Book List
Two atypical reads this time, plus a science fiction novel:
24. Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. I've been slowly working my way through this one on audiobook off and on for a couple of years. It's a quite dry survey of economics, written at a layman's level and told from a distinctly conservative slant. I finally started making headway in it while stuck in Los Angeles traffic a few weeks ago and was able to finish it. Despite it's dryness, it's actually pretty good about conveying some fairly complex subject matter understandably, such as comparative advantage and how international trade works. Of course, coming from such a free market perspective, it cogently points out cases where government meddling in free markets is counterproductive, and ways in which government's incentives are sometimes misaligned with the economy as a whole. But because of his bias, Sowell neglects to bring up obvious examples where individuals within a corporation, or a corporation as a whole, might have incentives which are similarly misaligned, and which markets don't fully check. He does concede that monopolies and environmental externalities are valid reasons for government regulation, but tries to minimize them. While my own biases are towards freer markets whenever possible and practicable, I'd much rather have seen Sowell try to grapple with his opponents' strongest arguments.
25. Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson.
This is the third and final volume of Wilson's Spin trilogy. The first volume is among the best science fiction novels I've ever read--up there with the Hyperion Cantos and Beggars in Spain--combining the sense of wonder of hard SF and the in-depth characterization and social worldbuilding of soft SF. The second volume, Axis was fine on its own merits, but a huge let-down from Spin. Vortex is somewhere in the middle -- not on my all-time best list, but probably the best science fiction novel I've read this year. Like Spin, it's got two narratives greatly separated by time, but unlike Spin they mostly follow different characters and are in different sub-genres. One story, about a Houston social worker who encounters a mentally disabled young man who may have seen too much, has very little speculative elements in it, despite being set in the aftermath of the Spin. The second acts as a sequel to Axis, showing Turk Findley's odyssey through the strange societies far-future humanity has created, and revealing the ultimate nature of the Hypotheticals who have been meddling in human affairs. Start with Spin, but this series is definitely worth reading.
26. The Campaigns of Alexander by Arrian. Arrian was a Greek aristocrat writing during the second century CE. As such, he's almost twice as far from Alexander the Great in time as we are from George Washington. Yet Arrian has an advantage that no modern historian has: he had read the histories written by eyewitnesses to Alexander's conquests, including that of Ptolemy, the general who later gained control of the Egyptian part of the Alexandrian empire, and which ruled Egypt until Cleopatra. Ptolemy's history, alas, did not survive to the modern day; it would have been in the Great Library of Alexandria, had it survived. (Don't get me started...)
Arrian's account alternates between dry and exciting. Arrian was a military man, as was Ptolemy, and so while there are some good anecdotes about Alexander as a person, most of this is a military history. Some of the battles are vivid--Alexander fought in the vanguard and that makes for great action scenes -- but others all sound the same, and it's easy to lose track of just which hill tribe he's fighting this week. In addition to the depictions of his military brilliance, it's clear just how good Alexander was at inspiring his troops and getting men to do what he wanted them to. Even in the most famous case of insubordination, when his men refused to go further into India, Alexander gets what he wants: he insists they go back by a different route than they came, which just happens to mean he gets to keep conquering people all the way home!
It wasn't exactly an easy read, but I'm glad I read it, and I regretted that he didn't keep going into the Successor Wars.
24. Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. I've been slowly working my way through this one on audiobook off and on for a couple of years. It's a quite dry survey of economics, written at a layman's level and told from a distinctly conservative slant. I finally started making headway in it while stuck in Los Angeles traffic a few weeks ago and was able to finish it. Despite it's dryness, it's actually pretty good about conveying some fairly complex subject matter understandably, such as comparative advantage and how international trade works. Of course, coming from such a free market perspective, it cogently points out cases where government meddling in free markets is counterproductive, and ways in which government's incentives are sometimes misaligned with the economy as a whole. But because of his bias, Sowell neglects to bring up obvious examples where individuals within a corporation, or a corporation as a whole, might have incentives which are similarly misaligned, and which markets don't fully check. He does concede that monopolies and environmental externalities are valid reasons for government regulation, but tries to minimize them. While my own biases are towards freer markets whenever possible and practicable, I'd much rather have seen Sowell try to grapple with his opponents' strongest arguments.
25. Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson.
This is the third and final volume of Wilson's Spin trilogy. The first volume is among the best science fiction novels I've ever read--up there with the Hyperion Cantos and Beggars in Spain--combining the sense of wonder of hard SF and the in-depth characterization and social worldbuilding of soft SF. The second volume, Axis was fine on its own merits, but a huge let-down from Spin. Vortex is somewhere in the middle -- not on my all-time best list, but probably the best science fiction novel I've read this year. Like Spin, it's got two narratives greatly separated by time, but unlike Spin they mostly follow different characters and are in different sub-genres. One story, about a Houston social worker who encounters a mentally disabled young man who may have seen too much, has very little speculative elements in it, despite being set in the aftermath of the Spin. The second acts as a sequel to Axis, showing Turk Findley's odyssey through the strange societies far-future humanity has created, and revealing the ultimate nature of the Hypotheticals who have been meddling in human affairs. Start with Spin, but this series is definitely worth reading.
26. The Campaigns of Alexander by Arrian. Arrian was a Greek aristocrat writing during the second century CE. As such, he's almost twice as far from Alexander the Great in time as we are from George Washington. Yet Arrian has an advantage that no modern historian has: he had read the histories written by eyewitnesses to Alexander's conquests, including that of Ptolemy, the general who later gained control of the Egyptian part of the Alexandrian empire, and which ruled Egypt until Cleopatra. Ptolemy's history, alas, did not survive to the modern day; it would have been in the Great Library of Alexandria, had it survived. (Don't get me started...)
Arrian's account alternates between dry and exciting. Arrian was a military man, as was Ptolemy, and so while there are some good anecdotes about Alexander as a person, most of this is a military history. Some of the battles are vivid--Alexander fought in the vanguard and that makes for great action scenes -- but others all sound the same, and it's easy to lose track of just which hill tribe he's fighting this week. In addition to the depictions of his military brilliance, it's clear just how good Alexander was at inspiring his troops and getting men to do what he wanted them to. Even in the most famous case of insubordination, when his men refused to go further into India, Alexander gets what he wants: he insists they go back by a different route than they came, which just happens to mean he gets to keep conquering people all the way home!
It wasn't exactly an easy read, but I'm glad I read it, and I regretted that he didn't keep going into the Successor Wars.