Recently Mentioned Books

Cristiano Bianchi and Kristina Drapić, Model City Pyongyang .  An excellent picture book, mostly of architecture, presenting Pyongyang as yet another installment in the 20th century series of deeply weird cities.

Peter Gatrell, The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent .  A very nice history of earlier post-war European migration, such as Turks and Greeks moving to West Germany, Cape Verdeans settling in Portugal, and so on.  Excellent background for the current debates.

Here you can buy The Stand for $8.30 , by the way I love Houllebecq but the new one isn’t very interesting, as sadly it reads like a parody of his earlier, superior work. Submission remains one of the truly great novels of recent times.

Here you can buy The Stand for $8.30 , by the way I love Houllebecq but the new one isn’t very interesting, as sadly it reads like a parody of his earlier, superior work. Submission remains one of the truly great novels of recent times.

Here you can buy The Stand for $8.30 , by the way I love Houllebecq but the new one isn’t very interesting, as sadly it reads like a parody of his earlier, superior work. Submission remains one of the truly great novels of recent times.

I still think Stephen King should get one.  I didn’t enjoy trying to read Tokarczuk, though I suspect she is a very good writer in Polish.  By Handke I can recommend his Sorrow of Dreams , a memoir of his mother dying, and also a book that influenced Knausgaard.  But mostly I am find him boring, pessimistic, and nasty, perhaps consistent with his support for Milosevic and the tyranny in Serbia.  I don’t think that disqualifies him from the prize per se , but neither do I see him as an author who...

And yes on overrated vs. underrated, you get Taylor Swift, Clint Eastwood, and Seinfeld, among others.  I highly recommend all of Ben’s books , but most of all his latest one Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic .

Here is his home page .  Here is Ted on Twitter , one of the very best follows.  Here is his latest book Music: A Subversive History , due out next week.  And there is more :

Christophe Jaffrelot, The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience .

Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country .

That is from the new Philip Mansel book King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV .

That is from the forthcoming and excellent book by Robert Bryce, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations .

1. “Cheap books make authors canonical.”  From a new study of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas .

Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson, Ingenious: The Unintended Consequences of Human Innovation .

Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work .

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World For All .

An excellent book, you can order it here .

That is the new biography by Benjamin Moser , along with Ingmar Bergman bios you can call this topic my soap opera equivalent.  Here are a few scattered bits:

That is from The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings , edited by Lawrence Sutin.

Edward Snowden, Permanent Record .  Starts slow, but an interesting read no matter what you think of him, most of all of how one can step by step be led to actions one did not originally intend.  I thought his own case for what he did was weaker than I had been expecting.  Embedding it in an “the internet used to be so much better” narrative doesn’t help.  Nonetheless, I read through to the end eagerly.

Matthew Gale and Natalia Sidlina, Natalia Goncharova .  The images in this book I found mind-blowing, claiming a place for Goncharova as one of the very best artists of her time (and what a time for the visual arts it was).

Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Innovation and Equality: How to Create a Future That is More Star Trek and Less Terminator .  A very useful 131 pp. introduction to those issues, most of all arguing that a future full of innovation does not have to push inequality to untenable levels.

Tom Segev, A State At Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion .  I read about one-third of this one.  A fine book, beautifully written, but somehow too much of the material felt familiar given other accounts I had consumed.

Nicholas Lemann, Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream .  Lots of mood affiliation in this one, but the chapter on finance economist Michael Jensen and his longstanding connection with “guru” Werner Erhard is excellent material you cannot find elsewhere.

Thomas J. Campanella, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City . More detailed than what I am looking for on this topic at 552 pp., but some of you will find this an interesting resource.