Best albums I listened to: 2014

1. Real Estate - Atlas. 

2. Temples - Sun Structures. 

3. Beck - Morning Phase. 

4. The Life and Times - Lost Bees. 

5. Spoon - They Want My Soul. 

6. Lana Del Ray - Ultraviolence. 

7. Jenny Lewis - The Voyager. 

8. Hail Mary Mallon - Bestiary. 

9. Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 2. 

10. Foo Fighters - Sonic Highways. 

11. Foster The People - Supermodel. 

12. Young the Giant - Mind Over Matter. 

13. Cloud Nothings - Here and Nowhere Else. 

14. Swans - To Be Kind. 

15. Sturgill Simpson - Metamodern Sounds In Country Music. 

16. Fucked Up - Glass Boys. 

Best books I read: 2014

I didn't read as much as I could have in 2014 and I don't feel too bad about that. Much as with people, I don't want my relationship with books to become just another conduit for ticking clocks or action items. My year-end lists are just that - simple sequences of my own thoughts on what I've read. I found many of my favorites in the first half of the year, but that just left me a more leisurely pace for reading in the second half.

My main regret is that I kind of checked out of writing reviews. I find them more helpful than anything else in terms of keeping my thoughts organized, in drawing connections between things, and giving myself notes for future reading. I don't feel bad about dropping a half-read book I didn't enjoy, but of the ones I did finish, some kind of review, even if only a quick paragraph, seems like the least I could do.

What I can do about that in 2015 I'm not sure; promises to yourself are always tricky to keep. I mean, I read barely half as many books this year as I did last year, which isn't encouraging for the future. Fiction in particular really fell off a cliff for me this year, since nothing I read after June was as good as anything I read before. I guess that'll happen and there's not much to say except that I need more recommendations and more willpower.

But whatever - there's always next year. Here's the best 5 fiction and best 10 non-fiction books I read in 2014, in alphabetical order as usual.

Fiction:

Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Death On the Installment Plan. This novel is absolutely bursting with every kind of nasty, seedy, disgusting, abhorrent aspect of human behavior you could dream of. I haven't read a book that so revels in filth to the same degree in a long time, maybe ever. Reading it is less a process of bloodlessly analyzing the language/syntax/diction/tone like your high school English teachers tried to beat into you, and more about inhaling the impossibly appalling phantasmagoria of lust, greed, idiocy, malevolence, and every other ugly side of humanity there is, all layered under as many thick puddles of every gross bodily waste product Céline could think of (and as he was a doctor in real life, that's quite a lot). It's great.

Herman Melville - Moby Dick. This novel is just as good as its mammoth (or should I say leviathan) reputation indicated it would be. It was caricatured to me as a dull slog through a science exhibit on whaling, but it's famous for a reason: a thoughtful examination of our relationship with nature, an extremely rewarding character study, and an informative investigation of an entire livelihood, all with plenty of wit, insight, depth, and great writing. In fact, while I was reading it I had several of those moments where I get irritated at how much more self-indulgent and less pleasurable a lot of contemporary novels seem than 19th century ones. It might seem odd to call anything more self-indulgent than this long, digressive, allusive tome about whaling that has not one but multiple sections where Melville stops the action to explain his own use of symbolism, but not only are those moments usually funny or informative, they help give the book an enjoyable rhythm that makes it speed along in a way that a truly self-indulgent book could never manage.

Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations. Two moving and mobile plotlines, a clever high-level structure, and more affectionate science nerdery than you could reasonably hope for. The novel's title works in Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold Bug and Johann Sebastian Bach's The Goldberg Variations, in a clever nod to the main thematic material, but in addition to those motifs of codebreaking and music, Powers also works strains of genetics, knowledge, and information into the mix, in addition to more human subjects like love, fidelity, and responsibility. He manages a deft admixture of somewhat quotidian plots with high-level concepts (genetics and Bach over two interrelated love affairs), and I think he succeeded at unifying ideas and messages he wanted to get across with the action. In fact, the scaffolding tricks he used to unfold the story were so clever that it's even more impressive that the main narratives were as compelling as they were in comparison.

Raymond Queneau - Exercises In Style. Some books are clever in theory but dull in execution, whether due to the abstruseness of the underlying ideas or some incapacity of the writer. Exercises In Style is not one of those; even in translation (performed ably by Barbara Wright), it's obvious that this is one of those books that came out just as the author intended. While the underlying conceit (Queneau takes a boring, everyday scene - the unnamed narrator watches two other men jostle for space on a bus, and then later sees one of them again being given fashion advice - and describes it in 99 different ways) may seem a bit lame, the underlying product is quite funny and enjoyable.

Lu Xun - The Real Story of Ah-Q. I always respect authors who are willing to make bold criticisms of their own societies, because nothing is artistically easier or more temptingly lucrative than to simply give people what's familiar and flattering to their own prejudices. But these short stories, which are often very funny in their amused chronicling of universal human foibles, are incredibly uncomplimentary to basically every aspect of what at the time was a catatonic and stagnant culture, and Lu deserves real credit for his Nikolai Gogol-esque portraits that are instantly relatable even as they depict people at their worst and least likable. Only someone who actually cared about his country could make a story of people's ignorance and gullibility so affectionate and amusing.

Non-Fiction:

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee - The Second Machine Age. Brynjolfsson and McAfee's earlier book Race Against the Machine was a sober, data-driven overview of what they thought the likely effects of increased automation on the labor force would be, with interesting case studies and plenty of good data. Its major flaw, in my view, was an ending solutions chapter that spent more time on perennial Silicon Valley wishlist items like reforming the patent system or allowing for more H1-B visas than on engaging with the political process. While those wishlist items haven't gone away, this sequel - devoted to the three characteristics of modern technological progress: exponential growth, large amounts of digitized information, and constant remixing of old ideas into new ones - not only offers a greatly expanded take on their earlier analysis of technological progress, but a broader and more carefully thought-out list of possible solutions to problems that automation will cause for many workers even as the economy as a whole benefits greatly.

Richard Ben Cramer - What It Takes. By far the most detailed book about presidential campaigns I've ever read, in fact so detailed it's almost exhausting over its thousand-odd pages of tiny, close-set type, What It Takes is an extremely entertaining read that also raises profoundly troubling questions about the whole venture. Out of all the people contesting the 1988 presidential campaign, Cramer selects Democrats Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Dick Gephardt, and Gary Hart, Republicans George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole, and asks some serious questions about their ultimate goal. What makes people want to become president? What sort of person takes that idea and commits to it? What does that commitment really mean in terms of how it relates to the rest of your life, the quiet, private, alone parts? What kinds of obstacles are there along the way? What is it really like to be completely surrounded by the press and by other people, and by the public? How often do people crack under the strain and what is that like? All these questions and more get raised and answered, but one can't help but be unsettled by the process, and ask why the public tolerates this kind of spectacle.

Robert Drews - The End of the Bronze Age. A fascinating look at the history of the Bronze Age collapse, one of the least-known but most pivotal periods in history. Even though the invasions of the Sea Peoples were so devastating that there aren't even records of their proper name, and despite the passage of over thirty centuries and the disappearance of most of the historical record, Drews reviews the greater part of the known evidence of the battles that the eastern Mediterranean civilizations fought against them and comes up with fairly convincing theories to explain how so many nations vanished so suddenly during the 12th century BC, how the Egyptians eventually managed to stop them, and what the consequences were for military tactics and Western civilization as a whole.

Eric Foner - Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. All the more impressive for having been initially released as a PhD dissertation, this is one of the most comprehensive and insightful treatments of a specific ideology that I've read. While it requires some fairly advanced knowledge of the issues of the antebellum political system (issues like the Wilmot Proviso, party factions like Barnburner Democrats, and key figures like Horace Greeley get dropped into the analysis with cursory to no effort made to explain their context), Foner manages to pull together a large amount of primary source material to explain just what ideological positions and political tactics took the Republican Party from marginal upstarts to the nation's dominant political party in less than a decade. While his decision to structure the book one theme at a time instead of purely chronologically means that the narrative jumps around a bit, ultimately it's a highly effective way to tie together all the threads of thought from the various movements and issues that dominated the national agenda in the 1840s and 50s - how the country would expand, who would get to settle in the new territories, and what kind of life they would be able to live.

Steven Moore - The Novel. Such a vast, erudite, ambitious, encyclopedic work as this deserves applause. Steven Moore was once the editor of Dalkey Archive Press, one of the best publishers around, and his goal of showing that many so-called "innovations" of modern novels are actually quite ancient might come as old news to many seasoned readers, but he handily succeeds at showing why this literary heritage matters in a reading environment where sophisticated fiction often struggles. His enthusiasm for the project, the vast range of material he's gone through, and his highlighting of countless forgotten or unknown books (sure to be news to even the most hardcore bibliophiles) will be extremely welcome to anyone whose reading list just isn't long enough, or who wants a quick tour through basically all of world literature until the year 1600.

Alex Ross - Listen to This. At its best, music criticism can be revelatory, casting a formerly unappreciated work in a new light or turning the listener on to entirely new sounds. By those criteria Ross succeeds handily: I found myself mentally revising my opinions many times and adding more and more works to my to-listen list the further I got through the book. The essays run from historical classical composers, to contemporary composers, to conductors, to singers, to performers, to pop artists. Best of all, much like with his previous book he has a listen-along guide on his website so it's possible to hear much of what he talks about rather than having to buy dozens of CDs (though he does provide a buyer's guide as well in an appendix). Highly recommended for classical music fans, and still recommended for those with an open musical mind.

Kevin Starr - Golden Dreams. Starr has done a tremendous job synthesizing vast amounts of research on California's transformation into the most American part of America, a position it's never really relinquished. He talks about the booming of the major cities and the blossoming of the minor towns. He analyzes trends in music and its composers, movies and their stars, architecture and its designers, and literary movements and their authors. He notes the vast demographic trends and the ubiquitous cultural innovations. He chronicles the politics of water usage and the struggles over freeway construction. He connects the growth of the super-cities with the solitary wildernesses they encroached on. He profiles the civic leaders and the restive outcasts, the cops and the criminals, the ordinary citizens and the pioneering artists, the religious figures and the radical environmentalists, the trailblazing progressives and the reactionary conservatives. As the legendary lazy grade school book report has it, California emerges as "a land of many contrasts".

James Stewart - Den of Thieves. As with all stories about high-flying 80s Wall Street players, Den of Thieves inspired in me that peculiar mix of disgust and envy - disgust for the unethical behavior and blatant criminality that these guys thought they could get away with, and envy for the amazing lifestyles and sheer balls they had. One of the main characters has a resume created for himself with a hilariously straightforward summary: "Dennis describes himself as a person who truly loves to do two things: do deals and make money". What happens when that kind of personality is unleashed upon the junk bond market in the Reagan 80s? A lot of money is made for some, a lot of money is lost for others, and a very interesting story of finance, ethics, and the law unfolds.

James Stewart - Disneywar. Very early on in the book, Stewart reveals a fascinating bit of trivia about the Disney leadership's corporate culture: every senior executive, no matter if they're the public face of the company or if they're in a behind-the-scenes workhorse position, has to spend a day at a Disney theme park in costume as a character. They do this not as a hazing ritual, but to help the people who run the company understand that for many people, Disney isn't just another media/entertainment company - it's the creator of their childhoods. It's one thing to work in the office making deals, planning strategy, and cutting costs; it's quite another to put on a Goofy suit and give a high-five to a 4-year-old who thinks you're the greatest thing that's ever happened to them. The unique nature of Disney products - the word "magical" gets thrown around a lot - means that the stakes around any business decision they make are about as high as it gets in the entertainment world. That's why it's so fascinating to read all the downright un-magical behind-the-scenes material about the tumultuous tenure of superstar CEO Michael Eisner that Stewart unearthed. Rarely will you get see so many men worth hundreds of millions of dollars, each dedicated to the careful curation of childhood, act so childishly themselves.

Matt Taibbi - The Divide. As perhaps the most fully realized book Taibbi has written so far, The Divide retains all the markers of his signature style - the specific personal faces on abstract trends, the outraged tone, the hilariously inventive ways of insulting people - and matches them to a simple but powerful idea about how American society is quietly sorting itself into two different moral landscapes. The idea of "two Americas" is quite old, of course, but one important manifestation of our recent slide into a neo-Gilded Age is the division between patricians and plebeians in the criminal justice system. There are many books on economic inequality, plenty on inequities in the justice system, and still more on the perversities in our immigration system, but rarely do you see them all tied together in such a compelling way. In this book as in his others though, the only downside is that the picture of systematic injustice he draws is so all-encompassingly bleak it's difficult to imagine how it could be halted or reversed.

Best albums I listened to: 2013

1. Dawes - Stories Don't End. 

2. Dave Grohl - Sound City: Reel to Reel. 

3. Steve Earle - The Low Highway. 

4. The Lone Bellow - The Lone Bellow. 

5. Bombino - Nomad. 

6. The Black Angels - Indigo Meadow. 

7. Sharks - Selfhood. 

8. Electric Eye - Pick-up, Lift-off, Space, Time. 

9. Best Coast - Fade Away. 

10. Beach Fossils - Clash the Truth. 

11. Peace - In Love. 

12. Washed Out - Paracosm. 

13. El-P & Killer Mike - Run the Jewels. 

Best books I read: 2013

This year has absolutely soared by. I'm not quite done reading yet, but I hit my target of 72, Christmas is coming up, and I've been asked what my favorites of the year are, so it's time for my annual year-end list.

First some statistics courtesy of Goodreads (friend me!: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3749410-aaron-arnold):

- 23 / 72 were written in 2013. I've been more current this year than ever. Next year I'm going to tackle some big doorstop classics (namely Moby Dick, Ulysses, and The Recognitions) which might slow me down, but I think I did a solid job at keeping up with the 2013 hype.

 - 34 / 72 were fiction. Almost exactly half. I tend to gravitate towards non-fiction, but I found a lot of excellent fiction this year by keeping up with the New York Times Books section, as well as blogs like The Millions and Bookslut. 

- 11 / 72 were written by women. I don't have a quota system or anything, and a lot of the genres I read like sci-fi aren't exactly packed with female writers, so that explains the low number. However, a full quarter of my favorites this year were written by women, so I guess women tend to overperform their numbers for me.

 

Anyway, here's the 10 best fiction and nonfiction books I've read so far this year. Alphabetical order as usual because I hate numerical rankings. However, if you read only one, which you shouldn't, my favorite fiction was either Pessoa or Munro, while the best non-fiction was either Reisner or Ross.

Fiction:

Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl. If you're looking for a good post-apocalyptic science fiction novel with a solid backing premise, an interesting world, a riveting plot, and well-drawn characters, this novel deserves all of the awards it won. It tackles things like fears over genetic modification, colonialism, and the loss of social cohesion, and it ends on the right ambiguously promising note that makes you want a sequel while still being satisfying on its own.

Thomas Bernhard - Extinction. The narrated life story of an unpleasant man who receives word that his brother and parents have just been killed in an accident, it will at first seem like the guy simply never shuts up. But even if not all of this stuff is worth saying, it's worth reading, because even if this guy isn't exactly likable, I think he's more like us than we might like to admit, and the final effect of this word-torrent is both a renewed appreciation for the pleasures of escape that human contact gives us, and a healthy capacity for amusement at how silly our own negative thoughts can be, no matter how recurrent or compelling.

Joseph Conrad - Nostromo. Joseph Conrad writes another insightful novel, this time about a fictional South American country and a silver mine that corrupts both locals and foreigners, even the supposedly invincible eponymous hero. The way his characters all deal with the challenges caused by the mine are riveting, and his portrayal of the country's government and "resource curse"-crippled institutions could have come right out of a history book.

Jennifer Egan - A Visit From the Goon Squad. This book's unusual half-novel, half-short story collection format is perfect for delivering the book's points about what it takes to achieve (or not achieve) adulthood and contentment, the blur of drugs and sex and music both evocative and precise to each character, and the humor perfectly pitched to deliver the pathos of everyone's losses and changes over the years. You experience the fragility of memory and the effects of the passage of time on life in a different way than you would have with a more conventionally structured novel.

Ursula K. LeGuin - The Dispossessed. Le Guin packed so many interesting topics into this novel - language, gender, sexuality, anarchism, socialism, science, academic freedom - that it would probably take several more books to fully explore all the subtleties of her presentation, but she worked all of her philosophizing so smoothly into the narrative that it never feels like pontificating. It's a great demonstration of how much more palatable that kind of political philosophy can be when tucked into a novel, and the book manages to both cover a lot of ground thematically while still also being the affecting story of a man on an alien world trying to get back to his wife and family. 

Zachary Mason - The Lost Books of the Odyssey. A great collection of short stories that play with various aspects of the greatest adventure story of all time. If you've read any of Borges' fictions, you'll find a lot that's familiar in terms of how cerebral yet playful Mason is with all the elements of the hero's wanderings, and you'll be impressed with how well he brings out all the brave, clever, cowardly, loyal, duplicitous, and melancholy qualities of Odysseus.

Alice Munro - Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Munro just won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, and I'm happy to report that this is a wonderful collection of short stories that shows Munro as being in the first rank of fiction writers and makes for a great introduction to her work. Fully discussing each of the nine stories in here would take as long or longer than just reading the stories themselves, but they are all basically flawless - full of well-drawn characters, realistic yet compelling drama, and acute psychological insight. Her writing style is also notable, being so naturalistic, subtle, and skillful that her presence is barely even perceptible, yet I frequently found myself reading for a while, pausing to think, and then going back a page or two to marvel at how much she was able to pack into her sentences without the Heavy Hand of the Author showing.

Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet. This is a tremendous work, as difficult to describe as it is impossible to forget. Page after page of a seemingly infinitely self-annihilating prose poetry, this is a "factless autobiography" of a bookkeeper who engages in some of the most simultaneously lucid and hallucinatory flights of reasoning I've ever come across. In Bernardo Soares, Pessoa has created one of the most vivid and alive characters that I think it's possible to within the confines of a single novel, especially when the character doesn't actually do much of anything, and in fact regards action with both contempt and indifference. Full of Deep Thoughts, trivial banalities, and everything in between.

Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge. Yet another "weird detective story", Bleeding Edge is also by far the most "normal" book he's ever written, meaning it contains the fewest goofy songs, ludicrous Dickensian names, drug-addled digressions, or egregiously stupid/brilliant puns, though all of those elements definitely appear. I won't call it "mature", since he's been ahead of the game ever since his very first book, but this exploration of the intersection between 9/11 and the dotcom boom is his first novel to seem like it was written by a father, someone with real roots in the ordinary quotidian life of school days, sleepovers, and the rest of the thankless but necessary work done by any ordinary parent.

José Saramago - The History of the Siege of Lisbon. A Portugese proofreader's impulsive decision to insert a single erroneous word into the manuscript of a book he's proofing changes his life profoundly as he finds love, changes from being a lonely, cowardly shut-in, and begins writing an alternate history of the Reconquista of Portugal from the Moors. Saramago makes a lot of interesting points about the nature of truth in history, and his unusual style of dialogue somehow makes the book flow even better.

Non-Fiction:

Gregory Clark - A Farewell to Alms. An ambitious alternative to the ever-influential Guns Germs & Steel: an overview of the logic of the nearly economically static Malthusian trap that every society in the world inhabited until approximately 1800, an explanation of the math behind the Industrial Revolution which allowed a select group of societies to escape that trap, and finally, a cursory look at why many of the poorer nations of the world currently struggle to escape their own Malthusian shackles. His "reverse Idiocracy" thesis of consistent selection pressures leading to increased entrepreneurialism is intriguing, to say the least.

R.R. Palmer - Twelve Who Ruled. The French Revolution is one of the most interesting periods in history, and this is an excellent biography of the dozen men who made up the Committee of Public Safety during the fateful year 1793, when the country seemed about to collapse either from anarchy or foreign invasion. Palmer does a lot to illuminate and contextualize the actions of often-maligned men like Robespierre, and his vivid writing really brings the period to life. There's a lot of thought-provoking analysis and direct quotations from the historical figures themselves that will really enrich your understanding of the time.

Jeffrey Pilcher - Planet Taco. The only thing that people like more than eating food is talking about food, and this history of the development of Mexican food offers plenty to talk about. It covers the story of what I consider to be one of the best cuisines in the world, from its various origins in pre-Colombian Mexico, through its struggles to gain respect in the 19th century, and up to the present day as it has been globalized and reinterpreted both by Mexicans and by other cultures. It also offers up plenty of interesting analysis of the politics of food that will have you thinking about different cuisines in new ways.

Marc Reisner - Cadillac Desert. Fresh water is one of the most fundamental resources of civilization, yet tens of millions of Americans live in parts of the country that have barely any of it at all. Though a book written in the 80s is obviously somewhat dated, its basic insights on how fundamentally suspect the decision to locate a huge chunk of society in some of the most forbidding terrain in the world haven't changed at all. It has a wealth of history on the settlement and development of the American West, and a lot of great points on how fragile our way of life really is.

Alex Ross - The Rest Is Noise. Almost certainly the greatest book ever written about classical music in the 20th century, and definitely one of the best books written about music, period. Ross is able to discuss an incredible number of artists, their works, their influences, and general social and intellectual currents over the decades in a dense but extremely readable volume. You don't have to already have a PhD in music theory to understand his discussions of the meanings and structures behind some of the 20th century's masterworks, but you'll come away much more informed about music, be it classical, contemporary, or whatever after you're done.

Tom Standage - The Writing On the Wall. Countless people use social media every day to keep relationships going that would be vastly more difficult without them, and if most communication seems trivial, perhaps the real answer is that people are often trivial. The ultimate moral is familiar, that communications technologies are ultimately what we make of them, and can be used for good or evil depending on how they're structured and who the gatekeepers are. This history of social media from the Sumerians to the present shows that human nature is endlessly entertaining no matter which century you're in or what medium you're viewing it with.

Richard Stites - Revolutionary Dreams. If you are interested in Russian literature, science fiction, Marxism, or Russian history, then this is a must-read, one of those far-ranging critical studies that intelligently sums up a vast field while still giving you plenty of other works to chase down afterwards. It's a history of utopian thought in pre-revolutionary Russia, a discussion of practical problems the revolutionaries faced in building a new society, an overview of many now-forgotten writers and social movements, and a sad chronicle of literary censorship as the revolution began silencing dissidents and hardening into Stalinism.

Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror. Tuchman's greatest skill is narrative - it's very difficult to think of historians with comparable talents to make what could have been a blurry smear of snore/war/gore in the 14th century into a clear, comprehensible, and fascinating history. Like many people, this period in history was kind of a morass to me, so it was welcome to have her organize this chaos of plague, war, recession, famine, brigandage, despotism, religious strife, and squabbling nobility into something not only memorable but instructive. While I wish she would have done more connection between the events of this time and those of the present day, this still stands as an excellent introduction to the period. Besides, figuring out parallels for yourself is half the fun.

Elijah Wald - How The Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll. There's a lot of very interesting discussion of trends in music composition, recording, consumption, and evolution in here, and its core thesis - that the watershed moment in the mid-Sixties when The Beatles and their contemporaries transformed the music industry had downsides as well as upsides - is well-argued and very thought-provoking. There are numerous objections you could raise to this idea (e.g. what about hip hop?), but I think Wald is onto something when he says that James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" is in its own way just as revolutionary as most of what The Beatles put out, and that the world has lost something when genres like funk, soul, R&B, and so forth are artistically segregated from whiter, artier genres.