Bookeywookey's bookish plans for 2014

After the look back at the past year (here and here) it is time to look ahead at some of the reading to come in 2014 (theoretically).


Non-fiction

Nate Silver's 2012 The Signal and the Noise is a look at the application of statistics to everyday prediction making and how data is converted into knowledge.

Chrystia Freeland, a finance journalist, writes about the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. in the U.S., the consolidation of power into the hands of fewer and fewer persons across the globe, even as we continue to holler the word 'democracy' and try to sell it to the highest bidder. 

A companion piece to the above, Mark Mizruchi's book, argues that the influence of America's CEO's has changed since World War II from a consolidated force driven by civic responsibility to a fragmented group uninterested in using their power to tackle the "big issues." 

I'm really looking forward to Robert Page's synthesis of the work uncovering the genetic and physiological mechanisms which underlie bees' collective societies and how their social behavior evolved.

British social historian Theodore Zeldin wrote in 1994 about the forces that shape humanity in what is meant to be a ranging, unsentimental, and learned volume.

The thesis of Ian Buruma's latest, Year Zero, is that 1945 was the founding year of our modern era.  His narrative has a dual focus on world events and on the biography of his father, who was imprisoned by the Nazis, spending much of World War II in Berlin.




Fiction

This book was a gift from a friend and colleague in celebration of the completion of my PhD.  I love it when a friend is willing to pick a book to give as a gift instead of giving a bookstore gift card.  Described as a  seductive love story, a satirical epic about the middle class, a comedy about the interior world of a cuckold,  like Joyce, Baron Munchhausen, and the Marx Brothers, this work, published in 1968, is now considered a classic.  I can't wait!

Alberto Moravia's Contempt was the basis of a Jean-Luc Goddard film.  It is rumored to be a "caustic dispatch from one man's self-made hell." While this isn't likely to be a laugh-riot, it is meant to be psychologically astute and an unflinching look at a failing marriage.

I was introduced to the writing of James Purdy when his collected stories came out in 2013.  I haven't actually decided which of his novels to read first, but this one about the dual forces of creativity and self-destructiveness in a mother and daughter is drawing me.  His prose is astonishingly plain and clear - Jo Ann Beard and Joan Didion both came to mind as I dipped into it, which is promising.

I have really enjoyed some of Kathryn Davis's strange, other-worldly novels, so I am hopeful about Duplex which apears to be part social examination of suburbia, part time-travel.  Hmmmm.

The winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize, The Luminaries, by New Zealander Eleanor Catton may be up next.  I am chomping at the bit to start this 800-page saga - part mystery, part 19th century nautical novel, part adventure, part ghost story. 

Ah, so many books, so many plans.  I wish you all a 2014 full of curiosity and wonder, fueled by good reading.