Today, we’re launching a new monthly feature called “On Our Bookshelves.” As the mysterious title suggests, it will feature our random thoughts on books that we’ve read, are currently reading or would like to read right after we finish reading all those other books we haven’t read. Enjoy, and please share your recommendations!
Larissa Douglass
I am reading a collection of essays by the Austrian historian Gerald Stourzh, From Vienna to Chicago and Back: Essays on Intellectual History and Political Thought in Europe and America (2007). Stourzh analyzes the historical context and core legal and moral ideas driving constitutionalism; republicanism; freedom; equal rights and the modern liberal state; Austrian constitutional compromises and Austria’s place in Europe; Tocqueville on democratization of English, American and French societies; and Charles Beard on American foreign policy. Stourzh’s last essay in the collection, on Camus’ The Fall , with its assessments of the “simplistic absolutes of modern times” and his description of the last virtue that remains in our world “when justice and reason have become powerless” is still highly relevant, even though the piece was originally published in 1961. I’m also reading Tales of Hoffmann by E.T.A. Hoffmann, which is sort of the archetypal Romantic collection of stories about respectable bourgeois members of the middle class leading dark and secret double lives.
Jessica Hun
Amongst the books that I have read explaining China’s politics of market transition, I strongly recommend Dali L. Yang’s Remaking the Chinese Leviathan: Market Transition and the Politics of Governance in China. The significance of this work comprising various case studies of China’s administrative reforms is that, contrary to conventional wisdom that political reforms have been minimal there, Yang indicates remarkable development in improving the administrative and institutional framework for economic governance, including a more realistic view on the role of the state in guiding and managing the economy. Most importantly, markets developed owing to an expansion of central state power—a kind of power that allows the state to regulate activity more effectively through laws, regulations, various policies and “soft” means, short of coercion. Despite the fact that policy implementation in the localities continues to be challenging, Yang provides a nuanced way of understanding China’s genuine attempts at meeting the increasing demands of a modern, market economy.
For leisure, I am also reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and P.G. Wodehouse’s Carry On, Jeeves. Having a habit of balancing the various emotions that my leisure reading could bring, Crime and Punishment, from the title itself, is a classic depiction of conflicting feelings at the heart of human existence; of self-loathing and pride, of contempt for and need of others, and of despair and hope of redemption. Carry On, Jeeves, on the contrary, is a lighter read and the first of a series of fourteen books on the comic relationship between a gentleman and his indispensable butler, Jeeves. A mixture of perhaps the best of British humour and satire, the book definitely reminds me of the good old days in Great Britain.
Nonna Gorilovskaya
I recently finished The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. It’s a novel about an unorthodox teacher and her six pupils set in 1930s Edinburgh. For those who are looking for “an altruistic teacher rescues lost students” type of a story, this book is not for you. Miss Jean Brodie’s bond with her girls is intense, and she channels her sometimes destructive fantasies through them. I loved Spark’s wit and thoroughly enjoyed the 1969 movie adaptation starring Maggie Smith. After watching the film, you too will feel the urge to replicate Smith’s foxy walk and proclaim: “I’m in my prime!”
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