In the Year of Our Lord 2017, I finished 52 books. I read both hard copy and on Kindle. This was also a year in which I got very into Audible and listened to a number of audibooks[i]. For books I thought could be important, I sometimes read in tandem with the audiobook. My reading covered history, philosophy, self-development, poetry, current events, fiction, psychology, and the sciences. A peculiar trend I noticed in retrospect was an interest in biology, DNA, evolutionary psychology, and theories of consciousness. In no particular order (outside of my favorite, served up front). Here are the favorites from this year and some thoughts on what I valued in them. First, though, some honorable mentions:
Honorable mentions:
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck – Mark Manson
The Happiness Hypotheses – Jonathan Haidt
The Ways of The Stranger: Encounters With The Islamic State – Graeme Wood
The Path: What Ancient Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life – Michael Puet and Christine Cross-Loh
Life 3.0 – Max Tegmark
A Crack In Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution – Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow – Yuval Noah Harari
My favorite book of 2017 is the sequel to my favorite book of 2016. Yuval Noah Harari is one of the clearest and most cogent thinkers that I have ever encountered. He has a natural talent for synthesis of knowledge across a variety of fields and an ability to create a compelling narrative about where humanity may be heading. Sapiens covered the past of the Homo Sapiens and examined our evolution from a middle-of-the-food-chain animal among others to the rulers of the world who control the fate of other animals. We came to outcompete because our big brains enabled us to develop a fictive language that allowed for large-scale coordination with many other sapiens. We can create memes, which can transfer information faster than genes.
Through sharing information and creating intersubjective truths, we came to dominate our present world. In Homo Deus, Harari points his eye toward the future, and finds that human beings have almost won the evolutionary game – we have largely defeated famine, plague, and war. The human agenda has changed, and we instead look toward living forever and creating artificial intelligences. This will be problematic, because what we’ve come to know in these quests seems to show that humans may not be that special, and that consciousness may not be required. The latest findings in evolutionary biology and psychology seem to show that we are little more than emotional algorithms that have been programmed for biological success. Once we’ve gotten smart enough to know this, we can try to shape these algorithms and create better ones, be they biological or technological. We may merge these algorithms, once the technological tools we create know us better than we know ourselves. If so, humanity will become Homo Deus, a new type of life. This type of life may then look at us like we look at our relatives lower down on the tree of life. We may care about them, but not if they get in our way. Normal humans will be relegated to “The Useless Class – not just unemployed, but unemployable.” All of this is fascinating, page-turning, and deeply troubling. Homo Deus represents one of the best minds of our generation ruminating on the most important issue of our age, arguably of all time. You would be foolish not to read it.
Stoicism is my philosophy of choice, and I try to get in a few good Stoic reads a year. This year expanded my exploration of Seneca. Previously, I read his essays “On The Shortness of Life” and greatly enjoyed his philosophical and rhetorical eloquence. His philosophy is one of great consolation to the broken and the suffering, something I reflected on in greater detail earlier this year. Seneca calls for the pursuit of wisdom and study of virtue. He preaches self-mastery in the things in one’s control, and indifference to the things beyond. He teaches the value of the liberal arts and continued education. This is a great work of practical philosophy, wisdom that you can carry with you into the turbulent times in your life. It is reading that will do your soul good, and will train your spirit for the challenges to come.
Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity – Carlo Rovelli
I read two Carlo Rovelli books this year, as well as two other books that generally fall into cosmology/astrophysics. Reality is Not What It Seems was by far the best. In addition to a thrilling and up-to-date picture of theoretical physics and his work on quantum gravity, Rovelli has crafted a masterful book on the philosophy of science. It is, in his words, “the reply he would give to a colleague and friend asking me, “So, what do you think is the true nature of things?” as we walk along the shore on a long midsummer’s evening.” One thing I really loved about this book is that it cast science as an ongoing, creative process that is continually trying to re-frame ways of understanding the world in a way that stands up to continued challenge by experimentation. It is a means of producing knowledge – not certain knowledge, but reliable knowledge. It allows us to transcend how things appear to us and to realize that reality is not always what it seems. Rovelli traces the history of these revisions, starting with a view of reality as particles moving in time and space, and moving to his current proposed view of Quantum gravity. This theory merges spacetime and quantum fields into a single unit –a covariant quantum field of a single force, gravity. A fascinating part of this theory is the notion that there is a smallest possible unit of space; that space itself cannot be infinitely divided, there is a lower limit. At these scales, time seems to disappear. Confused? Yeah, you probably should be, but you should read the book, and you won’t be as confused, because Rovelli writes beautifully and clearly. You’ll get a passionate defense of physics and a mind-bending description of the current best picture of reality. It’s not what you expect.
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia – Peter Pomerantsev
I love things with creative titles, and how great is this one? It has instantly jumped up among my favorite book titles of all time, joining Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes and Play The Piano Drunk Like A Percussion Instrument Until The Fingers Begin to Bleed A Bit. The notion expressed in the title is so beautifully and chillingly phrased. This was a book about modern Russia and the rise of what the author calls “triumphant cynicism.” Peter Pomerantsev was an Englishman with a Russian name that he parlayed into a job in Russian media. Here he got to see behind the curtain of modern Russia’s bizarre mix of state, criminal, and media power. Pomerantsev leads you through a Russia that has survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and seen a rise of insane wealth consolidated into the hands of a few, usually very shady people. This book looks at a world of disinformation and deception, where political opposition are often paid actors and the rules of the game can change depending on the whims of those in power. This is triumphant cynicism – an extension of post-modernism that cynically uses any values to achieve the true ends of power. They will use democratic talking points one day, then switch to passionately defending socialism or fascism the next. It’s a bizarre world of glitz, glamour, and PR: Nothing is true, and everything is possible. There’s so much in this book that is surreal. There’s Holy Russian Bikers who ride with icons of Stalin and the Virgin Mary and dream of a resurgent Moscow as a Third Rome. There are billionaire oligarchs who jockey for positions of power and throw lavish parties, and Russian women who are trained at finishing schools at how to best marry rich.
And there are cults! Probably the biggest surprise of the book was the investigation of a supermodel’s Ruslana Korshunova suicide, which he traces back to a cult, The Rose of the World. The section of the book investigating this organization was one of the most fascinating breakdowns of brainwashing and how it works – the investigative journalist they sent in started to lose it, even knowing what was going on. Fascinating, and frightening. This was a really interesting book for our current media landscape, which is looking more and more like a triumphantly cynical world.
Notorious: The Life and Fights of Conor McGregor – Jack Slack
It’s Our Boy, Jack Slack, back with more of the best writing about fighting. And that’s a huge compliment, as writing about fighting is some of the most compelling writing there can be. That’s because combat sports offer such raw human drama. It is sport at its most bare, with thrilling highs and crushing lows. But beyond the violence, it is the narratives that are compelling – we get to see humans pursue and achieve excellence, and we get to see what that pursuit does to them. One of the more thrilling narratives in combat sports in the recent years is the rise of Conor McGregor, the flamboyant Irish knockout artist. This unusual lad from Crumlin went from fixing toilets as an apprentice plumber to being the king shit of this MMA game. Jack Slack documents this rags-to-riches story marvelously, tracking the development of the Irish superstar from fight to fight. This is where this book really differentiates itself from others. This is a martial arts book in two senses: one, in that it is the history and biography of a martial arts icon; and two, it is a masterful breakdown of the techniques and strategies used in the fights as they occurred. Slack tracks the development of McGregor’s style, and helps you understand what makes his overall game so effective, and helps you appreciate his triumphs and defeats in greater detail. Not only will this book help you understand combat sports as a cultural phenomenon, it will help you grow in your own martial arts strategies. I greatly enjoyed Slack’s inserts called “The Sweet Science” which broke down specific techniques, including some on little-understood MMA kicks, like capoeira’s meia lua de compasso. It is simply a great joy to read, as Slack is a very humorous writer with some wry observations about The Hurt Business. If you’re at all interested in combat sports, this is well worth your time.
Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting – Shannon Vallor
I spend a lot of time worrying about the future. Not in the local sense, either, but in the capital F Future sense. One of my favorite subjects to worry about is technology and all the weird things that are incoming. Not to worry you, but here’s just a few technologies you could/should worry about: autonomous killing robots, virtual reality worlds, gene editing, social media, digital surveillance, and, oh yeah, General Artificial Intelligence. I don’t often have a lot of techno-joy, either. Frankly, I think there are a lot more ways to fuck this up than to get this right. In my estimation, it’s much easier to end up in a techno-dystopia than a techno-utopia – easier to get The Matrix than Star Trek. Luckily for all of us, we have brilliant people working on the problem, including Dr. Shannon Vallor. I know Professor Vallor from my formative days at Santa Clara, where I took her classes on metaphysics and epistemology. She is a great philosopher of science and technology, and Professor Vallor has written one of the only books about the future and technology that has left me even a bit optimistic. It is a book that looks to bring one of humanity’s oldest skillsets to our newest problems: it is an application of virtue ethics to the problems posed by technology. Vallor makes several compelling arguments for this approach. It is globally universal, as Vallor looks at examples from Aristotelian, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions. It is flexible, and thus able to address the challenge of “acute technosocial opacity,” the idea that technology and society are changing too quickly for rule-based ethical theories like utilitarianism and deontology. Instead of looking at hard and fast rules, Vallor wants us to consider what kind of moral practices technology is engendering, what virtues they create, and what kind of technological moral leaders we want to follow. Basically, rather than better technology, we need wiser humans to wield the technology better. It was a different approach than I have seen from other scholars I read on this topic, and one that made more slightly more optimistic than other books. Another interesting thing about this book is that it challenged my generally libertarian intuitions, by showing the fact that the problems presented by technology are global and can only be addressed through global coordination on a governmental scale. This was undoubtedly one of the harder books I read this year; a philosophy book for philosophy people. It’s clearly and concisely written, it is just dense with wisdom and content. I don’t know how many people are like me, but if you’re like me – interested in both practical moral philosophy and the philosophy of technology – you won’t find many more intriguing books.
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging – Sebastian Junger
We’ve been at war since I was 12, and I’ve barely noticed. My life has proceeded unimpeded on the homefront. Yet the decade of war has certainly changed our country and the world, in ways that I often struggle to understand. One piece of this is the divide between the military and civilian classes and the divergence of these experiences. The creation of a volunteer army has had the effect of isolating trauma in a small population, with very different experiences. Some of us understand war, and most of us don’t. I do not, at all. I grew up in a military town, with a veteran father, and great respect for our warrior class. I understand how I need Jack Nicholson on that wall, so to speak. At the same time, I think war is one of the worst things in the world – it has all the corruption and waste of a government program, plus the output is murder. I’m of conflicted intuitions.
This short book from noted war journalist Sebastian Junger looks at both the noble and tragic sides of war. He looks at the purpose that comes from shared survival experiences and how it bonds us into egalitarian tribes. The sense of belonging in these tribes and the sense of being in the moment from a survival experience often end up being the peak experiences in people’s lives. This is what makes sense of confusing statements that are sometimes made, where people can report that their times in the war were the most meaningful and best parts of their lives, despite being times of great objective suffering. Jünger also looks at the challenges of post-traumatic stress disorder and reintegration. He uses this challenge as a means of illuminating how atomized and hierarchical our Western society is. These conditions make Western society generally unsatisfying – it is largely a consequence of our lives being too easy; we do not by and large need to struggle to survive in small tribal groups, the conditions that seem to make us feel most meaningfully alive. This is an important book – it speaks to something confusing in the human condition and something timely about our modern world. As we as a nation work to deal with the consequences of our wars and the way that we have isolated that trauma in a veteran class that struggles to reintegrate. I, like most Americans, don’t understand war, the highs or the lows of it. But we’re going to have to try, and in doing so, we may come to understand better what it means to be human.
Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen – Steve Sims
Bluefishing is a book you should read if you love Seth Godin. It’s also a book you should read if you don’t love Seth Godin, as it is a delightful little handbook of life and business advice. But I bring up Godin because Steve Sims has a similar focus on authenticity and personal branding. He is focused on being genuinely himself and the real relationships that spring from that. There’s so much homespun wisdom to love in this book. Sims is a charming and charismatic man who elevated himself from a meager background as a bricklayer by asking, “Why not me? Why can’t I live like the other half?”, and who continually hustled to build an empire. And the coolest thing is that it is an empire built on providing value to other people: as a profession, Steve Sims gets shit done and makes things happen. He is an elite concierge who can make your dreams come true. He provides experiences and once-in-a-lifetime experiences for his clients. He makes things happen that don’t seem possible. Whatever you could think of, this guy can get it done. And Bluefishing is his playbook – he tells you the secrets of his trade. It’s worth its weight in gold. What are those secrets? Authenticity, “messy” marketing, and continuous trial by experimentation. Sims continually investigates beneath the surface, asking “why?” three times to uncover. He understands the value of showing people that you’re thinking about them, in a way that is genuine and authentic. For example, if Steve knows that a client is passionate about cars, he may find a magazine with that person’s dream car, rip out a picture of it, and stuff it into a shoddy, handwritten envelope and sent it off to the client with a note saying, “Hope you’re still chasing the Lamborghini dream, saw this and thought of you, hope you are doing well.” The recipient can’t just delete the email. They have to physically open an object, then they find something that was undeniably done by another human, with you in mind. This is powerful. That authentic engagement is an experience, and Sims understands the notion of giving and creating experiences, which can change people’s lives in a way that other gifts cannot. He advises a “Would I have a beer with this person?” test of a person’s ethos, and always tries to keep himself beer-worthy. It’s simple stuff, but Sims presents it in a deeply compelling and well-organized fashion. The audiobook, read by the author, is particularly delightful and predictably authentic. The last chapter of this book should be on everyone’s desk, especially if you work in sales or marketing. Sims has built a playbook to help you sell or market yourself without feeling sleazy, in a way that allows you to add value to your community. The best recommendation that I can give this book is that as soon as I finished it, I thought of an entrepreneurially-minded friend who would enjoy it, and sent it to him with a genuine note. It was a bit of Sims’ advice in action. It’s wisdom that you can put to use to improve your personal and business relationships.
Mortal Questions – Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel is a philosopher who other philosophers I like reference and speak highly of, but whose work I had never explored myself. As a philosophy undergrad, I read “What is it like to be a bat?”, because that’s what philosophy undergrads do. I’m sure I thought it was interesting, but I hadn’t read anything further until this year. What made me circle back to this philosopher and this work? Well, this is the only book on my list that comes with a bonus podcast recommendation: Very Bad Wizards. This irreverent show about philosophy and psychology examined a number of essays from Thomas Nagel’s Mortal Questions. They examined The Absurd, Moral Luck, and The Fragmentation of Values.
I found their discussion fascinating, and it prompted me to pick up and read all of these essays. In these, Nagel reflects on a number of ‘mortal questions’ that don’t seem to have answers; they seem to pull our intuitions in opposite directions, and they seem to edge up against the limits of our perspectives. These questions include “why does life seem absurd?”, “what is ethical in war and politics?”, “where does consciousness come from?” If you are looking for answers, you won’t find many. What you’ll find is a clear framing of the problems. At the heart of these mortal questions is the challenge of perspective and the fact that humans can take both objective and subjective perspectives on things. We experience things subjectively, from a point of view and consciousness that feels immediately and irrevocably ours. We feel like selves and agents with dignity. It is one of our most clear, core psychological features. At the same time, we can reason our ways to a more objective view of the world, where we are clearly objects in an external reality. This leads to a clash of perspective and intuitions that recur across a variety of philosophical problems.
In ethics, we are torn between intuitions of what objectively seems like a better consequence for the whole and the feeling that there are certain moral laws that a self should not violate. In metaphysics, we are torn between the feeling that there is a self with agency and that there is an external world where there are objects and events with no place for a self to influence causality. The subjective experience of consciousness is what is key here – there is something that it is like to be you, and we are inescapably rooted from this subjective point of view. At the same time, we encounter reality and can reason objectively. These essays will unsettle you and stick with you. They will bump you up against the edges of what we can know from our human perspective.
I once heard someone on a podcast say that they read Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson and immediately became depressed by the idea that they would never be able to write something as beautiful. They nailed it. These are beautifully crafted short stories, written with a poet’s command of language. Johnson masterfully creates a character across the span of interconnected stories told by a burnout heroin addict who has bounces from one mischievous or outright vicious deed to another. His narration is rambling and roving, reinforcing the damage done by a life of drugs and the things done to get them. The narrator is a scoundrel – he elbows women in the stomach, he breaks into a house and holds a family at gunpoint, he spies on an Amish couple trying to catch them in flagrante. The whole thing reminds me of a line from a Drive Like Jehu song, where the narrator simply states, “I’d stoop to that. Sure I would.” The narrator and his actions are utterly detestable. We should not want to read them. It is a testament to Johnson’s incredible skill that he makes the narrator not only relatable but strangely sympathetic. There is a sadness and a brokenness to everything around him, but there is so much beauty in the telling that it makes your heart ache and you feel for the damned soul, having seen things finally from his perspective. Utterly beautiful. Also recommend this on audiobook, where the narrator’s voice is little more than a hoarse whisper, a believable voice relating the tales of drugs and detox.
Conclusion
As I reflect on the reading, most of this year was spent grappling with questions of life and consciousness. This was a year I got deeply interested in the ideas of evolution and evolutionary psychology. I have often been drawn to the idea of a teleology – an explanation of the purpose of the given thing. I think evolution can help us understand our teleology further, and can help us make sense of our world and actions. This year I spent a lot of time thinking about emotions and consciousness, and how they may be byproducts of a system designed not to make me happy, but to keep me alive and drive me toward reproduction. Indeed, the consciousness may just be a byproduct of those evolutionary pressures. This year forced me to think a lot about the type of thing we humans are, and what we are doing here. With an understanding of some of these pressures and purposes, we are more free to accept or reject them, as we see fit. We can examine our purposes and the emotions driving us to them. The notion of a modular mind build by evolution can help us better understand the complexities and challenges of being human. I have just begun my exploration into the world of biology and evolutionary psychology, but it has been a fascinating and informing journey.
[i] Open to feedback – should I keep separate lists for things that I read vs listen on audiobook? I am of two minds –sitting down to read a book and having a book read to you are very different experiences. However, at the same time, I worry about splitting them, as I think of reading books as consuming ideas – this list is more essentially a list of the most interesting thoughts I tried to grapple with this year, whether in text or audio. What do you guys think? I am looking for honest feedback, as I am a bit flummoxed.