bibliographing

Last week, Amateur Reader pretended to write “a proper book review” in which he noted, “Many conventional book reviews include some piece of pro forma negative criticism, to show that the reviewer is a serious person, I guess.” It just so happened that I’d been reading about this very idea elsewhere over the past few [...]

There are some books that I sort of feel have a best-before date, in reference to the age of the reader. E.g., The Catcher in the Rye. Most of the books I put in this mental category I have, in fact, not actually read: Brave New World, Catch 22. This could be a totally wrong [...]

This morning I woke up to some unexpected snow so I think that means it’s time for a snowed-in day with books. I have no problem with that, of course. I’m already immobilized after a decadent Sunday breakfast.
Yesterday I started reading The History of Now, which I should have done ages ago as it was [...]

Early on in The Queue, while Vadim (our focal character) and Lena (his first girlfriend) wait, buses arrive and unload a stream of people who head straight to the front of the line. Our part of the queue gets pretty irate, trying to figure out what is going on, hoping the police guarding the queue [...]

I’ve been flipping through Jonathan Franzen’s collection of essays, How To Be Alone, and I’m really enjoying them. I like Franzen a lot so that’s not a surprise. “The Reader in Exile” was the first one I checked out—yes, because the word “reader” is in the title; the second one I read was “Books in [...]

Everyone is in line. What are they waiting for? We don’t really know, but they love talking about it. Sally Laird, the translator of The Queue, tells us to look for the melody amid the conversations. You see, the whole book is a conversation, one as long and winding as the queue itself. There is [...]

Via Marginal Revolution, I read a very interesting post on Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche. The post is based on a paper by Daniel M. Fleder and Kartik Hosanagar that demonstrates, in part, that “some…recommender systems increase the experience of diversity for every individual in the sample and yet decrease the overall [...]

What does Yukio Mishima think patriotism is? Well, if you know anything about his history, you can probably guess.
Knowing that, I have to say, detracted from the reading experience. It’s clear from chapter one what will happen, and I had made a pretty good guess just from the title. Scene by scene, all I could [...]

Have you ever heard anything this cute?
Pirates and economics may not be sexy subjects for a book, but economists tend to see things and do things a bit differently. So it made sense for Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason University, to propose to his girlfriend in the preface of his forthcoming book, The [...]

A Month in the Country is so like a month in the country. Brief, warm, quiet, healing. Comfortable, but not quite what you expect. Someplace you want to go back to almost as soon as you leave, too.
It’s so slim I thought I would just post a brief review and that would be that. But [...]