“Vision Splendid: A Social And Cultural History of Rural Australia” (Richard Waterhouse) A valuable work in the Raymond Williams cultural tradition, notably free of any desire to interrogate boundaries or supply transgressive hermeneutics, but still capable of challenging some of my preconceptions. I’ve written a review which is over the fold. It’s aimed at my local economics journal, Economic Analysis and Policy, hence the somewhat idiosyncratic focus.
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Now that it’s been established that meme means “Internet chain letter”, I’m happy enough to embrace the concept. Mark Bahnisch sent me the Book meme, which most of you will have seen already.

Total number of books I’ve owned
I haven’t counted, but I imagine it would be several thousand
The last book I bought:
“End of Poverty, The : Economic Possibilities for Our Time” (Jeffrey Sachs) I’ll probably try and review this soon. For the moment, I’ll just say that it’s the most plausible case for optimism about the possibilities open to us that I’ve seen for some time
The last book I read
“The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent” (Richard Florida) Again, more to come on this one soon.
Five books that mean a lot to me
This is a pretty hard one. I’m a voracious reader, but I’m also quite promiscuous, so I’ve been influenced a little by lots of different books. More generally, my mind is full of bits and pieces that I can’t recall where they came from. The Internet has been great in this respect. Anyway, here’s my list

George Orwell, Collected Essays Although adulation of Orwell is a bit of a cliche in the blogosphere and elsewhere, he really is worth it. If he were alive today, he’d be the greatest of bloggers

Raymond Williams “Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society” I’ve mentioned this before and a reader pointed out that there’s an updated version (a collective effort). I’ll try to track down the (rather lukewarm) review I read

Ursula Le Guin “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” I reread this not long ago, and it was mentioned on this list also.

Anthony Trollope“The Warden” As an archbishop is supposed to have said, there’s no better way of spending a Saturday evening than in bed with a good Trollope. I love all the Barchester novels, but The Warden is the original and best

“Work for All: Full Employment in the Nineties” (John Langmore, John Quiggin) Some of it stands up well after ten years and some does not, but working on this book it certainly made a big difference to me. It was my first significant participation in public policy debate in Australia, and I haven’t let up since.

As with most chain letters, I think everyone has already had this one, but I’ll flick it on anyway to Jason Soon, Gianna, and Kim Weatherall. I’ll keep the remaining two places for commenters on this post (those who actually have a blog will have to wait another 15 seconds for the meme to propagate to them).

Quite a few different things this week, no doubt reflecting the fact that I am spending the week assessing ARC Grant Applications, and am therefore engaged in displacement activity on a massive scale. It’s a job I find very hard going, as there are far more worthwhile applications than can be funded. Assessors don’t actually have to approve or reject, thankfully, but we have to give numerical grades, and only the topscorers get supported. So, rather than do the job in one big hit, I tend to spin it out and find lots of excuses for procrastination.
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I just reread “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” (Ursula K. Le Guin), which I enjoyed as much as ever. There are a bunch of other books I should be reading, most of them weighty tomes on network theory, real options and so on, but Mark Bahnisch has kindly pointed me to a nearly endless source of distraction, China Miéville’s list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read. Le Guin is on the list, of course, along with many of my favorites (though many of the books recommended are new to me) and classics like Bellamy’s Looking Backwards and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

I’ve just bought the new Nick Hornby novel, “A Long Way Down” first person narrative from four people who meet on a rooftop, each planning suicide. It looks promising so far – the implication is that all survive, but for all I know they may end up back on the rooftop, or may be speaking from the next world[1]. No spoilers, please.

I went with my son to Revenge of the Sith, which was certainly better than Episodes 1 and 2. My big complaint is that we’ve been waiting since 1978 or thereabouts to find out how Princess Leia comes to be fleeing from Darth Vader at the end of episode 4, and now we find that episode 3 ends with her in nappies. If Lucas meant to make a hommage to 1950s serials he hasn’t done a great job in this respect.

Better news is that I’ve got something to watch on Saturday nights again, with the arrival of a new series of Dr Who. Apart from the occasional Lions game (and they haven’t been too rewarding lately), I haven’t had any options since I abandoned The Bill a couple of years ago.

fn1. This device, effective in “The Lovely Bones” (Alice Sebold)The Lovely Bones seems to be getting hackneyed

“Changing Planes” (Ursula K. Le Guin)
Some great stories, with the starting premise being the sense of alienation from the world all sentient beings feel in airports.

I’m also reading “Rise of the Creative Class” (Richard Florida), as background for Florida’s latest, “The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent” which I’ll probably review. I’m only halfway through, but so far the book seems much more sensible than the potted summaries I read a few years back. It’s much more about work and autonomy than about metrosexual urban hipsters.

I also dug out my copy of Raymond Williams’ “Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society” reviving my long-moribund Word for Wednesday feature.

Via Rafe Champion at Catallaxy, I found this NYRoB review of a book Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values on the vexed topic of sport in US colleges. Bowen and Levin view the US system, where colleges use all sorts of inducements to recruit students who will play in their sporting teams, as entirely deplorable, and spend a fair bit of time on its various pernicious effects, but don’t really seem to have much of a solution. The reviewer, Benjamin DeMott has a more favorable view, pointing among other things to the fact that sports provide a route to college for working-class kids who wouldn’t otherwise get in, but doesn’t have a very effective response to the central point made by Bowen and Levin about the negative effects of a group of students who are mostly well below the average in ability, not academically motivated and are effectively employed full-time in their sporting careers in any case. Proposals to restore the ideal of the amateur student athlete have gone nowhere, and it seems unlikely that the radical approach of getting large numbers of colleges to pull out of the game altogether will do any better.

I’d like to suggest an alternative that is probably still too radical, but would not challenge the existence of college sports, and would overcome at least some of the problems aired by Bowen and Levin along with many others. College should recruit athletes as they do now, but let them defer all their classes for the four(?) years they play for the college team (unless they get cut earlier on). At the end of that time, a minority will make it into the professional leagues and big money, and won’t need a college degree. The rest will no longer have sporting commitments or the illusory hope of sporting riches. At this point, the college should give them their deferred education, with an explicit recognition that they are likely to need more help than the average student.

This seems like an improvement all round to me, but no doubt there’s lots of things I haven’t thought of, so I’ll let better-informed readers set me straight.

“Singularity Sky” (Charles Stross) and The Algebraist (Iain M. Banks)

I enjoyed Singularity Sky very much and am looking forward to getting hold of Iron Sunrise, which has been nominated for this year’s Hugo awards, along with The Algebraist and two books I’ve reviewed earlier Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Iron Council, plus River of Gods, which I haven’t seen yet.

I had planned to spend the afternoon in front of the TV, but it was so depressing (50 points down at haftime) that I went back to work on my review of Freakonomics An incomplete draft is over the fold: comments appreciated as always.
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