Results for “best book” 1835 found
Are the madrigals the best music of Monteverdi?
But if Book IV fires a warning shot across the bow, Books V and VIII launch an all-out musical assault on convention. For the first time an instrumental basso continuo part appears, providing continuity that allows voices to falter, stop altogether or even sing alone. Suddenly, musical emotion is less a matter of symbolism than of imitation; sighs, moans and shouts of joy can all be rendered truthfully, with each voice unshackled from its fellows. Harmonically, too, things are very different. The knife-twisting dissonances that famously angered the theorist Artusi in ‘Cruda Amarilli’ (‘A tumult of sounds, a confusion of absurdities, an assemblage of imperfections’) turn the poem’s cardboard lover into something of flesh and blood, someone whose thoughts alternately gallop and linger, whose emotions ebb and flow naturally, if unpredictably.
Book VIII is the greatest and widest-ranging volume of secular music of its age — perhaps of any. Composed over a 30-year span, the madrigals tackle not only the erotic charge of love and sexuality, but also for the first time its warring conflicts — the restlessness, agitation and rage that go hand in hand with its pleasures. No single work can represent such a collection, but perhaps the ‘Lamento della Ninfa’ comes closest; if you listen to just one work, make it this one.
That is from Alexandra Coghlan, via Ted Gioia.
The top bestsellers of 1916
- Seventeen by Booth Tarkington
- When a Man’s a Man by Harold Bell Wright
- Just David by Eleanor H. Porter
- Mr. Britling Sees It Through by H. G. Wells
- Life and Gabriella by Ellen Glasgow
- The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster
- Bars of Iron by Ethel M. Dell
- Nan of Music Mountain by Frank H. Spearman
- Dear Enemy by Jean Webster
- The Heart of Rachael by Kathleen Norris
Here is further information, a very interesting discussion of the works, hat tip goes to Ted Gioia.
Best fiction of 2016
I was disappointed by most of this year’s well-known releases, and did most of my rewarding fiction reading in past classics. But these are the fiction or fiction-related works I found to be outstanding this year:
Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians. A novel of an affair, with intoxicating Irish prose and a genuine energy on the page, though it is more a work of intensifying fervor than a traditional plot-based story.
Claire Louise-Bennett, Pond, more from Ireland, short, nominally fiction but more like a circular sensory experience of reading overlapping short stories, with a cumulative effect akin to that of poetry. I found this one mesmerizing.
Javier Marias, Thus Bad Begins. I have only started this, but so far I like it very much. I have enough faith in Marias to put in on the list.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Reputations, a short Colombian novel on memory — personal, historical, sexual, and otherwise, this was my favorite short work of the year.
The Complete Works of Primo Levi, in three volumes, edited by Ann Goldstein. By no means is all of this fiction, but I will put these books in this category. A revelation, as Levi has more works of interest, and a broader range of intellect and understanding, than I had realized. There is plenty of linguistics, economics, history, and social science in these literary pages as well as consistently beautiful writing and superb translations. This is technically from 2015, but I missed it last time around.
Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai. Review here. Strictly speaking, this is a reissue of an earlier published but neglected work. Maniacal, intense, super-smart, about a mother bringing up a prodigy.
Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Them, edited by Cristanne Miller. The visual presentation of poetry matters too, plus she is one of the very best.
The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. LeGuin, self-recommending.
Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia. A revealing mismash look into the mind of the author, giving you an integrated picture of her world view, with carefully calculated feints thrown in. I should note this one works only if you know and love her novels already. Ferrante’s “children’s” story The Beach at Night is also worthwhile, very dark, you can read it in a small number of minutes. Here is a good NYT review.
Jean-Michael Rabaté, Think Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human. This work of criticism is grounded in literary theory, but informative and smart nonetheless.
Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review Guide to Literary Fiction. An amazingly comprehensive and informative work, mostly about literature in translation, from the creator of the Literary Saloon blog about fiction. I liked it so much I decided to do a Conversation with Michael Orthofer. If you could own only ten works on literature, this should be one of them.
If you give me only one pick, I opt for the Primo Levi, even if you think you already know his work.
A few I didn’t get to read yet, but have hopes for are Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, and Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, caveat emptor in both cases, plus Invisible Planets, edited by Ken Liu, a collection of Chinese science fiction.
My post on best non-fiction of the year will be coming soon, plus I’ll do new entries for any excellent fiction between now and the end of the year.
eBooks are not declining as much as you might think
And self-published “indie” authors — in part because they get a much bigger cut of the revenue than authors working with conventional publishers do — are now making much more money from e-book sales, in aggregate, than authors at Big Five publishers.
And this:
The AAP also reported, though, that e-book revenue was down 11.3 percent in 2015 and unit sales down 9.7 percent. That’s where things get misleading. Yes, the established publishing companies that belong to the AAP are selling fewer e-books. But that does not mean fewer e-books are being sold. Of the top 10 books on Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list when I checked last week, only two (“The Light Between Oceans” and “The Girl on the Train,” both mass-market reissues of novels that have just been made into movies) were the products of major publishers. All the rest were genre novels (six romances, two thrillers) published either by the author or by an in-house Amazon imprint. Their prices ranged from 99 cents to $4.99.
That is from Justin Fox at Bloomberg.
Is KOKS the best restaurant in the world?
I am told KOKS is a Faroese word for “adding something excellent,” though there are varying accounts of the translation. In any case, in terms of originality, purity of concept and vision, execution, service, and also view — taken as an integrated whole — I can’t think of any restaurant experience that comes close to this one. Noma in Copenhagen is a pale memory in contrast, as are the Michelin three-stars in San Sebastian. KOKS is still unspoilt and on the way up, and the guiding star is the very young and extremely personable Poul Andrias Ziska.
It has been written up in the New York Times and Guardian for its innovative take on Faroese cuisine, though both articles are now out of date. The dining room seats only 20, and Ziska is also the pastry chef, with no loss of quality. You’ll find photos and food descriptions on their Facebook page. Here is the shaved horsemussel on dried cod skin:
Here is one recent review:
Its cuisine style is earthy and refined, ancient and modern. Instead of the new, it emphasizes the old (drying, fermenting, pickling, curing and smoking) with a larger goal of returning balance to earth itself. At KOKS, the cuisine is about seasonality, seriously engaging with agriculture and history and of making age-old food delightful to modern palates…
Poul continues to simply enjoy the uniqueness and richness of the Faroe Islands. Fan of ræst, (local preservation method) he supports and defends this technique that captures and boosts flavour.
I can agree with this assessment:
And finally (and I have to say the best dessert I’ve ever had), dulse seaweed served with chocolate crumble, fermented blueberries and dulse mousse. Sweet, a bit tangy, a bit crunchy, silky-smooth on the mouth and simple heavenly. My marathon reward ended on a very special note.
I am willing to go out on a limb here: it is probably the best restaurant in the world right now. It alone justifies a trip to the Faroe Islands.
Addendum: Ethika, also in the Faroes, has some of the best sashimi I’ve eaten, recommended as well.
How to manage your supply of the very best chocolate
My favorite (readily available) American chocolate bar is the dark Chocolove XoXoX, but recently they changed it. The packaging went from very dark to to gold, and the flavor is now a little sweeter and less nutty. The cocoa content is higher, but somehow it doesn’t quite shine through as strongly. It still might be the best on the American market, but now I wonder, because it is modestly worse than before.
I no longer find the old bars in supermarkets, and an Amazon order of the old bars brought a shipment of the new bars instead. But when I go to bookstores which sell chocolate, their supply turns over not so quickly, and so some of them still carry versions of the old bar. For now.
I have five copies of the old bar left in the cupboard, and no guarantee for when I might replace them.
My intuition is to eat them next in sequence, rather than postpone the exhaustion of their supply. Eventually I will engage in an optimal forgetting of their very fine taste, and it is best that happens sooner rather than later. To cite George Constantinides, that would be an optimal smoothing of habit-forming consumption.
An alternative philosophy is to consume them later in life, as late as spoilage costs will allow, so as to spread out aesthetic peaks over time.
Yet another alternative is give them away to latter-day customers who only have known the slightly inferior bar, and thus wreck their lives for sport.
Aeneid Book VI, Virgil translated by Seamus Heaney
A splendid book, here is Kate Kellaway at The Guardian:
There are two things this book requires. First, it is best read aloud – it comes thrillingly to life – it sounds tremendous. Second, it repays close reading. Studying it is to listen in on a poet with perfect pitch. Getting the diction right – so that the ancient is neither modern nor archaic – is the challenge. And Heaney shows that plain words are stormproofed. It is about more than George Orwell’s tired prescription: “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” It is about how plain language, like plain speaking, has integrity. And it is weight-bearing. It carries. When he introduces uncommon, eye-catching (sometimes longer) words – scaresome, asperging, hotbloods – they stand out but work harder against their plain backgrounds. Take the sighting of the golden bough. The word “refulgent” is strikingly charged, surrounded by “clear”, “green-leafed” and “cold”. Refulgent breaks Orwell’s rule and stands out like the golden branch itself. Or consider the description of Aeneas’s father, Anchises: “A man in old age, worn out, not meant for duress.” “Duress” is the pleasing surprise here (so much better than everyday “hardship”) seizing attention while “old age” and “worn out” do their unobtrusive work.
I will reread it shortly, you can buy it here.
“If you could recommend only one book for me to read…”
That is a question from a very smart person, over thirty years of age, who claims not to have read very much (I don’t know how much).
So which book should I recommend?
Conditional on the person knowing me, the idea of simply introducing economics is not going to win, even if that would be the correct recommendation for many others. And “Collected Works” are not allowed.
How about a broadly philosophical novel, such as Don Quixote or Homer’s Odyssey or In Search of Lost Time? Moby-Dick? A play of Shakespeare? A current favorite, such as Ferrante or Knausgaard?
How about a perfectly constructed travel book, touting the virtues of a new and magical place? But most travel books I find dull, unsatisfying, and too scattered with wasteful, overly subjective sentences about sunsets and train trips.
A didactic, moralizing book, perhaps on charity or Effective Altruism?
For many people music may be more powerful than the written word, so perhaps the recent Jan Swafford biography of Beethoven, or John Eliot Gardiner’s book on Bach, or any number of good books on Mozart. A critical guidebook to some of the best movies available? Almost everyone can glean new ideas for their Netflix queue, even if they already have seen lots of films.
I don’t know of a biography which is inspirational for everyone or even most people, and I figure an intelligent person older than thirty already has been exposed to the world’s major religions.
How about a book which is a compendium for a hobby, such as a bird watcher’s guide, a Sotheby’s auction catalog, or a Fuchsia Dunlop cookbook?
I keep finding myself drawn to recommend a book which leads the advice recipient away from books, rather than toward them. Is that a strength or weakness of the book medium?
What book that you have NOT read has most influenced and shaped your life?
That is from Venkatesh Rao, retweeted by Ben Southwood, a version of “Questions that are rarely asked.”
I suppose if you haven’t read the Bible or Quran those are easy answers, but let’s say you have.
I’ve only read snippets of Mein Kampf, so that has to stand as a contender. But has the book really influenced and shaped my life? Maybe you can attribute the relevant marginal product to the life of Hitler, with the book being intermediated by Hitler himself. Therefore I am not sure that answer is true to the spirit of the question.
How about a training manual of some kind, which perhaps my early teachers read but I have never seen or even heard of? Might my mother have read Dr. Spock or other parenting books? That would be my best guess.
Book markets in everything, even free internet content
Reddit is collecting some of its best Ask Me Anything interviews — with Bill Gates, Waffle House workers, Spike Lee, nuclear missile operators — in a “beautiful coffee table book.” It’s 400 pages. It’s $35. (Yes, there’s an e-book version, too.)
That is from Michael Rosenwald.
When can median income consumers afford the very best?
A random Econ ? that pops into my head: are there any goods that a US median income maker can buy that are the best available?
I can think of quite a few:
iPhones and Kindle
mineral water (Gerolsteiner)
most vaccines and antibiotics
writing paper
books
movies
basketballs and many other sporting goods
rutabagas
Coca-Cola, Mexican or otherwise
Google and Facebook
Raffi himself cites “razor blade” on Twitter.
What else?
Best fiction of 2015
I thought it was a stellar year for fiction, even though most of the widely anticipated books by famous authors disappointed me. These were my favorites, more or less in the order I read them, not in order of preference:
Michel Houellebecq, Soumission/Submission. The correct reading is always a level deeper than the one you are currently at.
Larry Kramer, The American People. Epic, reviewed a lot but then oddly overlooked in a crowded year.
The Seventh Day, by Yu Hua. Perhaps my favorite of all the contemporary Chinese novels I have read: “Lacking the money for a burial plot, he must roam the afterworld aimlessly, without rest.”
Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz, New World, “An innovative story of love, decapitation, cryogenics, and memory by two of our most creative literary minds.”
Vendela Vida, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. Fun without being trivial.
Elena Ferrante, volume four, The Story of the Lost Child. See my various posts about her series here, one of the prime literary achievements of the last twenty years.
The Widower, by Mohamed Latiff Mohamed. My favorite novel from Singapore.
The Meursault Investigation, by Kamel Daoud. I’ll teach it this coming year in Law and Literature.
Eka Kurniawan, Beauty is a Wound. It’s been called the Garcia Marquez of Indonesia, and it is one of the country’s classic novels, newly translated into English. Here is a good NYT review.
Nnedi Okorafor, Binti. Okorafor is American but born to two Nigerian parents, this science fiction novella is creative and fun to read. Ursula K. Le Guin likes her too.
Of those, Houllebecq and Ferrante are the must-reads, the others are all strong entries, with New World being perhaps the indulgence pick but indulgences are good, right?
And here are three other new books/editions/translations which I haven’t had any chance to spend time with, but come as self-recommending:
The Poems of T.S. Eliot, volume 1 and volume 2, annotated. Rave reviews for those.
Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Dennis Washburn.
Homer’s Iliad, translated by Peter Green. Also gets rave reviews.
Best estimates are that American debt cannot be fixed with taxes on capital
D’Erasmo, Mendoza, and Zhang have a new NBER working paper on this question. It is the most serious and scientific approach to American debt sustainability I have seen, ever. Here are two key sentences:
The dynamic Laffer curves for these taxes [capital taxes in the U.S., labor taxes in Europe] peak below the level required to make the higher post-2008 debts sustainable.
And:
The results of the applications of the empirical and structural approaches paint a bleak picture of the prospects for fiscal adjustment in advanced economies to restore fiscal solvency and make the post-2008 surge in public debt ratios sustainable.
One point the authors emphasize is that, unlike after earlier episodes of American debt binges, America today has not reestablished a comparable primary surplus. The authors suggest taxes on labor or consumption can restore fiscal solvency, but higher taxes on capital won’t work, given dynamic and Laffer curve considerations. They do not devote comparable attention to changes in the trajectory of government spending.
It is wrong to call this “science” outright, but it is the closest to science we have on these questions. There is a possibly different ungated copy here (pdf).
And along related lines, consider this new Brookings study of boosting the top tax rate to fifty percent, by Gale, Kearney, and Orszag:
We calculate the resulting change in income inequality assuming an explicit redistribution of all new revenue to households in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. The resulting effects on overall income inequality are exceedingly modest.
You will not hear everyone shouting that one from the rooftops. And of course it does not all get redistributed to the bottom twenty percent, believe it or not.
What is the best novel about a bureaucracy?
I don’t quite mean “the best novel,” rather I mean “the best novel as a novel of bureaucracy.”
There is Franz Kafka, but I find his writings more theological and fantastic than insightful about bureaucracy per se. Besides, his short stories are his best work and the novels do not have proper endings.
There are post-war Eastern European novels galore, where to start? In the First Circle? Still, communist bureaucracies are no longer so typical, so I am not ready to award any of these novels first prize. Gogol’s earlier Dead Souls also stands out as a Russian candidate.
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is in the running, as are John Le Carre, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. Here is a discussion of Dickens, Orwell, and other classics. Here is a jstor-gated survey of the topic. There are plenty of novels about universities, very few of which I can endure.
The Chinese have an entire genre of “bureaucracy literature.” And perhaps bureaucracy in science fiction is deserving of its own post.
In any case, my clear first choice pick is Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, which I started reading a few days ago. Here is the first sentence of the Amazon.com review:
This 1857 sequel to The Warden wryly chronicles the struggle for control of the English diocese of Barchester. The evangelical but not particularly competent new bishop is Dr. Proudie, who with his awful wife and oily curate, Slope, maneuver for power.
So far I am finding that just about every page has insight about bureaucracy. Trollope, by the way, had extensive experience working for the Post Office in England and Ireland, and furthermore he missed out on a major promotion.
What else am I forgetting?
Charles Murray has a new book coming out
By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, due out in May, here is some summary:
In this provocative book, acclaimed social scientist and bestselling author Charles Murray shows us why we can no longer hope to roll back the power of the federal government through the normal political process. The Constitution is broken in ways that cannot be fixed even by a sympathetic Supreme Court. Our legal system is increasingly lawless, unmoored from traditional ideas of “the rule of law.” The legislative process has become systemically corrupt, no matter which party is in control.
But there’s good news beyond the Beltway. Technology is siphoning power from sclerotic government agencies and putting it in the hands of individuals and communities. The rediversification of American culture is making local freedom attractive to liberals as well as conservatives. People across the political spectrum are increasingly alienated from a regulatory state that nakedly serves its own interests rather than those of ordinary Americans.
An AEI notice is here, and for the pointer I thank David Levey.