Recently Mentioned Books

7. Movie : Gregory’s Girl .

6. Actor : How about Sean Connery?  Don’t forget Zardoz .

1. Novel : Alasdair Gray, Lanark .  Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod deserve notice as well.  I don’t relate to Trainspotting .  I understand the case for Robert Louis Stevenson and would wish to jump on board, but usually I lose interest before the end of his books.

Elster has been writing excellent books for over thirty years, and you can buy this book here .

3. Popular music : Sigur Ros, Agaetis Byrjun .  This CD has a transcendental and also anthemic sound, even if the group never quite lived up to their initial promise.  Bjork albums I usually find pretentious and I would rather listen to her earlier group The Sugar Cubes .

2. Novel, modern : How about Audur Ava Olafsdottir’s The Greenhouse ?  This is a boom area.  There are one hundred twenty Icelandic novels translated into German each year [correction of earlier estimate].

1. Saga : First choice goes to Njal’s Saga .  It’s the clearest and crispest of the lot.

5. Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight .  Brings the author and his milieu to life to a remarkable degree and shows Kafka was a comic author after all.

3. Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites .  More a memoir than a food memoir (which is how it is being marketed), the subtitle is thus better than the title.  This is an excellent example of the “read smart books by people who are totally unlike you” principle.  I finished it in one sitting, and it takes a place with The Great Man as one of my two favorite Christensen books.

3. Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites .  More a memoir than a food memoir (which is how it is being marketed), the subtitle is thus better than the title.  This is an excellent example of the “read smart books by people who are totally unlike you” principle.  I finished it in one sitting, and it takes a place with The Great Man as one of my two favorite Christensen books.

2. Tom Miller, China’s Urban Billion: The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History .  Excellent on land use but also one of the very best books on the Chinese economy, as seen through the lens of land.  Interesting on almost every page.

1. Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History .  There needs to be a single word for “excellent if read in conjunction with other books on the same topic, though a quality but wasted effort if read alone.”  This book is that.

Penguin Random House has in turned asked for its $1.7 million advance back, as they are still awaiting his delivery of a sequel A Suitable Girl .  The story is here , and for the pointer I thank Yogesh.  Seth never finished his doctorate at Stanford but A Suitable Boy is one of my favorite modern novels.

2. Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America .  Two of the takeaways from this book are a) the United States had a more statist approach to electricity infrastructure than did most of Europe, and to its advantage, and b) we didn’t let lots of people accidentally being electrocuted stop progress, again probably to our advantage.

1. David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity .  The typewriter and the bicycle revolutionized India early in the twentieth century

That is from the new Lynda Obst book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the NEW ABNORMAL in the Movie Business .  The book is poorly written but sometimes of interest for those who follow this topic.

That is from the forthcoming useful book by Richard S. Grossman Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them .  For the two relevant Robert Paul Thomas pieces (jstor) see here and here .

The author of this interesting work is Juan Cole and the subtitle is Invading the Middle East .  Here is one excerpt:

That is from George Gilder’s new Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing Our World . reviewed by Arnold Kling here .

3. Vaclav Smil, Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing .

2. F. H. Buckley, editor, The American Illness: Essays on the Rule of Law .

1. Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America .

That is from Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt, The Amish , which is an excellent social scientific look at what we outsiders know about Amish communities.

That is from Terry Eagleton’s Across the Pond: An Englishman’s View of America , which is sometimes amusing.

3. Why apes cannot pitch , and there will soon be a new Bruno Latour book , two of them in fact .