Esquire’s 80 Books Every Man Should Read

October 26, 2014 kroyte Leave a comment

You can find the list here, along with its lame comments about each book. Here are my comments, probably equally lame and certainly less informed (these are books I haven’t read):

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky: I love Dostoevsky, but he writes big novels about people with lots of big names, and so I haven’t read them all, including this one.

The Known World, Edward P. Jones: Pulitzer Prize winner.

American Pastoral, Phillip Roth: Another Pulitzer Prize winner. I’ve tried Roth a few times and once past Portnoy and Goodbye Columbus and another early one, I could never get started. For instance, the baseball one, the Great American Novel, just bugged me and I gave up a quarter of the way through. My loss I’m sure.

Sport and a Pastime, James Salter: On my list.

A Sense of Where You Are, John McPhee: McPhee is always great, and there is lots I haven’t read.

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison: Embarrassing.

The Professional, W.C. Heinz: This one is a find for me. I’ve heard of it, but it wasn’t on my radar. Foreword by Elmore Leonard.

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates: Saw the movie and read Tao Lin’s novel Richard Yates.

The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara: This is a book I’ve always wanted to read.

All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren: High on my list of classic American novels to read that I haven’t.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami: Just haven’t gotten to Murakami.

Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian: Everybody loves this one, and all those that follow. I’m sure they are as good as advertised, but I’m not excited.

Plainsong, Kent Haruf: National Book Award winner. Looks awful. I’m almost sure that’s wrong.

Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin: I have two copies of this in the basement, but I think it’s the cover that makes me think badly of it. Or stop from starting it.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, John LaCarre’: I’m not a big fan of spy novels, but I should read this one.

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, George Saunders: I read Tenth of December recently and I don’t admire or like his ability to render different voices. They seem phony to me. Not badly rendered, but bubbling with condescension and too much cleverness. Writing for readers who like to read writing. Hmm, put that second writing in quotes.

War and Peace, Leo Tostoy: Sure, on my list.

Moby Dick, Herman Melville: This one, too.

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie: I waded into this once. Also tried the one that got him on the kill list. Too fancy for my taste, at least then.

Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges: I’ve read some of this book, but not much of it. I have been meaning to spend more time with it.

American Tabloid, James Ellroy: Another overwriter accorded lots of respect, at least partially because he can tell a crackling dark story.

What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer: I used to read all the books about the making of the president and fear and loathing on the campaign trail and the boys on the bus, but at some point the notion that I was getting something useful started to fade. I chalked that up to maturity, though I thoroughly enjoyed Walter Shapiro’s One Man Caravan, about the pre-race for the president, before things actually got started. Maybe Cramer’s book is worthwhile.

So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell: I’ve read many Maxwell stories, but not this.

The Great Bridge, David McCullough: There is lots of McCullough worth reading, I’m not sure why this one would be the best, but then I haven’t read it.

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry: Saw the miniseries.

Underworld, Don DeLillo: I read the excerpt that became the shorter book, Pafko at the Wall, and it truly is brilliant. There the novel sits on my wife’s bookshelf, beckoning. Someday, for sure, after Moby Dick.

Savages, Don Winslow: Sounds like fun. Missed the movie last year.

The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson: I don’t know anything about this book set in North Korea.

Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann: On the bookshelf, on deck.

Hmm, 29 of 80 is a batting average of .362 of books missed (or .638 of books read). Good to know what’s missing, but they don’t tell half the story. Read on.

Ideas, News, Tech

Krugman on Amazon: Wrong.

October 25, 2014 kroyte Leave a comment

Paul Krugman argues that Amazon has too much power and is abusing it, and that abuse hurts America and Americans. He’s referring to Amazon’s battle with Hachette, which has been written about almost everywhere since it came to light last summer.

Amazon is not working hard to sell most of Hachette’s physical books because it wants Hachette to change the terms by which it sells its ebooks to Amazon. Krugman argues that Amazon is a monopsonist, a player with enough market power to drive prices down, and that this is a bad thing.

Book authors, my wife included, have protested that Amazon is using their well being as a negotiating tool against Hachette, undermining the business model that pays the writers who create the books.

Consumers can’t buy books that aren’t available, and books that aren’t available at Amazon are harder to buy, but it seems to me hard to argue that Amazon is hurting consumers by making it harder to buy books that are available elsewhere. And while their fight may be hurting writers in the short run, Amazon certainly isn’t arguing for a future without authors and books.

Krugman says Amazon has too much power, but he can’t say lower prices hurt consumers, so he makes an odder argument: “Book sales depend crucially on buzz and word of mouth (which is why authors are often sent on grueling book tours); you buy a book because you’ve heard about it, because other people are reading it, because it’s a topic of conversation, because it’s made the best-seller list. And what Amazon possesses is the power to kill the buzz. It’s definitely possible, with some extra effort, to buy a book you’ve heard about even if Amazon doesn’t carry it — but if Amazon doesn’t carry that book, you’re much less likely to hear about it in the first place.”

Is that true? Certainly the Today show or any other media outlet isn’t going to not book an author with an interesting book out because of the Amazon Hachette dispute. And the reason publishers send authors on those grueling tours is to promote sales in actual book stores, where the authors read and sign their books. Amazon doesn’t have that relationship with readers.

What it does have is enormous market power, lower prices, and an ability to do an end run around the interests of publishers. And that’s what this dispute is about. Amazon would like to crush the publishers, who to its mind add little value to a process that could be made much more efficient. And it would like to do that now, while it has a dominant position in book sales, since Amazon knows that competition from Apple, Google and Microsoft (with Barnes and Noble) is going to inevitably lead to a collapse in digital book prices.

By getting there first, Amazon will keep those big wolves away from its chicken coop.

Krugman seems to think that the publishers need protection from Amazon, as if they weren’t themselves each part of giant conglomerates, each with its own massive power center. Oddly, he doesn’t really say what he thinks should happen.

What should happen is nothing. If Amazon wants to mess with its relationships with its customers, by not selling them the books they want, so be it. Customers will go elsewhere.

In the meantime, Amazon is arguing that ebooks should cost much less than printed books because the incremental costs of each copy is much lower for the ebook. Hachette is arguing that if the cost of an ebook goes much lower sales of printed books will decline. This is important because Hachette knows that once ebooks dominate sales, its role in the book production chain will be undermined.

The move to ebooks would seem to be inevitable, eventually, and so Hachette is trying to slow its own march to oblivion. While Amazon knows that once ebooks dominate sales, the ecosystem of readers and online sales will be the one thing that differentiates it from the competition.

Which is why the knives are out. Let them play.

UPDATE: I found this Matthew Yglesias story from Vox after I wrote the above. He more elegantly makes many of the same points, and others that are also important. His points about the ability of publishers to promote books and the nature of the book advance are dead on.

Data, History, Tech

A View of the Spreadsheet From the Early Days

October 25, 2014 kroyte Leave a comment

I started using a spreadsheet to calculate my fantasy league standings, maybe in 1988. The program was called VP-Planner, and the front end of it was a clone of Lotus 1-2-3, which cost $500 at the time. VP-Planner cost $35, which for a regular guy was plenty.

But the real power and appeal of VP-Planner was it’s ability to access databases, and import specific data into the spreadsheet without a lot of tedious cutting and pasting.

Each week I would download the baseball stats from a sports gambler service in Las Vegas, massage the format to get it set, and click RECALC (F9) on my keyboard. My IBM XT would whirr and purr, and I would go to lunch.

Sometimes, the calculations were complete when I came back, sometimes not.

My friend Steven Levy reprinted a story he wrote about spreadsheets for Harpers magazine this week at his new online mag, called Backchannel. It’s a fascinating look from a distant perch at the effect of the democratization of data and our ability to model systems quickly and fairly easily.

In the middle of the piece he writes: “The computer spreadsheet, like the transcontinental railroad, is more than a means to an end. The spreadsheet embodies, embraces, that end, and ultimately serves to reinforce it. As Marshall McLuhan observed, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” The spreadsheet is a tool, and it is also a world view — reality by the numbers. If the perceptions of those who play a large part in shaping our world are shaped by spreadsheets, it is important that all of us understand what this tool can and cannot do.”

I suspect data journalists like Nate Silver and Ezra Klein could not agree more.

Food, Ideas, Link

LINK: Should We Eat Octopus?

October 7, 2014 kroyte Leave a comment

Silvia Killingsworth, who is the managing editor of the New Yorker, does a great job describing the problem. Octopuses have some kind of intelligence, they decorate their lairs for instance and make octopus gardens, as Ringo pointed out.

Should that disqualify them from being eaten by humans? It is, as she probes and tells, a typically more difficult problem to solve than saying yes or no, but I’m struck by some obvious points she makes, and some she doesn’t.

The octopuses we eat in New York are not local. They are caught elsewhere and frozen. If we value the reduction of food miles, we shouldn’t be eating octopus in New York City, usually.

The intelligence of the animal probably doesn’t matter that much. Pigs may be smarter than octopuses, or are at least close (though their housekeeping talents are definitely less rigorous), and we eat them. A lot of them. Though maybe that’s because they’re farmed, and we let them lie in mud and shit (enjoying life) for their entire lives, just like they like it.

Octopus isn’t kosher either.

She also does a nice job of describing the horrors and contradictions of the live octopus eating scene in the deliriously magnificent Korean film, Old Boy. But she merely says that the Buddhist actor, Choi Min-sik, said that he said a prayer for each of the animals before biting their heads off. She doesn’t describe how much excitement came with his transgression, but this clip does:

I don’t eat much meat anymore, and I struggle with the why. In part it is practical. My daughter doesn’t eat meat, she identifies with the animals, and I eat dinner with her. She doesn’t object directly if meat is a dish, but preparing two different dinners is extra work. Not eating meat isn’t a problem at home.

But going out and not eating meat is to miss the art of many chef’s work. I once went vegetarian at Union Square Cafe and was blown away by how good it was, but I also sorely missed that piece of barely-cooked tuna they served that is one of the great dishes I’ve ever eaten. Brilliant vegetables I can and do make at home. Well prepared flesh is a treat.

But I’m thinking harder about these special occasions. We source locally, we pay a lot, we serve small portions, but in the end are we better off? I feel like I’m still making value decisions about the eatability of different forms of flesh (lamb versus octopus? shrimp versus cow?) and I’m very unsure that that is the right tack.

The reason I decided to write about this NYer piece was because I see in it an echo of ethics and morality ringing through history. There is a straight (and long) line from slave holding to deciding not to eat octopus. The trick is to track that line into the future. Which behaviors of ours are actually natural and which are rationalized abominations? The sands shift with our history, but doesn’t our understanding that fact compel us to look closely and not accept today’s easiest answers?

Ethics, of course, are a luxury afforded when we can afford civilization. But that’s good enough for me. When the grid goes down and we start running out of food, the situation will be different, and will offer different answers. Today I think it’s better to eat way less animal flesh. Better for our health, better for the planet, and maybe better for the animals. But if I should land in a real Greek restaurant with a real wood grill, the earthy burn curling through the air like a temptress, will I resist the tenderly and lengthily massaged and prepared grilled octopus?