Results for “best fiction” 291 found
Octavia Butler, the Outsider Who Changed Science Fiction
Here is my Slate.com piece from today. Excerpt:
…her work went far beyond simply mourning the victim. She showed us why repulsion cannot be avoided, why we often resemble what we hate, and why it is sometimes our best qualities that prevent us from accepting the differences of others. Her ability to both understand the outsider perspective better than others and then to invert it, places Butler above her science-fiction-writing peers. She is a disturbing and important writer who transcends the usual genre categories.
Bestseller lists in UAE
Fiction:
1. The da Vinci Code (in English)
2-9. All in English, four more Dan Brown titles plus Paulo Coelho, etc.
10. The da Vinci Code (in Arabic)
Non-fiction:
1. Easiest Way to Learn Arabic
The bottom line: English is the number one language here, and the natives truly are a minority.
How bestsellers have changed
Here are some basic facts:
The popularity of religious titles has soared. Books such as Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the first in a popular series and No. 61 for the decade, used to be sold primarily in Christian bookstores. Now they’re stacked thigh-high at discount stores such as Wal-Mart.
Self-help, always a fixture of best-seller lists, is shifting the focus from improving people’s lives to improving their health as many baby boomers pass 50. [Diet books, most of all Atkins-related, have become especially popular.]
Brand-name series grabbed a growing share of the list. Chicken Soup for the Soul begat Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul, which begat Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. All were among the decade’s 100 most popular titles.
With 12 novels on the list of 100, John Grisham staked out a nearly permanent spot on the weekly best-seller list. Only the titles changed. But if the familiar was popular, there were a few surprises. Previously unknown novelists such as Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code) and Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones) ended up among the decade’s best sellers.
Fiction, led by thrillers, staged a comeback, accounting for 72% of last year’s weekly best sellers, compared with 59% in 1998.
Here are other facts of import:
1. Never have so many books been published: in the U.S. more than 1,000 new titles a week, nearly double the rate in 1993.
2. Aggregate book sales are flat.
3. “last year the average American spent more time on the Internet (about three hours a week) than reading books (about two hours a week). And…the average American adult spent more money last year on movies, videos and DVDs ($166) than on books ($90).”
4. Bestsellers (top ten in the major categories) account for only 4% of book sales.
5. Amazon, Barnes&Noble.com and BookSense.com account for 8% of U.S. book sales.
6. Discount stores and price clubs account for 11% of U.S. book sales.
7. Humor books have fallen from 5.3% of the bestsellers market in 1995 to 0.6% today.
8. The Cliff Notes version of The Scarlet Letter outsells the real thing by 3 to 1.
9. In August dictionaries are 77% of all reference book sales. Otherwise they run less than five percent of the total.
Here is the the full story, noting that some of the facts are found in the paper edition only.
The bottom line? The book market works wonderfully. If you have any complaint, it should be with the quality of public taste.
USA Today (from Thursday) offers a list of the 100 best-selling books of the last ten years (not on-line). Once you get past Tolkien and Harry Potter, there is little to interest me. That being said, I find it easy to walk into my public libraries and every week find numerous good new books to read.
Who buys fiction?
“More than 60 percent of fiction is bought by women and most of that by women aged between 35 and 55”, according to John Baker of Publishers Weekly, here is the link. Men don’t read fiction that much. Please write me if you have a good explanation for this fact in terms of evolutionary biology.
If you are curious, here are bestseller lists for the century, here is a New York Times bestseller list for right now, The Da Vinci Code remains number one, number five is Shepherds Abiding, described by Amazon in the following manner:
Karon [the author] works more homespun magic with this latest uplifting story set in sleepy Mitford, N.C. Father Timothy Kavanagh, stalwart of the Mitford series, is approaching 70 when he comes across pieces of an old English nativity scene at his friend Andrew Gregory’s antique shop. The set has definitely seen better days, and Andrew is hoping that someone will volunteer to restore it. Who better than Father Tim, who seems to have reached a turning point in his life and needs a project to distract him? Inspired by memories of a manger from his childhood that was destroyed in a rainstorm, Father Tim, after much deliberation, takes up the cause, planning to surprise his artist wife, Cynthia…The author’s warm spirituality and vibrant holiday spirit make this heartwarming eighth series entry a welcome one.
No, men are not buying this book in large numbers.
I am always amazed how strongly demographics predict our patterns of cultural consumption. People typically think that their cultural choices reflect their free will and their determination to construct their own identity. But when push comes to shove, it is young people who buy (or download) most of the music, see most of the movies, and middle-aged women who read most of the fiction. If you have a smart 19-year-old girl, who goes to Brown, I bet she doesn’t like heavy metal, but will have sympathies for Tori Amos and REM. And education and “social class” predict cultural taste better than does income.
The first linked piece also details just how hard it is to make a living writing fiction. You can have a few hit books, with reasonably large advances, but unless they are huge you might net no more than $20,000 a year. Yet overall incomes are rising. I predict that having an upper-middle class spouse, or richer, will prove the key to making it as a writer in the future.
Thanks to the ever-excellent www.2blowhards.com for the pointer to the first link.
*Amongst Women*
That is the title of a 1990 Irish novel by John McGahern, well-known in Ireland but as of late not so frequently read outside of Ireland. In addition to its excellent general quality, I found this book notable for two reasons. First, it focuses on the feminization of Ireland, being set in the mid-century decades after independence. An IRA veteran slowly realizes that the Ireland he fought for — a place for manly men — was a figment of his civil war imagination, and not an actual option for an independent, modernizing Ireland. The latter will be run according to the standards and desires of women, and actually be far more pleasant, whether or not Moran likes it. Second, the book is an excellent illustration of the importance of context for reading fiction. The story reads quite differently, depending how quickly you realize the protagonist is an IRA veteran with his wartime service as a fundamental experience. Few readers will know this from the very beginning, but I suspect many Irish readers — especially older ones — will figure this out well before they are told. In general, the very best fiction is context-rich, and this is one reason why many people may not appreciate all of the literary classics.
Other essential books of 2014
A few weeks ago I listed the best non-fiction books of 2014, here are a few which I either forgot or were late coming to my attention or were published or shipped after the first list. These are all very, very good:
1. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of World Order, 1916-1931. This one also starts slow but after about 13% becomes fascinating, especially about the internal politics in Germany and Russia, circa 1917-1918.
2. Michael Hofmann, Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays. Excellent and informationally dense literary essays, I especially like the ones on the German-language poets and writers, such as Benn and Walser and Bernhard and Grass.
3. Henry Marsh, Do No Harm, a neurosurgeon does behavioral economics as applied to his craft.
4. Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford, Rendez-Vous, a discursive chat while looking at some classics of art
5. Clive James, Poetry Notebook 2006-2014. A superb book, one of the very best appreciations of poetry and introductions to poetry of the 20th century. This book has received raves in the UK, it is not yet out in the U.S.
In fiction, to supplement my earlier list, I recommend:
6. Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq. Short stories about the conflict in Iraq, by an Iraqi. I expected to find these widely heralded stories to be disappointing, as the premise is a little too easy for the Western critic to embrace. But they are excellent and this book is one of the year’s best fiction releases.
7. Andy Weir, The Martian. Ostensibly science fiction, but more a 21st century Robinson Crusoe story — set on Mars of course — with huge amounts of (ingenious) engineering driving the story. Lots of fun, many other people have liked it too.
8. Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies, Poems 1952-2012.
By the way, Uwe Tellkamp’s The Tower [Der Turm] is now out in English.
What I’ve been reading
1. Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq. Short stories about the conflict in Iraq, by an Iraqi. I expected to find these widely heralded stories to be disappointing, as the premise is a little too easy for the Western critic to embrace. But they are excellent and this book is one of the year’s best fiction releases.
2. Michael Hofmann, Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays. Excellent and informationally dense literary essays, I especially like the ones on the German-language poets and writers, such as Benn and Walser and Bernhard and Grass.
3. Andy Weir, The Martian. Ostensibly science fiction, but more a 21st century Robinson Crusoe story — set on Mars of course — with huge amounts of (ingenious) engineering driving the story. Lots of fun, many other people have liked it too.
4. Andrew MacGregor Marshall, Kingdom in Crisis: Thailand’s Struggle for Democracy in the 21st Century. It is hard for me to judge the specifics of the argument, still this is a readable and conceptual account of the mess that is Thai politics, namely that much of it is about royal succession. If true, this is a very good book.
Arrived in my pile is Amy Finkelstein, Moral Hazard in Health Insurance, with Gruber, Arrow, and Stiglitz as commentators.
Assorted links
1. Cyborg call centers and telemarketing.
2. Using drones to market real estate.
3. How many ACA subsidies will need to be returned to the government? And David Brooks on ACA and mandates. And are these the right traffic estimates for healthcare.gov?
4. Michael Pollan on the intelligence of plants, very good piece.
What should I ask Marilynne Robinson?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is from Wikipedia:
Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of faith and rural life. The subjects of her essays span numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.
Her next book is Reading Genesis, on the Book of Genesis. So what should I ask her?
What I’ve been reading
1. Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create. Could the be the best book on NFTs? I think we should be genuinely uncertain as to whether NFTs have a future. In the meantime, I consider NFTs a good Rorschach test for whether an individual’s mind is capable of moving out of “the dismissive mode.” Do you pass or fail this test? The “snide, sniping” mode is so hard for many commentators to resist…
2. Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans. Excellent text and also color plates, including paintings and sketches of her, a very good introduction to her work. Here is a good bit: “Rarely, if ever, has a major poet grown up so deeply embedded in an avant-garde visual culture. Yet she seems actively to have resisted the lure of the world of images, preferring to live and write, as Bell liked to think she did spontaneously, out of her own mind.” A wonderful chronicle of a very particular time, artistic and otherwise.
3. Peter Cowie, God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman. The author knew Bergman, and early on, so this is a useful biography in several regards, most of all for some background information and TV and theatre projects that never came to fruition. But it is not useful for converting the unconverted, nor does it have much more interpretative meat for the in-the-know obsessives.
4. Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis. One of my favorite books on the British Enlightenment. For instance, the author captures the tenor of 18th century British debates about liberty very well. Very good chapters on Hume, Shelburne, and Macaulay. Whatmore somehow writes as if he is actually trying to explain things to you! If you read a lot of history books, you will know that is oddly rare. Recommended, for all those who care.
5. Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. So far I’ve read only 22 pp. of this one, and it clocks in at 900 pp. plus. It is obviously excellent and I wanted to tell you about it right away. I expect it to make the top few picks of the best non-fiction of 2024. The author’s main theme is that Byzantium built a “New Roman Empire,” and he details how that happened. The writing is also clear and transparent, for a time period that is not always easy to understand.
William Magnuson, For Profit: A History of Corporations is not a book for me, but it is a good and sane introduction for those seeking that.
Top MR Posts of 2023
This was the year of AI; including the top post from Tyler, Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history but also highly ranked were my posts AGI is Coming and AI Worship and Tyler’s GPT and my own career trajectory. Also our paper, How to Learn and Teach Economics with Large Language Models, Including GPT has now been downloaded more than ten thousand times.
2. Second most popular post was The Extreme Shortage of High IQ Workers
5. *GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter?*
6. Matt Yglesias on depression and political ideology which pairs well with another highly-ranked Tyler post, So what is the right-wing pathology then? and also Classical liberals are increasingly religious.
7. Can the SVB crisis be solved in the longer run?
8. Substitutes Are Everywhere: The Great German Gas Debate in Retrospect
9. My paean to Costco.
10. Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
11. The Real Secret of Blue Zones
12. SpaceX Versus the Department of Justice
13. What does it mean to understand how a scientific literature is put together?
14. In Praise of the Danish Mortgage System
15. Great News for Female Academics!
Finally, don’t forget Tyler’s posts Best non-fiction books of 2023, Favorite fiction books of 2023, and Favorite non-classical music.
What were your favorite posts/articles/books/music/movies of 2023?
What I’ve been reading
Rob Henderson, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Yes, that is the Rob Henderson of Twitter and Substack. He was raised by foster parents and joined the Air Force at the age of seventeen. He ended up with a Ph.D. from Cambridge. This is his story, it covers class in America, and it is a paean to family stability.
There Were Giants in the Land: Episodes in the Life of W. Cleon Skousen. Compiled and edited by Jo Ann and Mark Skousen. If you are interested in LDS, one approach is to read The Book of Mormon. Another option is to read a book like this one. It is also, coming from a very different direction, a paean to family stability.
Thomas Bell, Kathmandu. There should be more books about individual cities, and this is one of them, one of the best in fact. Excerpt: “At its most local levels, of the neighbourhood, or the individual house, Kathmandu is ordered by religious concepts, either around holy stones, or divinely sanctioned carpentry and bricklaying techniques. The same is true of the city as a whole.” And how do they still have so many Maoists?
Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala & English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas, edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne, and Shash Trevett. A truly excellent collection, worthy of making the best non-fiction of 2023 list. Or does this count as fiction? It’s mostly about things that happened.
Eric H. Cline, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations. A good sequel to the very good 1177 B.C.
Allison Pugh, The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World accurately diagnosing networking as a skill that will rise significantly in value in a tech-laden world.
Dorian Bandy, Mozart The Performer: Variations on the Showman’s Art shows how Mozart, first and foremost, was a showman and that background shaped his subsequent output and career.
My Conversation with the excellent Jennifer Burns
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode description:
Jennifer Burns is a professor history at Stanford who works at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history. She’s written two biographies Tyler highly recommends: her 2009 book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and her latest, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, provides a nuanced look into the influential economist and public intellectual.
Tyler and Jennifer start by discussing how her new portrait of Friedman caused her to reassess him, his lasting impact in statistics, whether he was too dogmatic, his shift from academic to public intellectual, the problem with Two Lucky People, what Friedman’s courtship of Rose Friedman was like, how Milton’s family influenced him, why Friedman opposed Hayek’s courtesy appointment at the University of Chicago, Friedman’s attitudes toward friendship, his relationship to fiction and the arts, and the prospects for his intellectual legacy. Next, they discuss Jennifer’s previous work on Ayn Rand, including whether Rand was a good screenwriter, which is the best of her novels, what to make of the sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, how Rand and Mises got along, and why there’s so few successful businesswomen depicted in American fiction. They also delve into why fiction seems so much more important for the American left than it is for the right, what’s driving the decline of the American conservative intellectual condition, what she will do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What’s the future of Milton Friedman, say, 30, 40 years from now? Where will the reputation be? University of Chicago is no longer Friedmanite, right? We know that. There are fewer outposts of Friedmanite-thinking than there had been. Will he be underrated or somehow reinvented or what?
BURNS: Let me look into my crystal ball. I don’t think the name will have faded. I think there are still names that people read. People still read Keynes and Mill and figures like that to see what did they say in their day that was so influential. I think that Friedman has got into the water and into the air a bit. I do some work on tracing out his influence.
Within economics, no one’s going to say, “Oh, I’m a Friedmanite,” or fewer people are, but this is someone whose major work was done half a century or more ago, so I don’t think that’s surprising. It would be surprising if economics had been at a standstill as Friedman still called the tune. When you think about the way we accord importance to the modern Federal Reserve, of course, there were things that happened in the world, but Friedman’s ideas did so much to shape that understanding.
He’s still in policymakers’ minds. He’s still in the monetary policy establishment’s minds, even if they’re not fully following him. I think we’re in the middle of a big reckoning now. You saw all the debate about M2 and the pandemic and monetary spending. I don’t know where it’s all going to settle out. It’s a more complicated world than the one that Friedman looked at. I tend to think he is an essential thinker, that the basics of what he talked about are going to be known 50 years from now, for sure.
COWEN: Did Milton Friedman have friends?
Definitely recommended, and Jennifer’s new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is one of my favorite books of the year. It will likely stand as the definitive biography of Friedman.
What I’ve been reading
1. Eric Ambler, The Night-Comers. (U.S. editions are sometimes titled State of Siege.) Think of Ambler as a precursor of Le Carré. I used to think he had one or two excellent works, now I am realizing his ouevre is much deeper than I had imagined. Just long enough at 158 pp., this novel uses the Sundanese setting very well. He was a favorite of Graham Greene’s, and I will read yet more by him.
2. Lydia Davis, Our Strangers, not on Amazon try these sources. Very very short fiction, sometimes as short as a single paragraph. With some periodic non-fiction (or is it?) thrown in. The best pieces are excellent, and many of the others are at least interesting. Here is my earlier CWT with Lydia Davis, I am a fan.
3. Alexandra Hudson, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. Highly intelligent, and today much needed. Her opening sentence is: “Did you know there are at least four women named Judith who are internationally renowned experts on manners?” I would say that Alexandra is one of my “dark horse” picks to become a leading classical liberal influencer, except maybe she isn’t a dark horse any more.
4. Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories. An extremely well-written, and also useful history of the opium trade, albeit with more than its fair share of left-wing jargon. And yes that is the novelist Ghosh. Due out in February.
The other books I’ve been reading I haven’t so much liked.
What I’ve been reading
Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849. The new go-to book on this topic, magisterial on the lead-up causes and later on the international influences and contagions. Will make the year’s best non-fiction list.
Fearghal Cochrane, Belfast: The Story of a City and its People. A wonderful book on this most underrated city, the best overall general introduction to Belfast.
Rory Naismith, Making Money in the Early Middle Ages is a historically important work about the significant of coined money in dragging the Western world out of the Dark Ages.
Florian Illies, 1913:The Year Before the Storm, considers what the leading German and Austro-Hungarian cultural figures were doing in that year, right before disaster struck.
Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. A lengthy and highly detailed polemic arguing that Protestantism is the true universal church, rather than a dissent per se. These are not my issues, but some people will like this book a good deal.
I can recommend Maurizio Isabella, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions, mostly about the 1820s.
Tara Isabella Burton, Self Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians is an interesting look at the earlier history of self-made celebrity images.
Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham, Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces that Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health, is a Freakonomics-style look at what we can learn from controlled and also natural experiments in medicine.
Soon to appear is Yasheng Huang’s The Rise and Fall of the East: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline. Here is my earlier CWT with Yasheng Huang.
I will not right now have time to read Wang Hui, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, but it appears to be a major work of importance.