Marginal REVOLUTION, the economics blog of George Mason University economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, has published a new entry in its recurring "What I've been reading" series, recommending four titles spanning memoir, criticism, architecture, and fiction — a series the site has run for years.

The first pick is Begoña Gómez Urzaiz's The Abandoners: On Mothers Monsters. The post calls it "a wonderful book about mothers who abandon their children" and praises it as "properly unsentimental," adding that readers "will never think about Muriel Spark the same way again" — Spark being the Scottish novelist best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Vashti Bunyan, the English folk singer-songwriter whose 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day found a devoted audience decades after its release, also receives a section. The verdict: "Recommended."

Next is Evan Gershkovich's This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story. Gershkovich is the Wall Street Journal reporter who was arrested by the secret service in Putin's Russia and held for eighteen months before being traded back home — an arrest that made him the first American journalist detained in Russia on espionage charges since the Cold War. The post says he "starts off naive, but does not finish that way," and calls the book "a compelling read" with background on what it is like to live in Russia in recent times, namely the early years of the war with Ukraine. In prison, it adds, he appears to have been treated better than most. The post quotes a passage: "I remembered what Eugenia Ginzburg had written about her two years in a maximum-security Yaroslavl prison before being sent to the Gulag — that during this period she was the best version of herself, at her most patient, kind, and thoughtful." Ginzburg was a Soviet writer whose memoirs of imprisonment and exile under Stalin are regarded as classic accounts of the era.

The third recommendation is Reinier de Graaf's architect, verb: The New Language of Building, described as "a fun read" with chapters on the various prizes in architecture, Vancouver and city liveability, Richard Florida — the urbanist best known for his "creative class" thesis — and more. De Graaf writes from inside the profession: he is a longtime partner at OMA, the Rotterdam-based firm co-founded by Rem Koolhaas. The book closes with "a fun list of b.s. terms often heard from both academics and bureaucrats."

Finally, the author is partway into China Miéville's The Rouse, a 1,200-plus-page novel "with pretty big pages." Miéville is the British author of genre-blurring fiction including Perdido Street Station and The City & the City, and a three-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. About 350 pages in, it "seems very good" — but the post asks when such a long book can fairly be judged. Can it sustain itself? Could it really "fall apart on p.1137," and past what page number is it "in the clear"? "I guess I will find out," the post concludes — with the bulk of the novel still ahead, that answer is left to future entries in the series.

Source: Marginal REVOLUTION, published October 8, 2026.