In the Year of Our Lord 2018, I finished a total of 53 books and audiobooks (mostly audiobooks). I fell short of my goal of 60 books for the year. While I am disappointed in me, most people either don’t or can’t read, so I feel superior enough, don’t you worry your pretty little head about me.
2018 saw me read a lot more fiction, particularly science fiction, than I usually do. I re-read a few old favorites. I read poetry that wasn’t Billy Collins. Science and philosophy continued to be driving topics, with a particular focus on the philosophy of mind and an appreciation of the animal kingdom. I tried to understand my psychology and the language I use to navigate it. And in 2018, I tried to understand perspectives and experiences different than my own, exploring more feminist and diverse literature than I am used to. It was a pretty good crop of books. Below are my 10 Favorites, and some words on them.
But first, honorable mentions:
Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them – Jennifer Wright
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress – Steven Pinker
Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits – David Wong
Why Honor Matters – Tamler Sommers
On Grand Strategy – John Lewis Gaddis
How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? – N.K. Jemisin
How Language Began – Daniel L. Everett
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South – Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington
Ever since I was Little Logan, I’ve had a love of Justice, Law, and Order. Probably because I watched a lot of Law & Order. But Radley Balko’s work, both here and in his important The Rise of the Warrior Cop, has really made me question those naïve commitments to the American Justice System.
Dr. Steven Hayne was Mississippi’s medical examiner and forensic pathologist for 20 years. In this time, he performed sometimes up to 2,000 autopsies a year – six times the maximum recommended by the National Association of Medical Examiners. He did this while testifying in court and holding down two other jobs.
Hayne was a flim-flam artist; able to snow a jury with false evidence. He was aided by a partner in crime, Dr. Michael West, a forensic odonatologist. Together, these charlatans sent many innocent men (I will let you guess of what color) to prison – to death row, even, where innocent men languish till this day.
This book made me sick. It made me sick, and sad, and angry. It also opened my eyes to a number of things. First: Coroners are bullshit, and you want medical examiners. Coroners allowed for the sordid history of public lynching as Mississippi’s publicly-elected, unqualified coroner’s allowed murder after murder “at the hands of persons unknown.” Second: Be very wary of “forensic evidence”: bite mark analysis, blood spatter, anything that is “pattern matching”, not based on DNA. Third: Experts can easily deceive, and you must look at who is accrediting them.
Justice has two parts: substantive and procedural. The story of Hayne and West is a tragic, infuriating miscarriage of both. They got the wrong answers, and did the wrong things doing it. They were part of a system that was more concerned with convictions than justice. I fear that their story is more common than we’d hope.
For the first time since I’ve started this practice, my favorite book of the year is not by Yuval Noah Harari. While I loved Harari’s work this year (see later), my favorite book of the year was The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. It isn’t exactly fun reading, but it is important.
Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness – Peter Godfrey-Smith
Well, this is weird. The first book I finished in 2018 was Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds. The first book finished in 2019 was Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus. Thus, 2018 both began and ended in the same place: contemplating the intelligence of these bizarre, beautiful cephalopods. Let it be known: 2018 is the year I learned to love the octopus (Insert tentacle porn joke here).
What weird goddamn animals. They are smart and curious creatures who have distinct personalities. They spray aquarists they don’t like with water. They carry coconuts around as houses. They explore fearlessly. They can consciously change their texture and color, despite being colorblind.
As author/philosopher/scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith points out, the octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an alien intelligence. It is the best example we know of the independent evolution of a different type of intelligence; our last common ancestor was shared about half a billion years ago, before things had brains or eyes. And yet, the octopus is intelligent; it seems to comprehend us as well as we it. Its mind is totally different than our own, with many of the neurons living in the arms, which may well be their own independent minds. Imagining all of this will butt you up against your Tommy Nagel and your hard problems of consciousness, but goddamn is it fun.
I love the philosophy of mind, and as I get older, I find more kinship in the natural and animal world. If you’re interested in either of those subjects, you’ll probably like this book.
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden – Denis Johnson
Denis Johnson is dead, and I am still alive, and that hardly seems fair. Johnson is one of the greatest writers I have ever read, and his loss is as crushing as the best of his work can be. And luckily for us, his best work is what he’s left behind here; a collection of short stories, a spiritual successor to Jesus’ Son ( a Logan favorite from last year). This posthumous collection is nothing short of masterful. In it you will find 5 stories that capture how life can be beautiful and how life can be broken.
You’ll find an aging ad-man, called and berated by his dying ex-wife, and unable to realize if the woman was his ex-wife Ginny or his ex-wife Jenny: “…And I suddenly didn’t know which set of crimes I was regretting, wasn’t sure if this dying farewell clobbering to my knees was Virginia’s, or Jennifer’s…We’d had our talk, and Ginny, or Jenny, whichever, had recognized herself in my frank apologies, and she’d been satisfied – because, after all, both sets of crimes had been the same.” You’ll find a group of convicts, wrestling with the prophecy of Strangler Bob. You’ll find the death of the author, and his triumph over the grave. You’ll find an insane poet’s conspiracy theory about Elvis.
You’ll cry and you’ll laugh, and you’ll think about death, and what life means. Denis Johnson is the best of literature; he makes us see more, feel more, understand more. Denis Johnson is dead. Long live Denis Johnson.
Dept. Of Speculation – Jenny Offill
Dept. of Speculations came to my attention courtesy of MMA journalist Ben Fowlkes, who I realize as I write this, also introduced me to Denis Johnson. I am grateful to Ben for making me a well-rounded fight fan, and his breathless review of Offill’s work inspired me to pick this up. Once picked up, it was not put down. I read it in one long, beautiful afternoon, one fascinated, voracious sitting. It is the story of “The Wife” and “The Husband”, told from the perspective of The Wife, who is one of the best-written characters I have ever spent time with. The structure of this unusual novel is essentially a collection of stream-of-consciousness notes from The Wife, reflections that follow the ups and downs of their relationship. It is astonishingly gorgeous, and heartbreakingly funny. It blends in snippets of everything I love: romantic poetry, Buddhist spirituality, and the history of space travel. While The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist is the best book I read this year, Dept. Of Speculations is my most whole-heartedly recommended. Do yourself a favor and check out this unusual, moving work of genius. It won’t take long. You’ll thank me, like I thanked Ben Fowlkes.
Lost Connections – Johann Hari
I have struggled with depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember. This may surprise people. I try to keep my head on straight, I try to smile, laugh, make jokes. But the truth of matters is that, more often than not, I feel broken, disconnected, alone. Johann Hari let me know that I am not alone. “You are not a machine with broken parts, you are an animal who is not having its needs met.” This is the message of the book.
Hari starts with his own personal story, and his 18-year relationship with increasingly powerful antidepressants. They did not work, and he set about to find out why. What he found is that all the evidence that SSRIs and antidepressants work were the results of big pharma pushing a bio-chemical solution to these problems. These were out-and-out lies. Anti-depressants alone cannot help you long-term.
You are not a biological machine with a broken brain. You are a social animal that does not have the connections you need. Hari makes a convincing case for a bio-psycho-social model. He suggests that we replace the vocabulary of depression with one of disconnection; the problem is not you are a broken brain that you’ll have to work around. The problem is that you are disconnected: you are disconnected from family, from community, from meaningful work, meaningful values, and a meaningful vision of the future. We heal ourselves through re-connecting, through building communities, useful work, living toward authentic values.
We live in a society that systematically strips many of these things from us in service of capital. It is normal to feel these things. You are not broken. The system is broken. We’re going to have to work hard to fix it, but that is ultimately an empowering message: It allows us to reframe our struggles with mental health. There is scant little evidence for the chemical model of depression, and the story of a misfiring, broken brain that can’t handle its own chemicals is a self-defeating one. Instead, Hari’s powerful bio-psycho-social model provides room for growth, healing, and connection. For the first time in a while, I feel whole, and I feel hope.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century – Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari is my favorite intellectual, able to look at the sweeping arc of history and extrapolate the signal from the noise. As mentioned earlier, his previous works were my favorites of 2016 and 2017. In Sapiens Harari looked at the human past, how we clawed our way from being a middle-of-the-food-chain scavenger to standing astride the world like a colossus. In Homo Deus he looked to the future, the emergence of the post-human as infotech and biotech merge, and how algorithms will eat everything. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval is focused on the present.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the present is kind of shitty and scary. The stories we have told ourselves about how the world works do not seem to be up to the challenges of technological change and the political problems of a connected globe. We believe in liberty and equality, but soon Big Data and Algorithms will know us better than we know ourselves, and control of the data will be the only thing that matters. And our political systems are not set up to deal with global problems of climate change, automation, and other technological changes.
This book was fantastic, but it did make me despair. At times, I felt to my core: “We will not be able to navigate this.” The challenges are real. The risk is existential. I am not optimistic. But what I do know is that if we don’t reckon honestly with these challenges; if we do not think as deeply as Yuval Noah Harari, we don’t have a chance.
How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain – Lisa Feldman Barrett
Humans are emotional animals, more than they are rational animals. But what are your emotions? Our emotions seem in-built, and it seems like your emotional makeup are part of the universal human makeup, part of our human essence. We all get what anger is, right? And my experience of anger is like your experience of anger, right?
Maybe not. Lisa Feldman Barrett has another theory, the theory of constructed emotions. It is based in her research in neuroscience and the fact that there is no common neural fingerprint for anger, sadness, or any other emotion. Our emotions are not circuits in our brain. Instead, our emotions are constructions, our brain’s best predictions about why it is getting the info that it is getting. Our brains are locked in the black box of our skulls, receiving information from our senses, and our brain makes predications that try to make signal from the noise.
The tools for the interpretation of this data are our Concepts. Our concepts are how we make sense of the world. They are the “intersubjective, fictive language” that Yuval Noah Harari pointed out in Sapiens. They are the tools we use to categorize our experiences, and they are the value of education. The greater your concepts, the more granularly you can categorize and understand your experience. Our concepts are mediated by our culture, which is why they can appear universal. Through refining and building nuance into your concepts, you can live a richer life.
This book felt like a philosophical Rosetta Stone, weaving in wisdom about how we perceive our world, how we use language, and how we understand ourselves. This book blew my mind, in all the best ways, and it offers an inspiring message: through questioning and controlling your concepts, we can be architects of our own experience. Our emotions are not our essence. They are what we bring to the table in understanding the world based on our previous experience. This is a masterwork of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It upended a theory which I had believed in all my life. It gave me new concepts, which, I hope you’ll read and see, gave me a new way of seeing myself and my world.
Future Presence – Peter Rubin
I do not have a lot of hope for the future[1]. While I love thinking about and researching new tech, I do not have a lot of techno-optimism. I can think of several technologies either already here or coming down the pipe that could utterly destroy the human race: general artificial intelligence, genetic editing, nanotechnology, big biometric data, and virtual reality.
Any of these could easily lead us to a technological dystopia. But out of all of these, only virtual reality gives me some kind of joy. Of the science fiction dystopias we could end in – Ex Machina, GATTACA, Blade Runner – the virtual reality dystopia of Ready Player One gives me the most hope. At least in that reality, we get an Experience Machine. And this to me is what is exciting about VR – the ability to create new digital worlds which can “feel real”, which have “presence.”
Future Presence is an exploration of the current world of virtual reality and what it may be in the future. It is a weird, wild world, with applications ranging from meditation to porn (I’ll let you guess which is pushing things forward more). Peter Rubin, a Wired editor, dives into the digital realm, exploring how the technology is used to create novel storytelling and social experiences. Through virtual reality, we can build expanded worlds of experience and empathy, able to see first-hand things we normally never could.
I got a PSVR for Christmas, and I went to Antarctica with Javier Bardem. The program started with me standing on an ice floe. Stretching out before me were massive icebergs, glowing incandescent where the pure ice merged and was swallowed by a deep blue ocean. I turned around to take everything in and jumped back when I realized I was standing at the base of a giant ice-breaking Greenpeace ship. Its prow was thirty feet above my head. Leaning over the top was Javier, waving to me. And for once, I had pure, unadulterated techno-joy. Bring on whatever dystopia may be, just get me better VR.
The Consolation of Philosophy – Boethius, H.R. James translation
Stoicism is my favorite philosophy, because it has so few moving parts. It tells me to practice acceptance of the things I cannot control, to not trust too much in fortune, and to prepare my mind and soul for when the capricious nature of the human existence turns against me, as it most certainly will. Life is suffering, it will break you, and I believe Stoicism to be a philosophy for the broken.
As such, I continually refresh my Stoic learning (I am far from a Stoic sage). This year, I made my way to this classic of Stoic philosophy that I knew the basics of from my schooling, and I was delighted by it. The Consolation of Philosophy is the story of Boethius, who hallucinates the heavenly personification of Lady Philosophy as he languishes in prison. Lady Philosophy helps Boethius wrestle with his “woe is me” and recall the valuable lessons of Stoic philosophy. These lessons include: “Fortune is a fickle bitch”, “you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your reactions to it”, and “Just because God knows everything doesn’t mean you don’t have free will[2].”
It is also one of the first great examples of prison literature. And oh, what literature it is! One thing I didn’t realize – and was joyed to find out – this book combined poetry and prose, to incredible effect. It’s a combination of delightful rhymes and insightful dialogues. It was the combination which really impressed me; there was not a lot of new philosophical ground covered, but the typical Stoic information was presented so beautifully. If you’re looking for a place to get into Stoicism, don’t wait as long as I did to check this one out.
The Odyssey – Homer, Emily Wilson translation
Classics are classics for a reason. Homer’s The Odyssey is an ancient classic; Emily Wilson’s translation deserves to be a modern classic. It is a work of staggering genius – the difficulty of what she’s accomplished can’t be overstated. In addition to moving from Ancient Greek to an eminently readable modern English, she has moved it from dactylic hexameter to iambic pentameter. The result is a beautiful, lilting, epic poem. I thought about trying to write this whole section of the review in iambic pentameter, but as I found out, it’s really hard! Emily Wilson managed it, while translating from a dead language!
The book starts with a fascinating introductory; a comprehensive exploration of the Greek world, its history, and the values that inform the tale about to told; honor and hospitality and loyalty. This would have been a neat enough book on its own! The story of the Odyssey itself is well-known: Odysseus travels far and wide and suffers more than anyone on his long journey home from the Trojan War while his son Telemachus tries to find out what has happened to him and his wife Penelope tries to delay the suitors of Ithaca. But Wilson’s poetry so masterfully done that even if you know the tale by heart, this version is well-worth your time. Come, and hear the muses’ invocation, and listen a while, to this tale of a complicated man on a long journey.
[1] Humanity’s future, that is. Logan’s future is bright, hopefully.
[2] Boethius loses the plot a bit with the God/predestination stuff; but what can you do, Christianity wasn’t that great for philosophy, mostly because it doesn’t make any sense.