What Are You Reading?

Vicar of Wakefield was fine, but there's no pressing reason for anyone to read it except for historical interest. Other writers (Dickens, most obviously) ripped Goldsmith off but did it much better; you might as well just read them.

Now on to Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, which is just fucking amazing fun for every single sentence. It's a mystery, I guess, where the lead character has Tourette's. I love the fuck out of it.

As a diehard Shteyngartian, that was the one I wound up selling later, good though it was. It was just so depressing and easily extrapolated from our present world. A far cry, I thought, from Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan. Just a stone-cold downer in many ways (and I'm not sold on the "heroine," to be honest).

Jean-Luc Lemur, Bloom always struck me as one of those guys like Moynihan or Schlesinger. Like you said, a classic postwar liberal who could never master the changes of the 60s.

Jut started Thomas Keneally's American Scoundrel, his biography of nineteenth century New York politician and Civil War general Dan Sickles (whose leg made a memorably amusing cameo in Lincoln). Weird to see how you could easily update the wheeling, dealing, and general excess that crowded Sickles' life and export it into the twentieth century (or a Law and Order episode; his trial for murder resulted in the country's first successful defense on temporary insanity grounds).

Looking forward to Hamalainen's The Comanche Empire and a biography of Bayard Rustin this week, as well as Ying Ruocheng's autobiography and Stefan Zweig's The Post-Office Girl (was giving myself some time after seeing The Grand Budapest Hotel to read the latter). Hopefully my order of N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms will show up at the bookstore around the same time.

I have Neil Gaimen's American Gods and any day now I'm going to open the book up and start reading it.

I ha

Rereading The Player of Games (Iain Banks) for the first time in many, many years. It was a Culture novel I always regarded as a little dry and slow, but so many people over the years have listed it as one of their favorite Culture novels that I decided I had to revisit it.

I just finished Raymond Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder, which I've discussed in greater detail in the Book Club thread for it, but I wasn't very impressed.  I've also read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle since the last time I posted in this thread.  It was my first Vonnegut, and I greatly enjoyed it.  I've found myself thinking dismissively of various group identities that I'm encouraged to lump myself into as granfaloons more than a couple of times over the last couple of weeks.

Now I'm in the middle of re-reading Faulkner's Light In August, which was one of my favorite books in high school, and it's standing up to the scrutiny of the more well-read adult me.  I'm also reading Robert Jordan's The Fires of Heaven, whose prose is proving just as mediocre and heavy-handed as the books preceding it in the series.  Oh hey, this character who you mentioned in the first book grew up the daughter of a poor fisherman, but rose to be powerful just used a folksy fishing-related idiom.  Good job, Robert Jordan, you've done more than enough to remind me of her humble upbringing and the way it's shaped her into a minor variation on the theme of all the cookie-cutter heroes in this series.  You really don't need to explain to me that the reason why she just used a folksy fishing-related idiom was because she grew up a poor fisherman's daughter.  Nor does her internal monologue need to include a folksy fishing-related idiom every other paragraph.  Lastly, I've just started Peter Matthiesen's In Paradise, as it got a good review on the Old Country and a digital copy was available to check out from the local library.  

I read the former years ago and can't say I thought much of it at all.  More recently I read Saul Bellow's Ravelstein, a roman à clef about his friendship with Bloom.  But Harold is definitely the Bloom I prefer.

I read it over my vacation! Possibly the geekiest vacation reading of all time, certainly my personal record.

There were certainly flaws in the book. The most glaring one, not because it was the biggest but because it was the weirdest, is Piketty's inexplicable vendetta against Bill Gates. The passage where he praises Jobs, trashes Gates, and implies that Gates doesn't deserve to be rich left my jaw hanging open. There's also a repetition of the common mistake of saying the average mortality of an earlier era being 40 meant most adults died at 40; it didn't, since so many people died before age 5. And every so often Piketty's language about capitalism, taming capitalism, defeating capitalism, etc. betrayed an ideological edge that I, as a good old capitalist, didn't much like.

On the other hand, much of the book is outstanding. The book is hard to read in the sense that it's very long, detailed, and concerning a difficult subject. The book is easy to read, though, in the sense that Piketty writes clearly, explains things well for non-economist readers, and strenuously avoids (or illuminates) jargon. In fact, even given the occasional clunker of a sentence, I'm willing to say Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a landmark of prose non-fiction, since it brings such clarity to such a tangled Christmas tree light strand of a subject.

As for the ideas, I am no economist, but I find myself persuaded by a lot of them. Truth is, the book is surprisingly low on ideas. It's high on data, but the data pretty irresistibly pushes you to certain ideas. Income and wealth inequality are, now, a lot like climate change: we know they're happening, we have a good idea why, we have some sketchy ideas on how to fix them, but we have to overcome the people who are still ready to deny there's a problem in the first place. This book serves as a weighty assembly of the evidence.

I can say, as a "lay reader," that I will now permanently carry around in my mind some core economic concepts thanks to this book, particularly "r > g" (rate of return on capital usually beats traditional economic growth) and "wealth/income = savings/growth." Also, somehow I had never heard that inflation didn't exist until 120ish years ago. Glad that's been corrected for me.

Dr. Dastardly alert: Thomas Piketty repeatedly discusses Pere Goriot. He also cites Disney's The Aristocats and Django Unchained.

Pekka Hamalainen's The Comanche Empire. Really interesting, pretty well-organized read, which manages to skirt the central problem of the paucity of reliable Comanche sources for the story of their overwhelming dominance in the Rio Grande Valley c. 1700-1850. Maintains a fairly evenhanded approach to its subject; Hamalainen avoids the kind of (understandable) romantic mythologizing one might have found in the subject a generation or two earlier and makes a good case for the Comanche as being, well, an empire, if not as highly organized or technologically advanced as its eventual conqueror from the east. The most startling realization so far is the Comanche's decisive influence on the Mexican-American War; the US Army was largely able to score as much initial success in the north (and, to some extent, the south) due to the region's earlier reduction to a howling wasteland by Comanche raids (the central Mexican government's diversion of such feeble resources it could muster to fight the raiders weakening the country as a whole). Thinking of checking out S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon next, covering some of the same ground but much less scholarly and much more a popular biography of celebrated late 19th century Comanche leader Quanah Parker (and, apparently, the Texas Rangers, said focus the source of a little online criticism, apparently).

Picked up Raymond Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder at the bookstore today; will hopefully finish that by early next week. Interesting to read the introductory essay already; lots of cultural baggage there (I shudder to imagine my ex-girlfriend's and her good friend's reactions to Chandler's ambiguous take on Dorothy L. Sayers).

Glad to hear this - it's been on my list but the hype, or rather the backlash, was making me have second thoughts...

Welcome to the TI!

The Severed Streets: second London police set urban fantasy by Paul Cornell (yes, the Doctor Who scribe). More coherent than the first book in the saga, and has a truly hilarious (to me at least, having known the man for years) cameo appearance about a third of the way through...

Thanks for the welcomes

Mrs David Tennant I went poking around in the author's website, and she says that The Goblin Emperor is a stand-alone book. I'm not sure if she means that it isn't set in any of her previous worlds (and she may write sequels), or if she's stopping here. I'm certainly hoping for more!