Book Club

Argh. Been so busy of late, esp. at work, that I'm always so tired. And I've run out of things to say, or to be really really excited about. Ok. The tiredness is an excuse, for not reading much of late. So, these days, I'm not even a pseudo-intellectual lor, just a brainless boy with awkward silences, cannot even be smart-alecky.

Anyhow, today, a friend suggested setting up a book club. What's a book club? ermz. Without wikipedia-ing, I get the impression that it's something like a group of friends coming together, having read a particular book / article / works by a particular author / poem / anthology ..., to discuss their thoughts. Kinda like a lit class perhaps, only hopefully without a know-it-all teacher who goes on and on about poetic devices and postmodernist interpretations. An excuse to socialise maybe. But a good (and possibly pseudo-intellectual :p ) one. Some different to do in Singapore.

If you were to set up a book club today, suggest a couple of books (any book, regardless of whether you're read it or not) you would put forth / recommend. :)

Browsing Amazon, I've come out with the following five:

1) The Stolen Child: A Novel
by Keith Donohue

Inspired by the W.B. Yeats poem that tempts a child from home to the waters and the wild, The Stolen Child is a modern fairy tale narrated by the child Henry Day and his double.

On a summer night, Henry Day runs away from home and hides in a hollow tree. There he is taken by the changelings — an unaging tribe of wild children who live in darkness and in secret. They spirit him away, name him Aniday, and make him one of their own. Stuck forever as a child, Aniday grows in spirit, struggling to remember the life and family he left behind. He also seeks to understand and fit in this shadow land, as modern life encroaches upon both myth and nature.

In his place, the changelings leave a double, a boy who steals Henry's life in the world. This new Henry Day must adjust to a modern culture while hiding his true identity from the Day family. But he can't hide his extraordinary talent for the piano (a skill the true Henry never displayed), and his dazzling performances prompt his father to suspect that the son he has raised is an imposter. As he ages the new Henry Day becomes haunted by vague but persistent memories of life in another time and place, of a German piano teacher and his prodigy. Of a time when he, too, had been a stolen child. Both Henry and Aniday obsessively search for who they once were before they changed places in the world.

The Stolen Child is a classic tale of leaving childhood and the search for identity. With just the right mix of fantasy and realism, Keith Donohue has created a bedtime story for adults and a literary fable of remarkable depth and strange delights.

2) In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote

Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre--journalism written with the language and structure of literature--this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers. But Capote achieved more than that. He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction. The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise--the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks.

3) Knowledge and the Wealth Of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery
by David Warsh

In this shrewd piece of intellectual history, former Boston Globe columnist Warsh shows how two contradictory concepts of Adam Smith-the invisible hand and the division of labor (famously, at a pin factory)-took on lives of their own after their 1776 publication in The Wealth of Nations, and then finally converged in the work of late 20th century economist Paul Romer. In the first half of this book, Warsh gives an entertaining and precise history of economic thought from Smith forward, through the lens of what have come to be two of his key constructs. Warsh's treatment of difficult economic concepts like value is brief but clear and accurate, and he gives equal weight to personalities, institutions and broader social forces. In the second half of the book, Warsh advances the claim that in the 1970s and 80s, when Romer divided economics into people, ideas and things, instead of labor, capital and land, he touched off a revolution in the field, one that is still playing out in now-dominant "New Growth Theory" economics. Warsh does not focus narrowly on Romer's work, but describes the social and institutional framework of modern professional economics: how ideas percolate, how papers are published, how careers advance and how meetings and societies are organized. The book brings sophisticated ideas into a complex story without losing the thread, or the reader's interest.

4) Why Most Things Fail : Evolution, Extinction and Economics
by Paul Ormerod

Businesses collapse just as surely as people do, yet economics textbooks and financial reporters stubbornly concentrate on success rather than failure. Ormerod (Butterfly Economics) argues this outlook is fundamentally flawed; failure, he says, is "the distinguishing feature of corporate life," and he uses it to link economic models with models of biological evolution, which he presents as a string of extinctions rather than survival of the fittest. Despite this parallel, his focus is on economic theory and what he sees as its inadequate accounting of uncertainty (defined as the impossibility of knowing how policies or business strategies will work) and how it breeds failure. He writes about complex concepts such as power-law behavior, game theory and bounded rationality, but makes them accessible to the lay reader with lengthy but readable explanations that forsake jargon for contemporary cultural references. (Though people who are already familiar with the debates he brings up will doubtless get more out of the book) Yet for all his persuasive examples, the book never crystallizes into a whole, so while readers may find many parts provocative, they are likely to finish it still lacking a complete understanding of failure as Ormerod sees it.

5) The Economics of Innocent Fraud : Truth For Our Time
by John Kenneth Galbraith

Economics cultivates its own version of truth. Galbraith notes that no one is especially at fault - and what is at issue is simply a widespreadpreference to believe what is convenient. Hence the term “innocent fraud”. Most practitioners have simply been conditioned into a thought framework, without consciousness of how their views were shaped. This much is certainly echoed elsewhere in the economics literature, as in Joan Robinson's comment that economics is part science and part ideology, and in the economic philosophy literature, per medium of the writings of Schumacher, Etzioni, Sen and others who object that most economists don’t appreciate that alternative conceptions of the nature of humankind and of the acceptability of utilitarianism are available and that their theories would have to change if they acceded to them.

Galbraith objects that bland reference to “the market system” places a veil over the reality of corporate power. The market is subject to skilledand comprehensive management but this is not mentioned in most economics teaching. Thus, teaching new students of “the market system”, and of consumer sovereignty, is “a not wholly innocent fraud”.

P.S. Italics are drawn from publishers' notes, reviews and blurbs.