Recently Mentioned Books
Showing 25 of 6845 mentions, ordered by most recent.
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.
Ovid, Metamorphosis , new translation by Stephanie McCarter. I have only browsed this one, but expect it to be very good.
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov , new translation by Michael R. Katz. I am on about p.200, so far my favorite of the major translations.
J.M. Coetzee, The Pole .
Rebecca F. Kuang, Yellowface .
Tezer Özlü, Cold Nights of Childhood . A Turkish novella, originally published in 1980, newly translated into English and the first English-language book by her. Here is more on the author . Only 76 pp., can be read in one bite.
That is the new book by Emmanuel Todd, subtitled An Outline of the History of Women and mostly on the feminization of society. It does not cohere, and spends too much time wallowing in pseudo-anthropology, but it has a number of interesting bits. Here is from the preface: