The reason for the 2 weeks’ silence here was of course my summer holiday – when I read fewer serious books than usual because I spent a couple of hours a day writing my next book (a public policy economics textbook for Princeton University Press). Among the detective novels and other fiction though, I did read East West Street by Philippe Sands which is absolutely as brilliant as all the reviews have said, and could not be more timely.

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It wasn’t all frivolous detective novels. As well as the Sands, Linda Grant’s The Dark Circle stood out, and Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist, though I wasn’t so keen as others on Zadie Smith’s Swing Time. I also really enjoyed MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me.

Having now read half a year’s worth of fiction in a fortnight, though, it’s time to pick my next economics book. In the pile are two Piketty-related volumes: Anti-Piketty: Capital for the 21st Century and The Contradictions of Capital in the 21st Century (or ‘pro-Piketty’). Also some September publication proofs. Both Scott Page’s The Diversity Bonus and Dennis Rasmussen’s The Infidel and the Professor are tempting but I think I have to start with Eli Cook’s The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life. This looks from a very quick skim like a pre-history of GDP from a US perspective.

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