Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Shameless Begging: Book edition

Some of y'all have emailed me to ask for recommendations for books to read and DVDs to watch, to go with the recommendations for kitchen gear and home electronics I offered earlier. Here are the book recommendations; DVDs will hopefully come later, but I'm sick as a dog, so I make no promises.

As you may know, now is the time of year when I engage in an absolutely shameless attempt to encourage you to earn me money from my Amazon.com associates account, under the thin pretense of suggesting things you can buy your loved ones for Christmas. I am poor, and my student loan officer is hungry, and the people at the workhouse will only give me one serving of gruel a day. . . this brazen commercialization of The Birth of Our Lord is the only way that I can afford to buy myself the books with which I enrich my mind so that I can offer you keen insight and witty commentary on a quasi-daily basis.

If you're going to do your Christmas shopping on Amazon this year, just click the handy links provided by me or another of your favourite bloggers (mine's over there at the right, if you scroll down a little!), and at absolutely not cost to yourself, you can send a little commission our way. We get the commission even if you buy something other than the product we linked, though the commission is higher for direct links.

However, even if you don't order through Amazon, all the stuff I'll suggest here is stuff that I genuinely love, so do consider purchasing for yourself or your loved ones offline. And if you do buy something I recommend, please, please, please email me to let me know how it went over.

And if you don't like anything you see here, please feel free to peruse last year's selections, though there is some overlap.

Fiction

Anna Karenina Yes, I know, it's shameful, but I just got around to reading it this year. Outstanding, even in translation . . . and I generally hate translation. Tolstoy's characters breathe even though they (never) lived over 100 years ago.

Letters from Earth This is a collection of Mark Twain's unpublished writings, which was put together after his death. It lacks the polish of his published work, and some of it is unfinished, but it offers in some ways a more intimate look into his mind. Especially recommend it paired with The Autobiography of Mark Twain, which is a sampling of the autobiographical musings he dictated at the end of his life. Because he didn't mean it to be published until after his death, it is much more frank than most autobiography, and of course, Mark Twain is one of the most brilliant writers ever.

A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and a Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin, as discussed in this post I can't tell you how much I enjoyed these books . . . they really made time fly in London

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit It's a period piece--postwar 1950's "Isn't there something better than this?" literature. He doesn't do it as well as John Cheever, but that's hardly a put-down, since Cheever was one of the prose greats of the twentieth century (and if you don't own The Stories of John Cheever, then run, don't walk, down to your nearest bookstore and pick one up.) Nonetheless, it's enjoyable not merely as a period piece--though peaking into the heads of our near ancestors is in itself a pleasurable reading experience--but as a novel, even though it gets a little sappy at the end.

Past Due by William Lashner. As you can see, my reading is eclectic; I whipsaw between genre fiction and "classic literature". But only selected genre literature. William Lashner is one of the few mystery writers who made my cut. It's sort of noirish fiction set in modern-day Philadelphia, narrated by a wanna-be mob lawyer. He's no Tolstoy, but he will help you pass more than a few pleasant hours. I liked his earlier books--Hostile Witness, Bitter Truth, and Fatal Flaw even better, but I recommend them all very highly if you like mysteries.

The Stepford Wives Didn't know it was a book, did you? I confess, I was taken aback by how much I enjoyed this book, which has a lean, understated prose style that really sets off the underlying horror. I liked it so much that I bought Rosemary's Baby, which I also highly recommend.

Heart of Darkness I reread it while I was in London, and may nominate the beginning of this book for best prose ever. I actually get chills down my spine every time I read the words "And this too was among the dark places of the earth". If you haven't read this, you must, and not just because you liked Apocalypse Now.

Non-Fiction

Freakonomics Yes, you've heard about it from every economics blog in creation, including theirs. But it really is enjoyable. It won't give you a basic grounding in economics, but it will give you insight into economic problem-solving. It's just a bonus that the writing is engaging and entertaining.

In the Wake of Madness It's a popular history about a whaling boat where a couple members of the crew kill the captain. The author dissects the official story, which had native crewmen going bonkers for no particular reason, and reveals that the captain was possibly crazy, certainly cruel. I know you probably weren't expecting me to recommend a book on whaling, but I found it surprisingly engrossing. I also learned a great deal about whaling, not that I expect this to come in handy any time soon.

Where are the customer's yachts? This is a humorous book about Wall Street written in mid-century, skewering the conceits of both investors and brokers. The shocking thing is that almost all of it still applies today.

Against Depression The author of Listening to Prozac, which I read when it came out, followed up with this book, which argues against the notion that one's depressed self is somehow the authentic, natural self, and that medication is thus false comfort. He also fights those who point out that since great artists tend to be disproportionately depressed, there is danger in treating all depression, saying that we would not have left Van Gogh untreated if he'd had cancer, and depression is little different. I'm not sure I agree with this--it seems to me that depression, with its sharper insight, does spur art, and I think that there are things in life more important than being happy--at least on even-numbered days. Anyway, even if you disagree with this, it's very much worth reading if you're interested in happiness research.

The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant. The story of the Durants is lurid enough to justify reading their work just for the prurient interest: Will fell in love with Ariel while he was teaching her at the Ferrer School, an early experimental school. She was just fourteen when he resigned his post and married her. Later they collaborated on the enormous multi-volume Story of Civilization, which I'll read someday when I have a zillion dollars to spare. This book isn't so ambitious; it's just a summing up of what they've learned about people and governments from their study of history. And it turns out the prurient interest is just gravy; their work is delightful. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Into the Wild I first read Jon Krakauer because he was on Everest in 1996 when everything went to hell; his chronicle of that expedition, Into Thin Air, is brilliant. Into the Wild is less biographical, more journalistic; it's a reconstruction of a boy on the hippy fringe who breaks all ties with his family and goes off into the Alaska wilderness to test his manhood, where he dies. It all sounds rather juvenile and melodramatic, and it is, but at the heart of juvenile melodrama there is a worthy core of aspiration that Krakauer deftly extracts.

More later, if and when I think of them. For now, I'm off to bed with a Nyquil.

Posted by Jane Galt at December 11, 2005 08:39 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links