Best books I read: 2017

You know the drill by now: "man, I tried to hard to read all these books but just couldn't find the time!" Yes yes, life happened, and I didn't finish quite as many books as I'd have liked - what else is new? Leisure reading should be about pleasure, first and foremost, and a lot of these books are excellent. I found it hard to cull the list down.

But, if you only had the time to read one, I'd pick Thomas Flanagan's amazing novel about the French invasion of Ireland during the French Revolutionary Wars, or Joe Heinrich's explanation of how gene-culture coevolution makes humanity so unique.

Fiction:

PFTCommenter - Goodell vs Obama. If you read or watch or follow any of the increasingly WWE-esque football sports-industrial complex at all, PFTCommenter is a must-read. His character - an invincibly ignorant, supremely confident internet commenter who actually believes the dumbest opinions spewed by ESPN talking heads and takes them to the next level - is essentially unique in the world of sports columnists, and only he could do justice to the greatest story ever told, a true clash of the titans. When Jerry Jones dies of a botched plastic surgery accident, a legal loophole allows Barack Obama to seize control of the Dallas Cowboys, and only Roger Goodell, the greatest league commissioner in all of sports, can prevent him from turning America's Team into a Kenyan soccer club via a mano a mano boxing match. There are so many brilliant details and jokes piled upon jokes in here that it boggles the mind, and the fact that it's all filtered through PFTCommenter's unique character, spelling and all, makes it close to the perfect sports take, like one of the old Something Awful articles by Jeff K expanded to its logical limit. Part of being a sports fan is knowing when to stop taking it so seriously, and this incredible tale of heroism, villainy, and football is absolutely perfect for that.

Ken Liu- Invisible Planets. Not having read much, or really any Chinese science fiction before, I picked up this volume as an intro. I've at least heard of Liu Cixin, the author of the well-known Three-Body Problem trilogy; he contributes two of the thirteen short stories and one of the three ending essays, and the rest of the authors I'd never heard of are for the most part quite good as well. Like all good short story collections, the wide variety of styles, themes, and perspectives included gives you a hint of how much richer the wider world of Chinese science fiction is, while still being satisfying on its own. The translations from the Chinese by Ken Liu, noted author in his own right, preserve the distinct voices of the original authors and offer a taste of what makes them special, while flowing smoothly enough for a monolingual English-speaking reader like me. I frequently found myself reminded of particular Western science fiction stories when reading these, but I wouldn't say that they're derivative (or at least when they are, as in the 1984-homage "The City of Silence", they're quite open about it), merely that they touch on similar themes. The ending essays are very high quality as well.

Thomas Flanagan - The Year of the French. During the tumult of the French Revolutionary Wars - before the Great Man himself transformed them into the Napoleonic Wars - the haphazard French attempts to aid Irish rebels in their independence are usually relegated to a footnote. After all, we know how the story ends, and the classically British mix of luck, skill, and sheer ruthlessness which ended those efforts condemned the Irish to over a century more of brutal colonial rule. But in Flanagan's hands this doomed effort to spread the flame of the Revolution to 1798 Ireland takes on a epochal significance. The French generals, British commanders, Catholic peasants, Protestant landlords, and more who populate the novel struggle with their own pieces of the conflict while never seeing quite the whole thing; it's an absorbing study of how warfare works on the ground as well as an effective way to shoe how different a cause seems on each side of the argument. You see the contradictions of French atheists liberating Catholic Irish from Protestant English, as well as the difficulty in replicating the formula of the self-liberation of the French in a country without its institutions and with a very different sense of itself, all while knowing that no matter how important the Irish struggle for self-determination felt to them, that even to their French allies they were a sideshow and a means to a broader end. It begins slowly, but by the end you get that rare sense of visiting a real living world that only the best historical fiction delivers.

Nikolai Gogol - The Collected Tales. Even if he had published nothing but Dead Souls, Gogol would still have a claim to be one of Ukraine's all-time greatest novelists. Luckily for us, he kept writing, and these excellent short stories show that his transition to becoming a more "Russian" writer did not dampen his humor or invention one bit. This collection shows off both sides of Gogol's output: first, the strange, magical Ukrainian stories full of drunken peasants, quarreling landowners, hilarious religious bigotry, and fantastical adventures that he wrote to exoticize his homeland to his new Russian friends. Second, there's the more conceptual St. Petersburg stories, which have more realist settings but no less surreal plots, with maddening bureaucracies, inexplicable transformations, and copious humiliations for the unfortunate denizens of the Russian capital. The second half has the more famous stories like The Nose and The Overcoat, which show Gogol's gift for presenting absurd situations in a straightforward, even poignant way, but even the earlier stories have their touches of genius, often coming across as minor theatrical masterpieces or as undiscovered fairytales. Almost no one was better at taking a mundane scene, adding an outlandish twist, and then following that wherever it led to emerge on the other side as a savage social critique.

Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Works like this are proof that the boundary between fanfiction and independent art is completely arbitrary, and perhaps totally meaningless. Yes, this play is a derivative work of Hamlet, but not only does it not really require you to have read its famous forebear (although you certainly should, for many reasons beyond giving this some context), but Stoppard's reflections on mortality, chance, and the contingency of life stand on their own. There is no reason whatsoever that philosophy can't be funny, and even on the page the dialogue and action is hilarious, as poor old R & G wander through this frequently metafictional work that fills in the gaps of Hamlet, meeting their ultimate fate in a way that's both inevitable given what happens without their knowledge in Hamlet as well as poignant purely on its own. I could go on and on about how skillfully Stoppard uses tropes like the play-within-a-play, or how he nods to other famous existentialist works like Waiting For Godot, but this is about as close to a perfect comic play as it gets these days.

Non-Fiction:

Jonathan Chait - Audacity. Barack Obama has been criticized in so many ways for so many different things, it would be refreshing to see a forthright and unapologetic defense of his legacy just for the novelty factor alone. The audience here seems to be mainly disappointed liberals who have bought into some variant of "he started off well, but either got only half-measures done or didn't even try". Chait demolishes these criticisms one by one: over a staggering range of policy issues, Obama was not only pretty good at getting things done, but right up there in the pantheon of liberal heroes like FDR and LBJ. Seen in full context, Obama's accomplishments were tremendous, and unlikely to be fully reversed even by the most determined efforts of the current Trump cadre of reactionary Republicans. While one could have always hoped for more (Guantanamo Bay, etc), given the maddening institutional constraints of the United States political system, Obama made remarkable progress in health care, climate change, education, and seemingly dozens of other areas that looked permanently out of reach during the Clinton and Carter years. This is not a "neutral" work of scholarship but an argument; Chait is advocating for his point of view, but on the merits I think he's correct that Obama is underrated. A successful contrarian take must not only assemble uncontroversial truths to package them into a surprising conclusion, it must also make that conclusion seem obvious in hindsight, and by the end of this book the idea that Obama was in any way a disappointment seems laughable. By the standards of US Presidents (admittedly not always a very high one), Obama has very few peers in American history.

Joseph Henrich - The Secret of Our Success. Love him or hate him, Jared Diamond's resource and geography-based theories of differential human social complexity in Guns, Germs & Steel have spawned an entire genre of Big History books refuting, supporting, or extending his arguments, and it seems like every few months there's an important new entry in the Big History field that presents a new angle on those research questions. Henrich's discussion of how gene-culture coevolution differentiates humans from all other species on earth thanks to our ability to pass on better ways of doing things is a fascinating bridge between E. O. Wilson's work on the logic of kin selection vs group selection in social animals in his books On Human Nature and The Social Conquest of Earth, as well as Peter Turchin's work on how cooperation and competition between and within human groups drives social complexity in his books War and Peace and War and Ultrasociety. Our dependence on culturally transmitted knowledge is a tremendous strength that allows our collective intelligence to conquer seemingly any environment on earth, even while individual humans are absolutely terrible at figuring out basic survival skills, or really just about anything, purely from scratch. The ideas in here interact well with Smithian/Hayekian theories of the importance of the division of labor, as well as more common sense ideas about the importance of public education and freedom of speech for spreading and improving general knowledge. That there's solid evolutionary theory here as well puts this in the top tier of Big History books.

Nate Silver - The Signal and the Noise. As the most famous "data journalist" out there, Nate Silver is the poster child of the recent trend of using data analytics to enhance traditional journalism (not to be confused with writing whatever you want and then throwing a graph on it). While he made his name in baseball and politics, and he does discuss those subjects in detail, in this book he also sets his sights a little higher: not just how to tell good predictions from bad predictions, but how to actually make predictions, weigh evidence, and even change your mind. The first part of the book discusses examples of prediction in sports, economics, and more offbeat areas like earthquakes and natural disasters, while the second is a guided tour through Bayesian statistics, the current best model we have for making inferences about uncertain events and updating our guesses in light of new information. Agree or disagree with him, the alternative to the bad use of statistics is not no use of statistics, and Silver's approach to modeling is about the best there is out there in terms of humility and rigor. Even should you violently disagree with him, he quite helpfully gives you plenty of conceptual tools to go and improve on his work on your own. Sometimes the chapters feel breezy, but given how low the general level of statistical literacy is out there, in comparison this is a masterclass in clear, concise, and useful thinking. And, in a slightly meta reflection upon finishing the book, given his relative success in acknowledging the uncertainty in the 2016 election forecasts (his model gave Trump 30% chance to win on the eve of the election vs 1% at places like the New York Times) I feel I can trust him more, which essentially proves his point. It's always neat when a book does that.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz - Everybody Lies. Big Data has become the kind of cliché you normally associate with Dilbert cartoons (the insights! the disruption! the leveraged synergies! - just add Big Data!), so it's nice to see someone drag the buzzword out of its reputational bog, clean it up for an audience, and show off its practical uses. While marketing departments and academics have always hungered for data to draw inferences from, the simultaneous rise of large data sets, cheap processing power, advanced statistical techniques, and readily available consumer data has created a seemingly endless new frontier in analyzing previously opaque human behavior. Survey data is notoriously unreliable: for example, the average number of self-reported sexual partners is famously higher for straight men than for straight women even though mathematically they must be equal (since everyone must go home with someone, this is charmingly known as the "high school prom theorem"). But since data can be collected in other ways that are harder to fake, like search history, browsing behavior, click rates, or app usage, an intelligent researcher can cut through the noise to shed new light on these problems. He comes up with all kinds of insights, from the discovery that lesbian porn is surprisingly popular with straight women, to the recommendation that wives should spend more time wondering if their husbands are alcoholic and less if they're gay, to the depressing conclusion that child abuse is going increasingly unreported. Under no circumstances should mindless number-crunching take the place of rational thought, but Big Data used properly is a valuable new tool to learn about ourselves, so this book comes off like a humbler yet more useful Freakonomics.

Matt Taibbi - I Can't Breathe. This is the non-fiction version of a great 19th century novel, with the tragic death of Eric Garner in 2015 due to a police chokehold as just more spin of the wheel in the vicious cycle of petty crime, aggressive policing strategies, and structural racism that makes up everyday life for too many people in America's underclass. Taibbi has always been a meticulous journalist, but this is a whole new level of detail and insight for him - he has seemingly spoken with everyone who ever knew Garner to explore how life works once you're caught up in the grinding gears of the legal system, and just how many ways there are for the justice system to get rid of unpleasant cases when no one wants to be held accountable. Taibbi has written his heart out, but this is ultimately an extremely sad book, since not only did Garner die pointlessly, the ultimate indifference of America as a whole to the killing of one poor black man implicates just about all levels of American society, even you and me. I don't know what his opinion on David Simon's work is, but this easily stands up beside The Corner or any of Simon's other work as a cry for us to look at what we've done and what we need to change.

Best albums I listened to: 2017

1. Lana Del Rey - Lust For Life.

2. The xx - I See You.

3. Spoon - Hot Thoughts.

4. Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 3.

5. Roger Waters - Is This the Life We Really Want?.

6. Margo Price - All American Made.

7. Real Estate - In Mind.

8. Tennis - Yours, Conditionally.

9. Alvvays - Antisocialites.

10. Brand New - Science Fiction.