Recently Mentioned Books

4. Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain .  I didn’t enjoy this book, so I didn’t read much of it, but I thought it was splendid in conception.  It requires some working knowledge of British urban landscapes and I, for one, have never been to Sheffield .  It’s a smartly written conceptual survey of the empty buildings that have come to populate British cities and I am sorry that I wasn’t up to it.

3. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 .  The best history of electrical infrastructure which I have found.  It is very good on explaining the difficulties in organizing an entire economy around electricity and why it took so long.  It is also fascinating on why the English lagged behind the Germans and Americans in the transition to electricity, in large part because of local interest group politics.  It sheds light on the “mystery” of British decl...

2. Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill .  This is insanely good, and I can’t believe I had never read it before.  It’s super short, but a thrilling reading experience at every word.  It’s in the “jaw hits floor” category.

1. Andrew Mango, Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey .  A pleasurable read and full of information.  For me it was most useful as a foreign policy history of Turkey, more than a biography of Ataturk himself.  One implication is that Turkey won’t be making too many more concessions on the global stage, or for that matter with the Kurds.

Also in my pile is Menzie D. Chinn and Jeffry A. Frieden, Lost Decades: The Making of America’s Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery .

5. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America .  I like the first hundred pages very much, so you’ll probably be hearing more about this one, which is a major study of its topic, with a good deal of coverage of Canada and Mexico too, often from a comparative perspective.

4. John Gimlette, Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge .  Yes, this book covers Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.  A revelation, I loved it.  Could Gimlette be my favorite current travel writer?

3. Patrick French, India: A Portrait .  Consistently thoughtful.  I didn’t love it, but a reader could do much worse.  I finished it.

2. My Blood Approves , by Amanda Hocking.  A landmark in the history of e-publishing, and a real button-clicker too .  But I can’t say I actually think it’s good.  Still, I finished it.

1. The Left Hand of Darkness , by Ursula LeGuin.  I hadn’t read this since I was fourteen, but it held up surprisingly well and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  This time around I could see how much the author is the daughter of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber.

John Holbo offers up some recommendations , and the comments section is especially good.  I’ll recommend Fritz Lang’s Siegfried , Buston Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr ., Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc , and Docks of New York , for a start, assuming you already know Chaplin and Eisenstein.  And don’t forget Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Dovzhenko, from further away.  Your ideas?

John Holbo offers up some recommendations , and the comments section is especially good.  I’ll recommend Fritz Lang’s Siegfried , Buston Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr ., Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc , and Docks of New York , for a start, assuming you already know Chaplin and Eisenstein.  And don’t forget Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Dovzhenko, from further away.  Your ideas?

John Holbo offers up some recommendations , and the comments section is especially good.  I’ll recommend Fritz Lang’s Siegfried , Buston Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr ., Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc , and Docks of New York , for a start, assuming you already know Chaplin and Eisenstein.  And don’t forget Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Dovzhenko, from further away.  Your ideas?

The author is Mara Hvistendahl, and the subtitle is Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men .  It will make my best books of 2011 list, excerpt:

6. Javier Marias, A Heart so White .  Loved it, a modern classic by Spain’s leading writer.

5. Popular Crime , by Bill James.  Silly idea, or self-recommending?  Perhaps a bit of both, because this is the Bill James, writing a 500-page treatise on popular crimes and also on other people’s books on popular crimes.  The classic error detection and pattern recognition skills are still there.  The bottom line is that a) I finished it (skimmed maybe a fifth, some of the cases I didn’t care about), and b) I liked it increasingly as my read progressed, and c) I have no trouble with books whic...

4. Hart Crane, The Bridge .  Two-thirds of this is stunning, mostly the first half and most of what comes after “Three Songs.”  Plus it’s fairly short and easy to read, though difficult to comprehend at the highest levels.  Think of it as the next step after Leaves of Grass .

3. Made in Britain , by Evan Davis.  Too simple for my tastes, but this is nonetheless an effective accounting of where the British economy remains strong and also where the weaknesses are starting to bite.  The author has a good understanding of economics and he avoids the mercantilism that you might fear is implicit in such an enterprise.

1. Red April ( Abril Rojo ], by Santiago Roncagliolo, translated by Edith Grossman.  This Peruvian “Shining Path noir” tale is as good as the strongly positive reviews indicate and it has an excellent dark humor.  Here is an interview with the author .

1. Red April ( Abril Rojo ], by Santiago Roncagliolo, translated by Edith Grossman.  This Peruvian “Shining Path noir” tale is as good as the strongly positive reviews indicate and it has an excellent dark humor.  Here is an interview with the author .

That is the subtitle, the title is Keep from All Thoughtful Men and the author is Jim Lacey.  Excerpt:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined , due out in October, 848 pages.  I’ll be sure to review it.

That is from Lyn Rodley’s classic Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia , a book which you read only if you are going to…Cappadocia.

From his Notebooks , (the best Emerson to read, in my view) circa 1841:

Other notable Hungarian composers are Kodaly and Péter Eötvös, sorry that I have not in every case mastered the diacritical marks.  Most Kurtag leaves me cold but the Kafka Fragments are one place to start.  There are many fine Hungarian film music composers.