by Ted on September 12, 2003
It’s long been one of my theories that the user ratings on Amazon are useless as guides to my reading habits. It seems like virtually every non-political book that I look up has a rating between 4 and 5 (out of 5). It’s not hard to understand how this would happen; I expect that most people don’t take the time to read and review a book unless they enjoy it. Self-selection would weed out the most negative reviewers before they pick up a book. (I probably wouldn’t enjoy Those Who Trespass, but I’ll never know because I’m not going to read it.) Furthermore, people who love a book are probably more likely to choose to review it than people who were indifferent.
I’ve taken a completely unscientific look at Amazon ratings. I looked at six categories: General nonfiction, general fiction, history, politics, classics, and “bad” books (evil, discredited, or worthless books, not trashy fiction). Most of the books in general nonfiction, general fiction, history and classics are books that I’ve read. (I’m interested in whether Amazon ratings are useful for me, you see.) I’ve read a few of the politics books, and none of the “bad” books. (A list of books and their ratings are here.) I know that this isn’t a randomized sample and that it’s biased around my tastes. I have no intention of defending this study’s methodology, except to say that I didn’t pick books in an effort to get results I wanted. It’s just for fun.
Here’s what I found:
| Category |
Average rating |
% of books rated 4-5 out of 5 |
| General nonfiction |
4.5 |
95% |
| General fiction |
4.2 |
94% |
| History |
4.1 |
85% |
| Politics |
3.6 |
35% |
| Classics |
4.3 |
100% |
| Bad books |
3.8 |
57% |
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by Henry Farrell on September 10, 2003
Like “Jacob Levy”:http://volokh.com/2003_09_07_volokh_archive.html#106312814305620404 I’m waiting on the release of Neal Stephenson’s _Quicksilver_: and the early signs are good. Dave Langford, who’s part way through reading it for Amazon UK “pronounces”:http://www.ansible.demon.co.uk/cc/cc143.html it to be a “joy to read, with a genuinely fresh slant on 17th/18th century history (or ahistory).” And Jacob and I are not alone – I confidently predict that September 23 (the book’s release date) is going to see prolonged blog-silences from everyone from Glenn Reynolds to Atrios.
But I’m digressing … I wanted to post about another book that I’m nearly as excited about, which will be released at around the same time. JG Ballard’s new novel, “Millennium People”:http://associatesshop.filzhut.de/shop/product.php?ID=7e33e52a9f201e22872aa9c926e79e21&Mode=&CategoryID=&Asin=&ASIN=000225848X, is about to come out. Ballard isn’t as popular in the blogosphere as Stephenson – but he should be; he’s a writer of genius. Which isn’t to say that he’s without flaws. He’s notoriously obsessive; ever since he developed his own voice, he’s written the same novel over and over. His language is (deliberately) flat, and his imagery repetitive – abandoned swimming pools; empty wastes of sand; rusting launch platforms. But there’s something admirable about his singlemindedness; something important.
For my money, John Gray has the most concise “take”:http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/199905100041.htm on why Ballard’s important (indeed, I think that this short review-article is likely the best thing that Gray has ever written). Gray’s essay highlights the main theme of Ballard’s work – “life as it is lived when the fictions that sustain society have broken down.” If the Revolution was immanent in every moment for Walter Benjamin, the Catastrophe is immanent in every moment for Ballard. Polite society is always wobbling on the verge of savagery. Gray also mentions how funny Ballard is – something that a lot of people miss (his humour, like Beckett’s is black and so understated as to be very nearly obscured in the shadows).
Two of Ballard’s recent novels are of particular interest to social scientists. If I ever teach my dream course on muddy thinking in social science, _Cocaine Nights_ will be the first required reading in the section on social capital. It presents in satiric form the disturbing thesis that the vibrant civic activism prized by Putnam, Fukuyama, Etzioni and other neo-communitarians is best produced through systematic clandestine violence. For Ballard, it’s not only impossible to have Salem without the witchburning; it’s the witchburning that brings Salem together as a community. _Super-Cannes_ is of more interest to sociologists, geographers, and urban planners. It’s all about the return of the repressed in a very thinly disguised version of “Sophia-Antipolis”:http://www.sophia-antipolis.net/. The orderly planned community of Super-Cannes doesn’t so much break down into chaos, as it perpetuates it – again, community and violence reproduce each other.
At the end of “Science as a Vocation”:http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Weber/scivoc.html, Weber famously claims that the age of prophecy, when an inspiration might sweep ‘through the great communities like a firebrand’ is over; we live in an age of disenchantment. Ballard’s work is a direct riposte to Weber; it claims that the New Millennium is most likely to have its start amidst the bored and deracinated upper middle classes and suburbanites, the willing victims of Weber’s ‘rationalization.’ A rough beast is slouching towards Shepperton to be born …
by Kieran Healy on September 8, 2003
Dan Drezner quotes Clive James to good effect on snarky literary reviews. James is the author of the poem “The Book of my Enemy has been Remaindered,” which captures the quintessence of literary schadenfreude that we get a whiff of when reading snarky reviews:
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book —
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.
by Henry Farrell on September 1, 2003
From one to the next … having just gotten back from the annual American Political Science Association meeting, I attended one day of the science fiction Worldcon in Toronto, stopping only to go listen to my “cousin’s band”:http://www.yaleherald.com/article.php?Article=2157, who were playing in a small club here last night. Caught up with “Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/ and “Cory Doctorow”:http://www.boingboing.net/, as well as “China Mieville”:http://www.panmacmillan.com/Features/China/index.htm, who apparently sometimes reads CT. Indeed, I’ve met people who know the blog at both conferences; it’s a little unnerving for me to find out that we actually have readers, and to meet them in a non blogging context.
Early, banal impressions of the differences and similarities between the two conferences …
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by Kieran Healy on August 4, 2003
by Henry Farrell on August 1, 2003
There aren’t that many philosophical romances published in English any more; the genre seems to have fallen into a quiet desuetude. Me, I blame Umberto Eco. His splendid _The Name of the Rose_ gave us high expectations, which were to be disappointed by the arid academic score-settling of _Foucault’s Pendulum_, and then forcibly dashed into the gutter by the otiose _Island of the Day Before_. At a stretch I suppose, you can count popularizations like _Sophie’s World_, which are of arguable philosophical merit and inarguable novelistic triteness, but I don’t really see why you’d want to. However, if, like me, you enjoy books of this sort, I’ve got three recommendations which I suspect many CT readers will never have come across.
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by Henry Farrell on July 31, 2003
I settled down last night to re-read _Firebreak_, Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake’s) last-but-one Parker novel, which begins with the sentence.
bq. When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.
This induced a feeling of complete comfort in me, which is rather odd when you think about it. Why is it that so many people find it relaxing to read about murder and violent crime?
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by Chris Bertram on July 29, 2003
I’ve been interested in buildings, architecture and cities for about ten years now. Truth be told, probably for much longer than that: but I’ve been conscious of it as an interest for that time. It is an enormously interesting and absorbing subject in more ways than are worth enumerating here. But one of the aspects that has interested me as a philosopher and borderline social scientist is the way in which buildings and cities are records of human reason in the face of all kinds of practical problems (social, topographical, economic, weather-related, material related) at the same time as being items of great aesthetic importance. Form, style, design are all products of human trial and error and what emerges is often striking and beautiful. Sometimes the product of an individual’s vision; at others the result of the accumulated strivings of numbers of people working without any general conception. (Often, for cities at least, the best results have come when humans have worked blind; and the worst when some architect of other has been given free rein.)
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by Chris Bertram on July 25, 2003
I posted a pointed to to a moderately pro-GM report the other day. But in the comments section I got pretty revolted by the suggestion that one day we might synthesize all our food. As I said there, I want my potatoes from the earth and my apples from a tree. I don’t think there’s anything especially “green” about feeling this and I’m somewhat embarassed, as someone who is supposed to live by good arguments, by how hard I find it to get beyond the raw data of feeling, intuition and emotion when I try to think about what is of value.
The best I can do, is, I think to notice how much of that is of value in human life has to do with an engagement with the natural world and a recognition of the uniqueness and (sorry about this word) the ‘otherness’ of the world beyond the human. I’m not just thinking about raw untamed nature here (Lear on the heath) but also about the way in which an artist has to work with the natural properties of pigments, a gardener has to work with plants and their distinctive characteristics, and a cook has to work with ingredients. Architects too have to work with materials, with stone, wood and so on.
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by Chris Bertram on July 24, 2003
by Chris Bertram on July 20, 2003
Having blogged about Alasdair Gray on Junius and declared my intention to read Lanark, of course I had to do so (especially given Henry’s encouragement). It is both an extraordinary and a really frustrating and perplexing work, combining as it does both the quasi-autobiographical story of Duncan Thaw and a Kafkaesque allegory about his double, Lanark. The Thaw parts (the middle of the book) I thought quite wonderful in their description of childhood and early youth both in Glasgow and as a wartime evacuee. The allegorical sections worked less well (sometimes the socialist didacticism is just too heavy-handed). The general effect is something like a random wander through a large gothic mansion: sometimes you find youself in a room full of interesting objects but the next moment at the end of a bare subterranean corridor. Recommended – but don’t expect an easy time.
by Brian on July 12, 2003
Andy Egan at Philosophy from the 617 responds to some of the debate Henry’s Harry Potter post produced, and in doing so brings up an interesting point about how we judge fiction. Lots of people say that in fiction, especially visual fiction but also in written works, the author should show the audience what happens, not tell them what happens. But what exactly does this rule mean?
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by Maria on July 11, 2003
The more things change, the more they stay the same. On the metro this morning I got to the passage in The Wings of the Dove where James beautifully describes why Kate Croy, “a young person who wasn’t really young, who didn’t pretend to be a sheltered flower” readily allows Merton Densher to call on her;
“…she was just the contemporary London female, highly modern, inevitably battered, honourably free.”
I revere James’ two great heroines, Kate Croy and Isabel Archer, and wish I was like them; admirably cool without being coy, analytical but not truly manipulative, reserved and self-reliant yet possessing great depths of passion. But I’m afraid Bridget Jones is a much more accurate self-reflection; gossipy, hapless and profoundly trivial! And BJ II (the Edge of Reason) follows my favourite Jane Austen, Persuasion, which shows that even spinsters pushing thirty can sometimes be nudged off the shelf…
by Henry Farrell on July 8, 2003
A.S. Byatt is “splendidly caustic”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/07/opinion/07BYAT.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position= in the NYT about the success of _Harry Potter_. It’s rather an interesting piece. Byatt rips into the Potter phenomenon, which she sees as part of a dumbing-down of fiction.
bq. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.
But she does so without dismissing either good popular culture or children’s literature. The problem with _Harry Potter_, as she sees it, is that it’s too comfortable. It’s unoriginal, “a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature.” And it has no mystery about it – the Potter books are remarkably prosaic for all their emphasis on magic. In Byatt’s view, the books don’t have any counterbalancing concern with the serious things of life. Byatt contrasts Rowling with “children’s authors”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000163.html like Ursula Le Guin, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, who convey a real sense of mystery and danger in their books. Magic should bite.
Now Byatt is going a bit far – comfort books aren’t necessarily bad, even if they don’t have a scintilla of seriousness. First witnesses for the defence are the wonderfully scruffy _Molesworth_ public-school comedies (for a Molesworth-Hogwarts collision, read the wicked parody “here”:http://www.alice.dryden.co.uk/ho_for_hoggwarts.htm). And silly adult books can be good too; Wodehouse’s _Jeeves and Wooster_ stories are utterly frivolous, but they’re undeniably works of genius.
Still, Byatt puts her finger on something. _Harry Potter_ has been so successful because it feeds into two sets of fantasies. It gratifies children, who dream of being popular, good at sports, and possessed of spiffy magic powers. It gratifies adults, who fantasize about the uncomplicated joys of childhood. It has very little to say about the awkward in-between stages in which children become teenagers and then adults. Talking about messy and complex stuff like this would break the spell. This is why _Harry Potter_ doesn’t have the sense of mystery that Byatt is looking for. Magic is dangerous and exciting for the young adults in Garner and Cooper’s books precisely because it’s tied up with their burgeoning sexuality. Here be dragons. If Byatt’s right, the Potter series is likely to become increasingly awkward and dissatisfying as the protagonist moves further into his teenage years. Rowling won’t be able to pull off the balancing act for very much longer without looking silly.
Update: interested parties, pro and con, should read Ruth Feingold’s bit in the comments section to this post, as well as John Holbo’s “response”:http://homepage.mac.com/jholbo/homepage/pages/blog/blog22.html#9