If the list’s books are skewed toward Barthelme’s particular obsessions — one of the entries is “Beckett entire” — this is only to its credit. Most are novels. All but two of the books, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Flaubert’s Letters (numbers 15, 40), were written in the twentieth century, most in the past thirty years. And all have that dizzying sense of otherness and surprise common to great books, an affluence of vitality.
Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years.
That’s not precisely true, but my book reading is down to a trickle of what it used to be. Most of my reading happens online for kottke.org and when I’m through with all that, the last thing I want to do is tuck into a book, no matter how good it is. But what I really haven’t been doing is talking about the books I’ve read or am interested in reading if I had the time. Oh, there have been a few mentioned on the site recently, but there are many more1 stacked on the bedside table, on the shelf next to where I put my keys, and in the “to shelve” pile near the bookshelves that have gone unmentioned.
I know there are a few of you who are interested in what I’ve been reading, if only to avoid the same titles, so I’m going to do a series of collective mini-reviews of every single book that has crossed my desk recently (where recently is loosely defined as the past four years or so). Here’s the first batch.
Create Your Own Economy by Tyler Cowen. I wanted to give this a full and proper review and perhaps still will, but right around the time I finished reading it was the shipping date for the second version of a project my wife and I were working on, Create Your Own Dependent Child. So this capsule will have to do. CYOE is an odd book consisting of two intertwining defenses: 1) of the internet in general and blogs/Twitter/Facebook in particular (one of the best defenses of the internet I’ve read, in fact), and 2) of autism, the main point being that a person on the autistic spectrum is not disabled or even differently abled but in many cases is better equipped to handle increasingly common situations in contemporary culture. I found Cowen’s interrelation of these two topics fascinating. This book is from out of left field in the best possible sense. Recommended.
Master of Shadows by Mark Lamster. Before Mark told me he was writing this book, I had no idea that Peter Paul Rubens was diplomat as well as a painter. I might give this one a whirl after I finish my tour of the Dark Ages.
Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins. Google sent me this book as a promotion of their Sidewiki thing. The book arrived with a bookmark in it that basically said “what if you could do this to any web page in the world?” I used Sidewiki for about 3 minutes and never went back. Mr. Collins book will likely remain unread and eventually find its way to Housing Works to find a better home than I can provide.
Extreme Fear by Jeff Wise. This book is due out in December; Wise sent me a copy after reading this post, one of many on the site about relaxed concentration and deliberate practice. If you enjoy when I write about these things, you may want to check out this book.
Lost and Found edited by Thomas Beller. This is a collection of essays and stories about specific places in New York City drawn from Beller’s web site, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.
Lost and Found, Volume II of the series, is a mosaic of voices, drawing on the diverse experiences of such New Yorkers as a frequent patron of Manhattan sex clubs, a diamond dealer on 47th Street, and a doorman on the Upper East Side. The book features many exciting new voices (Said Sayrafiezadeh, Rachel Sherman, Bryan Charles) alongside work by well-known writers, including Phillip Lopate, Jonathan Ames, Alicia Erian, Madison Smartt Bell, and Edmund White.
Bailout Nation by Barry Ritholtz. The subtitle of the book is “How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy” and it came out in May. It’s well-reviewed; the NY Times, WSJ, and the Freakonomics guys gave it favorable ratings. My son calls it his “pig book” for the porcine version of the Wall Street Bull on the dust jacket. Ritholtz blogs about economic and financial matters at The Big Picture.
SuperFreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The sequel to the blockbuster economics book has only been out a couple of weeks but is already generating a lot of controversy. I’m keen to read this one and do a proper review; it looks like a fast read and, with all apologies to Mr. Rubens, might be next on the list.
Ok, that’s enough for now. More soon.
[1] This is probably a good spot to mention that some of the books above (spacially speaking…or below, temporally speaking) have been purchased by me and some have been sent to me by the author or author’s publishing company or author’s publicist. In most cases, especially with books I’ve had for more than a few weeks, I honestly can’t remember where I got them from, so I can’t imagine it matters much w/r/t to my “review”. How about this: if it seems relevent in a particular case, I’ll mention it. ↩
This is a curious exchange between “book mechanic” Michael Turner and interviewer Brian Joseph Davis. Turner says:
We are living at a time when, for the writer, the book is too little.
And then Davis replies, in part:
[The book] is stalled out, in terms of technology, at 1500 AD, and sociologically at around 1930.
The sociological stalling of the book around 1930…I have no idea what that means. Could someone more steeped in book culture explain what that might mean? (via ettagirl)
Update:Henrietta Walmark asked Davis what he meant by his “sociological stalling” remark. Here’s what he said:
Literature in book form, and discussion around it, was the mark of education, of the gentry and petit bourgeois. Literature in book form never really found a place in mass produced, post WW2 middle class culture.
That’s pretty much the consensus of my inbox as well…TV and radio took over as the cultural currency around then.
A Story Before Bed allows you to record yourself reading a bedtime story to a faraway child…maybe you’re away from home on business or a grandparent who lives in another state or just working late. When storytime rolls around, the child sees the book onscreen plus a video of you reading it to them. Slick.
The Strange Maps book is out today. The book is based on the awesome Strange Maps blog, one the very few sites I have to exercise restraint in not linking to every single item posted there. The content of the book is adapted from the site, so of course it’s top shelf.
My only reservation in recommending the book is the design. When I cracked it open, I was expecting full-bleed reproductions of the maps, large enough to really get a detailed look at them. The maps *are* the book, after all. But that’s not the case…only a few of the maps get an entire non-full-bleed page and some of the maps are stuck in the corner of a page of text, like small afterthoughts. The rest of the design is not much better, cheesy at best and distracting at worst. I wasn’t expecting Taschen-grade production values, but something more appropriate to the subject matter would have been nice.
I was all fired up to make eight from-scratch servings of ramen last night after looking through the Momofuku book, but ulitmately the book is a Trojan horse for enticing people into the restaurants. As in: “Konbu? 5 pounds of meaty pork bones? Fuck that, let’s just go to Noodle Bar.”
Most people won’t instantly jump to buy ebook readers after seeing them in TV commercials or liveblogged keynotes. They need to be experienced in person. (The ability to do this easily will give Barnes & Noble a huge advantage over Amazon.) And they’ll spread via good, old-fashioned, in-person referrals from friends and coworkers.
I want a good e-reader more than anything…I instantly fell for the screen when I saw the Sony Libre a few years ago. I do a *ton* of reading, upwards of 100-150 pages a day when I’m working full-time. About 0.5% of those pages are from books. But the Kindle? I tried it and didn’t like it. The screen is still great…the rest of it didn’t work at all for me. And this is what is frustrating for me…the Kindle seemed right for buying books but not for what I want it for: reading all that other stuff. I know the functionality exists on these devices to read blogs, magazines, newspapers, etc., but they’re marketed as book readers (Arment even calls them “ebook readers” instead of “e-readers”), the user experience is optimized for book reading, and the companies (esp. Amazon and B&N) view them as portable bookstores.
But there are a lot of people — including, significantly, most people over age 40 - who don’t like reading tiny text on bright LCD screens in devices loaded with distractions that die after 5 hours without their electric lifeline.
Agreed. I don’t particularly enjoy reading text on the iPhone; I’d prefer a larger e-ink screen. Instapaper support on the Kindle was almost enough to make me get one…but not quite yet.
Most of Kottke’s problem with ebook readers can be solved in software
The problem isn’t that you can’t route around Amazon’s design decisions with clever hacks, but that Amazon chose to optimize the device for reading (and buying) books. I.e. the software *is* the problem. That is not so easily solved…to do so, Amazon has to address it. And maybe they will. I hope they do.
I’m not including RSS feeds or PDFs in the discussion. RSS feeds aren’t reading: they’re alerting, discovering and filtering.
Off-topic, but this isn’t my experience. I’d say about 30-50% of my reading is done directly in my newsreader…there are plently of blogs out there that aren’t link blogs or Tumblrs.
Sure, fine, make your single-use devices. But all these e-readers — the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, et al — are all focused on the wrong single use: books. (And in the case of at least the Nook and Kindle, the focus is on buying books from B&N and Amazon. The Kindle is more like a 7-Eleven than a book.) The correct single use is reading. Your device should make it equally easy to read books, magazine articles, newspapers, web sites, RSS feeds, PDFs, etc. And keep in mind, all of these things have images that are integral to the reading experience. We want to read; help us do it.
In addition to being a painter of some repute, Peter Paul Rubens was also a diplomat:
In Master of Shadows, Mark Lamster tells the story of Rubens’s life and brilliantly re-creates the culture, religious conflicts, and political intrigues of his time. Commissions to paint military and political leaders drew Rubens from his Antwerp home to London, Madrid, Paris, and Rome. The Spanish crown, recognizing the value of his easy access to figures of power, enlisted him into diplomatic service. His uncommon intelligence, preternatural charm, and ability to navigate through ever-shifting political winds allowed him to negotiate a long-sought peace treaty between England and Spain even as Europe’s shrewdest statesmen plotted against him.
Moretus was Rubens’s most frequent design client. To save his friend money, Rubens generally did his work for Plantin on holidays, so he would not have to charge Moretus his rather exorbitant day rate (Rubens was notorious for his high prices), and even then he agreed to be paid in books.
The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow more of it and plant more of it. The potato, by gratifying our desire for control, control over nature so that we can feed ourselves has gotten itself out of South America and expanded its range far beyond where it was 500 years ago. And the apple, by gratifying our desire for sweetness begins in the forests of Kazakhstan and is now the universal fruit. These are great winners in the dance of domestication.
In recent years, the gifts on offer have grown increasingly extravagant and ridiculous: a modern Zeppelin for $10 million, a 3-hole golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus for your back yard for $1 million, and a private concert with Elton John for $1.5 million. (via girlhacker)
A couple in London have found the ultimate space-saving solution for a city-dwelling book lover: a staircase bookshelf. UK-based Levitate Architects came up with the page-turning passage as a unique way to augment a loft sleeping space in the attic with discreet storage. If they could create a record crate bathroom, I’d be ready to move in.
The Informant (Steven Soderbergh, Matt Damon) is out in theaters now. I had no idea it was based on a true story…a genuinely crazy true story of corporate price fixing, FBI informants, and an eager-to-please executive. Kurt Eichenwald wrote a series of article about the case for The New York Times, which he fashioned into a book. This American Life devoted an entire hour to this story back in 2000…it’s a fascinating listen.
We hear from Kurt Eichenwald, whose book The Informant is about the price fixing conspiracy at the food company ADM, Archer Daniels Midland, and the executive who cooperated with the FBI in recording over 250 hours of secret video and audio tapes, probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act.
The cinema is now one of the main objects on which efforts should be concentrated in order to conduct the revolution in art and literature. The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature. As such it is a powerful ideological weapon for the revolution and construction. Therefore, concentrating efforts on the cinema, making breakthroughs and following up success in all areas of art and literature is the basic principle that we must adhere to in revolutionizing art and literature.
Here’s more information about Dear Leader’s cinematic and operatic interests.
On the Art of Opera describes how Kim and his dad, the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung, discovered the husk of a tired art form and gave it a much-needed shot of North Korean communism. Any impartial observer would agree that Kim’s aesthetic prescriptions are every bit as crowd-pleasing as his economic policies.
“In conventional operas,” Kim writes, “the personalities of the characters were abstract, their acting clumsy, and the flow of the drama tedious, because the singers were forced to sing unnaturally and their acting was neglected.” Furthermore, until the arrival of the Kims, “no one interwove dance and story very closely.”
And now? “The ‘Sea of Blood’-style opera,” he observes, “has opened up a new phase in dramaturgy.” In case you’ve been living in a cave, Sea of Blood is North Korea’s longest-running production, the Cats of Pyongyang. It has been staged 1,500 times, according to the official Korea News Service, which calls it an “immortal classical masterpiece.” Kim claims to have revamped the form by chucking the aria out the window and replacing all solo performance with a cunning Kim innovation: the pangchang, a more satisfying off-stage chorus representing groupthink.
Maybe using the adverb “slowly” seven times in your first 10 pages is the secret to good writing. That would make it 11,428,571 copies sold for every “slowly.”
Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow’s peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.
05049 was an actual pig, raised and slaughtered on a commercial farm in the Netherlands. Rotterdam designer Christien Meindertsma was shocked to discover that she could document 185 products contributed to by the animal.
Meindertsma’s design includes the publication of her book, PIG 05049, which charts and pictures each of the products supported by the animal. The surprise is in the fact that elements of production contributed to by pig farming include not only predictable foodstuffs — pork chops and bacon — but far less expected non-food items: ammunition, train brakes, automobile paint, soap and washing powder, bone china, cigarettes.
The caption on the page reads:
Fatty acids derived from pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent in crayons and also gives them their distinctive smell.
Crayons smell like pig bone fat. I don’t think I’ll use crayons ever again without thinking of that little factoid.
See also I, Pencil. Nobody knows how to make a pencil and nobody knows where all the parts of a pig go either. (via design observer)
The twothreads on book titles as if they were written today are still going strong…there are some really good ones in the comments.
Then: The Bible Now: A Million Little Signs and Wonders
Then: The Sun Also Rises Now: Drink, Bullfight, Mope
Then: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica Now: Why Do Apples Fall Down and Not Up? Answers From The Cutting Edge of Physics
Then: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus Now: Frankenstein: Wrath of the Supercorpse
Then: Declaration of Independence Now: The Pursuit of Happiness: How to get control of your continent and have fun doing it!
Then: The Oxford English Dictionary Now: Word Up! 300,000 proven ways to express yourself in speech and writing
Then: To Kill A Mockingbird Now: To Kill A Mockingbird (A Novel)
Then: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler Now: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel
Then: Cry, the Beloved Country Now: Black. White.
Then: Little Women Now: Concord 01742
Then: The Hobbit Now: Hobbit
Then: The Art of War Now: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Strategy Guide
Many of the entries took old fiction titles and converted them to contemporary non-fiction titles — e.g. Cinderella becomes How to Escape Being Bullied Without Once Standing Up for Yourself — which wasn’t really the point of the exercise but entertaining nonetheless.
Oh and if anyone wants to whip up book covers for any of these, feel free.
Realize that some premium options exist as decoys — that is, they are there only to make the less expensive options look more appealing, because they’re easy to compare. Don’t make binding decisions solely based on how easy it is to compare two side-by-side options from the same vendor. Try comparing all the alternatives, even those from other vendors.
What the Dog Saw is a collection of his writing from The New Yorker. Here’s an annotated table of contents with links to all the articles and the dates on which they originally appeared in the magazine:
The Pitchman - Ron Popeil and the conquest of the American kitchen. (Oct 30, 2000)
The Ketchup Conundrum - Mustard now comes in dozens of different varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same? (Sept 6, 2004)
Blowing Up - How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy. (Apr 22, 2002)
True Colors - Hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America. (Mar 22, 1999)
John Rock’s Error - What the inventor of the birth control pill didn’t know about women’s health. (Mar 13, 2000)
What the Dog Saw - Cesar Millan and the movements of mastery. (May 22, 2006)
Open Secrets - Enron, intelligence and the perils of too much information. (Jan 8, 2007)
Million Dollar Murray - Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage. (Feb 13, 2006)
The Picture Problem - Mammography, air power, and the limits of looking. (Dec 13, 2004)
Something Borrowed - Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life? (Nov 22, 2004)
In a world where useful and important answers come looking for you, it is the idea of unimportance that is the primary selling point of the miscellanies. The books promise to guide the reader somewhere older and slower, to create a little world in which information can serve as amusement rather than currency. A carefully done miscellany appears random, but it achieves a sort of quiet intellectual bustle, set apart from the roar of the daily info-chaos. The miscellanies are information as art, and art for art’s sake.
As Tyler Cowen seemingly reads every new book published in English each year (and I’m not even sure about the “seemingly”), a rave review from him directs my finger from its holster to Amazon’s 1-Click trigger. This week Cowen is on about The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham. From the review:
What can I say? I have to count this tome as one of the best history books I have read, ever.
Having just finished, coincidentially, Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy (more on that soon), I *am* looking for another book to read.
Dave Eggers has written a young adult novel called The Wild Things that is based loosely on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and the screenplay he co-wrote with Spike Jonze for the movie version. The New Yorker published an excerpt of the book this week.
Max left the room and found Gary lying on the couch in his work clothes, his frog eyes closed, his chin entirely receded into his neck. Max gritted his teeth and let out a low, simmering growl.
Gary opened his eyes and rubbed them.
“Uh, hey, Max. I’m baggin’ a few after-work Z’s. How goes it?”
Max looked at the floor. This was one of Gary’s typical questions: Another day, huh? How goes it? No play for the playa, right? None of his questions had answers. Gary never seemed to say anything that meant anything at all.
“Cool suit,” Gary said. “Maybe I’ll get me one of those. What are you, like a rabbit or something?”
But while I was working on the book, it was funny, because I started going in new directions, different from any of the screenplay versions, pushing it into some territory that was personal to me. So in a way the movie is more Spike’s version of Maurice’s book, and this novel is more my version.
The influential design magazine Emigre stopped publishing issues back in 2005, but now they’re releasing issue No. 70, which is actually a hardcover book celebrating the best of Emigre from the past 25 years.
This book, designed and edited by Emigre co-founder and designer Rudy VanderLans, is a selection of reprints, using original digital files, tracing Emigre’s development from its early bitmap design days in the late 1980s through to the experimental layouts that defined the so called “Legibility Wars” of the late 1990s, to the critical design writing of the early 2000s.
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