Recently Mentioned Books

David Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama .

Mary Gaitskill, Somebody with a Little Hammer, Essays .

Doug’s new book Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy is the greatest book on trade policy ever written, bar none. and also a splendid work of American history more generally.  So I thought he and I should sit down to chat, now I have both the transcript and audio .

In Spanish I will pick Juan Marsé , Rabos de lagartija , from 2011, don’t bother with the English translation.  In German it was Thomas Bernhard and Siegfried Unseld, Der Briefwechsel , a series of letters exchanged between an author and his publisher, some of them concern money (I haven’t finished it yet but so far it is quite consistent in quality).  As good as a really good Bernhard novel, also from 2011, there is no English-language translation.

In Spanish I will pick Juan Marsé , Rabos de lagartija , from 2011, don’t bother with the English translation.  In German it was Thomas Bernhard and Siegfried Unseld, Der Briefwechsel , a series of letters exchanged between an author and his publisher, some of them concern money (I haven’t finished it yet but so far it is quite consistent in quality).  As good as a really good Bernhard novel, also from 2011, there is no English-language translation.

My best “classic I had never read before” gets two picks, the first being James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer (review at the link).  The second is Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited , though come to it with at least a basic understanding of its Anglo-Catholic milieu.  Sooner or later this novel will be completely unintelligible to even highly educated readers, except for a few specialists.

Min Jin Lee, Pachinko . An old-fashioned literary drama, unfolds slowly but is gripping, reminds me of Dickens and also Vikram Seth but set in Korea and Japan as an extended set piece running throughout most of the 20th century.  For me, this was clearly the #1 fiction book of the year, and I didn’t include it in my Bloomberg column only because I read it after the column was in the pipeline.  It’s also rich with history and social science, a real winner.  NYT picked it as one of their top ten o...

Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation , edited and translated by Ken Liu.  A strong collection, with two stories by Cixin Liu.  Here is a new article on Chinese science fiction .

Ge Fei, The Invisibility Cloak .  This short Chinese noir novel, with a dash of Murakami, is one of this year’s “cool books.”  I finished it in one sitting.  Set in Beijing, the protagonist sells audio equipment, and then strange things happen.  Here is a good interview with the author .

Domenico Starnone, Ties .  This is one of the better Italian novels of the last few decades.  It is short, easy to comprehend, utterly compelling, and the basic story line is that of a married couple and their children, to say more would spoil the plot.  The introduction and translation are by Jhumpa Lahiri, also first-rate (by the way, here is my conversation with Jhumpa , toward the end she discusses this project). This Rachel Donadio NYT review provides very useful background knowledge.

You can buy the book here , here is one good review from Wired , excerpt:

Here you can buy Doug’s Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy .

Beyond Austerity: Reforming the Greek Economy , edited by Costas Meghir, Christopher A. Pissarides, Dimitri Vayanos, and Nikolaus Vettas, is an intelligent and useful look at where Greece goes next.

4. Alexander Thurston, Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement .  Makes a murky history relatively easy to follow, by the way: “Put all these ideas together, and “Boko Haram” means something like “Western culture is forbidden by Islam” or “the Westernized elites and their ways of doing things contradict Islam” — not just in schools but also in politics and society.”

3. Helen Dale, Kingdom of the Wicked .  Here is Helen on her book :

2. The Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649 , translated with notes by Richard Price.  I hadn’t realized how many of these early Church debates were kept and passed down to the current day.  The participants really do seem to know they are debating the intellectual framework for everything else to follow, and yet people hardly talk about these books.  They are among the most significant remaining traces of the ancient world, Rome and Constantinople in particular.  How can you beat this?: “If anyone ...

1. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids .  A remarkably readable and indeed prescient British work from 1951, you’ll find so much of the science and speculative fiction of the last few twenty years in here, a bit of Saramago too.  What if most (but not all) of the world goes blind but then has to fight-off plant-like invaders which turn out to be more intelligent than we had thought?  Underrated.

I will be having a Conversation with him December 4th, by the way, you can register here .  His forthcoming book is spectacular, but we will talk about everything under (and above) the sun, what should I ask him?

Honorable mentions : Jonathan Livingston Seagull , Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , and The Joy of Sex , all given to me by my mother.  I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking.  I also consumed numerous sports memoirs, such as Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer and also the war memoir Guadalcanal Diary .  From those I began to think about the relationships between character, work habits, teamwor...

Honorable mentions : Jonathan Livingston Seagull , Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , and The Joy of Sex , all given to me by my mother.  I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking.  I also consumed numerous sports memoirs, such as Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer and also the war memoir Guadalcanal Diary .  From those I began to think about the relationships between character, work habits, teamwor...

Honorable mentions : Jonathan Livingston Seagull , Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , and The Joy of Sex , all given to me by my mother.  I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking.  I also consumed numerous sports memoirs, such as Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer and also the war memoir Guadalcanal Diary .  From those I began to think about the relationships between character, work habits, teamwor...

5. Rudolf McShane and Jakow Trachtenberg, The Trachtenberg System of Basic Mathematics .  From this I learned how powerful the individual human mind could be, and also how much school wasn’t teaching me.  It began to occur to me that the mainstream doesn’t necessarily have the best or only methods.  That said, non-mainstream approaches still have the responsibility of coming up with the right answer.  Query: does it these days ever make sense to actually use this stuff?

4. David Kahn, The Code-Breakers, The Story of Secret Writing .  I read this one quite young, and learned that problems are to be solved!  I also developed some sense of what a history could look like and what a history should report.  I recall my uncle thinking it deeply strange that a boy my age should be reading a book of such length.

3. Reuben Fine, Basic Chess Endings .  I wasn’t influenced so much by this book itself as by a long series of articles in Chess Life and Review , showing the analysis was full of holes.  See my remarks on Kotov.

2. Bobby Fischer, My Sixty Memorable Games of Chess .  Reflects a certain kind of classicism in thinking and method.  Later, it was revealed much of the analysis was faulty and in part was from Larry Evans and not Fischer himself.