Best books I read: 2009

Robert Caro - The Years of Lyndon Johnson. I'm combining the three published volumes (Path to Power, Means of Ascent, and Master of the Senate) into a single entry, which is technically cheating, but this was one of the greatest book series I've ever read and I didn't want the three books taking up the top three spots. Equal parts a staggeringly detailed biography of LBJ (the author conducted hundreds of personal interviews with his associates and sorted through thousands of documents), a practical management guide, a riveting political thriller, and a sweeping overview of the vast changes in Austin, Texas, and American society as a whole during LBJ's life, this is the book series I would recommend that anyone read if they want to be a politician, learn about political power, or simply try to understand how one guy from the dirt poor Texas Hill Country became one of the richest men and indisputably the most powerful man in the world through sheer will and force of personality, only to end his career in disgrace. By the end of the third volume I really didn't know what to say about LBJ; he was responsible for so much good (the Great Society) and bad (the Vietnam War) that he almost defies moralizing, but his transformation from bratty child to Senate Majority Leader is epic and riveting even if you don't quite know what to say after it's over. The fourth and final volume which focuses on his presidency is due in 2012 and I can't wait for it. The third volume was the best, if you wanted to read just one, but you probably will then immediately read the others even if you didn't have much of an interest in LBJ before you started.

Paul Krugman - The Conscience of a Liberal. I've been a regular reader of his always-interesting New York Times columns for years, but ever since I studied his work on trade and urban geography in grad school (coincidentally, the work that would gain him the 2008 Economics Nobel Prize), I've been a huge admirer of his serious economics work as well. The Conscience of a Liberal is a response of sorts to Barry Goldwaters's highly influential 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative, making the case that if the United States is to remain a country where everyone can pursue their own happiness in maximum liberty and peace, the Reagan-era policies that benefit the rich few at the expense of the poor many must be reversed, and a new New Deal - chiefly the establishment of universal health care - is the best way to encourage opportunity and ensure that everyone can fully participate in the ever-changing American economy. It's also an enlightening history of the modern liberal and conservative movements that does a great job of showing the direct lineage from historical states' rights segregationists to modern health care reform opponents, and how calm debate and careful thinking can and should win out over narrow self-interest and greed. A good way to tell a good book is by how much it gives you to think about after you've finished, and The Conscience of a Liberal had me thinking about it for months afterwards.

Dan Simmons - The Terror. Historical fiction is tough to pull off well - you can either concentrate on completely minor personages so that history nerds can't nitpick your accuracy, or you can forget accuracy and just write whatever the heck you want about whoever your subjects are. The Terror neatly avoids this dilemma and doesn't bother pretending to be a normal historical fiction, it's an intense supernatural horror story that uses Sir John Franklin's ill-fated 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage as a starting point for a gripping and suspenseful Lovecraftian tableau of starvation, madness, and monsters from Eskimo mythology. I read the book early in the year during a cold front, and the dark chill of the real-life winter made the scenes of ice-bound ships and desperate, starving sailors especially vivid and compelling. I was already a fan of Dan Simmons from the great first two books of his Hyperion science fiction series (the other two books, not so much), and he brings the same literary flair to this genre. You'll never look at scurvy the same way again!

Thomas Geoghegan - Which Side Are You On?. Not that I've read a lot of books about labor law, but this is the most well-written book about the experience of practicing labor law I've ever read, a sort of ground-level counterpart to the labor-market sections of Krugman's book. I once read an Amazon review for another one of Geoghegan's books that claimed that all of his books were really about citizenship in one form or another, and I agree with that. This one focuses on the damage that conservative policies did to the traditional American understanding of citizenship during the 1980s, specifically that of the Chicagoland union members that were being fired in droves as structural shifts in the economy (both natural and planned) eliminated their jobs and their places in society under the guise of the "invisible hand" while the corporations who cheerfully outsourced their jobs made huge profits. Geoghegan is witty and self-deprecating as he recognizes the futility of reversing or even slowing the massive hemorrhaging of jobs, and he pulls no punches in recounting the resulting ugly fratricide as these desperate unions relentlessly and inscrutably destroyed themselves as they lost everything they had. Somehow I ended up reading a lot of anti-Reagan books this year, and this was the second-most vitriolic out of the lot.

Mark Ames - Going Postal. This was the most vitriolic. By an unfortunate coincidence, I ordered this book right before the 11/5 Fort Hood shooting tragedy, and after finishing it I was angry at how steadfastly unwilling the media (and much of society) are to ask the tough questions about why school and workplace shootings, which were almost completely unknown before the 1980s, have become such a grim and seemingly inevitable part of modern society. Mark Ames places the blame squarely on the new corporate culture of the Reagan years, where employees became expendable assets to be used up and thrown away. He chronicles in vivid detail the lives of these average people who "just snapped", and shows, using a lengthy and fascinating parallel to antebellum slave revolts, how time and time again these shootings were anything but random, how workers deliberately targeted their abusive and tyrannical supervisors while sparing coworkers they liked and yet their actions were always dismissed after the fact as "just random craziness" by a media systematically incapable of recognizing the recurring pattern. The same is true of school shootings like Columbine, where bullied and harassed students, routinely ignored by their school officials, felt that the only way they could bring their lives back under control was to go postal. It's hard to read this book and then read news stories about the Fort Hood tragedy, which is just the latest manifestation of the new ugliness in our society that Reagan symbolized and embodied. A good but extremely frustrating book.

Emile Zola - Germinal. This is just one book in Zola's 20-volume Rougons-Macquart cycle, his magnum opus which traces the fortunes of different branches of the same family throughout the great upheavals of 19th century France, but it got good reviews so it's the first one I read. Zola has a fantastic eye for detail in addition to his amusingly dated theories of congenital sin (the main character gets crazy when he's drunk just like his ancestors, and the other characters also have sins-of-the-father inheritances that prove something or other), and so his characters inhabit an incredibly entertaining world in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, where the protagonists battle through their love triangle while also caught in the grips of an epic coal strike. Germinal (named after a springtime month in the French Revolutionary Calendar that also signifies rebirth) reads a great deal like Upton Sinclair's masterpiece The Jungle, right down to the personal crises of the main character and the triumphalist political messaging at the end, but with French coal miners instead of Chicago meat-packers. I don't know if I'll ever track down all 19 of the rest of the series, but this was a great novel even in translation.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road. If you liked the brutal Texas shootouts of No Country For Old Men and the relentless Wild West slaughter of Blood Meridian, this lighthearted tale of a father protecting his son from the ravaged remnants of society in a brutal post-apocalyptic American wasteland will be right up your alley! All the hallmarks of McCarthy are present: gorgeous prose of near-Biblical cadence, constant violence, dialogue without quotation marks, fantastic and surreal landscapes, characters without names... they're here and they're great. There are a lot of subtle touches that make the simple survive-and-protect plot especially effective, like the fact in all their lonely and wanderings across the ruins of the country you never find out where they are, which makes the story take on a much more universal and haunting pallor than it might have otherwise. This is an extremely affecting book that sticks with you for a long time.

Matt Taibbi - The Great Derangement. Are we a society, or a sorry collection of deluded, implacably antagonistic interest groups? Is America still a nation of progress, or are we doomed to repeat the Soviet Union's slow decaying rot due to our inability to directly engage the unpleasant reality of our completely dysfunctional culture? Taibbi is easily my favorite journalist working now because he matches the most awesome, effortless prose since Hunter S Thompson (whose position at Rolling Stone Taibbi now fills) with the kind of incredulous anger that can only come from having to cover some of the most degrading and worthless media stories our culture has to offer (the Michael Jackson trial, Lynndie England). The basic premise of the book is that American discourse has become so infected with meaningless sports team-ish tribalism that it's almost impossible for our political system to function effectively. There's tons of hilarious yet depressing reporting on how irredeemably corrupt Washington has become, cheered on by a public that's nearly incapable of making informed decisions on any issues whatsoever due to an utterly worthless media that can only report the most banal and useless stories. I would say that the best part of the book is where he pretends to be born again at Pastor John Hagee's San Antonio megachurch (the same anti-Catholic nutcase who was briefly in the news last year when McCain tried to seek his endorsement), but the writing is superb throughout.

Victor Hugo - Ninety-Three. I've never read Les Miserables or The Hunchback of Notre Dame (all I've seen are the movies), so I have no idea how this one compares to the others in literary terms. However, this book was fantastic so I might seek out the others soon enough. It's set in the year 1793 (hence the title) during a counter-revolutionary revolt against the new French government, and it focuses on a British attempt to aid the supporters of the monarchy in a remote area of country against the revolutionary government's attempts to suppress the rebellion by whatever means necessary. One of the striking things about the writing is how even-handed Hugo is about presenting the different factions involved, which must have taken on added resonance given the book's publication shortly after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Everyone is portrayed in a bold, dramatic style that attracted none other than Ayn Rand, who wrote an introduction to my copy. Despite that dubious endorsement, rest assured that the dramatic action is backed by a series of truly thoughtful dialogues that place one of the most important events in the history of freedom in the context of the terrible warfare that went along with it.

Thomas Pynchon - Inherent Vice. Normally I hate loopy comparisons, but the only way I can describe this book is that it's the hardboiled detective noir of The Maltese Falcon plus the absurd goofiness of The Big Lebowski plus the copious drug use of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Pynchon is always stereotyped as a Difficult Author who writes Long and Complicated Literature, but one thing I've always loved about him is just how funny he is, even when he's writing about medieval postal conspiracies (The Crying of Lot 49), impossibly weird V2 rocket cartels (Gravity's Rainbow), or 18th century surveying controversies (Mason & Dixon). Inherent Vice is a sort of parody of detective fiction - I haven't read that much of the classic 30s-era detective stuff, but Pynchon hilariously spoofs the endless double-crosses and plot twists of the whodunit genre by wrapping the predictably unpredictable left turns in a very funny nostalgia trip for the late-60s/early-70s California surfer scene that's as much about the constantly high main character and his stoner buddies as it is about the murder mystery they're trying to solve, escape, or just ignore when the late-night cartoon marathons hit the airwaves. This might be the most normal (i.e., least insane) book he's ever written, but it was also one of the most immediately satisfying.

Best albums I listened to: 2009

1. The Life and Times - Tragic Boogie. 

2. ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - The Century of Self. 

3. Toma - As We Fall Into Static Our Hearts Sing. 

4. Oblisk - Weather Patterns. 

5. Daniel Land and the Modern Painters - Love Songs For The Chemical Generation. 

6. Russian Circles - Geneva. 

7. The Twilight Sad - Forget the Night Ahead. 

8. A Shoreline Dream - Recollections of Memory. 

9. The Rifles - The Great Escape. 

10. Arctic Plateau - On a Sad Sunny Day. 

11. Del the Funky Homosapien and Tame One - Parallel Uni-Verses. 

12. Les Fragments De La Nuit - Musique Du Crepuscule. 

13. Astra - Weirding. 

14. Metric - Fantasies. 

15. The Heavy - The House That Dirt Built. 

Book Review: Thomas Pynchon - Inherent Vice

Normally I hate loopy comparisons, but the only way I can describe this book is that it's the hardboiled detective noir of The Maltese Falcon plus the absurd goofiness of The Big Lebowski plus the copious drug use of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Pynchon is always stereotyped as a Difficult Author who writes Long and Complicated Literature, but one thing I've always loved about him is just how funny he is, even when he's writing about medieval postal conspiracies (The Crying of Lot 49), impossibly weird V2 rocket cartels (Gravity's Rainbow), or 18th century surveying controversies (Mason & Dixon). Inherent Vice is a sort of parody of detective fiction - I haven't read that much of the classic 30s-era detective stuff, but Pynchon hilariously spoofs the endless double-crosses and plot twists of the whodunit genre by wrapping the predictably unpredictable left turns in a very funny nostalgia trip for the late-60s/early-70s California surfer scene that's as much about the constantly high main character and his stoner buddies as it is about the murder mystery they're trying to solve, escape, or just ignore when the late-night cartoon marathons hit the airwaves. This might be the most normal (i.e., least insane) book he's ever written, but it was also one of the most immediately satisfying.

Book Review: Victor Hugo - Ninty-Three

I've never read Les Miserables or The Hunchback of Notre Dame (all I've seen are the movies), so I have no idea how this one compares to the others in literary terms. However, this book was fantastic so I might seek out the others soon enough. It's set in the year 1793 (hence the title) during a counter-revolutionary revolt against the new French government, and it focuses on a British attempt to aid the supporters of the monarchy in a remote area of country against the revolutionary government's attempts to suppress the rebellion by whatever means necessary. One of the striking things about the writing is how even-handed Hugo is about presenting the different factions involved, which must have taken on added resonance given the book's publication shortly after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Everyone is portrayed in a bold, dramatic style that attracted none other than Ayn Rand, who wrote an introduction to my copy. Despite that dubious endorsement, rest assured that the dramatic action is backed by a series of truly thoughtful dialogues that place one of the most important events in the history of freedom in the context of the terrible warfare that went along with it.

Book Review: Matt Taibbi - The Great Derangement

Are we a society, or a sorry collection of deluded, implacably antagonistic interest groups? Is America still a nation of progress, or are we doomed to repeat the Soviet Union's slow decaying rot due to our inability to directly engage the unpleasant reality of our completely dysfunctional culture? Taibbi is easily my favorite journalist working now because he matches the most awesome, effortless prose since Hunter S Thompson (whose position at Rolling Stone Taibbi now fills) with the kind of incredulous anger that can only come from having to cover some of the most degrading and worthless media stories our culture has to offer (the Michael Jackson trial, Lynndie England). The basic premise of the book is that American discourse has become so infected with meaningless sports team-ish tribalism that it's almost impossible for our political system to function effectively. There's tons of hilarious yet depressing reporting on how irredeemably corrupt Washington has become, cheered on by a public that's nearly incapable of making informed decisions on any issues whatsoever due to an utterly worthless media that can only report the most banal and useless stories. I would say that the best part of the book is where he pretends to be born again at Pastor John Hagee's San Antonio megachurch (the same anti-Catholic nutcase who was briefly in the news last year when McCain tried to seek his endorsement), but the writing is superb throughout.

Book Review: Cormac McCarthy - The Road

If you liked the brutal Texas shootouts of No Country For Old Men and the relentless Wild West slaughter of Blood Meridian, this lighthearted tale of a father protecting his son from the ravaged remnants of society in a brutal post-apocalyptic American wasteland will be right up your alley! All the hallmarks of McCarthy are present: gorgeous prose of near-Biblical cadence, constant violence, dialogue without quotation marks, fantastic and surreal landscapes, characters without names... they're here and they're great. There are a lot of subtle touches that make the simple survive-and-protect plot especially effective, like the fact in all their lonely and wanderings across the ruins of the country you never find out where they are, which makes the story take on a much more universal and haunting pallor than it might have otherwise. This is an extremely affecting book that sticks with you for a long time.

Book Review: Émile Zola - Germinal

This is just one book in Zola's 20-volume Rougons-Macquart cycle, his magnum opus which traces the fortunes of different branches of the same family throughout the great upheavals of 19th century France, but it got good reviews so it's the first one I read. Zola has a fantastic eye for detail in addition to his amusingly dated theories of congenital sin (the main character gets crazy when he's drunk just like his ancestors, and the other characters also have sins-of-the-father inheritances that prove something or other), and so his characters inhabit an incredibly entertaining world in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, where the protagonists battle through their love triangle while also caught in the grips of an epic coal strike. Germinal (named after a springtime month in the French Revolutionary Calendar that also signifies rebirth) reads a great deal like Upton Sinclair's masterpiece The Jungle, right down to the personal crises of the main character and the triumphalist political messaging at the end, but with French coal miners instead of Chicago meat-packers. I don't know if I'll ever track down all 19 of the rest of the series, but this was a great novel even in translation.

Book Review: Mark Ames - Going Postal

By an unfortunate coincidence, I ordered this book right before the 11/5/2009 Fort Hood shooting tragedy, and after finishing it I was angry at how steadfastly unwilling the media (and much of society) are to ask the tough questions about why school and workplace shootings, which were almost completely unknown before the 1980s, have become such a grim and seemingly inevitable part of modern society. Mark Ames places the blame squarely on the new corporate culture of the Reagan years, where employees became expendable assets to be used up and thrown away. He chronicles in vivid detail the lives of these average people who "just snapped", and shows, using a lengthy and fascinating parallel to antebellum slave revolts, how time and time again these shootings were anything but random, how workers deliberately targeted their abusive and tyrannical supervisors while sparing coworkers they liked and yet their actions were always dismissed after the fact as "just random craziness" by a media systematically incapable of recognizing the recurring pattern. The same is true of school shootings like Columbine, where bullied and harassed students, routinely ignored by their school officials, felt that the only way they could bring their lives back under control was to go postal. It's hard to read this book and then read news stories about the Fort Hood tragedy, which is just the latest manifestation of the new ugliness in our society that Reagan symbolized and embodied. A good but extremely frustrating book.

Book Review: Thomas Geoghegan - Which Side Are You On?

Not that I've read a lot of books about labor law, but this is the most well-written book about the experience of practicing labor law I've ever read, a sort of ground-level counterpart to the labor-market sections of Krugman's book. I once read an Amazon review for another one of Geoghegan's books that claimed that all of his books were really about citizenship in one form or another, and I agree with that. This one focuses on the damage that conservative policies did to the traditional American understanding of citizenship during the 1980s, specifically that of the Chicagoland union members that were being fired in droves as structural shifts in the economy (both natural and planned) eliminated their jobs and their places in society under the guise of the "invisible hand" while the corporations who cheerfully outsourced their jobs made huge profits. Geoghegan is witty and self-deprecating as he recognizes the futility of reversing or even slowing the massive hemorrhaging of jobs, and he pulls no punches in recounting the resulting ugly fratricide as these desperate unions relentlessly and inscrutably destroyed themselves as they lost everything they had. Somehow I ended up reading a lot of anti-Reagan books this year, and this was the second-most vitriolic out of the lot.

Book Review: Dan Simmons - The Terror

Historical fiction is tough to pull off well - you can either concentrate on completely minor personages so that history nerds can't nitpick your accuracy, or you can forget accuracy and just write whatever the heck you want about whoever your subjects are. The Terror neatly avoids this dilemma and doesn't bother pretending to be a normal historical fiction, it's an intense supernatural horror story that uses Sir John Franklin's ill-fated 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage as a starting point for a gripping and suspenseful Lovecraftian tableau of starvation, madness, and monsters from Eskimo mythology. I read the book early in the year during a cold front, and the dark chill of the real-life winter made the scenes of ice-bound ships and desperate, starving sailors especially vivid and compelling. I was already a fan of Dan Simmons from the great first two books of his Hyperion science fiction series (the other two books, not so much), and he brings the same literary flair to this genre. You'll never look at scurvy the same way again!

Book Review: Paul Krugman - The Conscience of a Liberal

I've been a regular reader of his always-interesting New York Times columns for years, but ever since I studied his work on trade and urban geography in grad school (coincidentally, the work that would gain him the 2008 Economics Nobel Prize), I've been a huge admirer of his serious economics work as well. The Conscience of a Liberal is a response of sorts to Barry Goldwaters's highly influential 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative, making the case that if the United States is to remain a country where everyone can pursue their own happiness in maximum liberty and peace, the Reagan-era policies that benefit the rich few at the expense of the poor many must be reversed, and a new New Deal - chiefly the establishment of universal health care - is the best way to encourage opportunity and ensure that everyone can fully participate in the ever-changing American economy. It's also an enlightening history of the modern liberal and conservative movements that does a great job of showing the direct lineage from historical states' rights segregationists to modern health care reform opponents, and how calm debate and careful thinking can and should win out over narrow self-interest and greed. A good way to tell a good book is by how much it gives you to think about after you've finished, and The Conscience of a Liberal had me thinking about it for months afterwards.