Best books I read: 2019

What's interesting about 2019, looking back on it, is how I managed to improve on last year's numbers even though I felt I was being lazy the whole time. It seemed like there were a lot of days where I just didn't feel like reading; maybe all those theories about social media and attention span are true. As always I feel like I've signed myself up for more reading to do than I will ever have time for, but isn't that a much better problem than the alternative?

I'm going to start posting all of my reviews to my blog, since I can do more links (and I don't have a word limit), but I'll still be posting to Goodreads. I read even more great fiction, and especially non-fiction, than appears here (see here for the full details), but such is the tyranny of Top X lists. If you only want 1 recommendation for a work of fiction, read Romance of the Three Kingdoms. If you only want 1 recommendation for a work of non-fiction, read Ages of Discord.

Fiction:

John Campbell - Frozen Hell. I vividly remember reading "Who Goes There?" as a child, in a sci-fi short story compilation I checked out from the library whose name I can't recall. I've completely forgotten the other stories, which were of the kind that fellow sci-fi veteran Robert Silverberg fondly but firmly sums up in the Introduction here as "wordy epics in which grim, methodical supermen repeatedly saved the world from menacing aliens by mastering, with the greatest of ease, such things as faster-than-light travel, the fabrication of matter-destroying rays, the release of atomic energy, and the penetration of hyperspace." Campbell's story about an Antarctic expedition's struggle against a shapeshifting alien was incredibly different - intensely-paced, relentless, eerie, and genuinely frightening to young me. It was a great bridge for me between more "literary" short stories like Jack London's "To Build a Fire" and other fantasy horror like H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, which coincidentally was also published in serial form in the same Astounding magazine about 2 years before "Who Goes There?", which Campbell of course went on to become the phenomenal editor of.

Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdoms Volume 1. I'm not sure if the term "epic fantasy" applies to this work, since the standard line is that it's "70% history, 30% fiction", but whether it's shelved in "epic fantasy", "historical fiction", or even "magical realism", it's undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of literature. It's almost overwhelming in how full of everything it is: the whirlwind of characters, the unyielding pace of the action, and the seamless integration of so many little human details and emotions that give the many side-plots and minor characters a resonance far out of proportion to their brief page time. Like with all great literature, even those diversions are pure pleasure thanks to clever storytelling. Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, each analeptic or proleptic excursion adds valuable depth and context to the main narrative, and the consistent treatment of the ways that individual honor, personal loyalty, and political duty overlap and conflict continuously give each and every decision by the main characters a real weight. Luo's account of the struggle to build a new world out of the decay of the old is as powerful as any modern work I can think of.


Sally Rooney - Normal People. What a thoughtful, infuriating, nuanced little novel. Even though I'm not predisposed to read a lot of stories about on-again, off-again teenage romances, the spectacle of these sympathetic, all-too-relatable characters making important life decisions based on poorly-understood or half-admitted emotional impulses really hit home. In a plain, unadorned language Rooney portrays many indelible moments of two young people struggling desperately to communicate something important to each other, failing because of the wrong phrasing, or an ill-timed silence, leading to them making seemingly irrevocable choices for reasons as unnecessary as they were inevitable. I couldn't count the number of times I wanted to shake some sense into both of them, yet Rooney so skillfully conveys how their presence in each other's lives is simultaneously irreplacable and unsustainable that each stage in their relationship had its own irrefutable logic. The way that crucial events were often conveyed through gaps and absences as much as by visible action made the open ending fully appropriate if not completely satisfying. Even if you thought these characters should have broken up with each other by the end of the first chapter, you're still pulling for them, in a way, all through to the end.

Upton Sinclair - Oil! The Jungle will always be Sinclair's most acclaimed work, and rightly so given its impact, but I believe that Oil! has just as much relevance to contemporary life, if not more so, and deserves to be as well-known as its more venerable sibling even if it did not spur the same reforms of the oil industry that The Jungle did for food preparation and handling. I was spurred to read it after a rewatch of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, and the novel is so different from, and more complex than, the film adaptation that they probably should not be considered strictly related. Anderson's film is a small, close study, with Daniel Day-Lewis' oil tycoon patriarch a cryptic, amoral madman, whereas Sinclair's sprawling epic of ambition and capitalism has the son as its vastly subtler and more complex protagonist, arguing for and against several political philosophies against the backdrop of World War 1, the Teapot Dome scandal, evangelical religious revivalism, the film industry, and the generally explosive growth of Southern California. As always with books vs movie questions, one should decide how much the snappier running time and enhanced aesthetic experience of a film outweighs the greater richness and depth of a novel, but there is so much great stuff in Oil! that isn't the film that it deserves to be experienced as its own masterwork, particularly its exploration of how internal leftist debates interact with public opinion and the forces of big business.

Jin Yong - Legends of the Condor Heroes Vol. 1. This is the first volume of one of the most popular Chinese martial arts novel series ever written, and it reads like an excellent novelization of a kung fu film, although of course it's really the other way around given how influential this series has been on depictions of martial arts in all forms of media ever since it was first published in the 50s. If you've ever seen a kung fu movie, chances are it borrows heavily from Yong's work in tone, setting, or spirit. Naturally wuxia/martial arts novels have had a long tradition dating back centuries before these books were written (in a pleasing fan-fiction-y touch it's revealed that the protagonist Guo Jing is a distant descendant of one of the characters in Water Margin, one of the Four Great Novels), but Yong's work is fully its own despite inhabiting the well-trodden, familiar universe of medieval China. Yong evidently didn't set out to reinvent the wheel in terms of wuxia tropes, but in much the same way that a genre classic like Harry Potter outshone a whole host of similar young wizard adventure novels by being the best version of that genre, Yong's work hits the optimal sweet spot of family drama, political turmoil, patriotism, and of course plenty of incredibly-named kung fu action.

Non-Fiction:

Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski - Markets Without Limits. I had an extremely polarized reaction to this book. Its central question - how exactly does money relate to morality? - is incredibly important, and its answer - if you may do something for free, then you may do it for money - is elucidated in a clear, convincing manner I've never seen anywhere else. I can't say that I fully agree with all of Brennan and Jaworski's arguments, but the main idea itself, that it's not immoral to buy or sell something for money unless it's also immoral to get or give it away for free, is worthy of a long ponder. Indeed, even though this book is clearly written from a libertarian perspective, you often encounter its central argument coming from "the left" in a surprising number of areas, even from those who don't subscribe to the infamous label "neoliberal", so it probably isn't all wrong. The notion that commodification introduces ethical problems is nearly universal, but lots of things are or were universal without being correct, and I think the logic here is strong enough that it's worthy of being promoted to the default view, in a John Stuart Mill sense, where the burden of proof should generally be on the side of market opposition and that we shouldn't restrict markets unless they can be shown to cause harm. However, the authors fail to convince in several specific areas where they don't engage with empirical evidence, such as when they try to argue that it should be legal to buy and sell votes, and their disengagement with many obvious real-world counter-examples means that even though I find the basic idea extremely compelling, much of the book falls into "nice in theory but maybe not in practice" territory.

Donald Palumbo - Chaos Theory, Asimov's Foundations and Robots, and Herbert's Dune. Probably the best close reading of these two titanic series you could ask for, Palumbo's thesis here is that in addition to being entertaining reads, one of the reasons that the Foundation and Dune series have endured for so long is due to their fractal nature: the structures of the novels recapitulate their main plots, which are themselves illustrations of their main themes. The nuances of psychohistory in Foundation and ecology in Dune are demonstrated not just by the characters talking about them, and not just by the actions they take, but also how the books in the series relate to each other, since each novel is a mostly self-contained story but each series builds and expands on the main themes in subtly brilliant fractal patterns. Even better, Palumbo made my own vague notions of how the two series' overlapping but distinct and even opposed ways of viewing the universe relate to each other much more clear - can the future be known, planned for, and managed, or will there always be elements of chance, volition, and surprise? Asimov's careful unification of short stories, novellas, novels, and entire trilogies into the Foundation "metaseries" (i.e. the initially separate Robot, Empire, and Foundation series) is itself an example of the psychohistorical vision of finding order in chaos, whereas Herbert's more shambling efforts in the Dune novels to set up and then knock down successively grander iterations of monomythical hero archetypes are themselves demonstrations of inescapable disorder in a seemingly perfectly ordered society and natural world. Debates over whether genre fiction can be as good as "real literature" are invariably as tedious as they are pointless, and as this literary analysis of two of the greatest science fiction series of all time shows, utterly wrongheaded.

Susan Scafidi - Who Owns Culture?. "Cultural appropriation" is a hot topic these days, a great example of how frustrating debate in the 21st century can be. An emotionally-charged subject with unclear boundaries and varying definitions that has deep implications for capital-letter topics like Authenticity, Identity, Ownership, and Power is an ideal engine for producing negative-sum arguments that leave everyone more angry and less enlightened than they were before. For my own edification I thought it would be helpful to read something about cultural appropriation that fit the concept into a more analytical framework. Scafidi's central ideas - group cultural property as an analogue of individual intellectual property, and cultural appropriation as an analogue of copyright infringement - are a much more useful way of thinking about the latest controversies over food, fashions, music, and so on than what you usually read. In addition to providing lots of interesting examples of cultural exchange, both good and bad, and across many types of cultures, Scafidi offers proposals to both protect sensitive aspects of culture as well as promote cultural innovation, which is an exceptionally difficult balance to strike even within a single culture. Like with many things in life, familiar concepts like respect, openness, and dignity are perhaps more important tools for this debate than any particular abstract theory of property rights, but I wish everyone who's tempted to write or read yet another clickbait article about cultural appropriation in the era of ubiquitous memes, remixes, and adaptations would read this immediately.

Peter Turchin - Ages of Discord. If anyone can claim to be making Isaac Asimov's dream of psychohistory manifest it's Turchin, who has done more work to create a truly scientific and predictive theory of macrohistorical patterns than probably anyone else. While this is of course impossible in the strictly Asimovian sense of being able to tell exactly when major crises will arise - and unlike Asimov, Turchin does not even pretend to then be able to present timely solutions via hologram - this book makes a convincing argument that we can discern real lessons about general trends in societal upheaval, while still humbly emphasizing how difficult it is to make even modest predictions about the future. Unfortunately, as the title unhappily alludes to, Turchin's prediction is that the 2020s will be even more unpleasant than today, an era of strife that echoes previous periods in history where the existing social order proved unable to accommodate internal divisions, and the political system could not easily resolve these tensions due to elite greed and status-hoarding. While not Marxist in analysis or conclusion, Turchin's Structural-Demographic Theory broadly aligns with the notion that the rich and powerful have diverted too much of society's wealth and privilege towards themselves, and general wage stagnation combined with class immobility is already having dangerously destabilizing effects on our cultural norms. Even though the book's prognosis is negative, it's just as high-quality as Turchin's other recent works, which collectively form one of the most impressive oeuvres in contemporary social science.

Carl Zimmer - She Has Her Mother's Laugh. The most important decision you can make in your life is who to have children with. This is understood more or less unconsciously by practically everyone, but the true nature of heredity - precisely what traits we inherit from our parents, and how we bequeath them in turn to our own children - is far more complex and subtle than we give it credit for. Zimmer traces our conception of heredity from one kind of ignorance to another, from our historical innocence of its genetic basis to our current incomprehension of what the ultimate consequences of our newfound power over it will be now that we have powerful tools like CRISPR. He does a great job balancing the pop sci elements of genetics 101 with the more complex cultural consequences at each stage of our understanding, so as concepts like X-inactivation, mosaicism, or epigenetics get discovered, you get crucial context as to how people used that new knowledge for both good and ill. The word "eugenics" casts a long shadow over our current attempts to consciously affect how our own heredity works, as it should, but the incandescence of real scientific knowledge is enough, or should be, to give us confidence that as we begin to use genetic engineering to deliberately reshape our genes that we don't have to simply repeat the old bigoted mistakes of the past. Our DNA might blindly attempt to replicate itself, but we don't have to, and a clear-eyed assessment of the possibilities in front of us should give us a great deal of optimism for our descendants.