My first order of books from Amazon, largely selected on the basis of recommendations from readers, has just arrived. A couple arrived a few days earlier, including Economical Writing by Deirdre McCloskey, which I have already read. Very enjoyable, though I can’t bring myself to accept her advice to abandon the “roadmap” para which ends the introduction to all my articles. Her view is that it’s meaningless until you’ve read the article, and useless once you have done so. I agree with this if you only read the article once. But I find this kind of para useful when rereading my own articles and those of others.
Anyway, thanks to all who made suggestions and a reminder that I’m always keen to get recommendations for reading on almost any topic.
John Quiggin 
As John probably knows, Prof McCloskey will be giving a keynote address at the Ec Soc cponference in late September (details here).
whoops – try that link again here.
Out of interest John, how many books do you read a week? Do you have some sort of speed reading ability? It seems that every time I log on here you’ve read another book!
On speed reading the critic Harold Bloom claims he read every book in three New York public school libraries as a kid. He also claims to be able to read 1000 pages an hour. I never understood this, what about difficult, dense prose? But Bloom claims once his read something its in his memory and he can recall any passage at any time? Who believes this? If you were capable of doing that then you could scan Aristotle’s metaphysics in three hours and take a walk in the park and recall the whole thing.
I guess I read three or four books in an average week, and of course I read a lot of stuff on the Web.
As regards speed, I can read quite fast on material that is clearly written and covers a reasonably familiar topic. For example, on this test, I did 888 wpm with 100 per cent comprehension on the first run, and I tend to speed up a bit on longer books.
But, as tu says, none of this helps if you don’t understand what you’re reading. And I certainly can’t remember the actual text I’ve read, just the main ideas and key quotes.
But even though she spangles her work target with the costume jewelry of literary yahoo game and historical allusion, challenging cnn the reader with obscure, referential toy puzzles, she also evinces a rare grasp restaurant of emotional chemistry. This “fictional cow essay” on marriage and adultery–really state an impressionistic poetic meditation–cuts kelly blue book