BRIEFLY NOTED: Recommended Reading

We try pretty hard to review good books we think are worth reading. Sometimes we instead review bad books we would not recommend you read, but which we nevertheless have a lot to say about. But this is a post about a third kind of book: good books, books we heartily recommend, but which we don’t have a lot to say about — or, at least, not a whole book review’s worth of things.¹

Live shot of our house.

• Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol

There’s something disorienting about reading a brutal satire of a society that’s very different from your own. It’s like when you're reading St. Augustine, that most uncomfortably modern of the ancient authors, and you’re nodding along with him, and then suddenly he drops the cautionary tale of a friend who went to the gladiatorial games and “imbibed madness.” There's a lurch, your train of thought flies off the tracks, and you realize that the author is actually from a completely different universe.²

There are some people who come away from Dead Souls disappointed, but it’s because they went in expecting the wrong book. This is not the kind of Russian novel that ponderously examines the human condition, this is the other kind — the surreal, comedic romp through a grotesque and disordered wonderland. It’s laced with weird cultural details, like why the letter theta is obscene and why all bears are named “Misha.” But most of all it's laced with incredible, extended, disturbing Homeric metaphors like this:

Everywhere one looked black frock cloaks flitted and darted by, singly and in clusters, as flies dart over a white, gleaming loaf of refined sugar in the summer season on a sultry July day, as an aged housekeeper standing at an open window cleaves and divides the loaf into glittering, irregular lumps: all the children, having flocked together, are looking on, curiously watching the movements of her roughened hands as they lift up the maul, while the ethereal squadrons of flies, held up by the buoyant air, dart in boldly, as if they owned the whole place and, taking advantage of the crone's purblindness and of the sun that bothers her eyes, bestrew the delectable morsels, in some places singly, in others in thick clusters. Sated with the riches of summer, which spreads delectable repasts at every step even without such windfalls as this, they have flown in not at all in order to eat but merely to show themselves, to promenade to and fro over the mound of sugar, to rub either their hind- or forelegs against each other, or scratch with them under their gossamer wings, or, having stretched out their forelegs, to rub them over their heads, and then once more turn around and fly away, and once more come flying back with new harassing squadrons.³

As the novel drags on though, these weird, alien cultural details melt away, and the satire grows uncomfortably familiar. Gogol is like the anti-Tocqueville: he describes and mocks a society where the “little platoons” and the ties of solidarity they stand for have all dissolved. The result of this is not freedom, but a horrible stasis. Everybody thinks they are very clever and worldly, but they all get fleeced by the first true player character to show up in town. As our own society looks less and less like 19th century America and more and more like 19th century Russia, maybe Gogol can teach us to laugh at ourselves.

—John

---

• Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer

It was chattering away about Albion’s Seed that made me realize we owed you this post, because what makes it a fantastic book (and it is a fantastic book) is the sort of thing that cannot be comprehensively conveyed in a few thousand words. There are lots of great bits — I’m particularly fond of this one:

For years, this unhappy couple refused to speak to one another, communicating only through their slaves. Long silences were punctuated by outbursts of rage so wild and violent as to border upon madness. After one such tempest, Col. Custis surprised his lady by inviting her to go driving with him. They rode in sullen silence through the Virginia countryside, until suddenly the colonel turned his carriage out of the road, and drove straight into Chesapeake Bay.

“Where are you going, Mr. Custis?” the lasy asked, as the horses began to swim.

“To hell, Madam,” he replied.

“Drive on,” said she, “any place is better than Arlington.”

— but it’s really the sheer weight of detail, the extensive portrait of not one but four different cultures, that sells the book. Any review that wanted to really get it across would end up like Borges’s map.

Fischer tackles four different waves of English emigration to the New World — the Puritans who came from East Anglia to Massachusetts, the Cavaliers who came from southern England to the lowlands around the Chesapeake Bay, the Friends who came from the Midlands to the Delaware Valley, and the Borderlanders who came from northern Britain and Ireland to the Appalachian backcountry — with extensive discussions of every aspect of daily life. The main text quotes from a vast corpus of contemporary writing and is chock full of illustrative examples, while the notes offer all kinds of quantitative details if that’s the way you roll: I mean, who doesn’t want a comprehensive list of all the towns in the Massachusetts Bay Colony named after English villages through 1660, by county?

For each group, Fischer addresses everything from religion and dialect to vernacular architecture, cuisine, family structure and marriage customs, child-rearing and education, and on and on and on. It’s terribly difficult to really enter into the mindset of a foreign culture, let alone four of them, but by coming at it from so many different angles he illuminates the characteristic preoccupations of each society until you feel like you really get these people and can imagine what, say, a Borderer horror movie might look like.⁴

Some texts I’ll tackle only with a pen in hand (or an ebook highlighting finger at the ready), lest I miss some vital point I’ll want to revisit later. Albion’s Seed isn’t like that: it wants a nice cup of tea, half an hour of uninterrupted time to immerse yourself in another world, and a patient companion who will listen appreciatively when you come across a particularly good line.

— Jane

---

• Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory, by Brendan Fong and David Spivak

Category theory is easy, I’ve learned it dozens of times!

But seriously, this is a branch of mathematics that is famously tricky for many people. Some suggest that’s because of the sheer level of abstraction — other pure mathematicians dismissively refer to category theory as “abstract nonsense.” So I was all the more intrigued upon hearing that somebody was out there pitching a book on applied category theory. How could that even be? Isn't it a contradiction in terms?

One of my favorite axes to grind in math pedagogy is that textbook authors don’t give enough examples of the concepts they are discussing. This is a minor issue at the high-school level, but gets worse and worse the farther you go. Many excuses are given for it, none of them good. Some say that giving examples runs the risk of having students believe the examples are the concept (maybe when they’re five years old, but seriously? Just give another, contradictory, example!). Others say that the ability to learn without examples, or to invent your own examples, is an important skill to develop, and so they're just helping you. I think all of this is balderdash, so I was delighted to encounter this book teaching a very abstract sort of math, and teaching it using nothing but examples. And really, it's a triumph.

Another interesting experiment this book takes is in its difficulty curve. In most math textbooks, difficulty is a monotonic function of page number. Fong and Spivak deliberately shoot for a graph that looks like a sawtooth instead — each chapter starts easy and gets very hard by the end, but the start of the next chapter is easy again. There are so many ways this is good: perhaps the biggest is that it encourages rereading. My first time through, I only paid careful attention to the “core” material at the beginnings of the chapters, and skimmed for flavor the subtle and interesting bits at the end. My second time through I had a mental map of the book and of the field, and was able to focus on those of the really hard ideas which I found interesting. In my experience, this is a much more natural learning style that more closely fits how people actually operate.

—John

---

• The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch

I’m a broken record on the topic of genre literature: I love it, and it’s all so bad! But not this one. This one is great.

You could describe it as “Robert E. Howard does Ocean’s 11,” and okay, that’s not…wrong, exactly: there are conmen, and wizards, and a city of spires and canals glistening redly in the lowering sun. But the beautifully limned Fantasy Venice isn’t why it’s great, it’s just where.

This book is a roller-coaster ride that just. doesn’t. stop. There are no breaks, there are no lulls, there are no down moments you’re tempted to skim: the passages of evocative description that you might mistake for one are actually the click-click-click of your car cresting the top of yet another hill that is somehow, inexplicably, even bigger than the last. And the one after that is, yes, bigger still. Things start flying, then exploding, then delivering witty one-liners while running around on fire, then all their relatives show up and shoot each other and catch fire as well, then it turns out one of the relatives was actually Stalin in disguise, then Stalin tears off his face-mask and OMG IT’S YOUR MOTHER, then the real Stalin bursts through the door and shoots your mother, but actually the gun was loaded with blanks and she was in on it all along, then just when Stalin and your mom are going to collect the insurance money, your mom runs Stalin over with a truck, and as Stalin lies there bleeding out in the street the faintest smile flickers across his face...and the truck explodes.

And yet despite all this frantic action the pacing is consistently, utterly perfect in a way that’s nearly impossible to pull off — as you can tell because Lynch doesn’t manage it in either of the sequels. We Psmiths disagree about which one is worse, but neither comes close to approaching the sublimity of The Lies of Locke Lamora. (A long-promised fourth volume actually has a publication date, which is more than I can say for fellow laggards George Martin and Patrick Rothfuss.)

Anything I say about the actual plot would only spoil it for you, but I do have to revise my earlier claim that contemporary genre fiction has no room for sympathetic portrayal of old-fashioned virtues like duty and honor and hierarchy. It actually turns out that while we daren’t put them in their original, heroic home, we’ll still permit them to criminals! The people yearn for a king, but they’ll settle for a capo instead.

—Jane

---

• The Seventh Day, by Yu Hua

Few people appreciate the degree to which modern China is, properly speaking, a post-apocalyptic society. The twin ravages of war and communism almost totally obliterated a millennia-old civilization, and left in its place a physical, psychic, moral, spiritual, and environmental wasteland where a fundamentally different civilization has lately begun to grow back. Ghosts stalk this landscape: angry and hungry and lost. 

So it's no surprise that Yu Hua, one of the best authors in the contemporary Chinese literary scene, decided that the only way to write a national epic was as a ghost story. Not the ordinary sort of ghost story either, but the opposite kind: where gloomy shades wander through a surreal and shattered dreamscape, occasionally haunted by the living. The ghosts complain constantly: they complain about their nausea, they complain about being lost, they're confused and in pain and don't understand what's happening. Yu isn't subtle, and it isn't difficult to recognize here a portrait of his (living) countrymen. In a particularly nice MacIntyrean touch, the ghosts often struggle to remember the meanings of words. This is appropriate since in modern China words are often ghosts too, lingering on long after their referents have been dynamited away.

This is a depressing and disturbing book, but Yu leavens the darkness with a Gogol-like sprinkling of the absurd and the grotesque (the Allan Barr translation is occasionally somewhat plodding, but it does a good job capturing the weirdness of Yu's style). Yu has a real talent for finding black humor in the nightmares he constructs. There's also something quite Russian (and quite Gogol-like) about the attempt to tell the story of an entire people, and capture the spirit of a nation, via a close examination of strange events happening to a small group of average folks. The other tempting comparison is to Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille, which is also about gossiping ghosts (and which MacIntyre once called the only fictional work he'd ever read that was entirely devoid of teleology).

—John

---

• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, by Samin Nosrat

I only cook from here once in a blue moon, because I have n hungry children and these recipes tends towards the time-consuming (her “this is the pasta sauce I make when I am tired and lazy” is 45 minutes of active cooking, which is more than enough time for several Magnatile palaces to be built and then destroyed by a rampaging toddler), but everything I do cook is the better for having read it.⁵

I’ve written before about cooking without recipes, or at least using them for guidance and inspiration more than following them in lockstep. This is a key book for developing your ability to do just that. Once you can taste a dish and figure out what it needs, you’re well on your way to culinary freedom! (FYI: it usually needs salt.) So it helps to know how and why things work: What happens when you add vinegar to something? What is olive oil’s effect on texture, and how does it compare to butter?

There are plenty of other books and websites that do this, but it’s usually as a prelude to giving you The Right Recipe, comprehensively tested with SCIENCE! You know what I mean, right? The Serious Eats, America’s Test Kitchen, The Food Lab kind of thing, where they’ve tested seventeen different blends for meatloaf and concluded that what you really need is two packets of gelatin and half a teaspoon of marmite. And not that there’s anything wrong with that, I appreciate someone else putting in the time, but it’s not what Samin Nosrat is doing. She’s giving you the food science as background, as principles for improvisation rather than explanations of for the prescribed precision. And that you can use however you’re cooking, even when you’re blindly following a recipe; after all, it says “salt to taste” right there.

— Jane

---

• How Asia Works, by Joe Studwell

Friedrich List’s “The National System of Political Economy” contains the following lines:

It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him. In this lies the secret of the cosmopolitical doctrine of Adam Smith...

Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth.

If you've never heard of Friedrich List, you aren’t alone. He was until recently almost completely unknown in the Anglosphere. The library of the MIT economics department does not contain a single complete set of his major works. Who is he? Only the architect of Prussian industrialization: the man whose theories guided Germany from economic backwater to one of the richest and mightiest nations on earth. You may never have heard of him, but the bureaucrats and dictators who managed the most successful Asian economic transformations — Meiji Japan, Taiwan under the Kuomintang, and South Korea under General Park Chung-hee — were obsessed with List and studied him religiously. 

This book is the meticulously-researched story of what they did with his ideas. The central thesis is that what separates the successful Asian nations listed above from the failures (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines), is that the failures listened to well-meaning White people and their NGOs who preached free trade, free markets, and deregulation. The winners, on the other hand, smiled and nodded when the World Bank came a-calling, then did the exact opposite (or, given that they were all under American military occupation at various points, as close to the opposite as they could get away with). Contrarian doesn’t begin to describe it; it is difficult to imagine a book that is more offensive to our ruling class and to the wonkocracy than this one. I wouldn’t believe every word of it uncritically, but it’s a useful corrective to some widespread myths about how advanced economies really work.

See also: Byrne Hobart’s review here.

—John

---

• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

This chart is 90% of what you need from this book:

A road is how you get from one place to another: it creates value by transporting people as quickly and easily as possible between places. A street, on the other hand, is the framework for building a place: it creates value by being a site for people to build, maintain, and improve their human environment. But the awkward middle ground, the “stroad,” is too fast to provide an effective platform to build a real place and yet too slow to connect places efficiently. But America is full of them!

This book is partly an overview of why that is, why it’s bad, and what we should do about it. Marohn, a former practicing traffic engineer and the founder of the urban planning non-profit Strong Towns, coined the term “stroad” back in 2011, and he has a lot to say about them. In that sense, it’s the missing piece for my earlier discussion of American suburbia: the FHA model for the post-war automobile suburb makes a lot more sense if you assume people are simultaneously constructing miles upon miles of stroads. But even if you’re not interested in the history of urban planning (why would you not be interested in the history of urban planning?!), it’s also a spectacular case study in how expertise actually works in practice.

In theory, technical expertise should be a tool. Traffic engineers, for instance, have enormous manuals that detail how intersections should be build, or how sharply highways should curve, or how the roadbed should be angled so rainwater won’t pool, all of which is obviously vital information for a municipality constructing a thoroughfare.⁶ The problem is the other thing they have: the central, unexamined assumption that traffic ought to move at the highest possible speed. This is a value judgment, and when it’s not recognized as such it becomes a thumb on the scale of street design.

Yes, those technical manuals contain guidelines for a great deal that can be done to make high speeds safe for drivers — wide lanes, sweeping curves, broad recovery areas and clear zones — but each comes with real tradeoffs. (Not the least of which is that you can’t really participate in a place at 45 miles per hour, but there’s lots more.) And yet the interplay between traffic engineers and the elected officials who hire them to design our thoroughfares consistently putting those value decisions in the hands of technical experts who themselves often don’t recognize the value judgments embedded in their profession. They see themselves as simply offering guidance on how to achieve the thing that obviously everybody wants, while in fact the community’s priorities might be quite different…if they ever realized they could choose.

Many such cases!

— Jane

---

• Empires of the Silk Road, by Christopher Beckwith

Afrocentrism doesn’t much interest me, but the idea behind afrocentrism always has. That is: what hidden assumptions, agendas, and ideologies are smuggled into the foundation of our world-picture by our choices about which regions and periods of history are considered central and which peripheral? I’ve read a couple of attempts to tell the story of human history from a radically different point of view, and even fantasized about writing my own, but they always seem like they’re reaching to make a point and I can’t quite take them seriously. The truth is, some places just were more important to how things turned out, and other places less important, and attempts to “center” the less important places are always going to feel like a gimmick to me.

Well, they were until I read this awesome book. Christopher Beckwith is convinced that the Eurasian steppe is the axis upon which history has turned, and he has written an account of civilization where all events are evaluated by their effects on the inhabitants of Turkestan and Tibet, Scythia and the Hindu Kush, rather than on the “peripheral kingdoms” of, for instance, China and Rome. And would that be so wrong? For much of history the “barbarians” controlled the majority of the wealth and population on Earth. Seen that way, “centering” them seems natural. Beckwith rather cleverly sneaks this up on you though — it starts out straightforwardly as a history of steppe hordes, and only slowly reveals itself as a horde-centric world history written in a way that sometimes seems like a deliberate parody of conventional histories.

Beckwith is clearly a lunatic, but he’s one in the best sense, and he’s honestly quite convincing as to his central thesis. I distinctly rememeber rolling my eyes at his claim that Sinitic languages are a long-lost branch of proto-Indo-European, and thinking “who is this guy, anyway,” and then learning that the answer is “literally the most knowledgeable person on earth about Old Tibetan.” I had that experience a lot while reading this book. Roughly half of his most outrageous claims turned out on further inspection to be true. As for the other half, it’s always hard to tell whether he’s serious, or whether he's making fun of conventional historians (though I'm pretty sure the time he describes Aristotle as an obscure philosopher influenced by steppe wisdom, it’s the latter).

—John

---

• From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, by Jacques Barzun

This is a massive book, both in scope and in sheer concussive potential, and as idiosyncratic as might be expected from the magnum opus of a 93-year-old cultural historian. Wide-ranging, erudite, and elegiac, it aims to describe a “set of ideas and institutions not found earlier or elsewhere,” which “in spite of patchwork and conflict has pursued characteristic purposes…and now these purposes, carried out to their utmost possibility, are bringing about its demise.”

Decadence doesn’t mean #decline, quite; Barzun writes in his introduction:

All that is meant by Decadence is “falling off.” It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are the great historical forces.

But then he gives you an eight-hundred-page tour of the thing that’s ending, speckled with illustrative quotations, little notes about what “the book to read” on a given topic is, zooming in on particular events and figures and then out again to give snapshot of the Weltanschauung of each era. Woven throughout the tour are those “characteristic purposes,” the common threads that Barzun calls ᴛʜᴇᴍᴇs (always in small caps), many of which pop up earlier than you might expect; we tend to associate ᴘʀɪᴍɪᴛɪᴠɪsᴍ with Rousseau, but the powerful desire to shrug off the complications of civilization pops up as early as the Reformation.

There are nearly a dozen of these ᴛʜᴇᴍᴇs — ɪɴᴅɪᴠɪᴅᴜᴀʟɪsᴍ and sᴇᴄᴜʟᴀʀɪsᴍ play major roles — but two always jump out at me as particularly illuminating. The first is ᴀɴᴀʟʏsɪs, the breaking of a whole into parts as a means of understanding it, which we’ve written about explicitly several times as a distinctive feature of the modern West. The second, which I don’t think we’ve discussed much, is ᴇᴍᴀɴᴄɪᴘᴀᴛɪᴏɴ, the breaking of bonds and the lifting of restraints — which is importantly distinct from freedom. The characteristic obsession of the 19th and 20th century liberals was not the creation or maintenance of liberty as some sort of continuing condition but the act of liberation itself. Hence the eternal churn as we hunt for the new Current Thing.

Like all Barzun’s ᴛʜᴇᴍᴇs, once you see it you can’t unsee it and a great many other things begin to fall into place.

— Jane

1. Obviously there is also a fourth category, bad books we have nothing to say about, and over those we shall draw a merciful veil.

2. Although… between the UFC on TV, Donbass War footage on Twitter, and Active Self Protection videos on YouTube, maybe we’re closer to Rome than we used to be.

3. Gogol loves bugs, close to that metaphor there’s another, quieter one: “a quiet room with cockroaches peeping out like prunes from every corner.”

Or consider one of his footnotes: “A koramora is a great, long torpid mosquito; occasionally one may chance to fly into a room and stick somewhere on a wall all by itself. You can walk up to it calmly and seize it by one of its legs, to which its only reaction will be to arch itself, or to ‘buck,’ as the common folk put it.”

4. Reportedly Robert Eggers’s The VVitch is not just a horror flick about Puritans but the sort of horror flick Puritans would make, and this should be doable for other cultures too! (I wouldn’t actually know, because I’m a “read the Wikipedia plot summary until I get too creeped out” kind of person.)

5. Most recipes marketed as “quick dinners” require you to be tied to the stove for the twenty or thirty minutes right before you eat them, which is exactly the wrong time to be unavailable to a houseful of small children. The ideal way to cook when you have little people underfoot is maximally time-shifted: a pasta sauce you make in the morning and warm up at dinner, a casserole or braise you can assemble over the course of an interrupted hour and then stick in the oven, that kind of thing. That said, I do make Nosrat’s clam pasta a couple of times a year, because it’s delicious and it scales well — but only when there’s another set of hands around.

6. Or a private individual in anarchocapitalist paradise, I don’t judge.