Results for “best book”
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Meta-list of the “best of” books of the year

Not all the "best of" book lists are out, but I can issue a preliminary report, with possible updates to follow.  This year opinion about best books seems unusually diverse.  Not so many books have been intellectually central to the market.  I have seen the following titles pop up repeatedly on "best of" lists:

Roberto Bolaño, 2666.  Duh.  After four hundred pages of reading, I see it as less perfect than The Savage Detectives but it has greater world-historic reach and even some sprawl.  A clear first choice in almost any year.

Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened Of.  I like some of Barnes’s work, most of all Flaubert’s Parrot, but I am embarrassed that such a shallow book would receive any favorable notice at all.

The Forever War, Dexter Filkins.  The quality of the journalism is high but for me it was insufficiently conceptual so I put it down after fifty pages or so.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel, By David Wroblewski.  I liked the 150 or so pages I read but just didn’t have the time or the love to finish it.  It reminds me of Stephen King’s better work.

I’ve drawn from the lists you will find here, among others.

During the year I saw many favorable reviews for Alexsandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (I liked it) and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (I haven’t read it yet), though neither seems to be popping up on so many "best of" lists.  Perhaps Robin Hanson would view such lists as signaling rather than a honest statement of preferences.

The best economics books of the year

Here is Arnold Kling’s list.  I liked this part:

Two books that show economic intellect to advantage are Discover Your Inner Economist, by Tyler Cowen and One Economics, Many Recipes, by Dani Rodrik. Cowen’s book is a set of observations on everyday life, while Rodrik’s book looks at the high-level issue of which economic institutions to recommend for underdeveloped countries.  I made the case for Cowen’s book here and the case for Rodrik’s book here.

What Cowen and Rodrik have in common is a gentle approach.  In contrast to Caplan and Clark, who self-assuredly hammer away at alternative viewpoints, Cowen and Rodrik allow room for disagreement and self-doubt.  Cowen and Rodrik encourage their readers to think, and I encourage readers to try to learn how to think like Cowen and Rodrik, whether or not you agree with them.

The entire list is useful, so go out and elevate the practice of holiday gift-giving.

What are the thirty best travel books?

Here is the list, courtesy of WorldHum, via Bookslut.  I agree with most of it, recognizing that no single author (e.g., Thubron, Raban, Theroux) can receive more than one pick.  But where is Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams?  David Campbell’s The Crystal Desert?  For my first choice I would select either Naipaul’s Turn in the South or Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana.  Surely they forgot Marco Polo’s Travels, which remains riveting.  Herodotus?  Can we count Democracy in AmericaGulliver’s Travels?  Dante’s Inferno?  Your further suggestions are welcome.

Best non-fiction books of the twentieth century

Here is a left-wing list. Here is a National Review list, with Hayek and Robert Conquest near the top. Here are two Random House lists. The critics elevate Henry Adams, William James, and Booker T. Washington. The readers favor Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard, and John Lott. The readers’ list has all kind of libertarian books, including David Boaz and Tibor Machan. Thanks to the ever-interesting www.politicaltheory.info for the link. All of the lists make for fun browsing, especially once you start thinking about the contrasts.

My pick for the best movie of the year, in which I share a bill with Kevin Spacey

Tyler Cowen, economist and author of Marginal Revolutions

May December

I found May December to be the most interesting movie of the year. It examines deep questions about who envies whom, what a meaningful life consists of, what about possession is satisfying, art versus artifice, the nature of celebrity, and how hard it is to live without worrying about what other people think. The stars are Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, and the director is Todd Haynes. The plotline (these are not spoilers) is that a grown woman had sex with a male seventh-grader, was sent to prison, and later ends up marrying him and having his children. Natalie Portman plays the role of a well-known actress who comes by to learn their story, so that she may better play the woman in a movie. The biggest cinematic influence is perhaps Bergman’s Persona, as we increasingly see different ways in which the two women are parallel or “twinned” in their stories. The movie poster reflects this. The highlight is when Natalie Portman explains to a group of teenagers what it is like to do a sex scene in a movie. In an era where Hollywood is supposed to be stale, this one resets the clock.

From The Spectator, there are many other (lesser) picks as well.

Which businesses mix the classes best?

Casual restaurant chains, like Olive Garden and Applebee’s, have the largest positive impact on cross-class encounters through both scale and their diversity of visitors. Dollar stores and local pharmacies like CVS deepen isolation. Among publicly-funded spaces, libraries and parks are more redistributive than museums and historical sites. And, despite prominent restrictions on chain stores in some large US cities, chains are more class diverse than independent stores. The mix of establishments in a neighborhood is strongly associated with cross-class Facebook friendships (Chetty et al., 2022).

That is from a new paper by Maxim Massenkoff and Nathan Wilmers.  Via Scott Lincicome.

The changing classic book culture that is German

I visited the best and largest bookstore in Konstanz, a university town and a town with above-average wealth.  The bookstore had three floors.

In times past, you might have expected to find hundreds of classic German-language novels in such a store.  This visit I found only a single shelf devoted to such novels, and most of them were not German-language heritage at all.  (In contrast, the section for English-language books was about three times larger.)  I saw Italienische Reise by Goethe and Wilde Phantasien by Tieck, and…?  Maybe two or three others?  There was plenty of Sherlock Holmes, a fair amount of Dickens and Austen and Melville, and so on.  No Kafka, Musil, Mann…you can keep on going and no it wasn’t there.  Nowhere to be found in the store.  You might do better looking for those works (in English) in an American Barnes and Noble.

Do the classic German book buyers simply use Amazon?  Or is the shift in reading habits so dramatic?  Is this another international conformity effect, and can I somehow blame the Woke?  Maybe immigrants are a modest factor too, or you might not wish to post your reading of such books on social media.

The new Scott Sumner book

It is called Alternative Approaches to Monetary Policy, it is on-line and free.  I have not read it yet, but here is part of the preface:

From feedback received on The Money Illusion, I see a need to take a deeper look at the fundamentals of monetary policy. What is monetary policy? Why do economists find it so hard to agree on a consensus model? Why do monetary theories seem cyclical, with various approaches going in and out of fashion over time? Why is it so difficult to clearly identify the points of disagreement? To answer these and other questions, it is necessary to go beyond discussing my own views of how the economy works and which policies seem best. We need to figure out why economists differ on some of the most basic questions in monetary economics.

Nicely presented, it is 219 pp. in total.  Here Scott comments on the book.

Patrick Collison’s books of the year picks

The best book I read this year was “The World of Yesterday” by Stefan Zweig. A vivid account of Austria and its pre-WWI cultural vibrancy, it left me sharing his sorrow for what was destroyed. (And his description of Insel Verlag, his publisher, provides good aspirational material for Stripe Press.) Relatedly, Peter Watson’s “The German Genius” provides the first comprehensive account I’ve read of what exactly happened in the 17th and 18th centuries that gave rise to Goethe, Bach, Euler, Kant, von Humboldt, etc. In Ireland, we don’t tend to appreciate Edmund Burke very much, but I found Richard Bourke’s “Empire and Revolution” to be a terrific account of Burke’s thinking. His contributions to the debates around the American and French Revolutions are well known, but he thought his opposition to the colonial abuses in India was more important. We recently started Arc, a new biomedical research organization, and I’ve been digging into the early days of other institutions. Thomas Lee’s “Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine” stood out. So did “Upstart” by Ed Walsh, the founding president of the University of Limerick.

Here is the link, you will find other people’s picks too.

The new Bryan Caplan book

The title has attracted a lot of attention and controversy, it is Don’t be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice, description here.  Bryan writes a letter to his daughter, telling her not to be a feminist.

To counter Bryan, many people are trying to cite the “official” definition of feminism, which runs something like:

feminism, the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes.

Who could not believe in that?  But here is a case where the official definition (which comes in varying versions) is off base.  Many people do not consider themselves feminists but would endorse those conclusions or come close to endorsing those conclusions entirely (I’m not sure what “social” equality for the sexes is supposed to mean.)  Or can’t you be a pretty radical fighter for women’s rights, without necessarily believing full equality (of which kind?) is possible?  What if you thought women shouldn’t be drafted into the military for combat?  Would that disqualify you?  Could Mary Wollstonecraft qualify on that basis?  Yet Wikipedia presents her as the founder of feminism.

Bryan’s preferred definition of feminism is:

feminism: the view that society generally treats men more fairly than women

That also seems off base to me.  If you were a feminist, but all of a sudden society does something quite unfair to men (drafts them to fight an unjust and dangerous war?), does that mean you might have to stop calling yourself a feminist?  Somehow the definition ought to be more weighted toward the status of women and remedies for women, rather than treating men and women symmetrically.  It seems weird to get people thinking about all of the injustices faced by men.

I don’t go around calling myself a feminist.  There is too much in “the other people who call themselves feminists” that I don’t agree with.  And it seems to me too aggregative a notion, and furthermore an attempt to win an argument by putting forward a definition that other people will be afraid to countermand.  Nonetheless here is a view I do agree with:

There is an important emancipatory perspective, one that would improve the lives of many women, and it consists of a better understanding of how social institutions to date have disadvantaged women, and a series of proposals for improvement.  Furthermore large numbers of men still do not understand the import of such a perspective, one reason for that being they have never lived the lives of women.

Unlike Bryan’s definition, this puts the treatment of women at the center of the issue.  And unlike some of the mainstream definitions, it does not focus on the issue of equality, which I think will be difficult to meet or even define.  Do we have to let men play in women’s tennis?  In women’s chess tournaments?  Whether yes or no, I don’t think the definition of feminism should hinge on those questions.

If you want to call that above description of mine feminism, fine, but I am finding that word spoils more debates and discussions than it improves.  I won’t be using it.  By the way, John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women remains one of the very best books ever written, on any topic, and indeed I have drawn my views from Mill.  Everyone should read it.  He never used the word feminist either.

I also would stress that my definition does not rule out emancipatory perspectives for men or other gender categories, or for that matter other non-gender categories, quite the contrary.  Freedom and opportunity are at the center of my conception, and that means for everybody, which allows for a nice kind of symmetry.

In the meantime, I will read Bryan’s book once it comes out Monday.  I’ve seen its component pieces already in Bryan’s other writings, I just am not sure which ones are in the book.

By the way, I wonder if Bryan’s views on gender are fully consistent with his views on poverty.  He advocates marrying, staying married, etc., that whole formula thing.  But if men are treated so badly in society, maybe in many cases there just aren’t enough marriageable men to go around?  What are the women (and the men) to do then?

What is the best interview question of all time?

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, also picked by the WaPo.  Excerpts:

What are the open tabs in your browser right now?

…First, the question measures what a person does with his or her spare time as well as work time. If you leave a browser tab open, it probably has some importance to you and you expect to return to the page. It is one metric of what you are interested in and what your work flow looks like.

It’s not just cheap talk. Some job candidates might say they are interested in C++ as a programming language, but if you actually have an open page to the Reddit and Subreddits on that topic, that is a demonstrated preference…

The question also tests for enthusiasm. If the person doesn’t seem excited about any of those open browser tabs, that may be a sign that they are blasé about other things as well. But if you get a heated pitch about why a particular website is the best guide to “Lord of the Rings” lore, you may have found a true nerd with a love of detail. That will be a plus for many jobs and avocations, though not all.

There is much more at the link, and to consider some other competing questions, do see my new book with Daniel Gross Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, publication date is today!

And do note that this particular question comes from Daniel.

The best fiction in recent times

Here are my picks, in no particular order:

W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1992, maybe not recent?).

Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan quadrology.

Karl Knausgaard, My Struggle, volumes one and two.

Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials.

Michel Houellebecq, Submission.

Min Lee, Pachinko.

Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem.

Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives.

And addended:

Haruki Murakami, IQ84.

Vikrram Seth, A Suitable Boy.

Orhan Pamuk, Museum of Innocence.

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.

David Grossman, To the End of the Land.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.

Jose Saramago, Blindness.

China Mieville, The City and the City.

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace.

I do not feel that recent times lag far so behind some of the earlier, more classic literary eras.  Which books am I forgetting?

Who are the best Irish artists?, part III, Mainie Jellett

Mainie Jellett, 1897-1944, born in Dublin to a well-to-do Protestant family of Huguenot origin.  She studied with William Orpen in Dublin and then moved to England, where she developed an attractive figurative style.  But soon thereafter her work turned abstract  when she studied Cubism in Paris in the early 1920s.  She was part of what might be the most significant (and rapid) revolution in the history of art, although the Irish branch of that revolution usually receives little attention.  She and Evie Hone led the introduction of modern art to Ireland, and arguably still represent the peak of that tradition.  “Like James Joyce, who had ‘not become modern to the extent that he ceased to be Irish’, Jellett made modernism Irish.” (source)

She blended cubism on top of Christian devotional ideas and also structures and images from the Book of Kells and other medieval Celtic sources.  At its best, her work is just perfect — you would not wish for the curves or angles or colors to go any other way.  Here is a classic Jellett image, also drawing on some Chinese influences:

Here is her painting “Abstract Crucifixion”:

For a point of contrast, see her homage to Fra Angelico.  Her Anglo-Irish background led to some hostility, and her deliberate invocation of specifically Catholic images is sometimes interpreted as a project for Irish cultural reconciliation.

Here is a less typical but still fine representational work:

I can’t bring myself to call her the greatest Irish artist ever, as perhaps she is not tops in breadth or multiplicity of perspectives, but she was one of the very best and I do not tire of viewing her work.  She is the equal of many of the better-known modernist artists from other countries and she excelled also in watercolors and sketches.  Her life was cut tragically short by pancreatic cancer.

Why do they keep the books wrapped in Mexican bookstores?

Yes, wrapped in clear shrink wrap.  So you can’t page through them and see what the book might be like.  I can think of a few hypotheses:

1. They don’t want you standing in the bookstore reading the thing, rather than buying it.  A bit like some U.S. comics news stands in days past.  Yet this doesn’t seem so plausible for longer books or most novels.

2. They want the books to look nicer and less grimy.

3. How about price discrimination?

Imagine there are two classes of readers.  The first is poorer, and only buys books when he or she knows the book is truly desired.  Harry Potter might be an example of such a book.   You want to read what everyone else is reading, to talk about it at school, and you don’t need to scrutinize p.78 so closely before deciding to purchase.

The second class of buyer is wealthier and usually will be buying (and reading) more books, indeed for those people book-buying is a significant habit.  That buyer wants to be on top of current trends, wants to have read whichever book is “best” that year amongst the trendy set, and so on.  If book quality is uncertain, such individuals will end up paying a de facto, quality-adjusted higher per unit price per book.  If you can’t sample the books in advance, you will end up buying some lemons, and you can’t just pick out the cherries.

Wrapped books thus extract more surplus from the second class of buyer and do not much discourage the first class.  The general point is related to the economic analysis of bundling and also block-booking — you have to buy a whole bunch of items to get the things you want.

I wonder if they would mind if I removed the wrapping to take a look before purchasing?  Maybe the store employees would be indifferent, but how about the retail outlet CEO?  The publisher?  The author?  Model this!

Or maybe that is just the way they do things.

The Edward Nelson books on Milton Friedman

Two volumes, such a wonderful book, for sure one of the best of the year.  Not quite a biography, more a study of Friedman’s career, but his career was his life so this is a wonderful biography too.  Here is one excerpt:

Friedman was a student of business cycles who was prone to say that he did not believe there was a business cycle.  He was a trenchant critic of reserve requirements as a monetary policy tools and a strong advocate of financial deregulation, yet he had many favorable things to say about moving to a regime of 100 percent reserve requirements.  he stressed the looseness of the relationship between money and the economy, yet critics saw his policy prescriptions as predicated on a tight relationship.  He criticized in detail the way the Federal Reserve allowed the money stock to adjust to the state of the economy, yet he was often characterized as treating empirical money-stock behavior as exogenous.  He made fundamental contributions to the development of Phillips-curve theory, yet he was averse to conducting discussion of inflation prospects using Phillips-curve analysis.  He spent much of his first two decades as a researcher working on labor unions and the use of market power in setting prices, yet for the subsequent five decades he found himself accused by critics of predicating his economic analysis on an atomistic labor market, a one-good model, or perfectly competitive firms.

Here is Scott Sumner on the book.  Highly recommended, here is the Amazon link, and volume II.