Recently Mentioned Books

That is from pp.442-3 of Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World , a truly timely book.

That is from Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World , which I am still enjoying.  Here is my previous post on the book .

I am enjoying this book very much, though it terrifies me as well.  I hadn’t known that Norman, later in his life, thought he could walk through walls.  Nor did I know that in the 1920s one-third of the population of the state of Colorado lived there as a (supposed) respite from tuberculosis.  You can buy it here .

On the popular music front, I’m now listening to Fleet Foxes at least once a day.  I’m also starting to like the new Bon Iver and the new Kanye West.

Calcutta Chronicles: Indian Slide Guitar , by Debashis Bhattacharya.

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Gurrumal .  Aboriginal music from Australia, on acoustic guitar, truly moving.  I don’t regret having paid $40 for it.

Un Dia , Juana Molina.  Quirky, oddly textured songs from Argentina.  She’s not just a one-trick pony but she now has a string of excellent albums.

The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru ; I bought it in 2008 at least.

5. The history is fully consistent with an alternative interpretation, as I have discussed in my post on the fetishization of measured gdp .  Namely, the Japanese spent more money putting unemployed resources to work on construction projects.  Measured gdp went up, but the Japanese didn’t get much of value for their money.  (Japanese construction projects from this era are notoriously ugly, wasteful, and unpopular .)  The spending also didn’t set off any kind of lasting recovery.  It was the pro...

The kind of equilibrium stability theory that obsessed Franklin Fisher was written off as irrelevant some time ago.  Maybe people will start looking at it again.

The best place to start is his Sonata for Cello and Piano, the Double Concerto for Harpischord and Piano, and the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpischord, all collected here .  The string quartets and the sonata for violin and piano are also important, plus the short late works for solo instruments or small ensembles or voice; choose by which instruments you like best.

The Kevin Shields/Patti Smith two-CD collaboration , which oddly lots of people don’t seem to know about.

Neil Young’s 1968 acoustic takes on Buffalo Springfield songs, and

I’ve found one extant meta-list for popular music, here .  It is OK for a slow year; I won’t pass along the meta-list I came up with myself because I happen to believe its contents are mediocre, noting that my copy of Santogold has yet to arrive in the mail.  If you wish, scour these lists to construct your own meta-list.

Both are high quality but neither is a game-changer.  I liked Miles from India , a combination of Miles Davis’s jazz fusion with Indian riffs; that would be my jazz pick of the year.

Bill Frisell, History, Mystery

Charles Lloyd Quartet, Rabo de Nube

6. Speaking of Bookslut, Jessica Crispin’s favorite fiction book of the year was the Hungarian Metropole , by Ferenc Karinthy.  I read it some time ago and inexplicably forgot to mention it.  The feel is Kafkaesque and the premise is that a man wakes up in a world where suddenly he cannot understand any of the languages being spoken and has no way of communicating with anybody.

5. Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter .  Translated from the Italian, this short novel is one of my favorite fictional works of the year; it is a favorite of Bookslut (and others ) as well.

4. Heraldo Muñoz, The Dictator’s Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet .  This book fills in a lot of back detail about the Pinochet years.  It is not perfect, but it is far more objective and useful than I had been expecting, especially given that the author was persecuted by Pinochet.

3. Michael Bérubé, Life as We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child .  About the author’s Down syndrome child; this is a very good book and it is also conceptual, not your usual concrete-bound memoir.

2. Alexander Dolgin, The Economics of Symbolic Exchange .  A long, sprawling, and often creative and interesting overview of cultural economics, especially as it relates to issues of symbolic goods.

1. Stephen Schwartz, The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony .  Islamic theology is a reading interest of mine and I don’t mean the stuff that the terrorists promote.  This book is not a comprehensive introduction to Sufism but it is interesting throughout and most of all excellent on the sadly neglected topic of Albanian Bektashi theology .

I will go through the book, chapter by chapter, with an eye toward a deeper understanding of what Keynes wrote and why it is, as Greg says, so important.  I’m not yet sure what kind of pace I can maintain but order your copy here, now . The Kindle version is only $3.96.  We’ll do chapters 1 and 2 by next Monday, eight days from now.

I will go through the book, chapter by chapter, with an eye toward a deeper understanding of what Keynes wrote and why it is, as Greg says, so important.  I’m not yet sure what kind of pace I can maintain but order your copy here, now . The Kindle version is only $3.96.  We’ll do chapters 1 and 2 by next Monday, eight days from now.