Capital and Ideology
(Belknap, $40)
“If inequality has become the subject of intense public attention, a good deal of the credit goes to French economist Thomas Piketty,” said Idrees Kahloon in The New Yorker. His 2013 book
Capital in the 21st Century, which built upon years of research that had already changed the conversation about wealth distribution, argued across 600 datapacked pages that capitalism always generates wealth at a faster pace for the rich than for everyone below them, resulting in intolerable inequality of the kind we now see. His follow-up is “yet more ambitious” and, at 1,100 pages, a cinder block. But “there’s a reason for the heft.” After opening with the “arresting pronouncement” that “Every human society must justify its inequalities,” Piketty provides a sweeping history of societal organization, analyzes capitalism’s faults, and recommends a “breathtaking series of reforms.”
The book has its virtues, including prose that’s “pithy and light,” said The Economist. But the central argument is one that Karl Marx made: Capitalism is essentially as exploitative as feudalism or slavery. For a remedy, Piketty advocates a new socialism, said Raghuram Rajan in the Financial Times. Rather than give the state control over industry, he wants to boost workers’ power within corporations and establish a tax system that forces business ownership to be passed along. Wealth
by Toni Morrison (1987). The story of an escaped slave and her murdered daughter, this novel contains wrenching truths. Beloved is not just a work of literary genius; it also improves our understanding of what it means to be human. Morrison brought us all that bit further along.
Beloved
by Vladimir Nabokov (1955). Nabokov’s novel is a warning to all stylists that, sometimes, a brilliantly written book can be not only morally void—as some of them want to be—but also repugnant. I am not sure if this is a recommendation or a warning; it is all very brilliantly done.
Lolita
by Michael Ondaatje (1987). This book goes everywhere that the beauty of the language takes it. Set from the 1910s through the 1930s, it is a shifting, thrilling, traveling tale of the immigrants who built Canada. Ondaatje’s prose is a generous guide: Every sentence opens the heart.
In the Skin of a Lion
by Angela Carter (1979). Carter wrote the first and best collection of fairy
The Bloody Chamber
tales in which the traditional fates of the female characters are reversed. Beauty becomes a fabulous beast; Little Red Riding Hood seduces the wolf. Carter was a high stylist, and this collection is lush, subversive, and truly liberating.
by Francis Steegmuller (1939). It is hard to describe the life of a writer—most of us spend our time sitting alone in a room. It is exactly these silent difficulties and triumphs that Steegmuller, a translator and longtime Flaubert scholar, understood best, and that understanding informs this double portrait of a book and its tormented creator.
Madame Bovary
by Alice Munro (1986). Pick up any volume of stories by the Nobel laureate and you will find quiet excellence, compassion, and precision. If you love life as well as books, you must read them all—and then read them again. This collection contains the iconic story “Miles City, Montana,” about a family trip that climaxes in a near-tragedy. It is one of the best stories about motherhood ever written.
The Progress of Love