Results for “best fiction” 355 found
Assorted links
1. Excellent fictional saga of a ZMP worker.
2. Model this, I call it the best and deepest game of hockey ever. Seriously.
3. Smallest frogs, tinier than a penny, newly discovered.
Are we stagnating aesthetically?
Some of you have been emailing, asking for my opinion of this recent Kurt Andersen Vanity Fair article. Here is the summary introductory paragraph:
For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.
There is plenty more at the link. A serious response would require a book or more, so let me offer a few conclusions, noting that it’s not possible in blog space to defend these judgments at any length. This is all about aesthetics, and it is distinct from the TGS technology argument, though one might believe that technical breakthroughs are needed to usher in aesthetic innovations, and that slowness in the one area would lead to slowness in the other. That’s not a claim I’ve ever made, but it’s worth considering even if it can’t be settled very easily. In any case, here’s my view of the evidence:
1. Movies: The Hollywood product has regressed, though one can cite advances in 3-D and CGI as innovations in the medium if not always the aesthetics. The foreign product is robust in quality, though European films are not nearly as innovative as during the 1960s and 70s. Still, I don’t see a slowdown in global cinema as a whole.
2. TV: We just finished a major upswing in quality for the best shows, though I fear it is over, as no-episode-stands-alone series no longer seem to be supported by the economics.
3. Books/fiction: It’s wrong to call graphic novels “new,” but they have seen lots of innovation. If we look at writing more broadly, the internet has led to plenty of innovation, including of course blogs. The traditional novel is doing well in terms of quality even if this is not a high innovation era comparable to say the 1920s (Mann, Kafka, Proust, others).
4. Computer and video games: This major area of innovation is usually completely overlooked by such discussions.
5. Music: Popular music has been in a Retromania sludge since the digital innovations of the early 90s, but classical contemporary music continues to show vitality and it is even establishing some foothold in the concert hall and in nightclubs too. Jazz has plenty of niche innovation, but it’s not moving forward with new, central ideas which command the attention of the field.
6. Painting and sculpture: Lots of good material, no breakthrough central movements comparable to Pop Art or Abstract Expressionism. Photography has seen lots of innovation.
7. Your personal stream: This is arguably the biggest innovation in recent times, and it is almost completely overlooked. It’s about how you use modern information technology to create your own running blend of sources, influences, distractions, and diversions, usually taken from a blend of the genres and fields mentioned above. It’s really fun and most of us find it extremely compelling. See chapter three of Create Your Own Economy/The Age of the Infovore.
8. Architecture: Slows down after 2008, but there were numerous innovative blockbuster buildings prior to the crash.
Today the areas of major breakthrough innovation are writing, computer games, television, photography (less restricted to the last decade exclusively) and the personal stream. Let’s hope TV can keep it up, and architecture counts partially. For one decade, namely the last decade, that’s quite a bit, though I can see how it might escape the attention of a more traditional survey. Some other areas, such as the novel, global cinema, and the visual arts are holding their own and producing plenty of small and mid-size innovations.
Although that is a relatively optimistic take on the aesthetics of the last decade, it nonetheless supports the view that aesthetic innovation relies on technological innovation. Most (not all) of the major areas of progress have relied on digitalization, and indeed that is the one field where the contemporary world has brought a lot of technological progress as well.
What I’ve been reading
1. David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918. Thorough, readable, never thrilling but consistently satisfying. It is a good follow-up to Niall Ferguson’s splendid The Pity of War.
2. Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. No surprises, good, perhaps best on the evolution of the natural gas market.
3. Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn. Never bad, it becomes excellent by the end.
4. Roger Ebert, Life Itself: A Memoir. One-fifth or so of this book is interesting, so some small number of you should wade through it. I liked the discussion of black and white cinema best, but most of it is rambling and insufferable.
5. 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. Definitely recommended, I urge you to get up the gumption.
6. Jo Nesbo, Nemesis: A Novel. Highly entertaining, indeed gripping, but by the end I was wondering whether I had wasted my time. It turns out not to be conceptual after all. A good plane read, which is for me what it was.
I didn’t “get” the new Stephen Greenblatt book; was Poggio so important? I still find myself unable to enjoy Hollinghurst, though in the abstract I admire the writing. Bellow’s The Victim is beautifully written but seemed to me dated.
What I’ve been reading
1. Jo Nesbø, The Redbreast. These days it’s odd to read a fictional book about neo-Nazi cults in Norway, including a murderous villain who leaves behind a manuscript explaining his ideas and purpose. I didn’t love it, but I liked it and I never considered putting it down; I will likely try another book by Nesbø. The author, by the way, graduated from the Norwegian School of Economics.
2. Félix J. Palma, The Map of Time. Spanish speculative fiction, now in English. It never feels deep, but finally we have a time travel novel chock full of new (and good) ideas. Recommended to all those who find that sufficient, but not for those who don’t.
3. Tim Congdon, Money in a Free Society. Neo-monetarist tract! With plenty on all the different notions of the liquidity trap out there, which are often confused.
4. Kate Christensen, The Astral: A Novel. About marriage, self-deception, and general decay and destruction. Her best book so far.
5. Isaac Asimov, Franchise. Only a short story, but available in stand-alone form. Asimov considers a future world where AI is so advanced that elections can be settled by asking a few questions to a computer-identified “typical” voter and adding that input to the calculations of the computer. One of his deepest works, recommended for all students of public choice.
Assorted links
Assorted links
Star Children: Return to Home
DARPA, believe it or not, has a request for information on what they call the 100 YEAR STARSHIP™ STUDY.
Neither the vagaries of the modern fiscal cycle, nor net-present-value calculations over reasonably foreseeable futures, have lent themselves to the kinds of century-long patronage and persistence needed to definitively transform mankind into a space-faring species.
The 100 Year Starship™ Study is a project seeded by DARPA to develop a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make long-distance space travel practicable and feasible….
We are seeking ideas for an organization, business model and approach appropriate for a self-sustaining investment vehicle. The respondent must focus on flexible yet robust mechanisms by which an endowment can be created and sustained, wholly devoid of government subsidy or control, and by which worthwhile undertakings—in the sciences, engineering, humanities, or the arts—may be awarded in pursuit of the vision of interstellar flight….
Responses should describe the:
• Organizational structure;
• Governance mechanism;
• Investment strategy and criteria; and
• Business model for long-term self-sustainment.
The best model we have of such an organization is a religion. Business organizations such as the Hudson’s Bay Company have occasionally lasted hundreds of years but more by accident than by design. Universities have lasted hundreds of years, although often with government support and vague missions. A few foundations have lasted for a long period of time but often with big mission changes.
Many religions, however, have maintained themselves more or less intact for over a thousand years. Even in the modern age, new religions appear to be quite capable of forming and maintaining themselves for long periods of time. Mormonism has been on-going for nearly two centuries, the Unification Church and Scientology (n.b. started by a science-fiction writer) have been on-going for over half a century. A religion with a million or so adherents can easily last for hundreds of years while generating substantial revenues and while maintaining focus.
Humanity was born of the stars, our very atoms forged in the heart of a million suns. It is in the stars that we lost travelers will find our true home and our true destiny. The twinkling lights of the yawning sky gently call to us each night to return to the place of our birth. We must answer that call. Star-children, return to home.
(See what I mean? This could work. )
Hat tip: Daniel Kuehn.
Books about America, by foreigners, bleg
George Hawkey writes to me:
I know you’ve posted “best books” queries on the site before, so here goes. Do you have any input on the best books about American History and Culture, but written from a non-American point-of-view?
Obviously Tocqueville, and there’s a whole raft of Canadian published books on the US culture as well. What I’m looking for is more like: what would “The Best and the Brightest” be if it were written by a Japanese journalist. Or what if Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters” trilogy was written by a Russian sociologist? “The World Is Flat” but written about the US by an Indian?
In many cases, I’m guessing these texts are not yet or will never be translated, but I’m still interested in finding greater perspective on the US than what’s provided by the traditional pundits, authors and historians.
I’ll recommend these five works of fiction, starting with Nabokov and how about Ayn Rand as well? The comments are open for your further suggestions…
In my pile
1. Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels, by Heather Shouse. I’ve read enough of this book to know it is true to its title.
2. The Moral Lives of Animals, by Dale Peterson. It looks like Adam Smith’s TMS applied to the moral sense of non-human animals, making the point that the moral sense is not unique to human beings.
3. Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and his Fifteen Quartets, by Wendy Lesser.
4. Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes; so far I love it, imagine a mix of Raymond Chandler, near-future science fiction, and South African grit.
All are worthy of purchase, we will see how they develop. I found The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, the most enjoyable science fiction novel I’ve read in a few years, and it should appeal to fans of Thailand too.
What I’ve been reading
1. Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad. National Book Award for fiction, and it is enjoyed by most people who pick it up,Will Wilkinson reviews it well.
2. Margaux Fragoso, Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir. This book raises questions about the meaning of consent, but despite its quality I was unable to get all the way though it. Too brutal for me.
3. The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obreht. The author may be 25, Serbian, beautiful, and feted everywhere, but still I found it contrived and overwritten. The substance-obsessed Laura Miller nails it. Against my better judgment I enjoyed and finished Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination.
4. David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: a History of a Land, its Regions, and their Peoples. So far released only in the UK, in this excellent book Gilmour claims that for a while, in the 19th century, Garibaldi was the most famous person in the world.
5. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute’s Soliloquy. The first third is a superb humane and philosophical response to adversity, namely imprisonment on Buru Island. Of the rest, which is never sent letters to his family, at least half is very good.
6. Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact. Perhaps the best book on what its subtitle indicates.
Assorted links
1. Kevin Drum reviews TGS. And Lane Kenworthy. And Nick Schulz at Forbes: "It’s possible the most important non-fiction book this year won’t be published on paper."
2. Megan on the 1954 kitchen. And "densifying" to get more low-hanging fruit, from Ryan Avent. And more from Scott Sumner on the book: "Tyler Cowen’s book has been both a marketing coup and an intellectual game changer. It has gotten people to focus on issues they intuitively knew were out there, but for which they lacked a framework for thinking about."
5. Index method? why not just read the thing?
*The Return*
The author is Daniel Treisman and the subtitle is Russia's Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev. Is this the first non-fiction book to be making my "Best of 2011" list? Most of all, it argues persuasively that, rather than botching the transition away from communism, the Russians/Soviets did a remarkably good job, relative to what could have been expected. It's also the best all-round book-length treatment of what the subtitle indicates and it is readable as well. Excerpt:
But [under Putin] did the bureaucracy become more effective and the population safer? The state certainly grew. In Putin's eight years as president, about 363,000 additional bureaucrats were hired, mostly federal agents stationed in the regions. Law enforcement mushroomed. In the United States, there are two judges and prosecutorial employees per 10,000 residents. When Putin took over, Russia had eight; when he left, it had fourteen. Federal spending on law enforcement and national security rose from $4 billion in 1998 to $26 billion in 2007.
Despite this influx of resources, most indicators suggest the state became less, not more, effective. It built less housing, paved fewer roads, and laid fewer water mains and gas lines per year than under Yeltsin. The number of public schools and buses in service fell faster than before. Reforms of the education and health systems were repeatedly postponed…As for keeping citizens safe, few saw any improvement.
Here is a recent review of the book from the WSJ; I liked the book more than he did.
What I’ve been reading
1. The Half-Made World, by Felix Gilman. I very much enjoyed this mix of dystopian steampunk and speculative science fiction, reviewed by Henry here.
2. Vassily Grossman, Everything Flows. I found this more fluent and compelling than his longer Life and Fate; it's the story of a man who returns home from a concentration camp. Recommended.
3. Richard Overy, 1939: Countdown to War. I didn't think a book so short on this topic could be good. I was wrong. Overy has a strong overall track record as an author.
4. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. I don't have any objections to this much-touted book, but I expected to learn more from it than I did. It didn't feel like 352 pp.
5. Nicholas Ostler, The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel. A provocative book on the forthcoming decline of English as a globally dominant language. I'm not (yet?) convinced, but I'm less unconvinced than I thought I would be. One main point is that more and more business will be done without English at all, often through the BRICS countries. It is interesting to see that fewer people in South Africa are learning English.
*Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet*
That is the new book by Jennifer Homans and it is one of the very best non-fiction works of the year, impeccably written and researched. Here is the excerpt of greatest interest to most economists:
None of the Russian ballet's many admirers, however, would be more central to the future of British ballet than John Maynard Keynes. Keynes is usually remembered as the preeminent economist of the twentieth century, but he was also deeply involved with classical dance and a key player in creating a thriving British ballet…
For Keynes…classical ballet became an increasingly important symbol of the lost civilization of his youth…With Lydia at his side, Keynes plowed his talent and considerable material resources into theater, painting, and dance, even as he was also playing an ever more prominent role in political and economic affairs on the world stage.
The couple's Bloomsbury home became a meeting place for ballet luminaries (Lydia's friends) and a growing coterie of artists and intellectuals who saw ballet as a vital art…When Diaghilev died in 1929, many of them joined Keynes in establishing the Camargo Society, an influential if short-lived organization devoted to carrying Diaghilev's legacy forward — and to developing a native English ballet. Lydia was a founding member and performed in many of the society's productions…Keynes was its honorary treasurer.
In the mid-1930s, Keynes also built the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, funding it largely from his own pocket…As Britain sank into the Depression, Keynes's interest in the arts also took on an increasingly political edge: "With what we have spent on the dole in England since the war," he wrote in 1933, "we could have made our cities the greatest works of man in the world."
I did, by the way, very much enjoy Black Swan (the movie), despite its highly synthetic nature, a few disgusting scenes, and its occasional over-the-top mistakes. So far it's my movie of the year along with Winter's Bone, the Israeli movie Lebanon, and the gory but excellent Danish film, Valhalla Rising.
My favorite recording of Swan Lake (and my favorite classical CD of 2010) is conducted by Mikhail Pletnev (controversial but there is a good review here), who was recently cleared of child abuse charges in Thailand.
What I’ve been reading
1. Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan, by D.R. Thorpe. I'm not one of these people who enjoys reading a lot of long tracts about British politicians, but this is one of the best non-fiction books of the year. It's full of good information, offers useful context for British economic and political debates, has plenty of original research, and is as suspenseful as a very good novel. Most of all, it brings its world and character to life. Highly recommended.
2. J.P. Singh, Globalized Arts: The Entertainment Economy and Cultural Identity. The definitive book for updating coverage on its topic, including the best and most comprehensive history of the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity.
3. James K. Glassman, Safety Net: The Strategy for De-Risking Your Investments in a Time of Turbulence. p.11: "Reduce the proportion of stocks in your portfolio."
4. Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Loyalists, and Indian Allies. "The civil war had four overlapping dimensions. In the first, Loyalists and Americans battled for control of Upper Canada. Second, the bitter partisanship within the United States threatened to become a civil war, as many Federalists served the British as spies and smugglers, while their leaders in New England flirted with secession. Third, Irish republicans waged a civil war within the British empire, renewing in Canada their rebellion, which the British had suppressed in Ireland in 1798. Invading Canada, Irish-American soldiers faced British regiments primarily recruited in Ireland, for thousands of Irishmen had fled from poverty by enlisting in the royal forces. Fourth, the war embroiled and divided native peoples…In the North American civil war of 1812, Americans fought Americans, Irish battled Irish, and Indians attacked one another. They struggled to extend, or to contain, the republicanism spawned by the American Revolution." Some of this book has too much detail for my interests, but overall it is good.
5. Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History. I liked the cover so much that I also enjoyed the book more. I also liked the weight of this book a great deal; it was just right. In any case a fine one-volume introduction.