What I’ve been reading
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 […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION .
Fredrik deBoer's book, All in Your Head, delves into the topics of illness as identity and trauma as fashion. The author provides clear and stark explanations; however, the book falls short when discussing autism. The New York Times review praises the mental illness sections but laments the weaker efforts in the autism chapter. Colm Toibin's Homage to Barcelona, set in the early 1990s, ranks among the best "single city" books, alongside Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.
The book also highlights the wealth of Catalonia back in the 1300s. Missouri Williams' The Vivisectors combines elements of J.G. Ballard, Shirley Jackson, Gothic, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland. The puzzles in the book kept me engaged, though opinions on it are mixed. Michael Rey and Oriana Zill de Granados' The Havana Syndrome suggests Russia as the culprit behind pulsed microwave weapons, a theory supported by a good review.
M. John Harrison's The End of Everything, a Booker Short List contender, shares similarities with J.G. Ballard's work, involving alien arrival through an otherworldly dimension and crumbling infrastructure. Mathias Énard's Perfecting the Shot follows a killer assassin within the protagonist's mind. The 280-page book is concise and avoids exhausting the reader with tedium.
Lastly, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey's Equality of Permission provides much-needed perspectives on industrial food and its potential improvements.
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