What I’ve been reading

i) I’ve completed The Collected works of Leo Tolstoi, a book I’ve mentioned before.

The book has 728 pages and it also has a big variance in quality. It spans from boring to excellent, but even if the lit-profs would have you think otherwise, there’s no way around the fact that the years have been rather hard on some of it, particularly when it comes to the short stories (called ‘tales’ in the book). That said, I liked the abridged version of Anne Karenine as well as some of the novellas the best, and they are excellent; I think I shall have to get the full version of the former at some point, it’s amazingly well written.

ii) I’ve read some more of Origin… by Darwin, mentioned in the link above as well. I hate to read books online, so it’s going rather slowly, I’ve still only read a couple hundred pages by now.

iii) I’ve read the second installment in Peter Øvig Knudsen’s project Blekingegadebanden, Den hårde kerne. It’s a good read, but I don’t have the book with me at the moment so I don’t feel comfortable discussing it [danske læsere henvises til Jalving's anmeldelse på berlingske].

iv) Leland Yeager, The fluttering Veil – Essays on monetary disequilibrium. It’s been on my shelf for more than a year, but I’ve simply not gotten around to reading it until now.

I thought it was a good read, but people who do not have some degree of training in economics and know a little about monetary theory will not get much out of it. I am probably myself in the lower quadrant of the skill-spectrum of those who stands to benefit from reading this book. Of course the book is a collection of essays, so there’s some variation as to how difficult/accessible the different sections are, but be that as it may, it still isn’t a book for the average 12.th grader.

As it is, I find that it would be much too far-reaching for me to make a long post about this book, and where I agree and disagree with Yeager, so it shall suffice for me to say that if you find monetary theory interesting, this is not a bad place to start looking a little deeper into it. On the whole though, I very much liked Yeager’s emphasis on monetary disequilibrium, as I have always found the ‘always equilibrium’/'instant clearing in the money markets’-assumption in most macro models, well, problematic. Besides from that I don’t have much to say, perhaps I’ll discuss a particular subject or two treated in the book later, but no promises.