Recently Mentioned Books
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8. Like myself, Haven considers Theater of Envy to be his most underrated book.
That is the new book by Cynthia L. Haven , which I was very enthusiastic about. I find about half of it to be a revelation, and the other half to be perfectly fine, though material I largely had seen before (but still useful to most readers). Here are a few of the things I learned:
That list is from Robert D. Kaplan’s quite interesting The Return of Marco Polo’s World . Are there others? Shanghai, for a while; Rangoon, what else?
Honorable mentions : Joe Haldeman, The Forever War ; Greg Bear, Eon ; Octavia Butler Xenogenesis trilogy ; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . My dark horse pick might be Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things , or Audrey Niffennegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife , if that one counts as belonging to the genre. High marks to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and The Stand , again if they count. Any of these mentions could make the top ten without shame.
Honorable mentions : Joe Haldeman, The Forever War ; Greg Bear, Eon ; Octavia Butler Xenogenesis trilogy ; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . My dark horse pick might be Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things , or Audrey Niffennegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife , if that one counts as belonging to the genre. High marks to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and The Stand , again if they count. Any of these mentions could make the top ten without shame.
Honorable mentions : Joe Haldeman, The Forever War ; Greg Bear, Eon ; Octavia Butler Xenogenesis trilogy ; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . My dark horse pick might be Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things , or Audrey Niffennegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife , if that one counts as belonging to the genre. High marks to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and The Stand , again if they count. Any of these mentions could make the top ten without shame.
Honorable mentions : Joe Haldeman, The Forever War ; Greg Bear, Eon ; Octavia Butler Xenogenesis trilogy ; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . My dark horse pick might be Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things , or Audrey Niffennegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife , if that one counts as belonging to the genre. High marks to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and The Stand , again if they count. Any of these mentions could make the top ten without shame.
10. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game trilogy , it only gets great at the end of the first volume, nonetheless deeply worth it.
9. Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem trilogy . Again note the first volume is tough sledding for quite a while.
6. Dan Simmons, Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion . I’m not sure these are important science fiction, but they sure hold your interest.
6. Dan Simmons, Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion . I’m not sure these are important science fiction, but they sure hold your interest.
5. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End . In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. And once again, why haven’t they turned this into a movie?
4. Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness , her masterpiece, sadly I find The Dispossessed pretentious and unreadable.
1. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, Star Maker . Who needs characters and plot when such a compelling mega-Hegelian take is on the table? His other novels are underrated as well.
I will be having a Conversation with her soon. She is a philosopher at the University of Chicago, and her new book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming is coming out in early April. Here are some of her papers . Here is her recent NYT Op-Ed . So what should I ask her?
What should you read by him ?: Violence and the Sacred , Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World , Theatre of Envy .
What should you read by him ?: Violence and the Sacred , Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World , Theatre of Envy .
What should you read by him ?: Violence and the Sacred , Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World , Theatre of Envy .
Politico is running an excerpt from my essay in the new Cass Sunstein book . Here is one opening bit:
The authors are Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl, and the subtitle is Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society .
You should all buy and read Robin’s new book, with Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life .
While promoting my new book , I’ve repeatedly argued that foreign language requirements in U.S. schools are absurd and should be abolished. For two distinct reasons.
Many of you have asked me for further commentary on Bryan Caplan’s education book , which is doing very well. I’ll be doing a Conversation with Bryan, but for the time being I’ll say this: everyone obsesses over the mood-affiliated “I’m going to lower the status of education signaling argument.” Hardly anyone has discussed what to me is Bryan’s strangest assumption, namely a sociologically-rooted, actually anti-economics “conformity is stronger than you think” argument, which Bryan uses to ass...
The subtitle is The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism . Imagine a novel and interesting coverage of the post-war Austrian School, here relabeled the “Geneva School,” a well-done partial history of the WTO and EU, and a book where the central characters are not only Mises and Hayek, but also Alexander Rüstow , Wilhelm Röpke , and Michael Heilperin .
Domenico Starnone’s self-contained short novel Trick is now out, translation and introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri.