Best books I read: 2018

I read some truly awesome books this year. I think the non-fiction I read will stick with me a bit longer, since much of it deals with contemporary political issues, but somehow, even though much of my fiction I read dipped its toes back into the waters of Greek mythology and philosophy, I appreciated the way it felt new again. It was incredibly difficult to whittle down my read list to 5 each.

If you're looking to read only a single fiction book, Helen DeWitt's novel was fantastic. For non-fiction, I've found myself referencing and thinking about John Stuart Mill more than anything else.

Fiction:

Paul Cooper - River of Ink. Here's a great little piece of historical fiction about a time period I didn't know anything about - the invasion and attempted conquest of Sri Lanka by Kalinga Magha in 1215 AD - that manages to be densely researched, well-written, and satisfying on a storytelling level all at once. Cooper fits an impressive amount of research into the details of the Sinhalese-Tamil struggle, the kingdom, the palace, the food, the clothing, etc, in here, and while he drops in maybe a few too many untranslated terms for the prose to be completely smooth reading for a non-Sri Lankan, if you just relax and go with the atmosphere eventually you're so fully immersed you hardly notice it, especially because he's so descriptive and detailed. It's a novel about translation, bother personal and literary, which means it must also necessarily convey something about the difficulty of communication, and the melancholy love story that accompanies the war for control of the kingdom makes the personal political, adding a welcome human element to the mix of literary commentary and political struggle.

Helen DeWitt - The Last Samurai. Novels that deliberately pitch themselves as "for smart people" often draw much more attention to the author than to the story itself (the works of James Joyce being the most extreme example), so I was delighted to read this really entertaining novel that integrated a tremendous amount of advanced linguistics, music, film, physics, and other "just go look it up" subjects into the plot in a way that both showed off DeWitt's intelligence yet still had those qualities that make for a satisfying novel instead of a particularly long Wikipedia session. It begins from the point of view of of Sybilla, a smart but unambitious single mother who gets knocked up after a one-night stand, and her attempts to raise her child prodigy son Ludo. Ludo comes off as mildly Aspergery, and he's absolutely determined to learn out who his father is over his mother's objections that she can raise him by herself. As he becomes the primary character and finally discovers and is then disappointed by his true father's thoroughgoing mediocrity, he decides to visit several candidates to be a surrogate father to him, inspired by the assembly of the characters in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which his mother rewatches endlessly. The pleasure of the novel is not just in watching Ludo grow up over time, but in how his life exemplifies so many things: the joy of learning, the challenges of fitting in, the power of chance, the struggles of making sense of life, the enrichment we get from art, the difficulties of fatherhood, how potential is achieved (or not), and the question of what separates knowing a bunch of facts from an actual education. Among many many other things, DeWitt explicitly references John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, which I had just read, and Mill's quest for wisdom is well-echoed here.

George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman. Superb historical fiction, all the more notable for having one of the all-time antiheroes as its protagonist. Fast-paced, well-plotted, bitterly cynical, funny, and full of well-researched historical detail, you almost couldn't ask for a better pulp experience. It was written as the memoirs of Harry Flashman, a spoiled rich kid bully with a great talent for getting out of jams and having his character flaws interpreted as virtues, who's reluctantly forced into the army and spends the rest of the book shirking every responsibility he can en route to completely undeserved glory and fame thanks to the public's need for a hero. He's a total scumbag on basically every page (lazy, cowardly, misogynistic, greedy, lecherous, racist, untrustworthy, etc), and half of the time you're actually pulling for the Plot Armor protecting him to let up and give him what he deserves (in addition to his constant good luck at small things, there's more than one "this is the end, there's no possible way Flashman will get out of this one!" cliffhangers resolved neatly by a timely deus ex machina or fade to black), yet he seems to be the only one capable of understanding the sheer folly of the British experience in the First Anglo-Afghan War, and of imperialism/colonialism more generally.

Min Lee - Pachinko. "History has failed us, but no matter" belongs up there in the pantheon of opening lines, and it's especially apt, given that this is not quite a "historical novel", but a novel which uses the vicissitudes of real history - the Japanese occupation and annexation of Korea, the migration of Koreans to Japan for work, the devastation of WW2, the partition of Korea - to follow an ordinary Korean peasant family from the very early part of the 20th century near to its end as successive generations experience poverty, fall in love, settle in Japan, try to make money, survive wars, encounter racism, and, most of all, try to turn their sorrows into fulfilling lives. Korean history is something I have large gaps of understanding in relative to Japanese and Chinese history, particularly prior to WW2, so I would have appreciated this novel even if it hadn't been so affecting. Many questions of Korean identity are raised repeatedly by Koreans, South Koreans, North Koreans, and Korean-Japanese; I don't have any special take on that, but for me the pleasure of the novel lies in how these lovingly rendered characters make their choices, and how those choices define their lives but also present new opportunities even when they're really painful. Pachinko is, of course, a popular game for gamblers, and the central idea that fate and freedom are present in every moment is very movingly presented here.

Jo Walton - The Just City. Plato's Republic is one of the most-debated thought experiments of all time, but I'd always seen the critiques/reflections/responses to Plato's speculations on civic virtue in serious academic writing, so it was very refreshing to see someone think about the Republic in narrative form, and as a fantasy novel no less. What would actually living in the ideal city look like? How would you set it up, keep it running, deal with challenges? Karl Popper spent the whole Volume 1 of The Open Society criticizing the Republic as a totalitarian nightmare state (the classes of citizens, the abhorrence of trade, the idea that as long as the rulers are smart and virtuous enough nothing can go wrong), but in Walton's hands, for many of the characters it's much freer than the societies they came from, a practical lesson in applied ethics and the relativity of idealism that couldn't be obtained any other way. Once Walton has set up the premise - Athena has gathered thousands of people from across time in a recreation of Plato's Republic in part to teach Apollo, fresh off of Daphne's escape from his advances via transformation into a laurel tree, important insights about morality and mortality - the characters, including Socrates, have to work within the structures they've chosen and been chosen for to build the lives they want. Utopian societies have a long and honorable place in fiction, such as Francis Spufford's superb evocation of the Soviet 60s in Red Plenty, but it was very satisfying to see the Just City, the ancestor of them all, treated according to its own premises, and as one character says, "Nobody reads Plato and agrees with everything. But nobody reads any of the dialogues without wanting to be there joining in."

Non-Fiction:

Navid Kermani - Between Quran and Kafka. I love the "literary synthesis" essay subgenre, where an author who's widely read and deeply thoughtful traces the connections between literature and the broader world at their leisure, unlocking hidden insights from silent texts with the help of their brethren. Kermani is ethnically Persian but culturally German, and so most of these essays link elements of German culture, particularly the great authors of the past, to their Islamic counterparts, in often surprising but always logical ways. The Koran is the fundamental text of not merely Islam but also Islamic culture; this gives Kermani plenty to talk about in regards to its influence, although he regrets its near-hegemonic dominance. German literature has no comparable single text, but certain authors come up again and again, most prominently Kafka. Kermani talks very personally about what Islam and Germany mean to him, but like all worldly writers, his interests are far too broad to be confined: not only does the title neatly sum up the major preoccupations of the book, it balances his Iranian heritage and German birth, and also faith and doubt, belonging and alienation, and parochialism and universalism.

Charles Mann - The Wizard and the Prophet. Both of Mann's previous books, 1491 and 1493, described in great detail how various societies have interacted with local and global ecology, but never before has he offered such a clear framework for thinking about the reasons why humanity can't resist the urge to mold our environment to our activities and not the other way around, and drawn such clear lines between different approaches to nature. This is a full-length expansion of "The State of the Species", his 2012 essay for Orion magazine, wherein he compared humanity to a rapidly bacteria that is just beginning to reach the edge of its petri dish and faces a stark choice between a catastrophic decline in numbers or a gradual accommodation to the limits of future possibilities. The first attitude he terms the Prophet mindset, personified by William Vogt, a bird ecologist whose research into guano production led him to warn that unchecked human activity would lead to calamitous resource shortages. The second stance is what he calls the Wizard mentality, represented by Norman Borlaug, a Nobel-winning crop scientist whose experiments with rice and wheat created the Green Revolution that fed billions of additional people. A worthy successor to the fascinating dialogues about environmentalism in John McPhee's peerless Encounters With the Archdruid, Mann's work is a detailed look at our efforts to defy what seems like an ecological equivalent to the law of gravity: that every species eventually hits the carrying capacity of its environment, and must choose between a calm acceptance of a ceiling to its ambitions or the grim process of decline due to overreach.

John Stuart Mill - Autobiography. The autobiography is such an ancient genre, St. Augustine having written his Confessions in 400 AD, that its conventions were already pretty fixed by the time that Mill finally completed his shortly before his 1873 death. His contribution to the genre is right in line with what we expect: an overview of his life, his work, his relationship (note the singular), and his likely legacy, balancing between honest modesty and fair self-regard. It's notable not just merely because of who he was - pioneering radical, influential politician, prescient philosopher, one of the most enduringly useful of the great modern thinkers - but because of how he thought, and though each chapter is written in that dense, fractally-claused 19th century style, the precision, honesty, and clarity of his sentiments comes across regardless. His descriptions of his own crisis of confidence, his admiration for his wife, and descriptions of his role in some of the most important political and philosophical debates of his time are still worth reading today, because aside from the historical recollections, he works in several other genres as well: implicit child-raising guide, a model for self-education and rational thinking, a self-help book on depression, advice on how to reform the political system from inside, and even some relationship goals. I'd previously read Nicolas Capaldi's biography of him and it's not bad, but there's nothing like going back to the source. This is definitely worth a stop after reading Utilitarianism and On Liberty.

David Reich - Who We Are and How We Got Here. This is absolutely the book to read if you're interested in genetic history, either your own or humanity's. Reich zooms out tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago, far past most Big History books, discussing how the latest research on recent discoveries of ancient DNA has begun to make sense of the vast movements of peoples in the dim unremembered mists of time from before we have written records. The rapid pace of technological advancement in genetics research, to the point where we can reconstruct detailed models of peoples we know only from scattered bone fragments, is challenging a lot of what we thought we knew about the past (did humans really evolve solely in Africa? how many waves of migration from Asia to the Americas? how recently did modern racial categories form?), and as astonishing as it is to imagine that we can track the migration and reproductive patterns of long-vanished ethnicities and even extinct subspecies like Neanderthals and Denisovans, genetics has advanced to the point where we can even identify "ghost populations" in our modern genomes - long-dead ancestors who have left no trace of language, settlement, or literature, but whose migrations and mixings live on in our DNA. The rapid pace of discovery in this field means many specific conclusions might be in flux, but as Reich shows, the wealth of knowledge unlocked by DNA sequencing means fields like history and anthropology already have plenty to chew on. I haven't found this kind of rigorous, sustained investigation of the deep roots of our ancestry anywhere else.

Warren Treadgold - The Byzantine State and Society. Surely the best single-volume history of the late Roman and Byzantine Empire I've read, and perhaps the best one out there, despite being published in 1988. Copiously researched and well-organized, Treadgold balances alternating military/political chapters with economic/social chapters, so there is extensive coverage of not only the expected battles and dynastic cycles, but also the more humanistic aspects, with plentiful maps and tables of statistics on everything from military strength to budgetary woes to population distribution to help the reader keep track of how the Byzantines continuously tinkered with their society for over a thousand years in the face of continuous waves of plagues, invasions, and civil wars. While the Roman Empire will forever be more highly esteemed by laymen for how they steadily assembled their pan-Mediterranean state (everyone loves watching winners conquer one enemy after another), over the course of the book I developed a grudging and then unabashed respect for how the Byzantines did their best to adapt that rigid, ethnocentric, coup-prone Roman governance model to maintain a surprising amount of coherent identity in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multifariously-threatening world. They may have failed eventually, but you try creating an empire that lasts for over a millennium!