Results for “best fiction” 291 found
What I’ve been reading
1. Richard Hanania, Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy. Could this be the best public choice treatment of U.S. foreign policy? Gordon Tullock always was wishing for a book like this, and now it exists. I see Hanania’s views as more skeptical than my own (in East Asia in particular I think the American approach has brought huge benefits, Europe too), but nonetheless I am impressed by his careful analysis. This is a book that should revolutionize a field, though I doubt if it will.
2. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is one of the best written pieces of literary fiction this year. Very Irish, and it helps to have a one paragraph knowledge of Ireland’s earlier “Magdalen laundries” problem. It is not exciting for the action-oriented reader, but a perfect work within the terms of the world it creates.
3. Justin Gest, Majority Minority. The book considers racial transitions and how majorities may lose their ethnic or racial majority status. To see where America might be headed, the author considers histories from Bahrain, Hawaii, Mauritius, Singapore, trinidad and Tobago, and New York City.
4. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Persians: The Age of Great Kings. The Persian empire had the best infrastructure of any of the great ancient civilizations. The Royal Road for instance stretched 2,400 kilometers. Read more about the whole thing here.
Hannah Farber’s Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding is a good and economically literate treatment of the importance of maritime insurance during the time of America’s founding.
Gregory Zuckerman, A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of The Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine is a good account of what it promises.
In the Douglass North tradition is Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Ilia Murtazashvili, Land, the State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan.
Thursday assorted links
Wednesday assorted links
1. Stephen Carter best books of the year list (Bloomberg).
2. Malcolm Gladwell on Bulletin on Paul Simon.
3. Should we have octopus farms?
4. Against proof of stake (you need to scroll down a bit to get to the interesting part). Is this the best piece on crypto and public choice/constitutional economics questions?
Monday assorted links
*Where is My Flying Car?*
Engineer J. Storrs Hall is the author of this new Stripe Press book. Let’s be honest: you might think this is just the usual blah blah blah, heard it a thousand times since 2011 kind of treatment. But no, it is a detailed and nuanced and original treatment — at times obsessively so — of why various pending new physical technologies, such as nuclear power and nanotech, never really came to pass and transform our world as they might have.
Definitely recommended, worthy of the best non-fiction of the year list. Here is the Stripe Press website for the book.
*Partition: How and Why Ireland Was Divided*
By Ivan Gibbons, why can’t all non-fiction books be this good? At 148 pp. brief and to the point, perfectly clear, full of substance, and a model presentation. You can buy it here, headed for this year’s “best of” list.
Saturday assorted links
2. People systematically overlook subtractive changes. And a Patrick Collison comment: “An obvious point that took me way too long to appreciate: in software engineering, you should probably optimize for speed even when you don’t have to, because it’s one of the easiest/best ways to prioritize subtraction and parsimony in the solution space.”
3. Against alcohol.
4. Ezra Klein interviews Brian Deese about the economic thinking of the Biden Administration (with transcript). A good instantiation of “where they are at.”
5. Various observations on the Biden corporate tax plan.
6. ‘Sense of Disappointment’ on the Left as the N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race Unfolds.” (NYT) Again, I’m going to double down on my earlier claim that the progressive Left has peaked (which is not to claim that statism has peaked, it hasn’t). This is NYC people!
7. Fact and fiction about Ethiopia’s ethnofederalism? The content is hardly controversial to most readers I suspect, or even deeply committal on main issues, but the author chose anonymity nonetheless, which is itself a meta-comment on the piece’s own topic.
8. Map of all the physics particles and forces, highly useful, good explication, I don’t find any of this stuff intuitive. “Strangely, there are no right-handed W bosons in nature.” What is wrong with you people!? Why can’t it all be windowless monads? Or is it?
My Conversation with the excellent Dana Gioia
Here is the audio, transcript, and video. As I mention in the beginning, Dana is the (only?) CWT guest who can answer all of my questions. Here is part of the summary:
Dana and Tyler discuss his latest book and more, including how he transformed several businesses as a corporate executive, why going to business school made him a better poet, the only two obscene topics left in American poetry, why narrative is necessary for coping with life’s hardships, how Virgil influenced Catholic traditions, what Augustus understood about the cultural power of art, the reasons most libretti are so bad, the optimism of the Beach Boys, the best art museum you’ve never heard of, the Jungianism of Star Trek, his favorite Tolstoy work, depictions of Catholicism in American pop culture, what he finds fascinating about Houellebecq, why we stopped building cathedrals, how he was able to effectively lead the National Endowment for the Arts, the aesthetic differences between him and his brother Ted, his advice for young people who want to cultivate their minds, and what he wants to learn next.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why is Olaf Stapledon an important writer?
GIOIA: It’s not a question I expected.
COWEN: How could you not expect that?
GIOIA: Well, first of all, I hope people know who Olaf Stapleton was. Tremendously influential, rather clumsy, visionary, early science fiction writer who wrote novels like Odd John and the First and Last Man. What Olaf Stapleton did was I think he was the first really great science fiction writer to think in absolutely cosmic terms, beyond human conceptions of time and space. That, essentially, created the mature science fiction sensibility. If you go even watch a show like Expanse now, it’s about Stapledonian concerns.
COWEN: He was also a Hegelian philosopher, as you know. My friend Dan Wang thinks Last and First Men is better than Star Maker. Though virtually all critics prefer Star Maker.
GIOIA: Michael Lind, the political writer, and historian, Stapledon is one of his formative writers. Star Maker is kind of an evolution of the Last and First Men. Odd John is kind of the odd, the first great mutant novel.
Definitely recommended. And I am very happy to recommend Dana’s latest book (and indeed all of his books) Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life.
The new Michela Wrong book
It is called Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, and so far it is very good. Here is one bit:
As a Rwandan psychologist once told me: “To show emotional reserve is considered a sign of high standing. You do not just pour out your heart in Rwanda. You do not cry. It’s the opposite of Western oversharing, a form of stoicism.
A culture that glories in its impenetrability, that sees virtue in misleading: to someone proposing to write a nonfiction account embracing many of the most controversial episodes in Rwandan history, it posed a bit of a challenge.
Recommended, I will continue reading, and this one is likely to make the “best non-fiction of the year” list.
Classic Star Trek and rape (with spoilers)
With so few significant new movie releases to follow, I have taken to some strange pasttimes, including the viewing of old classic Star Trek episodes. I was struck by two obscure episodes in particular. One is Who Mourns for Adonais?, and the other is Metamorphosis, both from early in the second (and best) season.
In Adonais, a crazed being, who is in fact the ancient Greek God Apollo, seizes control of the ship and of a landing party, consisting of Kirk and a few others, including a beautiful Lieutenant Carolyn Palamas. In due time Apollo “takes” her, with her degree of actual compliance being highly uncertain (the whole ship and landing party are under constant threat of death). Kirk and the others encourage her to court him further, and then to reject him, to weaken his spirits, which leads to his eventual loss of control. It is Carolyn’s cleverness that saves them, she has been through emotional hell, and then they spurn and forget her while returning to the ship.
I am very familiar with “Golden age” science fiction and how badly it treated women, not to mention classic Star Trek’s own reputation. Nonetheless watching this episode it struck me, as a 2020 viewer, that the main message is how unaware high-achieving men are of the sexual travails of coerced women, most of all the coerced women they so often rely upon. Really.
In Metamorphosis, Kirk is carrying a lovely female ambassador on a trip, and they are waylaid by a strange being on a strange planet. I’ll spare you the whole story, but the ambassador ends up meeting a male castaway she dislikes, an alien takes over the body and partly the mind of the ambassador, and the combined alien/ambassador decides to marry the castaway so they can live happily ever after on the strange planet (really). The ambassador never would have chosen any of that on her own, and it seems to me this counts as a lifetime of rape for her, not to mention imprisonment, exile, and having to share one’s life and thoughts with a deeply alien being.
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are just fine with this! Admittedly, given the powers of the alien, they didn’t have much choice, but they are downright jolly — from Wikipedia: “When McCoy asks who will complete Nancy Hedford’s [ambassadorial] mission, Kirk shrugs and says, “I’m sure the Federation can find another woman, somewhere, who’ll stop that war.””
Brutal! The collateral damage on the distaff side deserves not a single mention or act of mourning, though otherwise Kirk will risk the whole ship to save the life of Bones or Spock or Scottie.
Again, I went away from the whole episode feeling this was a progressive rather than repugnant take on the whole narrative.
Perhaps it is I who am crazy, but I am beginning to think that “The Revisionist Sexual History of Classic Star Trek” remains to be written.
And maybe you prefer TNG, or some other later Star Trek version, but I tell you the 1967-69 version is far less “censored” and for that reason much more interesting to rewatch.
*Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition*
By Mark Lawrence Schrad. From the Amazon summary:
This is the history of temperance and prohibition as you’ve never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that affected virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries.
I have been reading the galleys, I will blurb it, it will be one of the best non-fiction books of 2021, more in due time you can pre-order here.
What I’ve been reading
1. Darmon Richter, Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide. This year’s best travel book? And do you get the joke in the subtitle? It has an unusual flair, excellent photos, and will make the updated “best of the year” list.
2. Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis. a very well-done book about mankind’s biggest problem and risk — what more could you want? I didn’t find much shocking new in here, but a very good overview for most readers.
3. Stephen Baxter, Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time. Yes that is Baxter the excellent science fiction author and here is his excellent book on both the history of geology and the Scottish Enlightenment. What more could you ask for?
4. Diana Darke, Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe. Among its other virtues, this book makes it clear just how much valuable architectural the world lost in Syria. I had not known that the Strasbourg Münster was the tallest medieval structure still standing in the world. Good photos too.
5. John Darwin, Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalization in the Age of Steam 1830-1930 (UK link only, I paid the shipping costs). I felt I knew a good bit of this material already, still this is a well-researched and very solid take on one of the most important factors behind the rise of globalization and international trade, namely the fast steamship and how it enabled so much urban growth for ports.
6. Charles Koch, with Brian Hooks. Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World. The best of the three Charles Koch books, interesting throughout, and much more personal and revealing than the generic title would imply. I read the whole thing.
There is Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State, a book-length reply to Mariana Mazzucato. For me it was too polemical, though I agree many of Mazzucato’s claims are overstated.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Think, Write, Speak:Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor is an entertaining read. It is good to see him call out Pasternak’s Zhivago for being a crashing bore. And to call Lolita a poem, repeatedly.
Kevin Vallier, Trust in a Polarized Age, I agree with the argument, and it is a good example of a philosopher using social science empirical work.
And Simon Baron-Cohen, The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention. OK enough, but underargued relative to what I was expecting.
I have only browsed them, but two very good books on Roman history are:
Anthony A. Barrett, Rome is Burning: Nero and the Fire that Ended a Dynasty.
Michael Kulikowski, The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantinople to the Destruction of Roman Italy.
Why you should use *Modern Principles* for your class
Alex has had numerous posts on Modern Principles, but here is my two cents. A textbook, as the name indicates, is a book. It has to be conceived of as a book, and thought of as a book, and written as a book, and ideally it should be read as a book. There are many other textbooks out there, and I do not wish to name names, but consider the following question. Which are the authors who really love books? Who spend their lives reading books? And indeed writing books. And who spend their lives studying what makes books good or bad? Who view books as truly essential to their overall output?
An ancillary question to ask is who are the authors who are truly dedicated to video, and to on-line communication more generally, as an independent outlet for their efforts and creativity?
Here is information on our new fifth edition, better than ever. Because we love books.
Favorite books by female authors
Elena Ferrante named her top forty, and I am not sure I approve of the exercise at all. Still, here are my top twenty, in no particular order, fiction only, not counting poetry:
1.Lady Murasaki, Tale of Genji.
2. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights.
3. Alice Munro, any and all.
4. Elena Ferrante, the Neapolitan quadrology.
5. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook.
6. Octavia Butler, Xenogenesis trilogy.
7. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
8. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
9. Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter.
10. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
11. Virginia Woolf, many.
12. Willa Cather, My Antonia.
13. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
14. Jane Austen, Persuasion.
15. Anne Rice, The Witching Hour, and #2 in the vampire series.
16. Anaïs Nin? P.D.James? A general award to the mystery genre?
17. Christa Wolf, Cassandra.
18. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian.
19. Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise.
20. Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness.
Comments: No, I didn’t forget George Eliot, these are “my favorites,” not “the best.” Maybe Edith Wharton would have made #21? Or Byatt’s Possession? The other marginal picks mostly would have come from the Anglosphere. I learned my favorite Latin American writers are all male.
How do you shop for books in a bookstore?
Jason emails me:
I would be interested to read on your blog about how you would shop for books in Daunt (or any good bookstore, but Daunt since you mentioned it). Is there method to your browsing/do you ask for recommendations, etc. Is there a person there who you particularly rate? It sounds basic but I think readers would be interested in knowing your approach. I live in London and too often walk out of a bookstore with books I have already heard about rather than taking a chance on something new.
Daunt has about seven or eight main “pressure points” near the very front of the store, and they are easy to find, and that is where you should look for your books. My key advice for Daunt is simply to have a basket, and/or an arrangement with the front desk that you can rest your accumulating pile of books there while you continue to look for more.
The basement floor of Daunt is organized by country, rather than by genre of book, and each visit you should scour at least two country sections for new (or older) items of interest. Overall I find that “by country” is a better to organize the back titles than what any other bookstore does. So, for instance, Chinese fiction is put next to Chinese history, not next to other fiction.
What makes the Marylebone branch of Daunt the best bookstore is how they organize the store, and the quality of selections they put on the front tables, not the overall number of titles.
Making random purchases of featured fiction, if it looks vaguely intelligent, is not crazy in Daunt, yet it would be in literally any American bookstore, or even in Waterstone’s in London (another superb store, go to the Piccadilly branch, but use it for history and biography not fiction).
If you are in a Barnes and Noble, mostly focus on finding the “new non-fiction” section, which these days is increasingly difficult to come across and ever-smaller.