Booklist: An occasional look at what I've been reading
The System of the World
by Neal Stephenson
This book ends the Baroque Trilogy. I'm a bit shocked to discover that this was a character study of two school chums, a soldier and an economist. Despite that, it kept me riveted throughout the later half of 2004, and I grabbed each new book in hardcover and tore through it as fast as I could. This volume took me quite a while because other social obligations have been impinging on my reading time.
I've always been miserable at British history, but now I think I have a passing knowledge of the events surrounding the Glorious Revolution, the Hanoverian succession and the beginnings of the stock market.
Naked Economics
by Charles Wheelan
This book was informative, enlightening, and intelligent. I think it brings up many salient economic points that are utterly unexamined in typical news analysis, for example, that inflation is sometimes encouraged by corrupt governments to minimize their debt. And yet ...
There are some blatantly unexamined assumptions here. This book gives some pretty short shrift to the arguments against the way free trade agreements are being hashed out, and doesn't even mention the phrase "sustainable economics." It's as if Schumacher never wrote Small Is Beautiful. If you're looking for a more nuanced explanation of what's happening with Social Security, World Trade, and the Federal Reserve that what your getting on the TV, this book would still be a great start.
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Now I'm reading Daniels' Designing Great Beers, in anticipation of this year's BJCP exam. The class scared me off of the exam last time (in 1999), but this time I'm going to take it. I started the book last week and it's already helped me ... I was able to calculate how much more malt we needed at the Club Brew this weekend when our mash efficiency was off.