Recently Mentioned Books

7.  Joachim Weimann, Andreas Knabe, and Ronnie Schöb, Measuring Happiness: The Economics of Well-Being , from MIT Press.

6. Alex Nowrasteh and Mark Krikorian, Open Immigration Yea, and Nay .  This book is structured as a debate with two separate parts.

5. Clive James, Poetry Notebook 2006-2014 .  A superb book, one of the very best appreciations of poetry and introductions to poetry of the 20th century.  This book has received raves in the UK, it is not yet out in the U.S.

4. James Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love .  A very good multi-dimensional biography for people already interested in Larkin and knowledgeable about his life, not necessarily a great introduction.

3. James Hamilton, A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth-Century Britain .  Another era — this time Turner and his contemporaries — falls under the commerce and culture treatment.  A nice background to the forthcoming Mike Leigh biopic of Turner.  This book made a number of best of the year lists in the UK, it comes out in the U.S. in 2015.

2. Michael Oakeshott, Notebooks, 1922-86 .  Lots about Aristotle, lots about love, good for browsing.  He wrote “‘The cowboy costume remains mysteriously sexy’.  Yes, but how much better it was when it was felt but not recognized to be so.”  That was from 1964.

1. Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology .  How quantum effects can matter for biological phenomena.  No, it doesn’t mean Roger Penrose was right (and this book usefully tells you why not), but still this is a stimulating book for tying together two apparently disparate areas of inquiry and two apparently disparate areas for popular science books.

That is from the new and notable Rendez-Vous with Art , by Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford.  The book is an ongoing dialogue between the two men about classical, Renaissance, and 17th century art, centered around specific pictures they are viewing together, recommended, in this genre it is difficult to execute such a book well but they pull it off.

Highly recommended, it is already out in the UK , in the U.S. coming out in May 2015 .  It has made many best of the year lists in the UK.  Here are some related videos .

I call it “probably the best and clearest book on the United States’ complex student debt problem.”  You can buy the book here .  Also buy the TLS issue, it is their best of the year, as it contains an especially fine “Best Books of the Year” list, you can stop worrying about TNR now.

Arrived in my pile is Amy Finkelstein, Moral Hazard in Health Insurance , with Gruber, Arrow, and Stiglitz as commentators.

4. Andrew MacGregor Marshall, Kingdom in Crisis: Thailand’s Struggle for Democracy in the 21st Century .  It is hard for me to judge the specifics of the argument, still this is a readable and conceptual account of the mess that is Thai politics, namely that much of it is about royal succession.  If true, this is a very good book.

3. Andy Weir, The Martian .  Ostensibly science fiction, but more a 21st century Robinson Crusoe story — set on Mars of course — with huge amounts of (ingenious) engineering driving the story.  Lots of fun, many other people have liked it too.

2. Michael Hofmann, Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays .  Excellent and informationally dense literary essays, I especially like the ones on the German-language poets and writers, such as Benn and Walser and Bernhard and Grass.

1. Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq .  Short stories about the conflict in Iraq, by an Iraqi.  I expected to find these widely heralded stories to be disappointing, as the premise is a little too easy for the Western critic to embrace.  But they are excellent and this book is one of the year’s best fiction releases.

That fact is from Dong-Young Kim, The Challenges of Consensus Building in a Consolidating Democracy .

4.Andrew Palmer, Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation is Reshaping Our World for the Better .

3. Ted Gioia, Love Songs: The Hidden History .

2. Peter J. Wallison, Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again .

1. John A. Allison, The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure .

Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph .  As good or better than the classic biographies of the composer.

Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution .  A good overview of how some of the main pieces of today’s information technology world fell into place, starting with the invention of the computer and running up through the end of the 1990s.

David Sterling, Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition , huge, expensive, wonderful, more than just a cookbook though it is that too.  I’ve spent some of the last few weeks learning these recipes and what makes them tick.

Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic .  This treatment stresses the (partial) cognitive advantages of having a tendency toward depression.

David Eimer, The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China .  A look at China’s outermost regions and their ethnic minorities.  Just imagine that, we had two excellent popular China books in the same year.