Category: books

First Day of Class 2011

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Yesterday was the first day of one of my Tsinghua classes. It has about 25 students. I asked each of them to say their favorite book in English. Several were mentioned twice: Pride and Prejudice (mentioned three times), Harry Potter, Catcher in the Rye, The Little Prince, and — this surprised me — The Secret. The last student to answer this question said her favorite book was Lolita. The class oohed. Last year a student said his favorite book was Ulysses. I said my favorite book was Cities and the Wealth of Nations. (A close second is Totto-Chan.)

I said the class would have three underlying principles: (a) Every student is different. (b) The best way to learn is to do. (c) Reading group. Two years ago, a Tsinghua engineering student started a reading group to read some famous Chinese book. He put a sign-up sheet in the library. The idea spread and now there are maybe ten reading groups, which meet weekly. It’s a alternative and successful educational system, they must be doing something right. To try to learn from their success, I am going to imitate their most obvious feature, which is a presentation about the week’s reading. For the coming week I asked for volunteers to give 5-minute presentations about the reading assignment. I said that if you gave a presentation, you wouldn’t have to do the regular homework assignment (commenting on the reading) for two weeks. Three students volunteered. After class, as I was leaving, one of the volunteers came up to me. She wanted to do the homework anyway, she said. She had volunteered to do a presentation “to exercise my bravery”.

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The Rules of the Tunnel by Ned Zeman

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I loved Ned Zeman’s new book The Rules of the Tunnel, which I read during a long plane flight. Not only does it combine three of my favorite subjects — high-end magazines, bipolar disorder, and the crappiness of modern psychiatry — but it’s very well-written and revealing. I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in a long time.

Zeman once wrote for Spy, as did I. Long ago, I met him at a Spy party. I suppose I could have gotten a free copy of his book but I bought it. I wanted something great to read on the plane.

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  • Edward Jay Epstein on Kindle publishing
  • review of The Beekeeper’s Lament, a book about the fragility of bees. “Colony Collapse Disorder [CCD] is a problem. But it isn’t the problem. Instead, it’s just a great big insult piled on top of an already rising injury rate. Saving the honeybee isn’t just about figuring out CCD. Bees were already in trouble before that came along.”
  • Vanity Fair provides a public service by providing full access to the final installment of Michael Lewis’s great series of Financial Disaster Travel Writing. Earlier installments were about Iceland, Ireland, and Greece. This installment is about Germany.

The Torchlight List by Jim Flynn

Seth Roberts8 Comments

In college and afterwards, I tried to educate myself by reading well-written stuff. At first, I went through back issues of The New Yorker in the Caltech library. Later I stuck with books. For example, I learned about molecular biology by reading The Eighth Day of Creation. The Torchlight List by Jim Flynn (discoverer of the Flynn Effect, the slow increase in IQ scores) has the same underlying philosophy: a good way to learn is to read books you enjoy.

The Torchlight List describes 200 books in pleasant narrative prose that Flynn both enjoyed and found educational. Here are the first three:

  1. The Story of Language by C. L. Barber
  2. The Greek World edited by H. Lloyd-Jones
  3. The Decipherment of Linear B by John Chadwick

Indeed, I read the Chadwick book and enjoyed it. I have yet to find a well-written book about language evolution (although I liked John McWorter’s lectures on the subject) so I look forward to the Barber book.

More people should write books like this; the underlying idea is very good. I found one important gap in Flynn’s categories of books (Science and Early History, American History, America Broods, The Human Condition 1, …): Books That Caused Discomfort (and are fun to read). There are not many such books. Robert Moses was intensely discomforted by Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. (A recent enjoyable TV series that caused discomfort was The Kennedys.) Lolita was discomforting, far more than Nabokov’s other books. First prize in this category goes to The Man Who Would be Queen by Michael Bailey.

 

 

The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie

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Ann Beattie, a great writer, has a new book out called The New Yorker Stories. I loved her early stories. Her first story in The New Yorker (1974) was “ A Platonic Relationship“. I still remember this:

When he did have a beer he would take one bottle from the case and put it in the refrigerator and wait for it to get cold, and then drink it. . . . One night Sam asked her if she would like a beer. . . . He went to his room and took out a bottle and put it in the refrigerator. “It will be cold in a while,” he said quietly.

Last night I put a Diet Coke in the freezer. It will be cold in a while, I thought, remembering this passage.

Alas, I haven’t liked her work over the last 20 years as much, although I am looking forward to reading Walks With Men, her latest novel.

Madame Bovary and Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Someone asked Lydia Davis: Why another translation of Madame Bovary? She replied:

In the case of a book that appeared more than 150 years ago, like Madame Bovary, and that is an important landmark in the history of the novel, there is room for plenty of different English versions. For example, 1) the first editions of the original text may have been faulty, and over the years one or more corrected editions have been published, so that the earliest English translations no longer match the most accurate original; 2) the earliest translators (as was the case with the Muirs rendering Kafka) may have felt they needed to inflict subtle or not so subtle alterations on the style and even the content of the original so as to make it more acceptable to the Anglophone audience; with the passing of time, we come to deem this something of a betrayal and ask for a more faithful version. 3) Earlier versions may simply not be as good in other respects as they could be—let another translator have a try.

This reminds me of my three-part answer to the question a journalist asked me: why it mattered that butter improved my arithmetic speed by 5%.

Just as I disliked my answer, I disliked Davis’s answer. It’s hypothetical (“may have been faulty”, “may have felt”, “may not be as good as they could be”). It’s flat and obvious (earlier versions may have room for improvement). It’s irrelevant (bad translation of Kafka does not justify new translation of Flaubert).

I had trouble figuring out a better answer to what I was asked, but I could instantly say what Davis should have written: The story of how she decided to do a new translation. (“I began to think about doing a new translation when . . . “) That would have been a lot more emotion-laden and not hypothetical, obvious, or irrelevant.

As soon as I thought what Davis should have said, I could see what I should have said. I should have answered the journalist’s question like this: Why does 5% matter? Let me tell you why I was so excited by this. . . .Â

Via Marginal Revolution.