近期阅读书单与内容分享

1. Fredrik deBoer, All in Your Head: Illness as Identity, Trauma as Fashion, and the Desire to be Disordered. A good book, I am happy to see positions laid out so clearly and starkly. Is this a radical view, or the mainstream view these days? Excerpt: “For all of Szasz’s rhetorical flair and provocation, he never offered a plausible account of how a society should treat someone in the throes of severe psychosis, someone who is experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, operating under intense paranoia, unable to care for themselves, and potentially at risk to themselves or others.” Here is a good NYT review. The book is best on mental illness, worst on autism, as the author tries to apply the same hammer all too quickly. 2. Colm Toibin, Homage to Barcelona. Dates from the early 1990s, but stilll one of the best “single city” books I have read, with Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found being the defining winner of this genre. The book also has aged very well, with the excesses of tourism being added as a local concern. A separate point (not mainly at the book, though the book hints at it) is that I had not realized how much Catalonia was one of the very wealthiest parts of Europe circa 1300. 3. Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors. In the direction of J.G. Ballard and Shirley Jackson, with some Gothic, Hesse, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland tossed in. There is a weird “The University” in a strange city, and the puzzles multiply. I found it compelling (good review here) though other reviews are mixed. It definitely held my attention. 4. Michael Rey and Oriana Zill de Granados, The Havana Syndrome: Secret Weapons, A Government Cover-Up, and the Greatest Spy Mystery of Our Time. It does seem it is true, it was Russia, and likely it was pulsed microwave weapons. 5. M. John Harrison, The End of Everything. On the Booker Short List, this broadly resembles science fiction but (again) in the J.G. Ballard direction. Something has gone wrong in England, aliens of some sort have arrived through what is possibly another dimension, and the infrastructure is starting to crumble…and yet the story remains in the realm of the metaphysical, rather than devolving into science fiction proper. 6. Mathias Énard, Perfecting the Shot. Inside the mind of a killer assassin, short enough to work and not exhaust the reader with tedium. And there is Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg, Feed the People! Why Industrial Food is Good and How to Make it Even Better. The book expresses some much-needed sentiments. Do not forget Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Equality of Permission: The Politics of Feasible Liberalism. Fabio Rojas and David de La Torre, Two Visions of the Art World: Competition, Community, and Creative Work, provide a revisionist, anti-Bourdieu account of the art world, stressing its cooperation and community-building as a “dual layer.” The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.