Recently Mentioned Books

3. Hawon Jung, Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide .  A good and sobering look at one side of Korean culture.  This is also (I hope) an especially effective book to hand to anti-feminist types, since the examples are not coded to standard left-wing vs. right wing American disputes.

2. Robert Darnton, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 .  Perhaps my expectations were too high with this one.  I don’t see anything wrong with it, and it is beautifully written.  But somehow it didn’t add much to my picture of those events, given I have read many other Darnton books.

1. Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel’s Battle for its Inner Soul .  An interesting look at Israeli society on the eve of the current war.

3. You can now pre-order Henry Oliver’s excellent Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life .

And yes he does propose concrete solutions, most of all at the level of the law.  The whole thing is only 84 pp., and this is one of the books that comes closest to diagnosing what is wrong with our country.  The subtitle is Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society .

Age 99, the reissue of his Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger is due out December 5 from Stripe Press.  And my planned CWT with him will have to be rescheduled …

Age 99, the reissue of his Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger is due out December 5 from Stripe Press.  And my planned CWT with him will have to be rescheduled …

Ches Smith and We All Break, Path of Seven Colors .  From the year before, but I discovered it this year, a blend of Haitian vodou and jazz.

Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles .

Irreversible Entanglements, Protect Your Light .  From a free jazz collective, still vital.

Cecile McLorin Salvant, Mélusine .  Her track record (and consistency) at this point is simply staggering, and you can put her on a par with the very greatest of female jazz vocalists.

Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile .

Paul Simon, Seven Psalms .  Now he is partly deaf, and he was already singing about dying.

Christine and the Queens, Paranoia, Angels, True Love .  Three CDs, weird, still growing on me.  By some French person.

Boygenius, The Rest .  Four songs, twelve minutes.

Yaeji, With a Hammer .  A mix of English and Korean, house and hip hop.  She lives in Brooklyn.

Lankum, False Lankum .  Claims to be Irish folk music, but has ambient textures and is designed to alienate its core audience.

The author of this excellent book is Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and the subtitle is Mental Illness in Rural Ireland .  One of the most interesting themes of this book is how life in rural Ireland became so “de-eroticized,” to use her word.  Here is one bit:

As usual, I will issue an addendum at the end of the year, because I will be reading a lot between now and then.  I haven’t even received my 1344-pp. Jonathan Israel biography of Spinoza yet.  Here is my earlier list on the year’s fiction .  And apologies for any of your books I have forgotten to list, there are always some such cases.

Fuchsia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food .

Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 .

Sophia Giovannitti, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex .

Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism .

David Edmonds, Derek Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality .

I will of course provide an update by the end of the year, if only because the new Ha Jin novel is coming soon.