.  I find many of Power’s earlier books too intellectualized, but this one held my attention throughout.  By the way, I also tried the non-fiction National Book winner, the book about the Dust Bowl years, but it didn’t hold my interest.

4. The Poor Always Pay Back: The Grameen II Story, by Asif Dowla and Dipal Barua.  A very good look at the micro-credit movement.

Addendum: The NYT picks its ten best books of the year.

1. Dave Eggers, What is the What.  Despite its preciousness, I quite liked A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  Sadly this quasi-fictional tale of a Sudanese refugee reveals that most contemporary writers are lightweights, pure and simple.

2. Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir.  I loved Palimpset, volume 1, but this follow-up is junk.  Julian is his best book, but overall he has more misses than hits.

3. Othello.  I’ll teach this in my spring Law and Literature class.  I read Shakespeare as despising the Moor for turning his back on his natural Muslim allies and fighting them in Cyprus.  In a strange way Othello deserves some of the bad treatment he receives — why should anyone trust him?

4. The new Stephen Dubner book…I am not reading it yet, but I don’t want to be slow with the news.  Discover the other Dubner.

5. Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic.  This is from the guy who brought us Everything Bad is Good for You, except it turns out that cholera isn’t good for you, it is bad for you.  A brisk and readable story of public health issues in Victorian London.

6. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold [Crónica de una muerte anunciada].  I regard One Hundred Years of Solitude as a good but overrated book; this slim volume may well be his most exciting fiction and it is clearly the most humorous.  I’m also fond on his non-fiction book about the kidnapping and volume one of his memoirs, plus of course the short stories; that is what he will be known for.

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.