Tyler Cowen on Reading 4/18/22

Today is March 9th, 2022. My guest is Tyler Cowen. This is Tyler's 15th appearance on the program. We're doing something a little unusual today. We're having a conversation, less of an interview, about our reading habits in response to a tweet from Noam Shapiro asking, how will I choose what to read? How do I read? And I thought there could be no one better to discuss that with than Tyler, who I think reads more than just about anyone. Tyler, welcome back to EconTalk.

Happy to be here, Russ.

I want to remind listeners, if you read a book a week, you'll probably read about 2,500 books a year in your lifetime. Um, that's, um, a small number, so choose wisely, which will be part of our conversation today. Tyler, how would you describe your reading habit? Do you have any rules, or is it just catch-as-catch-can? How would you— how do you think about it?

My basic rule is to read as much as possible A lot of books are sent to my house, so I order on Amazon. On a weekday, I might get 5 to 10 review copies, and I look at each and every one, and I read some of those. I love to reread classics. The earlier parts of my life, I spent a much higher percentage of my reading, uh, reading the kinds of books that would be in the back section of Harold Bloom's The Western Canon. Most of those I've read, say, 2 to 5 times. And then I read what my friends write. I spend a great amount of time on Twitter. And I love to print out, say, economics working papers and read those. And then I take books on trips. I'm about to take a trip and I just keep on reading, basically.

I, like you, I get a lot of books sent to me, which when I was younger would have been the most exciting thing I could possibly imagine to have a job or an opportunity where people would send me books without having to pay for 'em. I'm struggling with that these days. I have, before I moved to Israel, I think I had about 3,000 books. I gave away about 1,000. They're sitting in a warehouse in Maryland, so they're coming soon and it's scary. And when I was younger, I thought, well, I'll get all my father's books when he passes away. It turns out, passed away 2 years ago. I don't want any of it. I took, well, I took about 10. He had about 3,000 books also. And I thought, well, and my kids will want my books, but they don't. So I don't collect books the way I did when I was younger, but it is fun still when people send them to me. And I, like you, I look at almost every one and I read a sample. Do you turn to a certain page before you? Make a decision?

No, I just start at the beginning and see if it grabs me. And enough other people do that, that if the author can't grab you fairly quickly, it may in fact not be a good book. Now, older books are quite different. They were not written to grab people up front. So if the author is bad at that, it's not a negative signal. I don't give away many books. I'm afraid to give away books because unless I think the book I'm giving is the book in the world the recipient most needs to read, I feel I'm doing the person harm.

Yeah, yeah. Um, you don't give away— do you lend books out?

Not very often. I don't own many books. So I collected books in great numbers when I was an undergraduate, mostly history of economic thought. I thought I would build up this incredible collection of the great economics masterworks, but then I started moving around, and then I moved to Germany for a year, and like, this is not going to work. So what I will do— there's some economic historians in my department. If I get a history book, I will give it to them because I know they won't necessarily read it. They'll use it or not use it for reference, and I don't feel I'm tricking them into reading a book. But I would be very reluctant to give you a book, Russ. Not that I don't love you or like you both, but I would feel that you would feel obliged to read the book, correct?

That's a— that's an awkward thing, but For me, I asked you about lending books out. Uh, if someone's over to my house for a meal and they see a book of mine that they like, um, I just give it to them and I say, you don't have to give it back. I just give it to them if it's a book that I really care about, especially that I haven't written in, and I just buy another copy. That's sort of my rule, because what I used to do is I'd say, of course you could borrow it, and then you never see it again. It's an amazing thing, how hard it is for people to return books. And, and it would bother me intensely that they wouldn't return them. And I just now just give it to them, and I'm very happy. It's a great solution to this problem. Do you write in your books? No, I do— go ahead.

I don't take notes really in any way. I do fold over pages if there's something notable on the page, and typically I don't mark what was notable because then when I go back, I'll find other things. So I'm deliberately randomizing my second order search a bit.

You're a lunatic. I bend pages also. I do that, especially when I'm reading a book on Shabbat and I can't use a pencil or pen. And then I feel good about it that I've bent the page back, but I almost never go back to the bent pages, very, very rarely. So it's just a psychological comfort. I think I probably told listeners before, I have a lot of trouble writing, and I used to have a lot of trouble writing in books. That whole idea of highlighting, was so horrifying to me. It was, it was sacrilegious.

It's violence. It's violence against books, right?

Yeah, that's horrible. I, I hated it, especially if it's yellow.

That's the worst highlight color.

Awful, awful. And I would never write in the margins. Um, but as I got older, I realized that I'd figure something out about a really hard book and I'd want to remember it. So I eventually got in the habit. Now I do quite a bit, especially the underlining. I don't highlight, I underline or bracket. And I find that helpful when I go back and read a book a second time, actually. Sometimes I do notice other things. I end up basically highlighting often the whole book because the other part I didn't highlight, I was, "Oh, that's good too. I'll bracket that or I'll underline that." And then basically the whole book ends up underlined.

I just don't write very well, period. But I also find I could read another book in the time it takes me to highlight.

Yeah.

Next best book I haven't read is probably quite good. So why should I highlight?

But why should you read a book more than once?

Let me give you an example. I brought the books I'm reading now. So here's a book, it's called Land Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question by Philip Bull. So he goes through Irish land debates in the 19th century. I read about two-thirds of this book. It's from the library. I'm going to read most of it again, but only after I've read other books about Irish land history. So to reread it twice in a row makes no sense. To read it again 10 years from now, for me, makes no sense. But I like to read books in clusters. And overall, it's a good book. Much of what Bull says will have much more meaning to me after I've read 4 or 5 other books on the 19th century Irish land question. And that is how and why I'm going to reread, say, at least 2/3 of this book.

But when you talk about the classics that you were reading before, right, Those are— you read a book 4 or 5 times, you said, you said 2 to 5 times. When you're reading those again, it's not a clustering thing, is it? What's— what's— what are you doing? Is it comfort?

Those you want to reread after many years. So Tocqueville, Plato's Republic, Adam Smith, the very best books. As you are older and know more, they become very different. For the most part, I think they become much better. But even then, you should read them twice, twice in a row. When you're reading them. I think that's important. It's very hard to just read them and absorb it all. And I don't think you should finish it and then start again. You should read a chapter, then reread that chapter, and reread as you're going along. But those are, in my view, the books with the most wisdom, the ones that are most important to read, to study, to talk about with other people. Shakespeare— the list is mostly obvious, right?

But you don't take notes. So how do you remember anything you read? Or do you just have a great— I know you have a great memory, but is that you just rely on that? You just hope you remember, and the second or third time it gets a little bit richer?

I have a good selective memory, but I think I remember things better by sampling them from different sources. Like this book on the Irish land question. If I just reread it twice in a row, the things I didn't understand, I still wouldn't understand. But I'm going to invest in more context, and then many more pieces will fall into place. So I think it's that I'm good at context more than I have a good memory. If you gave me a string of random numbers to remember, I don't think I would remember them better than the median human being. So I view my skill as investing in context and having invested in a lot of context already.

Yeah, I mean, there's a limit to what you can remember. Writing things down is Some say it helps you remember it, having written it down, not because you're going to go back to it, but just the art, the act of writing it down. But, you know, I think the deepest things we learn from books are— you're saying context. I think of it as frameworks, lessons, classes, perspectives, insights. And when you read it again in a different phrasing and a different example, you start to own it, and you can apply it to something that isn't either of the two things you've seen the first two times. And for me, that's, that's what's, what's profound and powerful about, about reading. And, and reading clusters, books on similar topics or similar issues, um, it gets burned into your brain in a different way.

How do you decide when to reread a truly great book? Or which one to choose?

I don't do a lot of rereading. I'm preparing for this conversation, I thought about books I've read more than once. Now a book like a Jewish theology book, God-Man in History by Eliezer Berkovitz, I read it the first time. I didn't find any of it particularly hard, but when I finished it, I had no memory of what he'd said. I didn't read it over a long period of time. And I'd ask people, have you read that book? And they'd say, oh yeah, I read that a long time ago. Do you remember anything about it? Not a thing, not one thing, not one thing. So I read it again, and I sort of got an idea of what he was talking about. And I read it a third time. I'm doing that same thing with a book called— one of my books I'm reading right now is On Human Nature by Roger Scruton. It's a set of lectures he gave. I read it, I started it, got about 30 pages in, bogged down, wasn't sure what it was about, struggled with it, put it down, picked it up again, read the first 30 pages again, bogged down, struggled. The third time, I really liked it. I finally figured it out. I finally saw what he was trying to do. Now, some of that is that it's a complicated book. Some of it is I read it in a hurry. Some of it is may have been distracted when I was reading it. And some of it just, I'm not smart enough, right? There's a lot of possibilities for why I might wanna revisit a book. But once I've read it that full time through, I'm not sure I'll re— I might reread it one more time down the road 'cause I'll say, you know, I really, I got something interesting out of that. Maybe we should try it again. But great books that you're talking about, I don't reread very often. I remember reading, uh, I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pershing when I was a lot younger, 40, 50 years ago, and I loved it. And I told someone about it and she said, I didn't get much out of that. You like that? So I thought, maybe I missed something there. I'm gonna read it again to see if I still like it. And I did. I read it a second time. But that's very unusual for me. So I don't read a lot of Great fiction. Uh, I don't reread those kind of books. I should maybe. Or do you reread a lot of fiction?

The very best works I will reread a few times. So something like Moby Dick or Flaubert or War and Peace, absolutely. I'll read them 3, 4 times, but I spread it out over life.

I read Moby Dick in 1964. I was 10 years old. I think that was a mistake.

It's one of the very best books.

I haven't read it since. I think I should go back to it. I understand it's a lot about whaling. I'm not that interested in whaling, but—

It's mostly about man's quest for God, I think.

Yeah.

And Melville doing a kind of ideological tour of the theological universe. And that is sandwiched in between a story about chasing a white whale. And there's plenty in the book about law, and science and America of that time and abolitionism.

How many times have you read it, you think?

I would guess 5, but some parts I've taught and read like 20 times. So if I had to pick 5 novels everyone should read, Moby Dick would be one of my 5.

What would be the other 4? Off the top of your head, not holding you to it.

Let's say Proust, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Cervantes, Moby Dick and Dickens' Bleak House, just— or Gulliver's Travels. That would be the off-the-top-of-my-head list.

That's a horrible list, Tyler.

It's a wonderful list.

One of the things I want to talk about is how you feel about people who don't like the books you love as much as you do. So let me give you my 5, and then you can, you can pick on it. At first, I want to say what's wrong with your 5. Can we do that first?

Let's do that first.

Okay, so Proust is unbearable and unreadable. Terrible book. I read volume— I read En Recherche du Temps Perdu, In Search of Lost Time, I think is the way it goes, right? Um, which is volume 1 of, um, no, Swan's Way. Sorry, Swan's Way, which is the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. Uh, I got through it because in those days when I was younger, I would always finish a book I started, something I also learned not to do, and I strongly recommend that practice of not necessarily finishing every book, but I'm not a big fan of that. Cervantes, I enjoyed in parts. I started Don Quixote a couple times, couldn't get through it. Um, Moby Dick, I did read that once, 1964. What else we got?

Uh, Charles Coleridge's Travels, right?

Never read it. It's a missed opportunity. I'm open to that. And there was one other one, I think. I think he had 6 on your 5.

Uh, War and Peace.

War and Peace, excellent book, loved it. I would like to read that again. Because I did not like Anna Karenina, and that would be my least favorite famous book that most people love. And you can think about yours for a minute, but my top 5 would be The Brothers Karamazov, Soldier of the Great War, Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, Soldier of the Great War by Mark Halperin, In the First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Uh, what else would be in my top 5? I would pick Our Mutual Friend by Dickens, which is just my personal favorite.

And underrated.

It's very underrated, not well known.

It's about infrastructure, right? Waterworks.

There's a lot of infrastructure in it. And, uh, it's funny, I'm blanking on my— I actually wrote, wrote some of them down, so— oh, um, yeah, I can't— uh, somewhere is in here. I don't know. Anyway, um Those, those would be my top 4 for now. They're different than my top 4 when I was younger. I would have put Thomas Wolfe in there, um, probably some Robert Penn Warren, um, Robertson Davies. There's— I still love them, but they wouldn't make my top 5. And part of it's recency bias. I read them a long, long time ago, uh, so it's hard to— it's hard to know.

I would agree that I don't love Anna Karenina as much as many people do. I prefer Tolstoy's short fiction.

Oh, it's phenomenal.

And maybe it's strange to call Anna Karenina predictable at this point in time. We all know the book, of course it's predictable. But in some way, it's less striking and novel to me than either War and Peace or the short fiction, like Ají Murad or The Cossacks or Death of Ivan Ilyich or others, which I think are phenomenal.

Well, I just recorded it. It'll come out, before this conversation, uh, a conversation on, uh, Master and Man, which I think is one of the greatest short stories ever written. Uh, and you're not saying anything. Do you not know that story? You don't like it?

Oh, it's fantastic.

Sure. Okay, phew. Yeah, I mean, I got the Cervantes and Proust thing working against me. Do you like Anthony Powell?

I haven't been able to get through it. I started it once. I suspected the fault was mine. But I didn't love it. And the opportunity cost seemed too high. But I would say try Proust again. Language is a problem. The original English translation was not very good. Lydia Davis has done a better one. It's better translated into other languages. So I actually spent 2 years reading it in German in the 1980s. I bought the whole German set. It was very slow going, but just fantastic. Maybe that's my best reading experience ever.

You know, one of my favorite forms of pretension is to remember who translates books. Like, I think Scott Moncrieff was the—

correct—

and it's standard Proust. But that is not nearly as pretentious as reading Proust in German. Tyler, you have, you have topped that forever. That is the most extraordinary thing. I know a lot about you, Tyler, but that may be, uh, that, that kind of sets the standard.

Wow. I wish I could read French. I'm not impressed. I'm embarrassed. But it's a wonderfully comic book. It's the great comic novel, actually. And as a study of social— In Search of Lost Time.

Are we talking about the same book here?

We're talking about the same book. But the new Lydia Davis translation, and I just did a podcast with her on Conversations with Tyler Cowen, is much better than the older English language translation. Okay.

Would you gift that to me so that I'll still be your friend? Okay.

Can I gift it to you in Hebrew?

That won't help me, that'll be worse. I don't know where we were, we were talking about a bunch of things.

What's the book you're reading now and why?

So I'm reading, I think I made a list, I think before we started recording, you said you've got 5 books that you're in the middle of, I'm in the middle of 5 also, as it turns out. And these are, these are quote for fun. I read 20 to 30 books a year for EconTalk. These are things I'm reading on the side. So this would be, I'm reading "On Human Nature by Scruton," about halfway through it. I'm reading "Israel: Concise History" by Daniel Gordis, my colleague. I am reading "After Babel" by George Steiner. George Steiner is really a fantastic thinker and writer. I really recommend his book "Errata," E-R-R-A-T-A, a memoir. It's just full of interesting ideas. Um, what else am I reading? There's two more. Um, I'm blanking on them. You know, it's— I don't read— oh, I'm reading Invisible Man for EconTalk. That kind of counts. It's a little bit different because it's not a normal EconTalk book.

You mean the Ellison?

Yeah, I'm going to talk about it with Dwayne Betts. Um, he's going to read Primo Levi and I'm going to read Ralph Ellison, and we're going to talk about what it's like to read a book from a different perspective of, of your ethnic or race. It'll be interesting, um, I hope. And I'm reading something else, I can't remember. Oh, I'm reading about— I'm reading the— it's called Why We Are Restless, um, by the Storrs. S-T-O-R-R-Y. That's a possible EconTalk book. I'm enjoying it. I like having a lot of books open on my Kindle. I like going into them and trying them, reading them.

See, I don't like Kindle. To remember things, I try to remember visually where it was on the page, and that helps me remember the fact. And I can't do that for Kindle. It's all the same page somehow.

Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. So you don't read anything on the Kindle?

No. When I travel, I have to, and I, I can deal with it, but I never prefer it.

Hmm, okay, interesting.

Let me tell you what I'm reading. The main thing I'm reading, it's a new book, review copy, Leo Damrosch, Adventurer: The Life and Times of Casanova, which is a book about 18th century Venice, the Enlightenment, Casanova himself, and it's wonderful. Uh, I'm a big fan of Damrosch. All his books are very good. There's a new one. I'm going to read the whole thing.

Okay, what else? What else in your pile?

I have a fiction book which is very slow. Uh, Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish writer, Ava Trout, her last book.

Don't know it.

Wonderful prose. It is like molasses reading it, but it's partly slow because one enjoys it. And that I will read very slowly and take on my trip. And it's, uh, not too long and not too heavy, so that's a perfect book for a long trip. Elizabeth Bowen to me is one of the great underrated fiction authors. Last September is a fantastic book, though I had to read that twice in a row to really absorb it. Took me a long time. Then I have this book in Spanish that I might quit by Éric Zemmour, who is running to be the next leader of France, as you know. And he is now losing to Macron, but he wrote a book available only to me in Spanish, though he wrote it in French. It's called El Primer Sexo, like the first sex. It's about the feminization of society. And it's mostly long and rambling. So I might stop it, but it's good Spanish practice. Like, I actually can understand it. And the notion that a major candidate for a leadership post in a major country would write a whole book on the feminization of society seems to me noteworthy.

So wait a minute, Tyler, you read— you read in German, Spanish, English?

English. And I'm always reading something in Spanish and German at any point in time, but very slowly. Okay.

That'd be good for travel. Take you a while to get through it. You wouldn't have to take as thick a book.

And there's this book by Thomas Bernhard called The Voice Imitator, Der Stimmenimitator, which is short stories that are only a paragraph long, and they're in German. And every now and then I read 3 or 4 of them, and I keep on reading this book. And I'm reading that now too.

Do you like short stories?

Mostly I prefer novels. But in foreign languages, like, A, they're easier. They're shorter by definition, and I feel I understand them better in other languages. Somehow in English, I'm impatient with them in a way that I'm not with a novel.

Do you like William Trevor?

I like him. It's actually on my Kindle because the collected short stories is so big to carry around, but I don't love it. I would much rather read a novel by Elizabeth Bowen, say.

I really like William Trevor. He wrote both novels and short stories, but I think his gift, main gift, was was the short story. I think he's fabulous. Mark Halperin writes both great novels and great short stories.

You know, my copy of Halperin arrived like 3 days ago, 'cause you told me to buy it last time we spoke. So now I own the book.

Which one?

The one you recommended, something with great man or—

Soldier of the Great War.

That's right, yes. So I have it now.

I think you'll like it. It'll make you wanna go back to Rome, maybe. And if you like it, try The Pacific. Which is a short story collection. I like every one of his short story collections. I don't love all of his novels, but I love at least 3 of them a great deal. They're some of my favorite books. I think Winter's Tale is a great book also. And anyway.

Bookshops, what's your bookshop policy? Where do you go? Where are the good ones? Do you just use Amazon?

Well, I used to spend an enormous amount of time in bookstores. It was the equivalent of playing chess online. It's like a form of exercise.

Except it was offline. Yeah.

Yeah. And it costs money. Yeah, a lot more money. But yeah, I spent an enormous part of my youth just wandering in bookstores. I love— it'll always be nostalgic for me to be in a bookstore, especially a used books, a great used bookstore. I used to love to go to the Strand in New York. Here in Israel, there in Jerusalem, there's a ton of fantastic used bookstores. With English books. But my favorite books— one of my favorite bookstores ever is a bookstore here in Jerusalem called Ad Raba. And it is, um, it's about the size of my office. It has about— you know, I'm exaggerating. I'm not about the size, it's tiny. I was gonna say it has about 50 books. It, it doesn't have a lot of books. Most of them are in Hebrew, but there's an English book section of about 2 books, large bookcases. And virtually every book in those bookcases I've either read and loved or want to read, and they're all beautiful. So there's something wonderful when you find a collection of— I really do love a physically beautiful book, you know, with nice endpapers. And so it's a sweet, sweet, sweet nostalgic pleasure that I get less and less of as I get older and work on the Kindle.

So as someone who reads more than average, I know giving advice is hard. It depends on context. But what is the thing you would wish to tell your listeners that you feel you know about books or how to read that maybe they don't? If you had to boil it down.

Well, I've told some of them so far, which is don't finish every book you start. Take notes in your books, which you don't agree with, but I think it's very useful.

I think it's good for most people. In that sense, I agree.

But I guess the other thing I would say is to take them seriously. I can't tell whether we're in the golden age of books or the death of books, right? It's an extraordinary thing to be able to access Amazon and buy, quote, "any book you want." I mean, when I think back to my youth and relying on libraries or a bookstore, you know, when Barnes Noble came along, it was so exciting. It was just like the biggest candy store of all time for a reader. I loved it. And then Amazon just crushed them. Built a much bigger bookstore. And I love wandering, I love wandering in Amazon online. I think it's beautiful. But the advice I would give is to take it seriously. And I think reading's a little bit out of fashion. In some sense, that's misleading, 'cause I think a lot of people read online. They just don't read books. They read articles and essays and all kinds of things. But there's something about, something deeply precious about the opportunity to spend 10 hours or so with an interesting mind, and you're at their mercy. You know, they've laid out the book in the way they thought was best to capture what they wanted to say, and you get to experience that. And it's not to be taken lightly. It's a precious human thing. That people write books and read them. And, you know, you and I read— in a way, we probably read way too much. We'll talk about skimming in a minute. I skim some books, but to immerse yourself in a book is, um, is one of my favorite things. One listener asked— one Twitter person asked in prep for this, or maybe— no, it was you, I think, about music. And I've finished some books with music on. I remember reading Nietzsche with "Thus Spake Zarathustra" playing on my turntable. And I listened to opera while I read "A Soldier of the Great War," which is set in Rome. I think it's "Il Trovatore" is the aria that he is, it's either "La Traviata" or "Il Trovatore," I can't remember, that he loves and repeats in there. And so to listen to that while you're reading the book is, it's just a transcendent human experience. So that's what I would say. What would you say?

I would agree with your points. These are maybe squirrelier recommendations, but first, read in clusters. So read a bunch of books on the Irish land question. Any one book you read on that topic, you're not going to retain unless you're exceptional with your memory. But if you read 4 or 5—

it could be wrong too.

It could be wrong too. Yeah. If you read 4 or 5 books on that topic, even if you only read parts of them, you'll know something about it. But my other advice would be, I think picture books are greatly underrated. So if you want to learn about Venice, Italy, one thing you could do is go to Amazon, type in Venice, read a book on the history of Venice. I mean, that's fine, but if you just go to your public library and pull down a picture book, it's probably just titled Venice. Most people will actually learn more doing that, reading the picture book, which is somewhat in a kind of early Wikipedia style and with a lot of wonderful photographs and maps, and it will be very much to the point.. It's probably not that partisan, not trying to push some kind of very particular line, not postmodern, just a book about Venice called Venice. And people don't do nearly enough of that, in my opinion.

And that book on Venice called Venice was published in 1963. I can see the photographs. There's a certain style in those picture books of the, of the print quality of those photographs, very vivid to me. Carry on, what else?

If you read picture books about animals, about science, you'll probably learn more than if you do what most people do. This is not about books, but I think most of us— I know it's true for me— I don't spend enough time on YouTube. So YouTube is in many ways becoming more potent than books. So just evaluate your YouTube consumption and see if you can improve it would be another tip. But also don't read stuff you don't love.

Reading.

Simplest point that I would stress above all else. Maybe you have to read it for your job, but look, the point of reading is that you love what you're reading.

Joy.

Not don't do it.

Yeah. Do you ever read children's books or young adult fiction?

Not very much. I read The Hunger Games and some of the sequels. I quite like those. People give or send me a fair number of those books. I think they're good. They're just not my priority. And true children's books, pretty much never read, like for 4-year-olds.

I have a love of a book called "The Seven Silly Eaters," which I really like. It's a children's book. And a book called "The Gardener." It's interesting, these are picture books. These are written for, you know, to read out loud to a 7-year-old or a 6-year-old or an 8-year-old. And I find them quite often quite moving. They have to be short, right? They're a short story. The illustrations often enhance. And I've read a few other, see, I didn't read many children's books when I was younger. I read Moby Dick at 10 and it bothered my mom. My mom said, "He's missing out. He's not reading," you know, whatever it is, whatever boys at 10 usually read. And so some of those I've gone back to. There's a wonderful book by Robert Kermier— I don't know how to pronounce his name— but called I Am the Cheese. It's one of the scariest books I've ever read. It's written for teenagers. It's the creepiest thing I've ever read. It's a phenomenal book. Um, I mean, I kind of like— I like that. I'm a big fan of Winnie the Pooh. Um, those are good.

I like Encyclopedia Brown when I was 10. Yeah, yeah, I read a lot of chess books, a lot of books on cryptography.

What's your favorite chess book?

Well, they're all books I read a very long time ago.

You don't have to say—

Alexander Kotov, How to Think Like a Grandmaster, which is still a wonderful book for learning how to do almost anything. So it encapsulated a lot of the wisdom of the Soviet school of chess, how they trained people to become better. And the way you become better is by doing exercises with actual feedback that might prove you wrong. So try to annotate a chess game and then compare your ideas against— then a grandmaster, now it would be a computer— and that that's much better than just playing through games or staring at the board or what most people do. So that's a fantastic book, even if you're not mainly a chess player.

Are your parents readers?

My grandmother was a big reader. Her favorite authors were Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, and John O'Hara. My father didn't read that much. He ended up actually reading The Freeman from Foundation for Economic Education, which he brought home to me when I was like 11, 12. And I started reading that. So that was important. But he didn't read that many books. My mother ended up as a reader. She would read books like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, like popular but smart, maybe vaguely spiritual books. Smarter self-help books, books on psychology. And I read a lot of what she had around when I was young, say 11 or 12. That was a good influence for me, just to think about people in a better way.

Did she try to get you to read books that she loved?

I don't think so. I always read more than either of my parents did. My grandmother gave me some useful tips. And I would talk to my parents about what I was reading.. And my mother was great. She would always take me to the library. So even in Kearney, where I grew up as a kid, there was a Carnegie Library. My mother took me there, say, when I was 3. I was reading, like, when I was 2. I watched my grandmother teach my sister, who was 2 years older than me, picked up reading very early. I think my first favorite book was by Leonard Kessler, who just died, and it was something like Mr. Pines Paints a House. And it's a kid's book, But that was my favorite when I was 3.

So what I find interesting is that most of the books that my grandfather and father, who were the big readers in my life, most of the books they loved, I didn't love and struggled to read. So, you know, my dad, I may have talked about this on EconTalk, my dad likes Sir Walter Scott. His father likes Sir Walter Scott. He liked Thackeray. They both read a lot of Shakespeare, a lot of Macaulay in English history. I've never read Macaulay, a hole in my reading. I don't enjoy reading Shakespeare. And Sir Walter Scott, I just can't. I struggled to read. I probably read The White Company when I was younger. They also liked Robert Louis Stevenson a lot. And—

It's consistent taste of a sort. I like Scott much better than when I was younger. And I read some to prep for Neil Ferguson and really liked it. That's an example of going back to a classic.

Yeah, maybe I'll go back to that. 'Cause what's fun is with some of those books, I mean, a good example would be, you know, Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is incredibly entertaining. One of my kids had to read it and I hadn't read it since I was 15. And I just thought, oh my gosh, it's so good. It's so, the writing is so good. But most of the books that I love, my kids don't love. Most of the movies I love, they don't love. And the common denominator there is pace. They want faster. You know, one of my favorite movies is "High Noon." It's glacial.

But it is over in 90 minutes, right?

Yes, it is. And it takes exact, it's 90 minutes in real time. It's one of the most beautiful things about the movie is that, The movie starts and you watch 90 minutes of what happens. There's no flashbacks or cutaways to future stuff. It only covers 90 minutes of what happens in this town. It's a magnificent book, a movie, but my kids can't watch it. My father's, one of my father's favorite movies is a movie called "I Remember Mama." We can't watch it. It's too slow. And I just wonder if, the next generation will read Don Quixote and Dickens, and it's hard to believe that they won't, but—

Jane Austen and Shakespeare seem much more popular to me now than when I was a kid. Russian fiction seems much less popular. Doesn't make sense to people. What's all the songst about? You know, if there's no God, isn't everything evil? And so on. It's sort of like something from a bad Woody Allen movie.

Yeah, that's a cheap shot if I've ever heard one about two, at least two of the books on my list of top, top four. But okay, fine, Tyler, keep going.

When I've reread Dostoevsky, it hasn't clicked for me. When I was in high school, Brothers Karamazov was my favorite novel of all time. Just soaked it up, loved it. Uh, actually, my mother then read it, she loved it. I went back to it, I don't know, 7 years ago, I'm guessing. I could see the point, but it didn't grab me.

Well, my wife and I tried to read Crime and Punishment together, and, um, we couldn't get through it, I'm sorry to say. We got about halfway through. Uh, it's hard.

And what do you think of Dickens these days, other than our mutual friend?

I love Dickens.

It held up very well, I think.

He's a brilliant storyteller. He has a tremendous sense of humor. He's a great plotster. He plots beautifully. His characters are vivid beyond vivid. You know, I've probably read, I don't know, 10, but I have to confess, Tyler, I've never read Bleak House. Oh!

That I would give you a copy of.

Yeah, that I'm gonna have to give a shot to. You know, I've read a lot of Dickens. I find him, So Great Expectations, which is deeply flawed, I think, but it's— there are so many scenes in that book that are magical, just magical. The characters are— I miss them. When things happen to them, I feel bad. It's— they're wonderful. You know, Joe Gargery, who's Pip's, I guess, his stepuncle, is— what is he? I can't remember his exact relation. Gosh, I'd like to spend an evening drinking with him in a pub. It's just, you know, he's great, great.

But there are books young people read that I find much too slow. So I can't really get through the Harry Potter books.

Yeah.

Game of Thrones, either on TV or in the books. I can see the appeal. I'm just not sure at the end of it all what I'll have, and I stop reading, stop watching.

What about humor? Do you read funny books? Only Bruce.

Most books to me aren't funny. I just don't absorb the humor. Something like Wodehouse or these British writers that are supposed to be so funny, I see that they are, but they're not funny for me. YouTube is funny. TikTok can be funny. Larry David can be funny. Books to me just aren't funny.

Okay, so I've got a cheap shot at Wodehouse. That's not acceptable. I'm sure you know, Tyler, and I know my listeners know that Adam Smith points out that we care more that people hate what we hate than that they love what we love. But, um, I do, I do, I, I read a lot of Woodhouse.

Uh, I think it's good, it's just not funny for me. It's like a period piece of interest.

Okay, so he— my top 3 comic books would be anything by Woodhouse that has Jeeves in the title, though my favorite is a book called Joy in the Morning. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. Have you read that?

Never.

Okay, so that may tickle you. You may be amused by that. But my favorite, I think, is going to be in your sweet spot, Tyler. I'm feeling good about this.

Yeah.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by, um, Dave Eggers. Have you read that?

I quite like it. It's not funny, but I can see that it's funny. Okay, get my drift?

I do.

I think it's very good. I've been disappointed with him since then, but an excellent book. Oh.

We're on the same page there, but that book is one of the funniest and saddest books I've ever read. It's, spoiler alert, but it's not much of a spoiler because you learn very early on the book's about an orphan and the main character, it's not fiction, the writer loses his parents in a relatively short period of time. So I'm at a conference, I'm reading this book, And there is many passages in that book, 3, 4, 5, where I laughed out loud so hard I couldn't stop laughing. I was just so convulsed. I imagine being at a— not imagine, I'm sitting in this conference. I've been in the hotel waiting for the conference to start, an economics conference, and I'm laughing at this book and I'm imagining someone coming up to me and saying, "Oh, it's a funny book?" "Yeah, it's maybe the funniest book I've ever read." "What's it about?" Oh, guy loses his parents within a space of a couple of months. It's a very sad book. That's why it's a heartbreaking work, "Staggering Genius." But I think the comic set pieces in there are just, are genius. He's a phenomenal, phenomenally funny person, but okay.

Why isn't YouTube just always funnier than any book?

There are things that are funny on YouTube. I think there's something special about comic writing. It's a different thing. It's like saying, why would you eat French food when you can eat Tex-Mex? They're just different. I think they're just different. What books changed your life, Tyler?

Many, many books. All the early chess books I read got me playing chess, which was a formative experience for me. But reading Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal was a big thing for me. Loved the long novels or even a lot of the philosophy, but reading her on capitalism, Hayek, Mises, the Austrian school economics in general— I'm an economist, so that's been my life. And those are books I read when I was 13, 14 years old.

But you read, you read so many things outside of economics. Surely there's some other books besides chess and economics that have had a big impact. It doesn't have to be quite quote, changed your life, but are any that come to mind?

Well, Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, which I just discovered in a Harvard bookstore in 1984. I'd never heard of it, never heard of him. Never read it. It's a philosophy book.

Yeah.

I don't know that it makes sense to read the whole thing now, because it has been absorbed, and you can read how it's been absorbed. But that book definitely changed my life. A lot of my work and writings, Stubborn Attachments, came out of reading Parfit. Reading Quine and the American pragmatists in philosophy, reading Plato, reading Moby Dick, just books encouraging me always to think more broadly and to think about the role of narrative in society, to think, what do people really care about? How are people actually motivated? If you're trying to understand, say, the current war, you know, Russia attacking Ukraine, I think fiction often does you better than to read political science and international relations.

What fiction would you recommend?

Well, Moby Dick would be a good example because it's an obsessive quest, uh, believing in some screwed-up idea very badly and wanting to see it through. Or Tolstoy, for that matter. Just Russian fiction in general. The ways in which that culture can produce irrational behavior You learn that better from fiction, I think.

That's interesting. It's funny you mentioned Ayn Rand. I've become so less enamored of Ayn Rand as I've gotten older, but you remind me that when I was 17 and read it for the first time, I was just overwhelmed. I couldn't— I think I read Anthem first, a very, very short novella. And it just set me on fire. And again, I moved away from it many ways. I don't— there are many, many things I don't like about her worldview, but boy, could she write a story.

I think Atlas Shrugged in particular, it was highly prophetic and it's become underrated as sociology. Like her cocktail party scenes, her account of what we now call the woke. It's what, published in 1958 or around then? Yeah, and she saw this in the '50s. She so nails it, I think, better than any critic writing today. And there's a lot of critics of the woke.

Yeah, that's true.

But on that, she was so perceptive.

Have you read Atlas Shrugged?

I read it when I was 14. I once tried to reread it, couldn't do it. Even at 14, it mostly bored me. It's just too long. A lot of it's absorbing, but I felt battered a bit even then as a teenager. So the simple ideas about capitalism being highly productive and moral and supporting virtue, to me that's great. I think she is too one-sided on that, but relative to the current discourse, a much-needed corrective. Yeah, I never left Fountainhead. No, but I think particular scenes in Atlas Shrugged are still golden and remarkable. You have to read them this year to understand how good they are.

Yeah, the first 100 pages is just such a tour de force of storytelling. Forget the philosophy and the economics. It's just, it's hard to put down. It's a really good book, but it is 1,200 pages. I think it's the longest book I've probably read if you don't count Gulag Archipelago or, you know, multi-volume books.

Those books have impact even today.

Yeah, it's surprising. Yeah, yeah.

Harry Potter, many examples.

It's a bit of a puzzle, right?

It's a world you get absorbed into.

Yeah.

And it's a kind of totem and a signal of absorption into a culture that people share. And if the entry fee is too low, uh, the value of club membership is diluted.

Yeah.

So I think it makes sense in it, looking at it with economic reasoning.

So I was— I made a list of books that I thought changed me. I thought Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick, which I've not gone— I have not gone back to, but it had a huge impact on me. Fooled by Randomness, which was like by Tyler Cowen, was the beginning of my obsession with being deceived by numbers and the challenge of thinking about uncertainty, which, uh, I don't think I'll ever lose that fascination. There's this book by Adam Smith, not "The Wealth of Nations," called "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," which has also was an eye-opener for me. And then I'm gonna list a book. It'd be interesting to think about how many books I've read that you haven't, Tyler. It's a short list, I have a feeling.

It's not a short list.

No, I think it's a very short list, but I'm gonna list an author who's totally forgotten, who had a huge impact on me when I was younger. And that's Robert Ardrey. Have you read Robert Ardrey?

I don't think so. What did he write?

Okay, so he wrote, it's great, he's a playwright. And then he got into, you know, the kind of book I hate now, which is like a theory of everything. You know, so it would be, his first book I think you've heard of is called African Genesis. And the theme of it was very simple. It was that we came out of Africa humanity, not out of the Tigris-Euphrates area. And we were violent.

Oh, that book.

Yeah. Yeah. I think you thought you knew it. Well, he wrote a second book called The Territorial Imperative, which was— Yeah, yeah.

Okay. I read that as a kid. Yeah.

Yeah. And then the third book he wrote, it was called The Social Contract, which I'd love to go back and read. When I finished that book, I was— it's 1976. I was 22 years old. And I remember being so overwhelmed by how that book opened my brain. I don't even remember how, doesn't matter, but I thought, this is what I wanna do. I wanna write a book like this. And so it didn't change my life in the sense that, you know, I created a worldview out of it, but it made me realize what a book could do. And it just, it was a beautiful thing.

Has science fiction affected you much? 'Cause it was a huge influence on me and still is.

Now I wanna talk about that in a sec, but I gotta mention first, have you read Worlds in Collision by Immanuel Velikovsky?

As a kid I did. Did you?

Yeah.

I was like, oh my goodness. It seems to be wrong, but it made an impression on me.

Yeah, so did—

Von Daniken.

What?

Erich von Daniken.

Oh, see, I didn't read him.

It seems he was quite nasty and wrong, but again, when you're 13, you imbibe these things.

My dad gave me, I was about that age, my dad gave me a book called "The Passover Plot," which was this fantastic attempt to explain the facts of Jesus's life as a conspiracy. I mean, it's just fabulous work. And you read those books, especially when you're younger, you're not very smart, and you go like, oh my gosh. And you realize, you know, you've been let into this secret truth, this conspiratorial unveiling that you have access to. No one else knows. No one else knows that we're apes that are murderers. It's—

I think "I, Robot" might go down as the most influential book of the 20th century, not counting something like "Mein Kampf." which is a very different direction. Different kind of a real book, right?

Is that, is that Isaac Asimov?

Isaac Asimov. It's about artificial intelligence and how you would govern it with laws. And Asimov also had studied Torah, so the laws for the robots, they're a kind of running satiric commentary on, uh, Jewish law.

Yeah. Huh.

And the robots fail to obey the laws in all the same ways that the humans don't obey the laws in the Torah. So it's theology too.

So science fiction is a huge hole in my, um, I read, I've read, I think the list of books I've read that you haven't, if we cheated and include not good books, I read a lot of mysteries when I was young. Robert B. Parker, and then I went through a whole, um, set of British mystery writers who I, I love them. I read hundreds. Uh, it's the equivalent of playing chess online. It was a compulsive distraction from life. Uh, I don't know why I read all those books, but I never read science fiction. And the reason's simple: my dad didn't like it. All of my reading when I was younger was an attempt to earn the respect of my father, and science fiction was not on his list. And so I didn't read any. Um, I've read any science fiction I've read as an adult. I don't like fantasy either. I don't like Tolkien. I don't like, you know, I don't know, it's weird. What science fiction should I read?

Start with I, Robot, I would say.

I guess so, yeah.

Try Olaf Stapleton, Last and First Men, from the '30s. He was a neo-Hegelian philosopher who sketched out how he thought the world was going to evolve. If I get together, say, with a tech crowd, the book that everyone has read, it's some mix of Tolkien or I, Robot. Not the Bible, you know, not Charles Dickens, for better or worse, not Proust. But everyone has read those books, or almost everyone. Massively influential.

It's fascinating.

I love Tolkien, even though most fantasy I don't like. Once and Future King by White, I think, is a fantastic book. I would recommend you try that. I'd be willing to give you that book even.

I bet I'd like that, actually. I think I would like that. I've not read it. Um, do you have any holes? Do you have things you don't read? Genres that you've missed out on besides young adults? I can see that's a, that's a huge hole, Tyler.

It is a huge hole.

I'm gonna forgive you for that one.

Well, mysteries and crime, a lot of the best-known authors, I've read one book by them., and I typically think it's good, but I'm not interested in reading another. It feels like an act of repeat. So I wouldn't say I haven't read in that area, but there's no author I'm well-read in. Romance novels of the non-classic sort, which are a pretty big chunk of the book market, I've hardly read.

Yeah, for sure.

I've read a great deal of what you would call classic African American literature, but like popular African American literature, I don't think I know well at all.

Well, you have— you read so widely in non-Anglo stuff. I mean, most of my reading is overwhelmingly British and American. So I have giant holes outside of a sprinkling of Russian novels that I read when I was younger, a few French novels when I was younger. Do you like Flaubert?

I certainly like him a great deal, but he feels a little overrated to me. I don't quite feel the passion.

Balzac?

Uh, very solid, uh, underrated now, but the very best one is not enough better than the average— the average Balzac novel. So as a whole, they paint a portrait of French society that is important and interesting. But whatever might be the best one.

Hemingway?

Short fiction above all.

For sure.

The classic novels, they seem dated to me, but the stories are amazing.

Although my son's reading them now and he's loving them, which shocks me. I read them all when I was younger too, but they don't hold up for me. I would never wanna go back and read "A Farewell to Arms" or "Sun Also Rises." But his short stories are still, I think, very good.

How about Faulkner for you?

Well, so I had, I took a class in college on Conrad and Faulkner because I loved Conrad.

Two of the best for me.

And I hated Faulkner. I had tried to read "The Sound and the Fury" when I was 16, and I thought, "This is nonsense, this is horrible. This is, doesn't, you can't figure it out. It's the worst kind of modern art." By the end of the course, I became, oh, that would be on my list of great, top 5, and that would be Go Down, Moses. I, I think if those of you listening have tried to read Faulkner and failed, my advice is always start with As I Lay Dying. I agree, uh, because it's accessible. It's not easy, but it's not hard, and you can enjoy it. I read it twice. It's short. That's a book I read twice. When I first read it, I thought, oh no, I kind of get it, I get the hang of it, and I read it twice. Um, Death in August, Absalom, Absalom, they're pretty good. They're pretty accessible. Sound and the Fury, the most famous one, is very, very, very hard to read if you just pick it up and try to read it 'cause you don't know what's going on. Once you get the hang of it, it's very good. But "Go Down Moses," and I can't remember the two books that came before it about that family, are just, I loved all those. I like "The Reavers," just totally accessible, but not, I don't think, a great book.

Absalom is my favorite, but I don't think it's easy. I think it's one of the hardest novels to read.

It's not easy, but it's not "The Sound and the Fury." And by the way, my other confession, I've never read Ulysses by James Joyce or Finnegans Wake. Have you read either one?

Ulysses has to be in my top 5 if I can put in 7. Finnegans Wake, I've looked at every page. I wouldn't say I've read it. Like, maybe I'll just buy the NFT on Finnegans Wake and call it a day.

I do have a friend who says you should work your way through it. It's worth it. To me, it's like the worst kind of cryptic puzzle. I don't do cryptic crosswords. I kind of like them, but You know, it's 1,000 pages of a cryptic crossword. You need a book equally as large to try to figure out what the jokes are and the allusions, and it's a cruel, cruel book.

I don't think you can solve it. I think you have to read it as a very long poem. As that, for me, it comes across as tedious, but I suspect it's very good along some dimension I don't care about much.

Yeah, it's— yeah, it's—

Ulysses is easy and fun. That you should pick up. That I would give you. I would give you my copy.

Another one. I hope you're writing these down, Tyler. We are recording this, I hope, in which case listeners can make a list of Tyler's promises for me. Okay, so we've talked a lot about fiction. Let's go back to nonfiction.

Just one thing to add, Ulysses intersects with a lot of your interests: Judaism, cosmopolitanism, what it means to be human.

Yeah.

Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. Uh, it's definitely a book you should read in particular.

Okay. All right, maybe we should do a book club on it for an EconTalk episode. We'll do Moby Dick and then we'll do, uh, Ulysses. You'll explain it to me because it's a hard book. I think there, there— I used to own at least two books that explained Ulysses. Um, or now we're talking about James Joyce, not Homer. Um, but let's talk about fiction. Sure. Nonfiction.

Yeah.

What are some of your favorite nonfiction books? And I'm going to ask in two categories: history, which is— and then the sort of, you know, nonfiction book like Fooled by Randomness. Got anything, uh, that you love in there? I'm sure you have many.

I love nonfiction books less than I used to. I find what sticks with me are methods and ideas and tools for approaching problems, like economics. And clearly I've learned a lot of the economics I know from books, but it's not fundamentally a book thing. And most nonfiction books as books, I'm maybe a little disappointed in. And there's not that much I could name. There's a great number of wonderful history books, you know, Brodell, I was talking about yesterday with—

Fernando.

I like classic works that are not fiction, but they're not quite nonfiction either. Like, what would you call Plato's Republic, right? Theory of Moral Sentiments. Philosophy.

Yeah.

It's nonfiction in a sense, but it's not classic nonfiction. But Boswell's Life of Johnson would be one of my favorites. By the way, it's part fiction.

I have trouble reading that.

It's the small group theory, how small groups can have amazing dialogues and how that propels them forward. But a lot of it's made up.

How about Montaigne? The essays, do you read them?

Yes, uh, I have a very high opinion of them. I, I've gone back to them. They just seem a little slow for me right now. They are, but they haven't gone down in my eyes. I think they're pretty amazing, and he's ahead of his time still.

Oh my gosh, he's such a modern. It's so fat. That part of it is so fascinating to me.

Humane in some very deep way, and a big influence on Smith. I would say better than Smith, actually.

I'm just gonna let that sit there.

Yeah, that's my trolling you.

Yeah, exactly. Uh, what about— are you a Robert Caro fan?

I love the Moses book. Uh, the LBJ books I've started, I thought they were amazing, but I ended up saying I could just read the Wikipedia page and end up knowing the same things because I don't need to know the details of how he bribed his way through Texas state government. And I didn't read further, but they're incredible.

I think that's a missed opportunity. As a portrait of ambition, ruthless ambition, I think it's unparalleled. I say that having stopped, I think I only got through the first 3 volumes, but I loved them when I was reading them. I think they're extraordinary. They're a portrait of America. They're not a portrait of LBJ. They're, um, Incredible achievement in my mind. I'm gonna mention one of my favorite books, which is Churchill's History of World War II. Have you read it?

I have never read it. I think I've read snatches of it. It's beautiful prose.

It's incredible.

But I don't trust the narrative. I love the Victor Davis Hanson book on World War II, but it's like you don't wanna watch certain documentaries because they know, you know they'll skew you. And Churchill on World War II strikes me as a bit like that.

It's so good though, Tyler. And the other part I did, this is crazy, but I actually read in the back of every volume are all the memos he wrote. And I felt, this was in my phase when I could not finish a book.

Yeah.

And that would, by the way, that would include like the appendices.

Yeah.

So I would read all his, they're phenomenal. They're so great. He's such a good writer. It's, anyway, I recommend that even though I understand it's, You can read his fiction if you want. He's just a beautiful stylist.

I don't read books of letters much. There's a few I quite like, but do you love reading letters?

Not at all. Like, what would be— you mean like the letters of so-and-so?

There's exchanges between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, who were two poets.

That's worth thinking about.

And those are very good. There's some other examples, but mostly letters, the action unfolds too slowly for me. Yeah, too long. There's too much superfluous information.

Yeah, yeah, not my thing. Uh, Nabokov.

Fantastic. Lolita is hard to read when you read it from a current vantage point. You see just how brutal a story it is, and it's almost unbearable. Uh, many are excellent. Uh, Pale Fire would be like a top 20 fiction work for me. Pennine. But again, many others.

What a stylist.

Top 9.

Incredible. Yeah, incredible.

And writing in his second language, maybe it was even his third language.

Yeah, amazing. What, you have anything else you want to ask me or say?

How much do you feel obliged to read the books of your friends? You have a lot of friends who write books.

Yeah. Well, you talked about, you talk about books, fiction, excuse me, nonfiction being overrated. I do tend to believe that most books are just a good journal article or essay, you know, magazine or essay that got fleshed out into a book. I don't— I'm always disappointed. I'm not always— I'm often disappointed. I'll give you an example of a counterexample of that. I remember when I read Brian Kaplan, our— my former colleague, your current colleague— his book The Myth of the Rational Voter. There's an interesting idea on every page. There's no— there's not a single— you may not agree with it, might be wrong, but it is a—

you—

he earned the writing that book. It's full of interesting stuff. Um, so many books aren't like that. You know, one of my favorite books is Arnold Kling's Three Language Politics. It's short, every page is also good, it's just short. Um, so many books many, many pages don't speak to me and don't give me anything. Um, Taleb would be the opposite. He's a brilliant storyteller, so I like almost every page there. So when you ask me, do I read the books of my friends, I'll tell you, I'm going to confess, if you don't like the book, you're not your friends, is what you're telling me. No, no, I'm going to confess something even weirder. When I went through my library and I said I had 3,000 books and I gave away 1,000 before I moved to Israel, was— I don't think I gave away— I'm not sure I gave away any books by my friends, even when I didn't read the book or didn't like them. I just felt it was like, um, it would be a betrayal of some kind to, to not keep the book in the library, even though I wasn't going to read it, don't particularly like it. So that's mine. How about you? You also have a lot of friends who write books. Do you read them all?

Uh, if they give me copies, I will read it.

You will?

I will. But it's striking to me, the book I just finished writing called Talent with Daniel Gross, my co-author, I read remarkably few books to write that book. I read a very large number of articles. And this is maybe getting back to my view that books are overrated. I don't think there are many great books to read on understanding talent, other than just trying to absorb some very large corpus. Of knowledge about human achievement. You know, Dean Keith Simonton would be a counterexample. Gladwell's Outliers is quite interesting. There are books you should read. But I think more and more the idea— like, you learn methods, you read in clusters, you don't obsess over single books, you try to read on a project you're working on so you have context— that those are the best ways to read. I think I'm now believing more firmly than before. Interesting. What would be your summary statement of where you're at at the moment on reading books?

I miss my youth. I miss curling up with a book for a whole day and reading a book, like an entire book, cover to cover in a sitting, which I've done a handful of times in my life, or 250 pages in a different context for, you know, I can't do that anymore for a lot of reasons. You know, my old joke used to be when I was younger, I read a book a week. And then when I had children, I read a book a night. They just had more pictures. And now I'm back to reading a book a week, but it's usually for EconTalk. And it's not, occasionally I regret a choice. I wish I hadn't picked this book, but often I learned something, almost always I learned something, but I miss that immersion. Just like I miss in graduate school when I could sit for 4, 6 hours and just think through a problem and write stuff down, you know, that as I get older, you know, my memory— I, I was— I think I was blessed with a very good memory. It's not what it was, I can feel it, uh, but the compensation is, is that because I've read more stuff than when I was younger, I see connections that I couldn't see. And that's very precious to me. So when I read a book now and I see its connection to something else I understand or read, or I pull out a narrative or an anecdote or a story and I piece it together with something else, that's just the deepest kind of pleasure. And I just love that. But what I miss is that lost-in-a-book feeling, uh, which is hard for me now. I have more going on in my life. I've got— I'm older, I'm less able to concentrate for long periods of time because I've spent too much time on YouTube and, and Chess.com, and, uh, I missed that. But overall, uh, it's pretty good. And I would just say today is the second anniversary of the passing of my father, who was an enormous influence on me, as anyone who's listening can tell. And who's listened to me can tell, and books remain a great connection for me with him now that he's gone. I still read things that I think, "I wish I could share this with my dad." But it's still okay that he's still part of me. So that he's not here physically isn't so important in a way. I miss him, but the fact that I can't show him a passage in a book is okay 'cause, His son's reading that book. It's part of him. It's not— it's not— he's not gone that way and completely. So have you read Sum by David Eagleman?

I don't think so.

S-U-M?

No.

Can I give you a copy?

You can. I'll read it too.

Okay, it's real short. It's a magical book. It's phenomenal. He's a neuroscientist. Um, I've got nothing else to say. Do you want to add anything?

I would add I view Chinese fiction as a big open missing area for me. I've tried a fair amount. It's just hard for me to make progress on really grasping it in its context. And I will read your next book, Russ.

You already have, Tyler. What you don't know is that it's much better than when you read it before.

I'll reread it, and then I'll read your next book after that.

My guest today has been Tyler Cowen. Tyler, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

Thank you, Russ.

This is EconTalk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more EconTalk, go to econtalk.org where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for EconTalk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.