What I’ve been reading

1. Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk About Art as Intellectual Property, by Susan Bielstein.  Yet another treatment of how copyright has gone too far, this book is full of both information and good humor. 

2. Jonathan Tokeley, Rescuing the Past: The Cultural Heritage Crusade.  A pro-property rights, pro-market (but with regulation) approach to the antiquities trade.  A breath of fresh air in an otherwise poorly framed debate.

3. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy; I blogged this before, but now I am reading it, this book is a major achievement.  Here is an interview with Tooze.  Here is more, and here.

4. The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon.  This is also for my Law and Literature class next spring; from Pynchon, I enjoy this book and the first half of Gravity’s Rainbow.  You don’t have to love 1960s left-wing semiotics for this one, although it doesn’t hurt.  Over Christmas I might try Pynchon’s V., and for that matter Civilization IV.

5. Lots of opinions about intro economics, from CrookedTimber.