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The best non-fiction books of 2016

In most cases, my review is behind the link, though a few times it leads merely to the Amazon page.  If I wrote only a few words about the book, I have reproduced them directly in this post.  And the books are listed, more or less, in the order I read them.  Apologies if I forgot your book, each year I do neglect a few.  Here goes:

Robert J. Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, my review is here.

Marco Santagana, Dante: The Story of His Life.

Melancholy, by László F. Földényi.

Ji Xianlin, The Cowshed: Memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  The classic account of its kind, in this edition brilliantly translated and presented.

Robin Hanson, The Age of Em.  Unlike any other on this list, this work created a new genre.

Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries.

Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve.  Fun, engaging, and informative, worthy of the “best of the year non-fiction” list.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History.

Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia.

Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Continental Drift: Britain and Europe from the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism.

Marie Kondo, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying.

Peter Parker, Housman Country: Into the Heart of England.  It’s already out in the UK, which is where I bought my copy.

Lawrence Rosen, Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew: Entangled Lives in Morocco.  Superb descriptive anthropology.

Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and ProphetDue out in February, the UK edition is already out.  Substantive and delightful on every page.

Kerry Brown, CEO, China: The Rise of Xi Jinping.

Richard van Glahn, The Economic History of China: From Antiquity through the 19th Century.

Christopher Goscha, The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam.  The best general history of Vietnam I know, and it does not obsess over “the Vietnam War.”  Readable and instructive on pretty much every page.

Andrew Scott Cooper, The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran.

William Domnarski, Richard Posner.

Peter Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs.

Daniel Gormally, Insanity, Passion, and Addiction: A Year Inside the Chess World.  A personal favorite, you can read this as a study in labor economics as to why people hang on to crummy jobs.

Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders.  Short descriptions of places you ought to visit, such as ossuaries, micronations, museums of invisible microbes, the floating school of Lagos, the Mistake House of Elsah, Illinois, Bangkok’s Museum of Counterfeit Goods, and the world’s largest Tesla coil in Makarau, controlled by Alan Gibbs of New Zealand.  The selection is conceptual, so I like it.  I will keep this book.

Jean Lucey Pratt, A Notable Woman.

Ben H. Shepherd, Hitler’s Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich.

Sebastian Mallaby, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives.

Julian Gewirtz, Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China.

Marina Abramović, Walk Through Walls.

Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts.

shah

Here is Arnold Kling’s list.  Here is my list of the year’s best fiction.

I would describe this year as thick in wonderful, superb books, though I remain uncertain which of these is truly the year’s winner.  So many plausible contenders!  I can only promise I’ll continue to cover what comes out between now and the end of the year, and apologies if one or two of those above are from late 2015.

*The Conflict Shoreline*, best non-fiction book of the year

For best non-fiction book of the year, a late entry swoops in to take first place!  That’s right, I am going to select The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert, by Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh.

This is an unusual book.  It is only 85 pp. of text and about half of it is aerial photos and maps.  It covers the history of the Negev desert, the Bedouin, Israeli policy toward the Bedouin, ecology, seed botany, and the roles of water policy and climate change, all in remarkably interesting and information-rich fashion, with a dose of Braudel and also Sebald in terms of method.

For one thing, it caused me to rethink what books as a whole should be.  This is one cool book.

To make it stranger yet, this book is Weizman’s response to Sheikh’s The Erasure Trilogy, which is structured as a tour of the ruins of the 1948 conflict.  That book is I believe from a Palestinian point of view, and described as a “visual poem.”  I just ordered it; note that Sheikh is the photographer for The Conflict Shoreline and thus listed as a co-author.

Some will read The Conflict Shoreline as “anti-Israeli” in parts, but that is not the main point of the book or my endorsement of it.  The book however does point out that Israeli policies toward the Bedouin often were prompted by a desire to remove large numbers of them from their previous Negev land and move them into the West Bank and Egypt.  I had not known “The village of al-‘Araqib has been destroyed and rebuilt more than 70 times in the ongoing “Battle over the Negev””.  The book ends with a two-page evidentiary aerial photo of that village, taken during 1945; other photos of it date as far back as 1918.  This is all part of Weizman’s project of “reverse surveillance.”

It is a hard book to summarize, in part because it is so visual and so integrative, but here is one excerpt:

The Negev Desert is the largest and busiest training area for the Israeli Air Force and has one of the most cluttered airspaces in the world.  The airspace is partitioned into a complex stratigraphy of layers, airboxes, and corridors dedicated to different military platforms: from bomber jets through helicopters to drones.  This complex volume is an integral part of the architecture of the Negev.

And then it will move to a discussion of seed technology, or how Bedouin economic strategies have changed over the course of the twentieth century, and how these various topics fit together.  Think of it also as a contribution to location theory and economic geography, but adding vertical space, manipulated topography, rainfall, and temperature to the relevant dimensions of the problem.

Too bad it costs $40.00.  Recommended, nonetheless.  Here is one review, here is another, the latter having especially good photos of the book’s photos.

Here is a good interview with Weizman, who among other things outlines his concept of Forensic Architecture.

Here is my earlier post on the best non-fiction books of 2015.  And here is an earlier post the best books under one hundred pages.

Weizmanbook

Best non-fiction books of 2015

These are in the order I read them, more or less, not in terms of preference.  And I would say this year had more good entries than ever before.  Here goes, noting that most of the links go to my earlier reviews of them:

First, here are the economics books:

Mastering ‘Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect, by Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn Steffen-Pischke, technically late 2014 but it was too late to make that list.

Dani Rodrik, Economics Rules.

Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.  Self-recommending.

Garett Jones, The Hive Mind.  Why national IQ matters.

Scott Sumner, The Midas Paradox.  Boo to the gold standard during the Great Depression.

Greg Ip, Foolproof: Why Safety Can be Dangerous, and How Danger Makes Us Safe.

And the rest, more or less the non-economics books:

Robert Tombs, The English and Their History.

R. Taggart Murphy, Japan and the Shackles of the Past.  The last section is brilliant on current Japanese politics.

Michael Meyer, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China.  Adam Minter has a very good and useful review of a good book.

Ian Bostridge, Schubert’s Winter Journey.  Will improve your listening.

The Mahabarata, by Carole Satyamurti.  Rewritten and edited to be easier to digest, intelligible and rewarding.  As “an achievement,” this book does have some claim to be number one.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers.  You can never read enough commentary on the Torah.

Daniel Tudor and James Pearson, North Korea Confidential, how things really work there (speculative), rain boots for instance are a fashion item and black markets are rife.

Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, a good general history of the country.

Guantánamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi.  He’s a very smart guy.

Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, Space X, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

Sebastian Strangio, Hun Sen’s Cambodia.  Goes deep into a place most people are ignoring.

Michael Booth, The Almost Nearly Perfect People.  The Nordics, that is.

Timothy Snyder, Black Earth.  He succeeded in writing an original book about the Holocaust, which is hard to do.

Emmanuel Todd, Who is Charlie?  Background on France being screwed up.

Niall Ferguson, Henry Kissinger, vol. I.  Background on America being screwed up.

Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane.  How to talk, think, and write about the British countryside.

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World.  The best of the various recent books on Humboldt.

Frank McLynn, Genghis Khan.  Background on a whole bunch of other places being screwed up.

Daniel P. Todes, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science. I didn’t have time to read all of this book, but it seemed very good in the fifth or so I was able to read.  By the way, the whole salivating dog at the bell story is a fiction.

Pierre Razoux, The Iran-Iraq War, readable and useful.

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: At her Zenith: In London, Washington, and Moscow, vol.2 of the biography, 1984-1987.  This one I haven’t finished yet.  I ordered my copy advance from UK Amazon, it doesn’t come out in the U.S. until early January.  There is some chance this is the very best book of the year.

I don’t quite see a clear first prize.  If I had to pick, I would opt for a joint prize to the biographies of Musk, Kissinger, Thatcher, and Genghis Khan.  This was the year of the biography.

Sorry if I forgot yours, this list is imperfect in various ways!  And the year isn’t over yet, so I’ll post an update on the very good books I read between now and the end of the year, probably on December 31.

Best non-fiction books of 2014

First there are the economics books, including books by people I know, including Piketty, The Second Machine Age, Tim Harford’s wonderful macro explainer, Megan McArdle’s The Up Side of Down, Lane Kenworthy on social democracy, The Fourth Revolution by John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge, Daniel Drezner The System Worked, and Frank Buckley on why the Canadian system of government is better.  And Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.  We’ve already talked, written, and thought about those plenty, and they are not what this list is about, so I will set them aside.  Most of you are looking for excellent new books in addition to these, books you might not have heard about.

Here are the other non-fiction books of the year which took my fancy, mostly in the order I read them, noting that the link usually leads you to my previous review or comments:

Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century.  Long, exhausting, and wonderful.

Christopher Hale, Massacre in Malaya, a broader history than it at first sounds, fascinating from beginning to end.

Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life.

The Very Revd John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert.

John Keay, Midnight’s Descendants: A History of South Asia since Partition.  An excellent treatment of how much work remains to be done in the “nation building” enterprise in South Asia.

Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugutive Life in an American City.  A sociology graduate student hangs out with lawbreakers and learns about police oppression, an excellent micro-study.  My column on her book is here.

Gendun Chopel, Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler, Tibetan scholar goes to India and records his impressions, unusual.

George Prochnik, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of His World.  I loved this one.

I’ve only read the first half of the new Tom Holland translation of Herdotus’s Histories (I will get to the rest), but surely it deserves note.

Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China.  This book won the National Book Award for non-fiction.

David Eimer, The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China.  A look at China’s outermost regions and their ethnic minorities.  Just imagine that, we had two excellent popular China books in the same year.

The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, by Davi Kopenawa.  Repetitious in parts, sometimes incoherent too, but it offers a smart and unique perspective you won’t get from any of the other books on this list or any other.

Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic.  This treatment stresses the (partial) cognitive advantages of having a tendency toward depression.

Edward Hirsch, A Poet’s Glossary, assorted facts and insights about the English language, you don’t have to feel like reading a book about poetry to find this worthwhile.

David Sterling, Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition, huge, expensive, wonderful, more than just a cookbook though it is that too.  I’ve spent some of the last few weeks learning these recipes and what makes them tick.

Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.  A good overview of how some of the main pieces of today’s information technology world fell into place, starting with the invention of the computer and running up through the end of the 1990s.

Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing.

Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life.

Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph.  As good or better than the classic biographies of the composer.

Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 1.  This one I have only read a part of (maybe 150 pp.?), it is very long and does not fit my current reading interests, but it seems very good and impressive and also has received strong reviews.  So I feel I should include it.

Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins.

So who wins?  If I had to pick a #1, it would be The Very Revd John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, not the kind of book I would be expecting to coronate, which is a testament to the magnetic force it has exercised over my imagination.

Then I would pick Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugutive Life in an American City and David Sterling, Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition as the runners-up.

My fiction picks were here.  There are still some wonderful books to come out this year, and already-published books I will still read, especially after mining other “best of” lists, so around Dec.31 or so I’ll post an updated account of what I would add to this list.

Best non-fiction books of 2013

There were more strong candidates this year than usual.  The order here is more or less the order I read them in, not the order of preference:

Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschmann.

Daniel Brook, A History of Future Cities.

Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.

I liked Neil Powell, Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music and also Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century.

M.E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath.

Rana Mitter, China’s War With Japan 1937-1945, the US edition has the sillier title Forgotten Ally.  The return to knowing some background on this conflict is rising.

Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics.

William Haseltine, Affordable Excellence: The Singapore Health System.

Clare Jacobson, New Museums in China.  Good text but mostly a picture book, stunning architecture, no art, full of lessons.

Mark Lawrence Schrad, Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State.

Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and our Gamble Over Earth’s Future.

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: An Authorized Biography, from Grantham to the Falklands.

From books “close at hand,” I very much liked John List and Uri Gneezy, Virginia Postrel on glamour, Lant Pritchett, The Rebirth of Education, and Tim Harford on macroeconomics.

Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia gets rave reviews, although I have not yet read my copy.  From the UK I’ve ordered the new Holland translation of Herodotus and Richard Overy’s The Bombing War and have high expectations for both.

If I had to offer my very top picks for the year, they would all be books I didn’t expect to like nearly as much as I did:

Joe Studwell, How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region.

Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy, Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832.

Mark Lewisohn, Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years, volume I.

Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House.

Apologies to those I left out or forgot, I am sure there were more.

Best fiction books of 2013

Every year I offer my picks for best books of that year, today we are doing fiction.  I nominate:

1. Karl Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Two: Man in Love.

2. Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs.  Great fun.

3. Amy Sackville, Orkney.  Not every honeymoon works out the way you planned.

4. Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

5. Kathryn Davis, Duplex: A Novel.  Non-linear, not for all.

Since I think the Knausgaard is one of the greatest novels ever written, I suppose it also has to be my fiction book of the year.  (Except, um…it’s not fiction.)  But otherwise I found many books disappointing, perhaps because my own expectations were out of synch with contemporary writing.

Elizabeth Gilbert and Donna Tartt produced decent plane reads, but I wouldn’t call them favorites.  The new Thomas Pynchon I could not stand more than a short sample of.  I sampled many other novels but didn’t like or finish them.  I read or reread a lot of Somerset Maugham, which was uniformly rewarding.  The Painted Veil may not be the best one, but it is a good place to get hooked.  I reread quite a bit of Edith Wharton and it rose further in my eyes.  Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence are my favorites, more intensely focused than the longer fiction.  I loved discovering the Philip Pullman trilogy and vowed to give George Martin another try this coming year.

The very best coverage of the new Charles Murray book

Could it be the lengthy NYT profile of Stevenson and Wolfers?  Other than finding material on economists interesting per se, and knowing them a bit, I found this profile relevant for two reasons.  First, successful economists really can earn a good amount these days, and at relatively young ages.  They could probably earn much more, if that is what they set out to do.  Second, there really is a cognitive elite engaged in assortative mating, and the children of those couples will have a big head start.  Furthermore that cognitive elite is now global (Justin is from Australia).  No, Murray’s econometrics do not demonstrate all of his conclusions, but nonetheless this family is a walking embodiment of The Bell Curve, not to mention the new book.  (I would have preferred a piece which explored this irony with more depth.)  Some of you are negative in the comments on my post, but the facts about the Wolfers/Stevenson family are hardly exceptional, conditional on a few other variables but of course strongly conditional on those variables.  They own a Noguchi table, we own a Noguchi lamp (cheaper than you think, by the way).  They ban sugar, we do not, but there is no junk food, sugary or otherwise, kept around our house.  My professional writing rails against junk food.  I was disappointed that their nanny has only a Master’s degree.  The nanny in our family has a Ph.d and is a well-known economics blogger.; going back in time, the two other nannies were a professional linguist and translator and an engineer (they are sometimes called “the grandparents”).  Get the picture?  The rhetoric in the profile is oddly non-self-conscious, perhaps in a way that makes the couple look less charismatic than they really are, and that too is worth thinking about.  Parts of the profile felt like a bit of a slog to me (despite my interest in the topic), but I suspect not to most NYT readers, and of course we are seeing a highly skilled and experienced journalist at work along with a first-rate team of editors.

Always try to give things the more subtle reading.

Best non-fiction books of 2011

I’ve already covered best economics books, best fiction, and the very best books.  General non-fiction remains missing.  It’s been a very good year, and these are the other non-fiction books which I really liked, a stronger list than the year before:

Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country.

Daniel Treisman, The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev.

Frank Brady,  Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall — from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness.

Javier Cercas, The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination.  In the waning of Franco’s time, how did Spain turn away from military rule and toward democracy?  Can a mediocre man make a difference in history simply by retreating at the right moment?  Can a political life boil down to a single response, under gunfire at that?  Half of this book is brilliant writing, the other half is brilliant writing combined with obscure, hard-to-follow 1970s Spanish politics (does Adrian Bulli understand the life of John Connally?  I don’t think so).  Cercas is a novelist, intellect, and historian all rolled into one, and he is sadly underrated in the United States.  There’s nothing quite like this book.  On top of everything else, if you can wade through the thicket, it is an excellent public choice account of autocracy.

Hamid Dabashi, Shi’ism: Religion of Protest.

Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life.  This vivid biography brings its subject to life through the extensive use of correspondence and quotation.  The reader gets an excellent feeling of how Bismarck’s government actually worked, his intensity and also his mediocrities, and also the importance of Bismarck in building up Germany as a European power.  The story is as gripping as a good novel.  Sadly, almost no attention is paid to the origins of the welfare state.  Still, this has received rave reviews and rightly so.

Daniel Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts.

Jacques Pepin, The Origin of Aids.

Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.

Mara Hvistendahl, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Peoples, and their Regions.

Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.  Funny thing is, I read this on Kindle, didn’t have a physical copy to put in “my pile,” had no visual cue as to the continuing existence of the book, and thus I forget to cover it on MR.  I enjoyed it very much.

John Gimlette, Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge.  This book covers Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.  A revelation, I loved it.  Could Gimlette be my favorite current travel writer?

Robert F. Moss, Barbecue: The History of an American Institution.

Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II.

John Sutherland, Lives of the Novelists, A History of Fiction in 294 Lives.  I’ll blog about this remarkable book soon.

What is striking is how many “big books” make this list, and that is exactly what you would expect in an age of Twitter, namely that a lot of shorter books are being outcompeted — aesthetically though not always economically — by on-line reading.

Here is the best “best books” list I’ve seen so far, apart from my lists of course.

Best economics books of the year

1. Best behavioral economics books of the year, Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Bryan Caplan, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.

2. Best economic history book, Alexander Field, A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth.

3. Second best eBook of the year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy.  By the way, here is my recent debate with Erik; we both agreed in advance to mix things up and generate controversy, so interpret the exchange accordingly.  In reality, Erik and I agree about many many things and Matt Yglesias notes as much.  (We do, however, seem to disagree about what this graph means.)  Arnold Kling comments on the debate itself.

4. Best economics/business book of the year: Tim Harford’s Adapt.

5. Best Austrian or Austrian-influenced book of the year: Daniel B. Klein, Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation.  It’s not out yet, I’ll cover it more when it appears, more information here.

6. Best economics textbook, Ahem!  I don’t mean my favorite economics textbook (though it is that too), rather best economics textbook.  The revised second edition of Micro just appeared, the macro is due out any day now.

Overall if I had to pick one, text aside, it might be the Alexander Field book, but this is a diverse lot with something for everybody.

Best fiction and fiction-related books of 2011

1. Murakami I now have finished it, don’t think it adds up to anything but it is consistently fun for 900+ pages.  How many other books can claim that?

2. Steve Sem-Samberg, The Emperor of Lies, A Novel.  “I don’t want to read any more about the Holocaust” is not good enough reason to neglect this stunning Swedish novel.  A fictionalized account of the Lodz Ghetto, it looks at the lives of the ghetto rulers and whether they were heroes or collaborators.  I found it tough to read more than one hundred pages of this at a time; by focusing on the suicides rather than the murder victims, it is especially brutal.  Get up the gumption.

3. Audur Ava Olafsdottir, The Greenhouse.  From Iceland, it’s funny and sheer fun to read and short and easy yet deep and moving.

4. Habibi, by Craig Thompson.  I don’t enjoy many graphic novels, but this is my favorite of all those I have read.

Away from fiction proper we have:

5.  The Anatomy of Influence, Harold Bloom.  In part this is a lifetime achievement award, but his best passages are still stunning.

6. Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003, by Roberto Bolano.  Will make you want to read a lot more Latin American fiction.

Soon I’ll cover the best economics books of the year.

Best economics books for five- to ten-year olds

At FiveBooks, from Yana van der Meulen.  The first pick is Cloud Tea Monkeys ("This book focuses on a woman who is very poor") and I have not heard of any of them so I cannot judge the list.

Between the ages of five and ten, I liked books on science, books with maps, and by age ten I liked books on chess and also on cryptography and mathematics, most of the Trachtenberg method of speed arithmetic.  An alternative approach is to give your kid books which invest in analytical capacity, without trying to teach economics at all.  Is economics a topic or a mode of thought?  Perhaps it matters what age you are at.

By the way, did you know that the awesome FiveBooks has now merged with the awesome The Browser?  Let's hope the antitrust authorities let that one proceed…

The best 100 Arabic books?

Here is one list and here are the top five:

1 The Cairo Trilogy by Egyptian (Nobel-prize winning) author Naguib Mahfouz. Yes, of course it’s available in English: Trans. William Maynard Hutchins, Everyman’s Library, 2001.

2 In Search of Walid Masoud by the Palestinian author Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. This is available in English, translated by by Adnan Haydar & Roger Allen. Syracuse University Press, 2000. Also, Ghassan Nasr’s translation of Ibrahim Jabra’s The Journals of Sarab Affan, published by Syracuse University Press, was a runner-up for the Banipal translation prize in 2008.

3 Honor, by the great Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim. As far as I can turn up, this has never been translated into English. Ibrahim’s Zaat, The Committee, and Stealth are easily available from AUC Press, AUC Press, and Aflame Books. The Smell of It was translated, too, but it’s long since out of print.

4 War in the Egyptian Homeland, by the Egyptian Yousef Al-Qaeed has not been translated. (Oops! Hilary notes that War in the Land of Egypt by Yusuf al-Qa’id–see where a non-standard transliteration will get me–was published by Interlink in 1997, translated by Olive and Lorne Kenny and Christopher Tingley. Yes, and my title translation was lame. Worse, I’ve read that translation….)

5 Men in the Sun, by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, was translated by Hilary Kilpatrick and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers in 1998.

Hat tip goes to Literary Saloon.

Meta-list for best non-fiction books of 2009

I've been reading lots of year-end "best of" lists, from serious outlets that is, and these are the books which I see recurring with special frequency:

1. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.

2. Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey.

3. David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.

4. Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic.

5. Columbine, by David Cullen.

8. By Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City.

9. Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World.

10. Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, by Terry Teachout.

I thought all of those were well done but Lords of Finance was the only one I loved.  My favorites are here and Lords arguably would be third on that non-fiction list of two.  In fairness to the authors I've only browsed Gordon Wood (report coming soon) and I haven't yet read Pops but suspect I might like it very much (report coming soon).

If you wish, you can dig into some of the book source lists I used for this meta-list here.  Have someone ready to throw you a rope.

Here are some "best albums" lists, if you wish to wade through those.  They are harder to aggregate and I haven't found a useful way of doing it.