December 16, 2006
From the desk of Jane Galt:Shameless commercial begging: Recommended Reading
This is the last post I'll do on recommended items for Christmas. It's for those of you who have left your shopping until the last minute . . . or are looking for something to escape the clamouring relatives for a blissful moment.
Well, kinda. In fact, my reading this year was a little short on escapism. But I'll do my best.
1) The Economist Do you have a talented, intelligent, difficult-to-shop for special someone in *your* life? What better gift than the magazine newspaper so smart and up to the minute that it employs me. Plus, every subscription comes with complimentary access to the entire web site: all the archives back to 1997 are searchable and browsable by subject. None of this TimesSelect "100 articles a month" nonsense. The web savvy can read the magazine on Thursday afternoon, before anyone but the printers have it.
2) I've been on a kind of an Orwell kick this year. I'm halfway through his four volume omnibus collected writings, and I have no superlatives to describe it; it's just amazingly, quietly, brilliant. The problem with Orwell, for a writer, is that its very hard to shake the image of him standing over your shoulder as you right and shaking his head in despair at your serpentine sentencies, the blunted edge of your observational powers. Volume One, An Age Like This, is the early Orwell; the fresh cut raw materials for books like Homage to Catalonia and the Road to Wigan Pier (both of which are must-reads, I think, for anyone who wants to think seriously about economics, political structure, and justice). Volume II, My Country, Right or Left, is about the thorny problem of supporting your country without supporting its prevailing economic and social arrangements. For a companion read, I recommend Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens--except to budding writers, who may be driven insane by the juxtaposition of two such brilliant writers, and the inevitable invidious comparison of their own work to same.
3) On the cookbook front, this year I'm pushing Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food, which covers cooking, and I'm Just Here for More Food, which is his baking bible. I acquired both of them over the last year. I do not recommend them because the recipes are the best things you've ever eaten--many of them aren't to my taste. I'm recommending them because once you have finished the books you will understand how recipes work down to the molecular science, and that will make you better at cooking old and new favourites from other sources. That, for example, is how I perfected my pancake recipe by buying the electric griddle. That pancake recipe was adapted from Betty Crocker's 1950 Picture Cookbook, which remains my best basic bible; it is solid instruction for the novice moving towards advanced cookery, from an age before vegetable oil became the go-to ingredient for every occasion. Priceless gift for new brides because of the rather extraordinary advice to new homemakers at the back of the book.
4) For heartwarming mother-daughter cooking moments, I cannot recommend Miriam's Kitchen highly enough. It is the story of a woman going from non-observance to keeping a kosher kitchen, told through her memories of her mother and mother-in-law, and their memories, in turn, of their childhood kitchens. Especially good for a Hannukah gift, obviously, but beautiful even for agnotheists like me. Plus, the recipes for Kugel are very good.
5) The economics book of the season is, obviously, Tim Harford's superlative new book, The Undercover Economist. If the econ-geek in your life already has this little treasure, I suggest substituting either White Man's Burden, or, for a really clever twist, packaging Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom with John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society; both of the nation's most famous economics writers died this year. These are not my favourite books by those authors--for sheer fun, I'd substitute Free to Choose for the Friedman, and The Great Crash by Galbraith. But they are perhaps their purest cri de coeurs.
6) Stumbling on Happiness is a great book, and also, a very comforting book. It says you'll fool yourself into being happy with your choices no matter what, so why worry? On that note, don't hesitate to buy the book.
7) The Family that Couldn't Sleep is an odd little non-fiction find from our review pile, along the lines of last year's curiously unputdownable whaling book. It's the story of a family with a hereditary prion disease that strikes in their fifties, their struggle to find a cure, the scientific struggle to understand prions, and the author's own battle with a degenerative disease. It really is extraordinary.
8) For the SF/Fantasy crowd, I'm back with another Robin Hobb recommendation: though her new series, Shaman's Crossing and Forest Mage, have gotten mixed reviews for their ponderous pace, I loved them. They're conventional school and army stories set in a low magic world with a very unconventional main character. For me, the relatively slow pace is a feature, not a bug; I like to savour.
8) I'm a big fan of War Music, which is a modern recast of the first four books of the Iliad. Best taken in small doses, like a drug; the aftereffects linger, pleasantly, for days.
9) I'm not sure you'd want to give it as a gift, but Theodore Dalrymple's Romancing Opiates is an interesting deconstruction of the "addiction as illness" and "addiction as uncontrollable urge" schools of thought about drugs . . . but not from the standard libertarian viewpoint. Dalrymple doesn't approve of opiate use, but he doesn't romanticise it as an unslayable monster, either.
10) If you're a girl who wants to curl up with some girl-trash over Christmas, I recommend two girl-trash icons: The Best of Everything, which really started the trashy novel genre; and Sex and the Single Girl, which started . . . well, you know. This way, you're not indulging; you're being adorably ironic.
My father adds that I should have put Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon into my DVD roundup; my excuse is that they seemed to obvious. Also, I'd like to plug the Horatio Hornblower films, with Ioan Griffud, which are now available in a box set; they are just about the best damn coming of age films ever. If you're still looking for DVDs, kitchen equipment, etc, check out my AStore, or look at my reviews:
* DVDs
* Electronics
* Kitchen Equipment
* Ingredients
Merry Christmas--you've certainly made mine merry with your ordering!
"for those of you who have left your shopping until the last minute"
As far as I know, it's only the 16.th today. I never buy gifts before the last week before Christmas, and you let "the last minute" include this whole week. I guess these kind of things are relative.
I would include Jung Chang's book Wild Swans in the list.
The Economist is getting less readable all the time, particularly the political section. The pretentious, smug style is a poor cover for what is usually dull conventional wisdom. Lexington is particularly silly.
The business stories are enjoyable.
I've been a loyal reader of The Economist for several years.
The first year, they sent me a nifty pocket reference, The World in Figures or somesuch. Have not seen another. Can I buy one somewhere, or do I need to let my subscription lapse and re-up?
Is it a common problem to let back issues if The Economist stack up, because you hate to toss it partially read, or am I the only one who is afraid to miss potentially life-changing insights?
Sorry if this is picky, but Tim Harford's book has been out for about 2 years.
The Economist is trying to be more zeitgeist setting than it used to, sometimes this works, other times it doesn't. But, praise to them for trying. The Food Issue last week, for example, was thought provoking, if a little light on real hard evidence and data.
I recently threw out 2 years of Economist back issues and would recommend it. You stop worrying about what you've not read in old issues (it's all on-line anyway) and concentrate on reading the one in hand.
Try The Economist Store--they might have it: http://www.economistshop.com/asp/default.asp?promotion_code=EW00
I was a magazine procrastinator also, if I didn't read it right away I saved it thinking that I would get to it in time. When I was catching up and noticed a computer magazine had an article on the "new Pentium III" I knew it was time to do some house cleaning.
I agree about Alton Brown. He's my favorite TV chef, and I have his books, but I read/watch him for his techniques, not necessarily the flavor of his dishes. I think Tyler Florence is the TV chef with the best taste buds, although I don't really like his TV shows. His chicken and dumplings is one of my all time favorites.
I started subscribing to the Economist when I was in college in the 1970s, and it was printed on tissue paper.
I stopped subscribing a few years ago because: (1)it is too expensive; (2)its quality was uneven: (a)coverage of business and economics is first-rate, (b)there is now poor coverage of popular culture taking up valuable space, (c)coverage of other countries is thorough, but, sorry, I just don't care that much anymore about who's up and who's down in various large EU countries, at least I don't care enough to pay that much for it,(d)there is a lot of smugness and conventional wisdom in coverage of US politics and I can get that free on the web, and (e)it always seemed to me that their surveys were long, tedious, uninformative, and just ways to capture institutional ads; (3)now that I'm retired, I'm less interested in the world; and (4)yes, I always never found the time to read the whole thing, and that made me question why I spent so much money on it when I had stacks of unread editions all over the house.
My advice, if you're not retired: take the Economist for yourself if you have the spare change and you must have a newsmagazine. You can pay for it by not buying the NYT or WSJ in print. If you want to give someone a gift subscription, give them a gift of membership in an organization that shares their interests and publishes a reasonably good magazine or newsletter.
Count me as another somewhat disillusioned Economist reader.
My father gave me a subscription in high school and I read it cover to cover through the 1990s. I found the range and depth of coverage put other newsmagazines I had read to shame.
This decade though started off with the bizarre endorsement of Bush (I did not particularly mind their support of Dole, who I believe would have been a decent president). The analyical discussions remained strong but some of the conclusions have relied more on simple assertions(e.g. Social Security privatization).
The most painful change though has been the deterioration of the Lexington column. Every few weeks I seem to find a string of unsupported right wing fantasies.
The low point for me was one week where Lexington claimed that religious people were oppressed in this country by seculars. Guess all those polls that put atheists on the bottom of the food chain were wrong then.
Still a good magazine though when I can ignore the irritants, and data-driven enough to be able to recognize the weaknesses of our current president (eventually).
Tom G
...The Best of Everything...
I found this movie at our local library. I became mesmerized by it, so much that I forgot my date with Star Trek: Voyager until about fifteen minutes into the latter. For the remainder of the show, I kept switching between The Best of Everything and Voyager.
The latter had Janeway and Torres all muscled and sweaty and kicking alien ass, whereas the former had powdered and primped Hope Lange and Co. mewling and puking and hoping to find some man who wouldn't treat them like dirt. I think I got some sort of whiplash that night.
A review at Jane's Amazon link says there's less mewling and puking in the book.
Here are some magazine suggestions:
The Claremont Review
The City Journal
New Criterion
Commentary
National Review
For the science fiction part, try Alastair Reynolds. He has several books and all of them are great. I would start with Chasm City. He is an engaging author, and his novels are like detectives set in the future. Keeps one on the edge.
I like The Economist, and I do like to read about other countries and their experiences.
It's nice to know that I am not the only one saving the Economist issues for my grandchildren to read:)). (I already have all 112 years before 2000 of the National Geographic Magazine (32 CDs), and a pile of the recent ones). No CDs for the Economist, though...
Merry Christmas!
Olena-re saving The Economist, word of warning.
My father (BSEE, MBA,PhD-Econ) passed late last year. He had 20-25 years of Economist(in very nice binders, no less), twice that of National Geographic (also in binders), as well as Smithsonian, and others. Guess what was featured in the grandchildren's initial garage sale. I managed to "rescue" them for the local library.
Merry Christmas
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