Best books I read: 2020

2020 gave me the same sense of sloth it gave everyone else, so I did slacken on my reading a bit, but it hit my review writing even worse. I will catch up, since some of the books deserve fuller writeups both here and on Goodreads, but I am happy that I enjoyed the books that I did read just as much as last year. 

For fiction, Romance of the Three Kingdoms remains my top recommendation, though the Three-Body Problem trilogy was also excellent. For non-fiction, Scientists Against Time is the most relevant, though One Billion Americans is also quite timely.

Fiction:

Albert Camus - The Plague. I'm not sure if reading a novel about a pandemic during a pandemic actually counts as "escapism", but being cooped-up all day every day made me look for a novelistic rendition of my predicament regardless. I was reading a paper by Utteeyo Dasgupta, Chandan Kumar Jha, and Sudipta Sarangi titled "Persistent Patterns Of Behavior: Two Infectious Disease Outbreaks 350 Years Apart" comparing the similarities in responses to COVID-19 with the 1665 Great Plague of London as memorialized by Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys which referenced this novel, so I decided to check it out. This was actually only the second Camus I've read, after The Stranger, and I have to say I enjoyed it quite a bit more. The central point of Camus' absurdism - that humanity is compelled to seek meaning and purpose in a chaotic, amoral universe that won't and can't grant either - is personified far more effectively here by the hapless citizens of Oran in the face of a plague, as they all cope with its effects on their lives and attempt to find some semblance of normality, and the moral dilemmas here are more absorbing than in The Stranger. The Plague was published in 1947, 5 years after The Stranger, and I thought it was interesting that Camus put some oblique references to his earlier work here: one character overhears a discussion about a trial of the murder of an Algerian on a beach, and another character recounts a childhood experience watching his prosecutor father argue for the death penalty in a quick little vignette that sums up a great deal of the whole second half of The Stranger. My natural comparison for this novel would be José Saramago's excellent Blindness, but The Plague isn't quire so post-apocalyptic, merely remarking at the end, as the city returns to normal after months of sadness, isolation, and death, that there would be more plagues in the future. I wouldn't call Camus optimistic, per se, but there are worse endings than "life goes on".

Elena Ferrante - The Lying Life of Adults. Not quite the Neapolitan Novels, even if it would be impossible to bottle that kind of lightning in a jar only one-quarter the size of that tetralogy, but if Ferrante has a superpower, it's the ability to write such engrossing characters, with such vivid interior lives, that by the time you start to complain you notice that you've already inhaled half the book. This time instead of a journey from childhood to full adulthood, the narrative follows its protagonist Giovanna for just a brief period of her adolescence, and while this story shares many of the characteristics of its more famous predecessor - the rapid pacing, the Neapolitan setting, the way that your identity becomes entangled with those you love and hate, the ability of small symbols (the Blue Fairy short story there, a small bracelet here) to assume significance out of all proportion to their size, the rush of romance with an intelligent leading man, the subtle yet crucial importance of class and language to social status, the power of projection, the progressive disillusionment that adulthood brings - The Lying Life of Adults is distinct enough that it shouldn't simply be treated as self-plagiarism. Whereas Lenù in the Neapolitan Novels spent her whole life trying to define the personal boundary between herself and her best friend Lila, here a determination to meet the aunt Vittoria she's never known and the discovery that her father was having an affair with her best friends' mother sets Giovanna on the path of learning how to use the power of lying the way she thinks she sees the adults around her doing, as both a shield and as a sword. Ferrante's gift of creating powerfully absorbing worlds that are both inseparable from yet seemingly created entirely by the swirl of her protagonists' thoughts is still fully on display here, even if it doesn't hit quite as hard as her masterpiece.

Liu Cixin - Death's End. Somehow the final volume of the Three-Body Trilogy is not just as good as but even better than the previous two, as full as several novels put together. The trilogy started off with a fairly naturalistic scenario of interstellar neighbors stumbling into war, that by this volume has grown to encompass the nature of reality itself, in the form of an exploration of higher- and lower-dimensional space over a timescale of millions of years to literally the end of the universe that's equal parts Flatland, Greg Egan (particularly his novels Schild's Ladder and Diaspora), and Olaf Stapledon's majestic Star Maker. Liu spends a good deal of time exploring what "credibility" means in the context of MAD, with successive people given the full weight of responsibility for sending the signal to doom both Earth and Trisolaris, but for me the high point was almost purely literary: a scene where a human ambassador to the Trisolarians is attempting to pass back technological secrets about FTL travel, altering the speed of light, and multi-dimensional weapons via a coded fairytale. The fairytale itself was so well-written, and the scenes where the rest of humanity try to decipher his code were such a well-dramatized meta-commentary of the nature of story interpretation, that I was in awe; it was like a condensed version of the super-textbook Primer plot thread in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Unfortunately humanity as a whole fails to fully interpret the story and does not come off so well in the conflict, narrowly dodging being exterminated like locusts by the Trisolarians and then being collapsed into lower dimensions by even more advanced aliens due to yet more short-sighted defeatist ideology. But, by the very end Liu not only makes a powerful statement about the enduring power of love, he ties that into the discovery of a way out of the iron logic of self-preservation via annihilation that's driven the universe until now: everyone just has to work together, and kindness is not a weakness. Everyone has their own preference for the line between saccharine and sweet, but I was fully satisfied by the climax of this excellent series.

Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano. There have been a lot of novels about drinking, but very few that really capture what it's like - you either have to write it from a remove so it doesn't get sloppy, at the cost of losing something of the essence of the experience, or throw yourself into it and risk it becoming an unreadable mess. Hunter S Thompson was probably the all-time master of walking that reportorial tightrope, but Lowry, himself an alcoholic, uses all the techniques of modernism circa 1947 to craft a novel that takes you all the way from the first drink of the night to the next day's hangover and back again. British consul Geoffrey Firmin is an alcoholic (naturally), drinking his life away in Quauhnahuac, Mexico on November 2, the Day of the Dead, surrounded by a few loosely connected friends, fellow expats, townspeople, and his estranged wife, all of whom stagger around and perform various drinking-related activities. The plot really isn't the point; what matters is the language and technique, which are on the level of other famous modernist novels like Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, and indeed you will be frequently reminded of them since all are set in a single day (with the exception of the first chapter here which takes place exactly a year before the rest of the action), in a single place, following a variety of perspectives, using stream of consciousness, and so forth. Under the Volcano is a bit more like Ulysses in its polyglot profusion, dropping in loads of Spanish to reflect its setting, and its heavy use of symbolism both structurally (12 chapters = the 12 months and the 12 hours on a clock, etc) and narratively (plenty of allusions to Faust, Shakespeare, Kabbalah mysticism, etc), but even though Lowry is no Joyce, he gives you the same impression of really caring about his work, every single last syllable spoken by a character in an intoxicated fervor. My edition also includes a long letter that Lowry wrote to his publisher Jonathan Cape explaining the novel's structure and justifying his writing choices that's one of the best literary analyses/critical commentaries I've ever read (yes, it's his own book, but still).

Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdoms Volume 4. As one of the most tremendous reading experiences of my life drew to a close, I had almost too many thoughts to write down. Since the fourth volume (chapters 95-120) ends over a hundred years after the story begins with the collapse of the Han dynasty, the reunification of the three kingdoms into the Jin dynasty is completed by an entirely new generation of characters. This may be the finest dramatization in all of literature of Machiavelli's famous distinction between virtù (the human ability to bring events under control through will) and fortuna (everything else), and it's fascinating how constrained all of these larger-than-life characters are by their predecessors' actions - even the brightest among them, like western general Kongming, who's still hanging on after the death of Liu Bei and trying to fulfill his dream, or northern general Sima Yi, who looks at Cao Cao's heirs the way that Cao Cao did at the last Han emperors, have to play the hands that they're dealt and live with the consequences of the choices made by their ancestors, who played their parts and then dropped out one by one, after what felt like several lifetimes worth of intrigues, battles, and heroic deeds. The persistent question of loyalty, whether to a brotherhood, a family, a sovereign, or to the empire as a whole, runs through every action to literally the very last page, and though it didn't end the way I would have wished (I was pulling for Cao Cao all the way), I wouldn't change a word of it. 

Non-Fiction:

James Baxter - Scientists Against Time. I first saw this 1947 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History mentioned in a discussion lamenting the poor US response to coronavirus in essentially all of the logistical details. Back in WW2 we were able to design, develop, and distribute all over the planet fantastic quantities of goods based on completely new technology that required intense amounts of scientific research to meet vital deadlines, so why are we so inept today? Well, the full story of our decaying modern institutions is yet to be told, but this history of scientific triumph on the other hand is full of fascinating details on the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the successor to the National Defense Research Committee. It oversaw an incredible amount of stuff: inventing the modern research university paradigm, funding that basic scientific research, coordinating the pipeline from research to prototypes, running trials, sequencing manufacturing, and then getting the final products delivered anywhere on Earth. Advances like radar, aircraft, amphibious vehicles, high explosive charges, medicines, blood plasma, and many more poured out of America thanks to a shockingly simple strategy of hiring talented people, giving them clear goals but plenty of latitude to solve any problems that come up, and checking in frequently to course-correct. This doesn't sound so difficult, but it's evidently beyond us now - just compare the invention, refinement, and distribution of antimalarials back then to something as simple as facemasks now. Have we really become so much worse at project management in 80 years, against a pandemic that will most likely kill about as many Americans as died in WW2? Apparently so.

Dan Davies - Lying For Money. I've long loved reading about the blurry line between scams and legitimate ventures, so this book was right up my alley. Davies is probably most famous for his legendary 2004 Iraq War blog post "The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA - Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101", but by day his profession is high finance; you can draw a straight line from that blog post eviscerating the massive fraud used to justify that war to this thoughtful and wide-ranging assessment of financial fraud. With the air of a magician explaining how his fellow conjurors perform their tricks, Davies reviews numerous historical and contemporary frauds in order to both taxonomize them (from "long firms" through "counterfeiting" and "control fraud" to "market crimes") as well as explain how each instrument of fraud is carefully designed to exploit the web of trust that so tenuously links together every level of modern commerce, from the humble counterfeit goods retail scammer all the way up to the world-impacting LIBOR fraudsters. An important insight is that while many frauds begin with the straightforward intent to deceive, many others exist in a gray area where a simple peccadillo gradually unleashes a slow-moving catastrophe as the perpetrator is inextricably committed to a fatal course towards bankruptcy and prison, ruining what could have been perfectly legitimate enterprises via simple mistakes that just can't be undone. Theft is easy but fraud can be as complex as the economy itself, given the perpetually irresistible lure of a quick buck. As Davies says: "The English language has an irregular verb to describe the problematic effects of performance contracts, depending on how much sympathy you feel for the person at the sharp end: I respond to incentives / You game the system / He is a crook."

Michael Pettis - Trade Wars Are Class Wars. Klein and Pettis's model of how globalization can increase inequality, which causes anti-trade reaction is well-encapsulated by the book's title: international trade is usually treated as a sideshow to domestic economic conditions, but efforts to compete with other countries via currency exchange rates, capital controls, tariffs, quotas, and so on can exacerbate domestic inequality as the price of changing the terms of trade, and while trade policies like NAFTA and China's WTO membership generally have had beneficial impacts on net, they can cause political reactions that are reflective of distributional impact, which can then feed back into further trade surplus/deficit issues. This discussion is welcome and timely in the era of Brexit and Trump, although the authors spend some of the most interesting stretches of the book talking about historical events like the financial impacts of Germany's reunification spending on the East/West German halves of the country. Understanding how the US should respond China's rise is of course the major topic here, and so alongside discussion of America as the world's lender of last resort, and the role that Germany has played in the macroeconomics of the euro, they recommend that the US rebalance its economy so that we don't have to fight battles within and without simultaneously. 

Walter Scheidel - Escape From Rome. Our list of debts to the Romans is quite lengthy, as in the famous "What have the Romans ever done for us?" scene from Monty Pythion's Life of Brian (naturally quoted here) where the characters ruefully enumerate the benefits Roman imperialism brought to Judaea, but Scheidel, on the other hand, concludes that in the long run, perhaps the best thing the Romans ever did for Europe as a whole was to stop being in charge of it. Theories on the causes of Roman collapse could fill libraries, but Scheidel's contribution is not to ask why the Roman Empire fell, but to ask how its fall was useful, even essential, for the creation of the modern world. What makes his analysis so interesting is in his method, which is full of the kind of counterfactuals that are a staple of alternative history novels but rare in academic work. He contrasts the highly-fragmented polycentrism of post-Roman Europe with the hegemonic dominance of the successive Chinese dynasties, making the case that the eventual economic divergence between Europe and China, which for most of history was far richer than Europe, in the Industrial Revolution depended on an earlier political divergence: the inability of any one power to ever permanently reassemble Roman hegemony over Europe, which contrasted against the serial reassembly of pan-Chinese empires. 

Matt Yglesias - One Billion Americans. This book is an attempt to market a laundry list of progressive wishlist items like higher immigration, universal health care, better family policy, stronger climate policy, zoning reform, and so on in a conservative-friendly format. As a progressive, I support his agenda entirely, but I can understand why it hasn't gotten the reception I think it warrants, because it's a good example of how reasonable points can seem contrarian when given a different framing. Contrarianism is assembling individually uncontroversial facts to construct a controversial conclusion, and the entire art of it lies in making your audience feel like you're genuinely trying to overturn an incorrect consensus instead of muddying the waters or just trolling. However, taken individually or together, all of Yglesias' points about the win-win nature of immigration, the benefits of overhauling our regulatory apparatus, the need to improve American child care/health care/transportation/infrastructure/climate strategy/etc, and so on should be essentially unobjectionable to most progressives, and one hopes that conservatives find them congenial as well. Even if this quite short book does feel like a takes collection rather than a proper coherent scholarly argument, I think his overall points are firmly correct - we should be allowing in more immigrants as part of a general strategy to make life better for all Americans, however many of them there may be.