The 75 books Esquire thinks you should read

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In honour of their 75th anniversary, Esquire has presented a list of “75 books every man should read.” They admit the list is “incomplete and utterly biased”, but they also claim that the list comprises “the greatest works of literature ever published.” That’s silly. Their list simply isn’t pretentious enough, or wide enough in scope, to make that claim. Rather, this is a list of 75 books pretty much guaranteed not to bore you.

The inclusion of Flannery O’Connor is incredibly strange. Not that the book isn’t worthy, but she’s the only woman on this list, so either Esquire thinks that O’Connor’s short fiction is the best stuff ever written by a women for men, or they didn’t realise that “Flannery” was a chick. There are some great books by women that would have fit in perfectly with the tone of this list (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, White Teeth, Play It As It Lays, etc.) and they should have been included to make O’Connor stand out a bit less.

The thing that really annoys me about the list though is that Esquire insists on presenting only one book per page on their website, making it a chore to get through, and making it impossible to scan the list quickly. So, as a service to you, I’ve compiled the entire list below. There are a couple books here that I’m not familiar with at all (A Sport and a Pastime, Winter’s Bone), but their inclusion is high enough praise that I’m really looking forward to reading them. Thanks, Esquire.

  • What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver
  • Collected Stories of John Cheever
  • Deliverance, by James Dickey
  • The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
  • Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
  • The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Known World, by Edward P. Jones
  • The Good War, by Studs Terkel
  • American Pastoral, by Philip Roth
  • A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
  • The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
  • A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter
  • The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
  • Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis
  • A Sense of Where You Are, by John McPhee
  • Hell’s Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson
  • Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
  • Dubliners, by James Joyce
  • Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
  • The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
  • Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone
  • Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell
  • Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison
  • Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry
  • The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
  • The Professional, by W.C. Heinz
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
  • Dispatches, by Michael Herr
  • Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
  • Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates
  • As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
  • The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
  • Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
  • All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
  • Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
  • A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley
  • Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
  • Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brian
  • Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
  • A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
  • Affliction, by Russell Banks
  • This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff
  • Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin
  • The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
  • Women, by Charles Bukowski
  • Going Native, by Stephen Wright
  • Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
  • The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John LeCarré
  • The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders
  • War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
  • The Shining, by Stephen King
  • Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
  • Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
  • Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
  • Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
  • The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
  • The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
  • American Tabloid, by James Ellroy
  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley
  • What It Takes, by Richard Ben Cramer
  • The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett
  • The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
  • So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell
  • Native Son, by Richard Wright
  • Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans
  • Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
  • The Great Bridge, by David McCullough
  • The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
  • Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
  • Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
  • Underworld, by Don DeLillo
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
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Keeping America’s Shitty Jobs at Home

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One thing that disappoints me about every politician I like is their unswerving devotion to populist trade policies. Here’s that I want in a politician:

  1. Someone who understands that free trade helps everyone, rich and poor alike
  2. Someone who understands that it is alright for jobs to go whereever labour is cheapest
  3. Someone who also believes that we should also have terrific social programs at home and a first-rate education for everyone
  4. Someone who doesn’t think that their morals or family values are superior to anyone else’s

I guess you could say, I’m looking for someone who combines all the best aspects of socialism, libertarianism and capitalism all in one package. Is this too much to ask? In the meantime, Go Obama.


Obama Promises To Stop America’s Shitty Jobs From Going Overseas

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Lively Links for Mon., Sept. 22

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Calling out the Canadian environmentalists

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Robert Silver and Tim Powers have a blog that has been running on the Globe & Mail’s website during the Canadian federal election. Each one of them is a stout partisan: Silver a Liberal, and Powers a Conservative. I’d love to be able to call what is happening on the blog a “debate,” but for a debate to occur, both parties need to be able to come to some basic agreement on the topic at hand. For the most part, this hasn’t happened on the Silver-Powers blog, so the conversation has been dominated by a lot of sniping at one another. 

Yesterday, however, Silver posted one of the most provocative and interesting articles I’ve read by anyone this election cycle. He correctly points out that Stephane Dion’s major policy proposal this election, the Green Shift, is exactly the sort of thing that environmentalists have been demanding for the last 25 years. Finally, we have an election in which serious environmental policy should be the centre of discussion, and yet Canadian environmentalists have dropped the ball in terms of speaking up about the policy. 

Silver writes:

So today the enviros have the election they have been waiting for, they have the platform they have been lobbying for and they have a leader who believes in it to his core.

And yet, from the enviros, silence. It hurts ones ears to listen to the silence that has emanated from the environmental groups since the Green Shift was released, never mind during this campaign.

Oh sure, we heard yesterday – for the first time this campaign – from one who told us “it’s time for a serious debate.” Time for a debate? Well isn’t that nice. I love a good debate…where, when, what’s the resolution and more importantly what the hell are you thinking?

Without writing a treatise on lobbying, let me put it fairly bluntly: When you spend 25 years lobbying for something, a political party offers it up to you – not in part, in full – and you just don’t show up, you are screwed.

If, when you do decide to show up, about three months late to the party, you say it’s to start a “debate” and say there are lots of options available – as if there are three equal sides and a healthy exchange of ideas will work it all out – what do you think happens the next time you ask something of a political party?

You are ignored, is the answer. You are irrelevant. You have shown that you are toothless, all bark no bite – insert your hackneyed expression here but they all add up to irrelevance. Or worse, you are the new wedge that your opponents know they can set opposing political parties up on.

Full disclosure: Silver is an old friend of mine, and though we do not share the same politics, I think that a Pigovian tax scheme such as the Green Shift is an absolute no-brainer. It is exactly the type of fundamental shift that is needed to really address the costs that unchecked carbon emissions place on society as a whole. Nearly every serious environmentalist and economist I have read testify to the wisdom and necessity of a carbon tax.  

Canadian environmentalists, where are you? Are you going to let Stephen Harper’s obfuscations win the day? I respect Jack Layton immensely. He’s my local MP, but I think he’s spouting pure populism on the issue of carbon taxes because it looks like an easy way to win votes. I understand his motives, but I hope that if by some miracle, the NDP and Liberals win enough seats to hold power in a minority government, that they’ll be able to come together on a sensible carbon tax.

Obama meets Bartlet

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Josiah Bartlet

I love Aaron Sorkin. I’m a sucker for everything he does. My friends and I quote from The American President freely and at length. I think The West Wing is the greatest television show that’s ever been a television show. Hell, I just bought Studio 60 on DVD.

So, imagine my delight when I learned that Maureen Dowd asked Sorkin to write up a hypothetical meeting between Barack Obama and Jed Bartlet.

This is how it starts:

BARACK OBAMA knocks on the front door of a 300-year-old New Hampshire farmhouse while his Secret Service detail waits in the driveway. The door opens and OBAMA is standing face to face with former President JED BARTLET.

BARTLET Senator.

OBAMA Mr. President.

BARTLET You seem startled.

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET Come on in.

Visit Dowd’s page at the New York Times for the rest. It’s well worth the read. (Thanks for the email on this, Shuman!)

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Lively Links for Sun., Sept. 21

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The Psychology of Comfortable Air Travel

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The Singapore Airlines Suites

Robert N. Charette at IEEE Spectrum has a terrific interview with James Boyd, Singapore Airlines’ vice president of public relations for the Americas, about the thinking and psychology that goes into the design of Singapore Airlines’ customer experience.

Below are some of the highlights.

On the In-flight entertainment system:

In-flight entertainment is not just about providing you with music and movies; it also fits into the psychology of how we create a satisfied passenger. This is a business where consumers who are used to having a tremendous amount of control in their lives have to give up most of that sense of control.

Airlines tell you when you have to come to the airport, when you can board, when the aircraft is going to leave, how long it’s going to be aloft, and when you can get out of your seat, and that creates an enormous amount of stress for passengers. From a psychological perspective, we use the IFE system as a means of providing almost the illusion of control for the passenger.

If you can start, stop, pause, and rewind from a broad slate of options, it gives you something very specific to do. More important than that, it gives you a way to exercise control over your environment. We find that that is a really critical tool for helping to create a more satisfied passenger.

On the sommelier service:

The primary benefit of the wine program and the sommelier training our cabin crew go through is in creating a credible point of interaction between the passengers and the crew. You can have a discussion about the wine, we can set up a little impromptu tasting for you, or our cabin crew can speak intelligently from an educated perspective about what it is that they’re pouring and why this might be a better selection for the meal you selected from the menu.

So those few moments of credible, appropriate interaction between the cabin crew and the passenger are basically built around the “prop” of wine. Obviously, it’s important that we serve quality wine, because it supports the brand, et cetera, but in the same way that the entertainment system helps create a satisfied passenger by giving them control over their experience, the wine program creates that point of interaction that makes people feel that they have been looked after in a credible way.

In contrast, my understanding is that at Air Canada, they use an in-depth psychlogical study to determine exactly how rude and incompetent they can be before customers snap, then they back off from that line just a little bit.

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Deletionpedia: Wikipedia’s Memory Hole

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typing

Back in the days when people were still referring to the Internet as “The Information Superhighway“, a friend of mine liked to make this pronouncement: “The Internet is not an information superhighway. It’s a typing superhighway. Just because someone types something onto a computer doesn’t make it information.”

I’ve always loved that quote, and never has it applied to any website better than it applies to Deletionpedia, a collection of nearly 64,000 articles (so far) that have been deleted from Wikipedia. This is an awesome concept. It’s the world’s second collection of writing that is guaranteed to be useless, the first, of course, being the Toronto Sun. I simply love that a deliberative body has looked over this stuff and decide that it doesn’t meet the high standards of a public encyclopedia that dedicates tens of thousands of words to the television show Lost.

Here is some of the gloriousness that is Deletionpedia:

The complete list of entries for “List of Films with monkeys in them”

  • King Kong- was a gorilla but monkey family
  • Dunsten checks in- Orangatan part of monkey family
  • King Kong vs Godzilla- fictional mechanical gorilla

Some background on the Shady/Aftermath vs. Murder Inc. feud:

In the song, he not only made fun of 50 Cent, Eminem (he called him Feminem), and Dr. Dre (he had called him a bisexual and claimed that Suge Knight knew of Dre bringing transvestites home, and both are false), but he had also dissed his friend Busta Rhymes who signed to Aftermath at that time. The track also insulted Eminem’s daughter, Hailie, by saying that she’ll grow up to be a slut or a drug addict like Eminem’s ex-wife Kimberly Anne Scott and mother Debbie.

And one of the un-told tragedies of Hurricane Katrina, Air Gumbo:

Air Gumbo is an airline based in Lafayette, Louisiana, USA. It is a proposed low-cost airline start-up seeking to launch services from New Orleans to cities in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. It planned to launch scheduled services in November 2005, but the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina apparently forced the airline to reconsider that plan[1], and as of October 2007, the airline has not started operations.

This thing really is a browser’s paradise, and each article also includes a link back to the original deletion discussion on Wikipedia. This is my favourite new thing on the Internet in weeks.

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Lively Links for Fri., Sept. 19th

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The Soul is Dead. Long live the Soul.

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It’s been a hell week, one for the record books really. I certainly wish I hadn’t launched a new blog and then been totally incapable of posting to it for a week, but that’s just the way things go.

In any case, one of the things I’ve been working on has been research into neuromarketing for an upcoming column in Report on Business. One of the most interesting things I came across in the course of this research was a 1996 essay by Tom Wolfe titled, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died“.

Wolfe is one of my favourite writers and I must have read this essay when it was reprinted in Hooking Up, but it had totally escaped my memory. It’s funny how often something like that happens, a piece of writing needs to come along at the right point in your life or you can totally miss out on how great it is.

The essay was written in 1996 at the dawn of modern imaging of the brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) had just been developed, and for the first time we were starting to get a grasp on how the brain reacts to various kinds of stimulation in real time. fMRI measures

the flow of blood in the brain, so as various portions of the brain demand more glucose and oxygen they “light up” the display. It’s like watching the weather patterns of the mind.

Wolfe was very impressed by the technology available at the time, but he also thought that within ten years (2006) there was a good chance that fMRI would seem primitive. That has not been the case. fMRI has not been superseded by new technologies that give a deeper insight into the brain, not yet anyway. In fact, we don’t seem to have made much progress at all, either in terms of technology or on any of the larger philosophical debates that Wolfe thought would define our discussions of morality, free will, and the nature of what it means to be human in the 21st century.

The main thrust of Wolfe’s argument is the notion that in the coming decades we’ll have so much insight into the human mind and the actual mechanics of it, that quasi-religious notions like the existence of the soul will start to seem incredibly old-fashioned. He reports that when Nietzsche wrote “God is dead,” it wasn’t a pronouncement, but rather a simple accounting of an idea that had already taken hold in the minds of educated people. Darwin had replaced the need for a God in people’s understanding of the universe. Wolfe thinks that modern neuroscience will do the same thing for the soul.

I find this argument fascinating, but I don’t really buy into it. Darwin provided an explaination for why the world is the way that it is. Neuroscience, and fMRI in particular, is merely descriptive. It allows us to see what is happening in the brain, but it has yet to provide us with a deeper understanding of why the brain does what it does. It’s a weather map, not a climate model. (Look for that line to be repeated in my column when it comes out.)

Ultimately, I think that the soul and free will have a much better chance of standing up to any advances in science than God ever did.

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