Results for “best fiction” 318 found
What I’ve been reading
1. Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul, by Michael Reid. A good treatment of the region’s recent history; it is best for its balanced assessment of what market-oriented reforms have managed or not.
2. Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe, by James J. Sheehan. Blah, blah, blah, blah, Europe has fewer soldiers than it used to, blah. Blah. Sheehan is a first-rate historian, but there’s not much to this book.
3. Architecture of Authority, by Richard Ross. This book is nothing more than photos of jail cells, parole hearing rooms, Mary Boone Gallery, and the like. Thought-provoking.
4. Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike. Scattered essays on just about everything. Completely apart from his fiction, Updike is simply one of the smartest and most impressive people out there. It is amazing how many topics he knows so much about and how well he writes about them.
5. Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You With the Bill), by David Cay Johnston. This is quite a good compendium of different ways that government screws us over, written from a mixed populist/libertarian point of view. Recommended. I expected not so much but the substance here held my attention. I’d now like to know the total welfare cost of all these bad policies.
Meta-recommendations
I’ve spent lots of time scouring this year’s "Best of" lists, and I thought I should pass along what I have learned. These are not my recommendations (though I often approve), these are what I have gleaned from the recommendations of media critics. They are my judgment of the most common selections on the "Best of" lists, noting that I did not check the lists from publications I do not enjoy and thus there is an implicit filter being applied.
So here is my aggregation:
1. Non-fiction book: Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise.
2. Fiction book: Tree of Smoke, or The Savage Detectives.
2. Miscellaneous book: Letters of Ted Hughes. Everyone loves this, I haven’t read it yet.
3. Movie: No Country for Old Men. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly gets lots of picks, given that it is playing in only two cities.
4. Classical CD: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Sings Peter Lieberson, "Neruda Songs." Read the excellent Ed Uyeshima review on Amazon, it is first.
5. Popular music: LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver, or possibly Neon Bible, by Arcade Fire.
I still can’t figure out the consensus jazz CD of the year. Any help?
I might add that the non-meta me basically approves of this list, with two caveats. First, the Lieberson CD, while quite good, in part received so many mentions because the singer, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, met a young and tragic death this last year. It was her husband who composed these songs for her. Second, I don’t myself have clear picks for popular music. I do a lot of my popular music buying in December, when the "Best of" lists come out. I did put on LCD Soundsystem this morning but was bored by it on first listening.
The Food of the Gods
"Yes, but think of the dead!"
Another voice took up the strain. "The dead," it said. "Think of the unborn…"
Or:
"Whatever it dislocates," said Redwood, "My little boy must have the food."
Those are both from H.G. Wells’s excellent and far ahead of its time, The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth. The novella concerns a new tool of genetic engineering that makes people thirty-five feet tall, and of course occasions social conflict. Well’s short fiction is in general much underrated.
Recommended Christmas and holiday gifts
Suitability as gifts means the book is a short one, the items will signal elevated taste, they are at least reasonably entertaining, visually appealing, and they are unlikely to be given by others as gifts unless of course your social circle reads MR.
1. Fiction: Stephane Audeguy, Theory of Clouds. The conceptual foreign novel which got lost in the shuffle of the American fiction market.
2. Popular Music: The View, Hats off to the Buskers, from Scotland, this is musically superior pop and they still have room to get even better.
3. Classical music: Either William Byrd, Laudibus in Sanctus, beautifully recorded, or John Adams, The Dharma at Big Sur/My Father Knew Charles Ives, and yes I spent twenty years as a Johns Adams skeptic. In the last few years he’s raised his music to an entirely new level.
4. Gadget: I still use my iPhone almost every day and I can no longer imagine not having one. Mostly I surf web sites and blogs while waiting in lines, or read email. I’ve yet to make a phone call with it.
5. DVD: I watched through Planet Earth as quickly as I could. Yana then took the box up to college, if you need another testimony. If your loved one doesn’t merit an entire DVD box, I thought Away From Her was the best movie of the year; sadly the first-rate No Country for Old Men won’t be ready on disc in time.
6. Single song on iTunes: Anthony and the Johnsons, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. The key here is to pick a song on an album you won’t otherwise buy or you won’t otherwise think of.
7. Crazed economist idea: Buy someone a book of stamps. It has the efficiency properties of a cash transfer (who doesn’t need stamps?), yet if you choose an attractive issue it will show (a little) more thought than money alone. And hey — you had to stand in line to get it, or endure their ugly web site, and at a monopolistic institution at that.
Finally, it is often better to give experiences rather than possessions, and if you don’t know what your wife wants email her sister or best friend and ask.
What I’ve Been Reading
1. Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet, by John Armstrong. The author does not demonstrate overwhelming expertise but this is nonetheless not a bad place to start on the most neglected of all the great writers.
2. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla. Why Schleiermacher really matters, how Kant painted himself into a corner trying to solve the problems laid out by Rousseau, and why it all springs from Hobbes. I found this well above average for its genre, though you must have a taste for Straussian-like books where big ideas clash at the macro level and there is little attempt at any kind of empirical resolution.
3. How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom, by Garry Kasparov. This is a fun book, except that life mostly doesn’t imitate chess. Chess is characteristic for its lack of self-deception; it is hard to avoid knowing where you stand in the hierarchy and excuses are few and far between. That’s why most chess players are depressed. Kasparov seems to save his self-deception for politics; let’s hope he is still alive a year from now.
4. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. This favorite book of Jason Kottke is first-rate non-fiction, it is also one of the best books on the Cold War.
5. The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa. One of the best studies of the psychology of political power and the connection between tyranny and the erotic. A fun albeit sometimes harrowing read. Another superb translation by Edith Grossman, might she be the best translator ever?
My favorite things Georgia
1. Favorite Ray Charles song: "What’d I Say"; it’s heresy to admit this, but overall his stuff leaves me cold.
2. Favorite Jasper Johns series: Lately I often call up the "Decoy" prints in my mind. But the "Targets" series is my pick, followed by the American flag and "Numbers."
3. Big band arranger: Fletcher Henderson — does he deserve as much credit as Benny Goodman?
4. James Brown song: "Bewildered," and have you ever seen the videos of JB dancing on the T.A.M.I. show?
5. Favorite Otis Redding song: "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)."
6. Best Little Richard cover: "Long Tall Sally," Beatles.
7. Favorite Gladys Knight song: Tough choice.
8. Fiction: Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Erskine Caldwell, and James Dickey are all candidates but none of them do it for me.
9. Movie, set in: Duh. Remember "Dueling Banjos"?
10. Favorite REM song: "Shaking Through," from Murmur, is a good pick.
11. Favorite Leo Kottke album: Six and Twelve String Guitar; this one changed my life.
12. Musician I’m not supposed to like: Tommy Roe; "Sweet Pea" and "Dizzy" still sound pretty good to me.
The bottom line: Awe. It’s Jasper Johns plus music, music, and more music, and I didn’t even have to think hard about the music. I’m sure I left plenty out.
What I’ve been reading
1. Days on the Family Farm, by Carrie Meyer. An interesting economic study of life on an early twentieth American family farm, based on personal diaries, and an antidote to anyone who thinks that all GMU economics faculty are like the bloggers you know.
2. Theory of Clouds, by Stephane Audeguy. I loved this novel, which was the rage in France but sadly will die here stillborn. Think Julian Barnes, Sten Nadolny, or Kazuo Ishiguro. Short, fun, dreamy, and conceptual. Its quality illustrates one of my favorite book-buying algorithms, which is to snap up serious foreign fiction translated into English, if only because the selection pressures are so severe.
3. Free Trade Reimagined, by Roberto Unger. This is the fourth book this year to challenge the doctrine of comparative advantage, a more important fact than any argument in the books themselves. The book is weak on empirics but it does present the sophisticated version of the anti-free trade arguments. I don’t believe in open borders, so I suppose I’m not a free trader either. Unger is smart, smart, smart, but that doesn’t mean he should be Minister of Long-Term Planning in Brazil, which he is. Here’s the whole thing on-line.
4. The Bad Girl, Mario Vargas Llosa. That makes two wonderful novels in one week. I don’t enjoy all of his recent work, but this one is very fun, hearkening back to the tradition of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. The Edith Grossman translation is first-rate as always.
5. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross. Ross won’t quite say it, but he tries to convince the reader that
the twentieth century is the best century for music, ever.
That’s without pushing serialism too hard or resorting much to popular
music. Sibelius, Janacek, Messiaen, and John Adams are among the heroes in this story. If you
are only going to buy (and read) ten books on music, ever, this should be one of
them. Here is one good review. Here is a Jason Kottke interview with Ross, very interesting.
It was an amazing week for reading (the best since I’ve started doing MR) mostly because it was an amazing week for flying. There’s more to come…
The theology of popular economics
Once I pick up a popular economics book, I ask myself: what is this book’s implicit theology? (How would you in this regard classify Freakonomics? Undercover Economist? Steve Landsburg?)
That is one of the best first questions to ask about any non-fiction book.
I view Discover Your Inner Economist as largely Thomist and more Catholic than anything else.
It is suggested that people are capable of simply doing the right thing, although we should not necessarily expect them to do the right thing.
It is suggested that a unified perspective of faith and reason, applied in voluntarist fashion, can indeed give people better and more complete lives.
It is suggested that not everything can be bought and sold, yet markets have a very important role in human life.
The chapters on food, or the seven deadly sins, are too obvious to require explanation.
The book is highly cosmopolitan, and it is suggested that acts of will and understanding can open up the sacraments to us. The possibility of those sacraments lies right before our very eyes, and they are literally available for free. Except the relevant sacraments are those of culture, and not of the Roman Church.
I am not a Catholic or for that matter a believer, but as I tried to solve various problems in the exposition, the argument fell naturally into religious ideas. Religion has so much power over the human mind, in part, because its basic teachings about life are largely true. Furthermore classical liberalism is far more of an intellectual offshoot of Christianity than most non-Christians are keen to admit. (Muslims and Chinese often see this more clearly.)
So when I realized that Inner Economist had this strongly Thomist philosophic flavor, I was greatly comforted.
In this post the Episcopalians ponder their Inner Economists.
I hope to write more soon on political philosophy in Discover Your Inner Economist.
What I’ve been reading
1. Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, by Robert Frank (the economist Robert Frank). The best statement of the Frankian world view; every book of his is full of ideas and there are very few authors you can say that about.
2. John Lanchester, A Family Romance. Imagine finding out your mother was once a nun and then that she led a life of lies. I would have liked this book much better had it not been fiction. It felt so real and even has good photos but I am disappointed to keep on thinking it is only a story.
3. Gunther Grass, Peeling the Onion. Why oh why oh why do I let myself be fooled. There is only one author I find flat out too obnoxious to read, and it is this guy. And that was before I learned of the whole SS business. I had heard this one is different, but it isn’t. Or it is, but he’s still too far over the line for that to matter.
4. Elizabeth Currid, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion Art & Music Drive New York City. The title says it all.
5. The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, by Christine Kenneally. The early chapters have excellent material on the contributions of Chomsky and Pinker, but after that it bored me.
How to prepare for your trips, culturally
At this point in life the answer is usually that I do nothing other than call up memories of previous cultural consumption. If you are not at that point, Wikipedia is an excellent source for fiction and movies from a country. When it comes to music, consult the various Rough Guides to music; I mean the books, not the mediocre CD collections or the so-so travel guides. Also try the AllMusic guide, either paper or on-line; when it comes to music neither Amazon nor Wikipedia is to be trusted ("why not?" is an interesting question, is it because too many people feel entitled to have an opinion about music?). Bring music on cassette, CD, or iPod, as soundtrack for your trip, and ask your driver to put on Radio East Africa. Finding the best non-fiction books is the hardest category to master. I still prefer shelf browsing at libraries and book superstores.
An MR request is another option. Matt Dreyer asks what I recommend for a trip to Greece and Turkey. Offhand I’ll say Herodotus, the usual Greek classics, Pamuk’s Snow and Istanbul books, Sarkan (a Turkish singer), Sufi music, Greek traditional music from 1930-1950 (there are some wonderful collections, look for the word rembetika), a study of Turkish and also Greek textiles, a picture book on Cycladic art, a book on Greek sculpture at the National Museum in Athens, Norwich on the Byzantine empire, Michael Grant on the ancient world, Lord Kinross on the Ottoman centuries, a biography of Ataturk and there are a few good recent books which survey contemporary Turkey.
Your tips, either general or specific, are of course welcome.
My Favorite Things Tanzania
1. Music: Opt for Taarab, the Arabic style from Zanzibar, start here. Bongo Flava: Swahili Rap from Tanzania is above average for its genre. By the way, the Rough Guide Tanzania music CD is a bit lame.
Then there is Freddie Mercury, who was born in Zanzibar. Right now I’d rate "Killer Queen" and the "Bicycle/Fat Bottomed Girls" medley as my favorites. The Manichean element (Mercury’s parents were Parsees) is evident in "Bohemian Rhapsody," among other songs. Queen remains underrated, and I never tire of listening.
2. Cinema: This movie comes recommended, I’ve never seen it. Darwin’s Nightmare is set in the country, I haven’t seen it.
3. Film, set in: Hatari!, with John Wayne, isn’t bad in a jokey sort of way. It is, after all, directed by Howard Hawks. Hatari, by the way, means "danger" in Swahili.
4. Sculpture: Makonde is the dominant style. Try this older one.
5. Painting: The best-known naive style is Tingatinga. Here is one of the better pieces. It doesn’t compare to Haiti. Here is more. The leading Tanzanian naive painter was — can you guess? — E.S. Tingatinga.
6. Fiction? Ask me again once I’ve learned Swahili.
The bottom line: Freddy is long gone, and they play Congolese "lingala" music in the clubs, so it’s culturally a little dull here; in any case I am working on a micro-credit project with Karol Boudreaux.
Why has opera singing declined?
Bryan Caplan has been lending me CDs from the splendid series Lebendige Vergangenheit (and here), so I’ve been hearing or rehearing the best opera singers from the past. I’m no cultural pessimist, but I share the common opinion that opera singing has declined since, say, 1935. Why might this be?
1. Opera is less culturally central, and so the best voices do something else, or they are more likely to be narrow technicians rather than inspired musical creators and interpreters.
2. The best voices grow up watching TV, rather than reading Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann. The Zeitgeist makes them dull.
3. The average voice is much better, there is simply less individuality in approach and thus lower peaks. This sort of culturally mysterious process also seems to be governing fiction.
4. The best voices came from Germany and Italy and Austria, and World War II destroyed the musical and vocal training networks of those countries.
5. Conservatories and agents choke off musical individuality in the interests of technique and conformity.
6. Opera is now more heavily subsidized and more organizationally bureaucratic. The programs, while still excellent, are biased against individualistic, crowd-pleasing singers and biased toward singers who don’t make many identifiable mistakes. It’s a bit like the advent of peer review in economics.
Your thoughts?
Books favored by British bookstore employees
Here goes, via Kevin Drum. It has some obvious losers on it, but it’s a good place to start if you are looking to read contemporary fiction.
What are the French good at?
“The French government has always been very good at making things where government support is critical,” like trains, nuclear power plants and airplanes, Mr. [Joel] Mokyr says. “But the French are not terribly good at creating Googles or Microsofts, where private action is central.”
The French engineering company, Alstom, after all, is the world market leader in high-speed trains. But a well-informed person would be hard-pressed to name a leading French information technology company. Indeed, many of France’s best computer brains work in Silicon Valley. These Franco-geeks, who number in the thousands, even have two associations, SiliconFrench and DBF.
“The French business system is constraining for individuals while supportive of scientists and engineers working on large, rigid systems that actually benefit from top-down decisions and slow change,” says Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive who helped organize DBF and is a partner at Allegis Capital in Palo Alto, Calif.
Here is more. Looking toward culture, the French are relatively strong in cinema and contemporary classical music, but weak in painting and rock and roll. Contemporary fiction you could argue either way, though I incline toward the negative. I am not sure if these patterns fit into the broader thesis above, though perhaps health care would.
My favorite things Venice
1. Painting. This is, of course, a bit ridiculous. Three is gobs and gobs and gobs, but I have to opt for late Titian as the peak of painting, ever, by anyone. Except for Velazquez. Here is one image, here is another. Moving past the Renaissance, Tiepolo remains underrated; visit Wurzburg for one of Europe’s best artistic thrills. Rosalbe Carriera portraits are underrated.
2. Work of fiction, set in: Death in Venice, Thomas Mann, is the obvious pick, here is a long list of fiction set in Venice. There is Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and Henry James, The Aspern Papers, I’ll give the nod to the latter, unless we can count bits of Proust.
3. Movie, set in: Scroll down for a list. I love the best parts of From Russia with Love, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (really), but the clear winner is Orson Welles’s Othello.
4. Play, set in: Duh.
5. Techno group, named after: Venetian Snares, juicy stuff, high information content. Not for the faint hearted.
6. Music: Monteverdi will get his own post, Vivaldi bores me, Gabrieli is OK. Luigi Nono comes next, I like the Pollini recording of his work for piano and tape. There is Bruno Maderna as well.
7. Theatre: Carlo Goldoni, I once saw The Stag Hunt and loved it.
8. Writer: Casanova is fun to browse, more conceptual than you might think.
9. Librettist: Lorenzo da Ponte, who wrote Don Giovanni for Mozart.
The bottom line: Making this list was more interesting than I had expected. I have never felt "near" to Venice, but perhaps this trip — for a UNESCO conference — will change that.