This is probably the most difficult and time-intensive year-end list I've ever put together. Last Christmas I got an iPad, which has given me the opportunity to read way more books than I've ever been able to before. What's interesting is that it's been a complement to reading physical books, not a supplement - Half Price is still unbeatable for its low prices and opportunities to find random books that I never would have otherwise, and there really isn't a good replacement for the sheer tactile pleasure of a good-sized paperback. I think that even with all the major events in my life this year - moving back to Austin and getting a much more time-intensive job - I've been able to tackle way more books than I think I have ever before. I read 61 new books this year, and while not all of them were cover-to-cover (if Atlas Shrugged has taught me one thing, it's that there's no shame in not wasting your time on a book you don't enjoy), I re-read easily a dozen more, to make this the most reading-intensive year of my life so far. At least one a week isn't bad!
I've also found myself relying heavily on best-of lists, literary aggregators, and plain old personal recommendations to broaden my horizons and find new books. I wish I were a better writer so that I could capture all of the nuances of my reactions to the avalanches of words that have engulfed me this year. If I had infinite free time then I would love to blog more about all of these cool books. But I suppose I'll have to settle for cobbling together this insufficient précis, which in itself is a good lesson on how hard it is to set down thoughts in a valuable way. Hopefully this agonizing process of trying to collapse these complex and multifaceted works into simple sets of linear rank is useful to someone else, because there's nothing quite like the pleasure of having your mind's cramped and unused corners cleaned and relit by a good book. This year I'm changing my format a little bit to group similar works together, because trying to rank and compare a novel to a history to an economics treatise is dumb and unhelpful.
I also had to broaden my "top 10" to "top 25", because anything less would be unfair. No numerical ranks, but higher is generally better.
Fiction/Literature:
Charles Portis - Masters of Atlantis. A hilarious satire of religious cults, this is probably my favorite Portis book, and one that surely cements him as one of the great American novelists of the 20th century through his wry understanding of and appreciation for our bottomless appetite for the great and grotesque, and the mystic and mysterious. This has some of his greatest characters in it as well, most notably Austin Popper, a demented bibulous überfraud who will stop at nothing to swindle the world, and Lamar Jimmerson, an ordinary man seeking the American Dream in the ethereal gurgle of his own self-made cult.
Charles Portis - The Dog of the South. If Portis really wanted to, he could be another Mark Twain. He nails the South so well in this tale of a lovable loser on a quest to find his runaway wife it's uncanny - if you've ever lived in the South the dialogue he writes from his characters will sound almost truer (and certainly funnier) than life, and there's plenty of nuances in the story to keep you appreciating it long after you're done. He doesn't have the touch for social issues that Twain did, but his comic sense and ear for dialogue is certainly on par.
Henri Charrière - Papillon. A truly great adventure story, based on the (arguably) true story of a French petty criminal sent to prison on Devil's Island in the Caribbean and his various escape attempts. Even if the story's authenticity is only on the level of "based on a true story" it's still a marvelous tale of badass bravery and the kind of manhood you can only develop by being in various tropical prisons for a decade, and I wish I'd read it when I was 13 or so because I would have inhaled it.
Michel Houellebecq - The Elementary Particles. This is the kind of book that you almost couldn't imagine an American writing, not so much for its subject matter as its unflinching attitude towards it. It's about two half-brothers and their relationship with the world around them: one, abused and mistreated as a youth who grows up with an insatiable sex addiction, and the other nerdier one whose work in molecular biology finally makes sex unnecessary for reproduction. The book's title was also translated as Atomised, and Houellebecq's fatalistic view of the modern world's splintering and separating effects on people will stick with you in this alternately bleak and hilarious novel.
Francis Spufford - Red Plenty. This barely fictional novel about what life was like in the glorious planned economy of the Soviet Union's glory days could actually have been a lot longer, because its exploration of how the terrible economic system of the USSR was able to turn some of the smartest and most hard-working people in the world into the shabby gray drunks that leap to mind whenever we think of the Soviets felt like it was over almost as soon as it started. Nevertheless, it's a good story of how the dreams of the ordinary can be ruined by the dreams of the great.
Science Fiction:
Stanislaw Lem - Fiasco. Lem has been one of my favorite science fiction authors for a long time. I almost think of him as anti-science fiction, though, because many of the best of his books are dedicated to undermining the naive dreams of the techno-utopians (i.e. Star Trek writers) and remorselessly showing what happens when humanity's flaws get translated to the stars. As the title shows, this story of first contact doesn't go well, but what makes it so compelling is his trademark way of showing the consequences of our limited rationality and our ultimate smallness in a baffling and possibly unknowable universe.
Greg Egan - Schild's Ladder. Egan is very different from Lem. He has never found a mathematical concept he can't nerd out over, or social problem that wouldn't be more fun to explore with future gadgets. What makes his brand of ultra-hard sci-fi so compelling is the dizzying array of advanced physics he plays around with, the tons of cool ideas he crams in, and his ability to translate very human concerns into the far future. Imagine a Large Hadron Collider disaster in the year 1 zillion AD investigated by wormhole-jumping transdimensional superhumans, overlaid on a simple story of a young scientist growing up.
Science:
Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow. Behavioral economics is "in" right now, partially as a result of the weakness of the economics profession in recent years, and partially because psychologists have stopped practicing Freudian incantations and started uncovering amazing details of how human beings actually think and behave. Kahneman's research into the division of consciousness between the fast-acting and unconscious System 1 and the more high-powered but lazy System 2 is recounted in this alternately fascinating and horrifying exploration of the unconscious. After reading this lengthy catalog of flaws, biases, and lacunae in our overworked brains, you'll be amazed that civilization exists at all. You'll also be disturbed at just how fragile your every processes of judgment are.
Steven Pinker - The Better Angels of Our Nature. The 20th century was famously soaked in blood, but it turns out that it may have been the most peaceful ten decades in human history. Pinker's basic thesis is that over any time span, at any level, human beings have gotten unprecedentedly less violent, to the point where even the worst pockets of violence on the planet today would barely qualify as average in past eras, to say nothing of the the expansion of tolerance and reciprocity to entirely new areas due to the many revolutions in racial/gender/sexual equality. It's a book that has to be read to be believed, both because of the depth of its argument and because of the horrifying details on just how awful to each other people used to be. Unlikely as it may seem, humanity might actually be progressing.
Charles Mann - 1491. 1491 and 1493 are almost a single book, because they have the same subject - the epochal transference of flora, fauna, bacteria, and people known as the Colombian Exchange. 1491 is about the Americas before the Exchange, outlining the different ways historians have tried to understand the various peoples who lived there and how that understanding has changed. Plenty of great discussion of the ecologies, demographics, and social complexities of the various civilizations, with an eye towards pointing out how fragile historical knowledge really is. There's no noble savage-ism here, just a great summarizing sweep from Tierra del Fuego to Ellesmere Island.
Charles Mann - 1493. 1493, correspondingly, is about the entire world after the Exchange, and how the cataclysmic aftereffects have been toppling empires, generating trade, and creating cuisines ever since. There's a huge number of "Did you know...?" facts in each book (one example: Scotland's failure to colonize Nicaragua due to deaths from malaria so bankrupted the country that it was bailed out by and forced to unify with England), and by reading both back-to-back you get both a great scientific synthesis and a hugely entertaining history of the modern world. One interesting corollary of globalization is that diversity in any one place can increase while global diversity can decrease - this subtle idea has major implications for how we judge the performance of our new, interconnected world.
E.O. Wilson - Consilience. Wilson made his name in ants, as a rock star entomologist who made seminal contributions to the understanding of one of the most successful species of all time. It must not have been challenging enough for him, because this book is all about the unity of knowledge, where he tries to both explain why past attempts to bridge the divide between the arts and the sciences have failed (his verdict: they were based on "failed models of the brain"), and to chart out a new path for the synthesis of the human and nonhuman studies by basing them in the techniques of the natural sciences, which might be, to borrow from Churchill, "the worst way to study the world, except for all the others". As a science fan, I really enjoyed his clear-eyed appraisal of why science has been successful in doing what it does, but even a more poetically-inclined person will like his appreciation for the arts, his elegant writing, and his graceful and generous demeanor.
Brian Fagan - The Long Summer. If you like the Jared Diamond-type macro-history/science books, then add this to your collection pronto. Humanity is fortunate to have come of age in this current placid climactic era, in the same way that it's fortunate to have evolved on a planet in our sun's habitable zone, and this is a good overview of how recent climate shifts have helped take us to where we are now through the gradual cycle of warming and cooling. While he tosses in occasional goofy bits about prehistoric religious practices, this is an eye-opening look at how much climate has influenced our past, and certainly will in the future.
John McPhee - The Curve of Binding Energy. Nuclear terrorism is the dog that didn't bark. Despite warning of how easy it would be for terrorists to make or steal a nuclear weapon, we've never seen a Sum of All Fears-style attack anywhere. The fact that the central worry of a book has never been realized would ordinarily make it a relic, but McPhee's glorious prose and deep journalistic skill make this study of noted physicist Ted Taylor a worthwhile read. I wonder what a post-9/11 attempt to rewrite this book would look like.
Economics/Politics:
David Simon - The Corner. Out of all the books I've read by people who wrote for The Wire, it's fitting that the best of them would be written by the main man himself. It's intensely absorbing, dealing with similar drug and crime themes, and has such sadness in it to rival not only The Wire, but the best of the Dickensian social realist novels. I can't even begin to explain how depressing it is that this is a true story set in the United States of America, but there's no replacement for putting human faces on what we see as news bulletins, crime statistics, or changes in the price of illegal drugs, and I wish that more people read this book.
Ed Glaeser - Triumph of the City. In spite of its admitted downsides, living in a big city rules, and this distillation of expensive and extensive research proves it. Glaeser is one of the best urban economists working today, and he uses many examples from around the world to show how cities are above all an engine for connecting people, and a return to greater density and human contact can spur growth, environmental sustainability, and new technologies if only we'd stop senselessly promoting suburban sprawl with every zoning restriction, freeway project, or mortgage subsidy. You'll learn something new on every page and gain a new appreciation for the vibrant nexus of dreams that every great city embodies.
Dean Baker - The End of Loser Liberalism. I read a lot of liberal/progressive books, and this was one of the best I've come across in a while. As you can tell by the title, this is economist Baker's attempt to enter the crowded market of attempts to reframe the debate between "free market/growth" conservativism and "let's just hand poor people money" liberalism. It goes without saying that that's a dumb dichotomy and only hopeless Fox News junkies (who aren't exactly this book's target market) think that way, but where this book betters its peers is not only in its clear explanation of just how un-Adam Smithian the modern GOP has become, but also in straightforward policy prescriptions in how to allow more people to take advantage of economic growth and re-level the playing field.
Philip Mirowski - Machine Dreams: Economics as a Cyborg Science. The hidden history of postwar economics, with special attention paid to game theory, linear programming, thermodynamics, and information theory/cryptography. He explores a ton of fascinating linkages between these subjects with a scathing, almost Nietzschean denunciation of how the flaws and assumptions of past economists have turned modern economics into what it is today. However, it's also a celebration of the ideas behind economics, and the ending part where he shows an example of an auction market actually simulating another market is awesome. The amount of research he must have dug through is staggering.
History:
James McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom. I know that this is like the single most over-covered era in American history, but this is one of the finest single-volume histories ever written. It's amazing the number of things he was able to cover: Northerners vs. Southerns, wets vs. dries, immigrants vs. nativists, Catholics vs. Protestants, tariff supporters vs. free traders, developers favoring Hamiltonian projects vs. laissez faire adherents, plantation owners vs. industrialists, those who wanted to settle the West vs. those who wanted to preserve the existing balance of the states, rural folk vs. urban dwellers, Democrats vs. Whigs, Democrats vs. Know-Nothings, Democrats vs. Republicans, war hawks vs. doves, and of course slavery supporters vs. abolitionists, while still also devoting plenty of time to the coolest part: the battles. Definitely check this out, as well as others in the Oxford History of the US series.
Isabel Wilkerson - The Warmth of Other Suns. Great history of the Great Migration, told beautifully through a focus on three typical migrants from the South to the North, and how the legacies of the cruel Jim Crow system they left behind informed their experiences in the sometimes similarly unwelcoming cities they moved to. I was unaware just how large the population shift was, comparable to any wave of foreign immigration at any point in history, and how much of American culture depended on those demographic changes. Very interesting to read in light of the reverse migration that's occurring now.
Bradley Martin - Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader. North Korea might be a global punch line of a nation, but its history is both fascinating and almost unbearably sad. This might be one of the most comprehensive attempts to peer behind the veil you'll find, with tons of interviews with defectors to enhance the narrative. Plenty of cool but bizarre stuff to learn here - I had no idea that until the 60s the North was actually richer than the South, or what kind of nightmarish land of starvation the North had become only a few decades later.
David Kennedy - Freedom From Fear. Another Oxford History of the US entry, this one covers the Great Depression and World War 2. Those are the decades that fundamentally changed America in a way that will probably never happen again - we have grown too big, too complacent, and though reading through the section on the start of the Depression will have you punching walls in frustration at how little people seem to have learned, it seems like against all odds maybe we have retained a tiny bit about the value of a safety net and the dangers that can result from corruption and poor policy. I wouldn't say that the part about World War 2 is definitive in the same way that McPherson's volume on the Civil War is definitive, but it certainly tries to cover as much as it reasonably can.
Diarmaid MacCulloch - Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Religion plays a huge role in the world, but it's rare that you (or at least I) read a history devoted it specifically. No matter how religious you are, you are guaranteed to learn something from this massive tome, since it covers everything from the Greek and Egyptian forerunners of Christianity to the many diverse sects and divisions within the supposedly ecumenical realm of the cross. The interactions between Christianity and whatever secular authority happened to be in power at the time are interesting and sure to provoke thought, and reading about some of the debates people settled at the point of a sword back in the day, like making the sign of the cross with 2 vs 3 fingers, is hilarious but also kind of depressing. Christianity has had such a long and varied story so far that, like the subtitle says, its journey is far from complete.
Ray Ginger - The Bending Cross. A superb biography of labor leader and Presidential candidate Eugene Debs, this book was much improved by my reading it during the Wisconsin protests. While the gains that Debs fought for seem taken for granted today, it's worth a look back at this man of almost superhuman generosity and selflessness. It seems almost paradoxical that a mass movement of workers required a guy like Debs to lead it, but it's also sad that we don't have people like him around today. What does it take for a man to be a true hero? Whatever the answer, Debs surely has to rank among them.
Ron Chernow - Hamilton. Hamilton was better than Jefferson: there, I said it. This biography can shade into sycophancy at times, but you're almost forced to come away from it impressed by what a badass Hamilton was, and how fickle the ledgers of history can be to even someone as accomplished as he was, both due to his own failings and to the machinations of his rivals. TJ ranks highly among those, of course, and it's instructive to compare the life stories of the philosophizing plantation aristocrat on one hand, and the self-made immigrant entrepreneur on the other. America owes much to both men, but even though Jefferson's name is more prominent, Hamilton might have had the more lasting influence as one of the finest political economists, statesmen, and administrators of his era. If he hadn't been stupid enough to be into dueling, the country would have benefited greatly.
