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Dan Wang recommended Red and the Black by Horace Barnet Samuel and others, discussed War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott, The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, and A lion for love by Robert Alter, and criticized Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is a sweeping historical epic that chronicles Russian society and the Napoleonic Wars through the intertwined lives of several aristocratic families.
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann is a sweeping historical novel that chronicles the decline of a prosperous merchant family across four generations in northern Germany.
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain is a monumental early twentieth-century philosophical novel that follows a young engineer named Hans Castorp during an extended, transformative stay at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.
Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott is a critical examination of how large-scale state planning, infrastructure projects, and bureaucratic systems often fail because they ignore local knowledge and human realities.
Critiqued
“I think that James C. Scott's most popular work, Seeing Like a State, is also, unfortunately, his, I would say, weakest work.”
The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott is an anarchist history of highland Southeast Asia that examines how populations have historically evaded state control.
Discussed
“I think that, by far, James C. Scott's very best work is The Art of Not Being Governed, in which he did extensive fieldwork in Yunnan, as well as the broader zone of southwest China and southeast Asia, which is heavily mountainous, an area that is larger than Western Europe.”
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu is a renowned science fiction novel that explores first contact between humanity and an alien civilization facing environmental collapse.
The Red and the Black is a classic psychological novel by Stendhal that chronicles the ambitious rise and tragic downfall of a young provincial man in post-Napoleonic France.
Recommended
“Stendhal mentioned the Comte Ory in my favorite book, my favorite novel, The Red and the Black.”
“Before the last two questions, let me just plug your book again, which I was very happy to have blurbed. Dan Wang, it is Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future.”
