What We’re Reading

Preeti Aroon: The Others by Seba Al-Herz (a pseudonym). Written by a 26-year-old Saudi woman, this book is about a nameless lesbian Shiite college student in Qatif, Saudi Arabia, who also suffers from a health problem. The title The Others is indicative of the “otherness” she feels — a minority Shiite in Saudi Arabia, a lesbian, sufferer of a health problem.

Elizabeth Dickinson: If you have been watching Chile the last few months, you know that big changes are afoot. For the first time since the fall of the dictator, General Augusto Pinochet in 1989, the left-leaning ruling party Concertacion looks likely to turn power over to a conservative candidate in a run-off this January. This week’s Economist explains why that’s not bad news, but rather an incredible testament to what the country has achieved in those 20 short years: a stable democracy. And props to Chile — which has been invited to join the OECD club of rich countries. 

Rebecca Frankel:  For anyone’s who’s ever wondered what the real Hillary is really like off camera, Jonathan Van Meter’s profile of the secretary of state in Vogue’s December 2009 issue should be a pick for your holiday-travel reading. The piece may not pull down any big curtains (sorry, no Monica Lewinsky revelations here), but he does give you a pretty close look — without makeup, drinking with reporters, and possibly flirting with David Miliband. Van Meter has clearly developed a fondness for Clinton and examines her on a human level far outside the political circus she generally occupies.

Joshua Keating: Blogger Lisa Katayama, of Tokyo Mango fame, had a thought-provoking post on Boing Boing recently examining westerners’ seemingly insatiable taste for "weird Japan" stories — men marrying video game characters, robot unemployment, etc. She argues that to westerners, Japan "feels like a hyperextended high-tech version of 1950s America" and moreover is a relatively safe place to fetishize. 

David Kenner: I noted, sadly, that 2009 was the bloodiest year for journalists since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In Vanity Fair, Michael Bronner wrote an excellent profile of an insurgent’s travel from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to Iraq, and back again. In happier news, for the first time in Beirut, a Lebanese woman was allowed to open a bank account for her underage sons.

Blake Hounshell: In Fool’s Gold, Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett tells the story of a lovable group of J.P. Morgan bankers who invented credit default swaps in the early 1990s, only to find out later that they had created a monster. Although some might take issue with the book’s decidedly pro-House of Morgan slant, it’s a must read if you want to understand the origins of the financial crisis and why banks’ attitudes toward risk went so awry.

Christina Larson: In Vanity Fair, Michael Hogan ponders the purpose of business journalism, a media subculture that seems built to champion, rather than to tear down: "Should business writers concern themselves, first and foremost with telling great stories or with educating the public?" Does the business writer’s habitual search for the best stocks, investments, and companies inevitably shortchange journalism’s traditional watchdog function?

Britt Peterson: Currently, I’m reading articles about a book I really hope to someday read, if someone who loves me feels like dropping a few hundred dollars: the 45-years-in-the-making, 800,000-entry Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary . If you’re the type of person who can see the use of having 265 archaic synonyms for “immediately” or knowing that a “spunk-fencer” is a synonym for “seller of matches” or tracking the history of the word “elevenses,” this is clearly the ideal holiday gift for you.

Tell us what you’re reading in the comments.