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What I've been reading
1. Days on the Family Farm, by Carrie Meyer. An interesting economic study of life on an early twentieth American family farm, based on personal diaries, and an antidote to anyone who thinks that all GMU economics faculty are like the bloggers you know.
2. Theory of Clouds, by Stephane Audeguy. I loved this novel, which was the rage in France but sadly will die here stillborn. Think Julian Barnes, Sten Nadolny, or Kazuo Ishiguro. Short, fun, dreamy, and conceptual. Its quality illustrates one of my favorite book-buying algorithms, which is to snap up serious foreign fiction translated into English, if only because the selection pressures are so severe.
3. Free Trade Reimagined, by Roberto Unger. This is the fourth book this year to challenge the doctrine of comparative advantage, a more important fact than any argument in the books themselves. The book is weak on empirics but it does present the sophisticated version of the anti-free trade arguments. I don't believe in open borders, so I suppose I'm not a free trader either. Unger is smart, smart, smart, but that doesn't mean he should be Minister of Long-Term Planning in Brazil, which he is. Here's the whole thing on-line.
4. The Bad Girl, Mario Vargas Llosa. That makes two wonderful novels in one week. I don't enjoy all of his recent work, but this one is very fun, hearkening back to the tradition of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. The Edith Grossman translation is first-rate as always.
5. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross. Ross won't quite say it, but he tries to convince the reader that the twentieth century is the best century for music, ever. That's without pushing serialism too hard or resorting much to popular music. Sibelius, Janacek, Messiaen, and John Adams are among the heroes in this story. If you are only going to buy (and read) ten books on music, ever, this should be one of them. Here is one good review. Here is a Jason Kottke interview with Ross, very interesting.
It was an amazing week for reading (the best since I've started doing MR) mostly because it was an amazing week for flying. There's more to come...
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 21, 2007 at 08:03 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
The Fest of the Goat is first class.Also El pez en el agua or Los Cuadernos de Don Rigoberto.All recent and better than the Bad Girl.I liked it but is not his best.Is to transparent for someone like Vargas LLosa that dislike Ayn Rand type of literature, that is compromised literature.
Posted by: Jules at Oct 21, 2007 6:38:25 PM
Thank you for the link to Prof. Unger's work.
It has been over 2 decades since I read
any of his work. He IS very smart but
he writes in such generalizations that his analyses
must always be at least partly correct, but partly
incorrect as well, so I don't know how one can
have any confidence in his prescriptions
for policy.
Posted by: MarkT at Oct 22, 2007 5:23:14 PM
The man who has made up his mind to win will never say " Impossible".
Posted by: 台球杆 at Oct 23, 2007 9:21:48 PM
There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.
. Time is a bird for ever on the wing.
Posted by: 论文发表 at Oct 23, 2007 9:22:40 PM
Posted by: 鑽石 at Apr 2, 2008 10:52:57 PM
