Best books I read: 2012

I read 75 books this year, a new personal record. While I'm still not very good at keeping up with contemporary books, 4 of my favorite non-fiction and 2 of my favorite fiction were published this year if you count the Houellebecq translation as being new, which I do. I think that's neat, since who wants to read only old stuff all the time? I also read more fiction this year, since I hate feeling like a typical non-fiction nerd.

I still feel like there are too many books that I'll never have the time to read, but I made a bigger dent in the Pile this year than I ever have before. For the remainder of the year I doubt I'll read anything more challenging than the price tag on a case of Coors Light, and though I doubt I'll be able to repeat my feat next year, I'm looking forward to tackling some of my misses. Speaking of which, what did I miss this year?

Here's the list. I hate ranking books so wildly different from each other, so here it is in alphabetical order....

Non-Fiction:

Robert Caro - The Passage of Power. This is maybe a slight step down from Master of the Senate, but only because it's shorter and during this period its protagonist suffered one of the most dramatic losses of power imaginable. Even reduced by 500 pages from its predecessor, it's still a sprawling work of Shakespearean scope, chronicling the years of Lyndon Johnson's Vice Presidency and the first 7 weeks after the Kennedy assassination. And while there's less in the way of the inspirational scenes like the passage of the 1957 Civil Right Act from the previous book that restore your faith in the ability of the American government to actually help people, Caro's depiction of the way LBJ took command of the gridlocked government in the wake of JFK's death and got it moving again is thrilling. The retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis is an ominous foreshadowing of the Vietnam War, at the same time as LBJ's struggle to pass legislation presages the Great Society.

James Fallows - China Airborne. China's meteoric ascent from the crippling poverty of the Mao era to its current status as a still-poor but fast-growing major power is one of the major success stories of human history. Aerospace is one industry that symbolizes China's aspirations towards first-world status as well as illuminates its shortcomings, and James Fallows, whose excellent 2010 essay collection Postcards From Tomorrow Square presented many fascinating details from China's "controlled, yet chaotic" headlong pursuit of growth, is well-positioned to report on what China's attempts to cultivate a homegrown aerospace industry might mean for itself and for the world. Aerospace isn't an industry like just any other, and China's attempts to emulate the safe, reliable, and (relatively) free air travel culture of the United States will have huge ramifications for their political system and culture at large. Free of judgment but plentiful with insight, Fallows reports on this vast social and industrial transformation as well as any mere mortal can.

Jon Gertner - The Idea Factory. AT&T is still an immensely influential corporation, for good and for ill, but rarely in human history has a company contained such an assembly of raw scientific and engineering talent as AT&T did back in the heyday of Bell Labs. Ever wonder what kind of place could invent transistors, semiconductors, microwave towers, digital transmission, satellites, radio astronomy, information theory, quality control, fiber optics, undersea cabling, CCDs, cell phones, video phones, pulse code modulation, lasers, Unix, and the C programming language? Gertner tells its story as the confluence of many of the greatest minds of the time in a completely unique organization, and while you will come away somewhat depressed that modern corporations have seemingly abandoned this truly Promethean culture of innovation, its story is still capable of inspiring.

Michael Grunwald - The New New Deal. This is probably the best book I've ever read about a single bill. Grunwald analyzes seemingly every provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus, an act so vast that not even its supporters fully appreciate the range and depth of its impact. He concludes that while it might have been a political failure, it has not only been an economic success on its own short timeline but an underappreciated catalyst for lasting revolutions in sectors like energy, health care, education, and long-term growth. Grunwald has extensive and fair coverage of the thoughts, strategies, and interests of both supporters and opponents of the bill, and while he does show his own support for the measure, it's hard by the end of the book to disagree with him on the facts that the stimulus, which was 50% larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than the entirety of FDR's New Deal, both helped prevent a second Great Depression and will provide lasting dividends for years to come.

David Halberstam - The Best and the Brightest. No matter your attitude on war, whether you consider it a necessary evil, an absolute evil, or even if you simply enjoy it, the decision to launch a war is still something to pay attention to. Sometimes it's done as "politics by other means", sometimes it's done to prevent a greater disaster, and sometimes a war is begun almost by accident, the best of intentions becoming the worst of results. Halberstam's book is not only an immensely detailed breakdown of the various small, careful, incremental escalations that turned an obscure French territorial dispute in the 1940s into the greatest American foreign policy disaster of the century, but also a collection of vivid psychological profiles of the men who midwifed this tragedy. Not only will you learn about the background behind the transformation of a war in Vietnam into the Vietnam War, you will learn a lot about people, institutions, and decisions. This is the spiritual, more journalistic heir to Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August.

J. Anthony Lukas - Common Ground. Widely regarded as one of the greatest works of sociology ever written, Lukas' novelistic account of the desegregation of Boston's school system is by turns heartbreaking and outrageous, yet always rigorous and scrupulous to fact. The irony that Boston, intellectual headquarters of abolition, was by the 1970s one of the most segregated cities in America is explored through the stories of three families, the upscale Yankee Divers, the working-class Irish McGoffs, and the poor black Twymons, each of whom must confront the wrenching changes that busing will bring to their lives. Encompassing the courts, the schools, the police, the media, the Catholic Church, and seemingly the whole city of Boston, this deeply humane book offers one of the most complete and thoughtful looks you'll find at how America deals with race, power, and crime.

Charles Murray - Apollo: The Race to the Moon. We used to go to the Moon. That is, at some point human beings designed and built machines that were capable of taking people to an alien world, allowing them to land and explore it, and then returning them home safely. This achievement should stagger people, yet it seems like a half-forgotten dream from a civilization somehow mightier than ours. Who were those people, and what was it like to be responsible for spacecraft that took terrestrial life further away from our planet than ever before in history? Murray skips the frequently-told stories of the politicians and the astronauts, and concentrates on what the space program was like for the engineers who actually built the rockets and landers, relating the disasters both avoided and not so skillfully that by the end you're tempted to declare them heroes, and wonder why we can't do these things today. 

Arthur Schlesinger - Robert Kennedy and His Times. Being cynical about politicians is only natural, yet sometimes someone comes along who somehow taps into our natural craving for leadership, seemingly embodying the best of our national spirit and promising a better tomorrow via their charismatic presence alone. RFK is to many people the last politician they could trust emotionally, a man of infinite compassion yet ruthless integrity, a person of infinite compassion yet ruthless integrity, someone with a prosecutor's ferocity yet a poet's sensibility. He was murdered before he could really do much to validate the immense, almost messianic hopes that people laid on him, and this biography, written by a man who knew him well, takes you through his journey from hard-edged enforcer of justice to champion of the downtrodden in a way that will leave you greatly saddened at the cruelties of history.

Tom Slee - No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart. Economics, so the line goes, is the study of choices people make. Why do people end up in the patterns of economic activity that we see around us, and what effects do other people's choices have on us? Can you truly vote with your wallet? Slee wants to talk about how individuals following the logic of personal choice can end up in collective binds, without either coming off like a crypto-socialist business-hater or a right-wing corporate apologist. This is one of the most accessible yet practical guides to game theory you will ever come across, both whimsical yet serious in its analysis of how simple decisions can have big effects on the world around us. No matter your opinion on big box stores, you will gain a new appreciation for the workings of the market and a new way to look at the businesses around you.

Adam Tooze - The Wages of Destruction. Most histories of World War 2 concentrate on the battles, for perfectly understandable reasons. Tooze instead looks at the German war economy, providing an incredible alternate perspective on what Germany did during the war and why. Have you ever wondered what exactly Hitler was thinking when he started picking fights with seemingly every other industrial power in the world in such an odd order, one right after the other? Tooze shows that given Hitler's goals of making Germany a globally dominant empire on the order of America or Britain, and given Germany's war/hyperinflation/deflation-ravaged economy, he had no choice but to move as quickly as possible, as every year the superiority of the Allied economies would become greater and greater. However, those goals were impossible from the start, and it's incredible that Germany was able to last as long as it did. It's pretty grim in parts, but this book will change the way you look at Axis & Allies forever.

Peter Turchin - War and Peace and War. Yet another Big History book, this one really pulled out in front of the pack for me and I think it's the best one I've read so far. First, there's no better way to make me smile than with a reference to psychohistory, from my favorite sci-fi series of all time - Turchin compares his goal of scientifying history to Asimov's famous literary conceit right there at the very beginning of the Introduction. Turchin is serious about it though, offering a semi-mathematical framework for historical analysis he calls cliodynamics, which borrows methodologically from statistical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics. In English, that means he models the rise and fall of empires using equations that treat people as groups, and also account for chaotic behavior as well. This means that there's some population genetics lurking in the background as well. There is not actually any math in this book, however; this was a prose exposition of the equations that are all in his earlier Historical Dynamics, which I haven't read. There's still plenty of rigor, though, as he subscribes fully to Paul Krugman's sentiment that "The equations and diagrams of formal economics are, more often than not, no more than the scaffolding used to help construct an intellectual edifice. Once that edifice has been built to a certain point, the scaffolding can be stripped away, leaving only plain English behind." This is essential reading alongside Gun Germs & Steel.

Duncan Watts - Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer). This is frequently described as a book on common sense, which it is, but more importantly it's an investigation on human cognitive limits more generally and also a call to radically restructure the discipline of sociology in light of modern advances in technology. Sociology often gets made fun of in the hierarchies of academic disciplines, but Watts argues that there are reasons why sociology seems so vague and unscientific: not only are sociological problems very complicated in ways that physics problems like orbital mechanics are not, but in addition to the fact that only now do we have the ability to run experiments to truly test our long-held prejudices about ourselves and how society works, our problem-solving skills are themselves subject to those same prejudices. It's a tall order, and though inevitably the chapters pointing out problems are stronger than the chapters suggesting ways to do better, I think this is an excellent synthesis of a lot of good information and a solid guide to outlining future research directions.

Fiction:

Billy Lee Brammer - The Gay Place. If J.D. Salinger were a Texan, this is the book he would write about what politics was like in the sleepy capital of Austin in the 1950s. The book is structured as 3 short stories, with Governor Arthur Fenstermaker, a thinly-fictionalized version of LBJ, the only consistent main character between them. Though actual politics is put somewhat in the background, the stories show life in that time and place as an endlessly salacious succession of drinking, lobbying, and hooking up with the secretary, as Fenstermaker looms in the distance as the one indispensable man of the whole scene. The dialogue is extremely sharp and often almost hallucinatory, the characters by turns ebullient and melancholic, and the stories compelling, if somewhat similar to each other. According to legend, this book hit so close to home that LBJ made Brammer, who had worked for him after working at the Texas Observer, persona non grata in his Presidential administration, destroying his career.

Robertson Davies - Fifth Business. It's hard to describe what this book is about in ways that that make sense if you haven't read it. I would say it's a book about the subjectivity of life experience, and how different life looks to you on the inside than others on the outside. The main character Dunstan Ramsay grows from childhood to adulthood obsessed with the difference between the prosaic materialism of reality and the more vivid world of religion, spiritualism, and magic. The title is Davies' term for someone whose  role in life seems to be primarily that of a bystander and helper of others, and the way that Ramsay finds fulfillment in that role through his life story is the main strength of the book besides the writing, which is high quality. The book has sequels which I didn't find quite as compelling as this one, but it's good on its own nonetheless.

Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls. Writing a satire of an entire culture is a pretty big challenge for a writer, but Gogol is talented enough that this story of a con man with a get-rich-quick scheme looking for marks in early 19th century Russia is funny even today, halfway across the world. The plot sort of reminds me of The Music Man without the feel-good ending: the protagonist is trying to get the minor nobility in a small provincial town to sell him the titles to serfs who have died since the last census was taken and haven't been reported as deceased yet. With a large number of serfs on paper, he will take out a loan against them from the bank and run off with the money. The only problem is that the locals are as suspicious of outsiders as they are eager to impress someone they think has money, and he has to be careful to balance their stupidity against their greed. Many of Gogol's insights about the mentality of Russians then could apply to Americans today, which is a mark of really timeless literature.

Michel Houellebecq - The Map and the Territory. A big theme in a lot of modern novels is separation. Call it alienation, anomie, atomization, whatever - the distance between people somehow looms large in this age where we can be closer to each other than at any other time in human history. It takes real skill as a writer to explore this idea without sounding either trite or meaningless, and Houellebecq makes this story of Jed the artist both moving and unique, as this guy moves through life in an era where both people and things can seem more disposable than ever. Houellebecq has a great sense of ironic humor, which makes the emotion in Jed's relationships with his father and his girlfriend seem even more moving than they otherwise would be. By the end, when "the triumph of vegetation is total", you'll have a new appreciation for the connections you make in life.

Mario Vargas Llosa - The War of the End of the World. If ever a book deserved the adjective "apocalyptic", it would be this novelistic take on the War of Canudos, a small attempt to quiet a small rebellious village that grew into the deadliest civil war in Brazilian history. In Llosa's hands, the town's dedication to an obscure charismatic religious figure becomes a stand-in for the massive changes Brazil was experiencing at the time: abolition of slavery, transition from monarchy to a republic, and attempts to secularize a deeply religious people in the name of Brazil's new motto: Order and Progress. Llosa is a master of tempo, interspersing the epic battles with the stories of these people whose lives are entwined with the ideals of the age, and by the time you get to the ending you'll be in awe. For fans of Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy.

Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds. I like a book where the author isn't afraid to stop what he's doing and just write the heck out of some scenes and have fun with language. This story of a mediocre student writing stories that involve people who are also writing stories is one of the very first postmodern/metafictional novels ever made, and for my money the conceit hasn't advanced much since O'Brien did it here. The best part of the book to me was the layer of the story involving characters from Irish mythology, who march around and go on adventures in language that's a peculiar mixture of baroque archaisms and slapstick comedy that I've never encountered anywhere else. I still think O'Brien's best novel is The Third Policeman, but this book is also great and puts him alongside Joyce and Beckett where he belongs.

Thomas Pynchon - Against the Day. I don't know if my appreciation of his books has been warped in some way by reading them out of order, but every time I read one I'm impressed in a new way by how massive his range as a writer is, and how he's able to take seemingly any place and time and bring it to such a vivid life. This time he focuses, if "focus" is the right word for a thousand-page novel with dozens of characters that spans several decades, on the adventures of several members of the Traverse family in the decades immediately prior to the start of World War 1. Along the way he explores themes of anarchism, revolution, capitalism, power, math, music, technology, magic, time, fate, family, bilocation, resonances, love, and more while taking these characters across (and inside) the globe, slowly bringing you into this world he's created that, while maybe not quite as enthralling as the one in Gravity's Rainbow, still has enough richness in it to constitute the careers of several lesser writers. I don't know how he does it.

J.K. Rowling - The Casual Vacancy. I have zero interest in Harry Potter, but I was curious what kind of "regular" novel someone who had just finished one of the most successful children's series of all time would write. Far from seeming like some kind of victory lap or something jotted just to fill some free time, it was a surprisingly grim look at the way that the death of a city council member in a small British town forces several families to handle the problems of poverty, immigration, growth, and the disintegration of their families. Contemporary fiction is always tricky, but Rowling makes these grubby little people's selfishness and callousness both interesting and meaningful, probably due to her own personal rags-to-riches story and advocacy for Britain's troubled welfare state. I'd definitely read more from her.

John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath. I wasn't assigned this book in high school, which is probably why I liked it so much when I finally read it a decade later without having to write boring essays on it. It really is a truly great novel that deserves every bit of its place in the American literary canon, due to its vivid characters, strong dialogue, compelling plot, and the skill with which Steinbeck immortalizes the Dust Bowl, turning what could have been just another footnote in American history into a classic portrayal of greed, desperation, courage, and failure. Tom Joad may not be quite the archetype that Huck Finn is, but he's up there, and his struggles to feed his family during the depths of the Depression have lost none of their drama and poignancy. Incredibly, it was only the second-best Steinbeck novel I read this year.

John Steinbeck - East of Eden. I wonder what it's like for an author to sit down at their desk and think This is it, this book I'm about to write is going to be The One that puts me into the pantheon. Whatever Steinbeck was thinking at his typewriter, he turned out a masterpiece, one of those books that makes you wonder why anyone else even bothers trying to write a Great American Novel since that slot was just taken. The nickel summary is that it's the story of the relationships between the members of several generations of a family that moves from the Northeast to California to start a new life, but its scope includes life, death, love, brotherhood, fate, freedom, choice, sin, success, and all of the important issues that make us turn to Big Famous Novels in the first place. Steinbeck has this way of writing dialogue that should sound pretentious but instead strikes the perfect note, and the characters he puts in this book are so full of life it's almost unbelievable.

Evelyn Waugh - Scoop. Journalism is an easy profession to make fun of, and this hilarious satire written by a journalist shows some of the reasons why. It's the story of William Boot, an obscure nature writer sent to investigate, and if necessary invent, news from the frontline in an African country reportedly wracked by civil war. His improbable, even Wodehousian reportorial career is launched, destroyed, and relaunched by newspaper magnate Lord Copper, who edicts are motivated more by his all-surpassing cluelessness than capriciousness, and his adventures on the front are farcical and most likely all-too-real. The novel manages the rare trick of being both light-hearted, deadly accurate, and still relevant more than 70 years after it was first published.