03 January 2011

Reading List

Forget New Year's resolutions. I prefer to think of it as hitting a New Year's reset button, a la Secretary Clinton's Russian policy. And so I've spent the past two days cleaning out my bedroom, my office, and my attic. Fodder for blogging excitement!

I've moved around a lot in the past several years, and two or three moves back I fell subject to the worst curse of moving, which is that you begin to move boxes without unpacking them. This, of course, is a recipe for disaster and backache.

I ended up throwing away seven garbage bags, mostly full of academic kipple, a sort of kruft that had grown over the course of two years of coursework and conferences to begin to overwhelm any sensible organization that may have once existed. The organized part of my brain, which I had kept smothered during the past few months, seized the opportunity to move books from my bookshelves into the newly empty storage tubs. As a consequence, the contents of my bookshelves now suggest that I don't own any fiction, whereas in reality I simply don't read any.

The process reminded me that I have a lot of books that I want to read, a lot that I have to read, and a lot that I've half-read. So, as a response to Conor's list, here's mine. Suggestions welcome as always.

Nonfiction
  1. Amy Chua, Day of Empire.
  2. Duff Cooper, Talleyrand.
  3. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way.
  4. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, Sword and Shield.
  5. Christopher Andrew, MI-6.
  6. Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Court of the Red Tsar.
  7. John J. Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie.
  8. Carlo Ginzburg,
    The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Centu​ry Miller
    .
  9. Shuyun Sun, The Long March.
  10. Pauline Maier, Ratification.
Fiction
  1. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer.
  2. Kim Stanley Robinson, finishing The Mars Trilogy.
  3. Selections from Iain M. Banks.
Technical
  1. Scott Long, The Workflow of Data Analysis Using Stata.
  2. Michael N. Mitchell, Data Management Using Stata.
  3. John Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America.
  4. Long and Freese, Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata (2e)
  5. Samuel Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution.
  6. Gelman and Hill, Multilevel Modeling.
  7. King, Unifying Political Methodology.
  8. Morgan and Winship, Counterfactuals and Causal Inference
  9. Angrist and Pischke, again.
  10. KKV and Brady/Collier, again.
  11. Bennett and George, again.
  12. McCloskey and Ziliak, The Cult of Statistical Significance.

1 comment:

  1. PM-

    The Moveigoer has been on my to-get-to list for a while. Good call. I also forgot to include Robinson's Gilead. If I get to the Percy...we'll have to discuss.

    Ok, so suggestions: um, 1) don't reread KKV. 2) Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club (bet you've already read it), 3) Steinbeck's East of Eden.

    CW

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