Good Books

Bloggers have become the favorite whipping boys of everyone who stands for Culture The Way It Was Meant to Be. In his year-end reflections the DMN's book critic Jerome Weeks lobbed such an ignorant attack that I was actually surprised: "No wonder blogospheroids still crow over the book's imminent demise — as if in revenge for ever having to read one."

Weeks is a grouchy guy--I'd be grouchy too if I had to be a book critic in Dallas--but this is the silliest attack on bloggers yet. Bloggers love books. Bloggers promote books. Bloggers write books. The InstaKing of bloggers is about to publish a book, An Army of Davids, that wouldn't even exist without blogging. Nope, blogging is Revenge of the Nerds, and nerds read books. They just may not read the same books that Jerome Weeks does.

As you may have noticed, I haven't been blogging much lately. But I have read a bunch of interesting books, all worth sharing. Since the first of the year, I've read:

The Elusive Search for Growth by William Easterly, which combines a lucid intellectual history of the economics of growth with a sometimes heart-breaking account of how development policy has failed again and again, mostly by ignoring basic economic principles. Bono really needs to read it.

An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. My next book project will likely be an exploration of heterogeneity, working title Nobody's Normal, and Sacks tells stories of people on the extremes of human difference--to the point that they sometimes seem, even to themselves, like alien intelligences (hence the title of his book). He deserves his reputation as both a great writer and a humane scientist-physician.

Mindsight by Colin McGinn. I picked up McGinn's newer book The Power of Movies in December and, after reading it, realized that to understand glamour as an imaginative process, I need to delve a bit into the nature of imagination. I'm less interested than McGinn in parsing the differences between percepts and images, but I find his writing provocative and accessible. Plus he provides good bibliographies. I'm now rereading The Power of Movies.

Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 10, 2006